I was mostly blah last night from the climb and the travel back, so didn't shower. We are back at Yanacocha Lodge today, so I knew that the showers were not hot, they were just slightly cooler than tepid. When I woke up at 6:15 to a teammate's accidental alarm, and, as I already had 9 hours of sleep, decided to embrace the cold shower.

Turns out, the tepid was "not enough hot water because everyone else was showering at the same time." The shower did start off cold, and I jumped in, but it warmed up as I cleaned up. Never quite sure if the water was becoming warmer, or I was becoming colder and the water warmer by comparison, I eventually put my head into the water to wash my hair and it was warm!

Mucho happiness!

One thing I don't understand at this lodge is how everyone is walking around in socked feet. These floors are COLD. I'm in my indoor shoes nearly all the time and my feet are still chilled.

Well, that was an adventure. I did not summit. None of the team summitted. I learned a lot, and have a new highest point for me: 5000m (16404').

That said, this climb was a complete mismanagement of intake resources, coupled with significant equipment issues. Which begs the question, "Can a climb be awesome and awful, wondrous and a wreck?" Yes? Good, because this one was.

I had packed my summit bag and written up my checklist last night, so that I should be good to go immediately at wake up. Didn't really work out that way. I went through my checklist as quickly as I could, but was still far behind everyone getting ready to go. I think maybe one person didn't have his crampons on by the time I arrived at the stones to put mine on.

We all went to bed around 20:00 tonight, to "rest" before starting the summit attempt at midnight.

We had arrived at the Cayambe Hut hike about 15:15, hiked up (still took me 22 minutes, though it felt like 10), and all piled into the bunks. The toilets are on the bottom floor, one set of bunks is on the middle floor, with a second set of bunks on the upper floor. Nominally, where we slept wouldn't matter, as we would be "asleep" for only three hours. Still, I requested the closest bunk to the toilets. The irony of this request was that I slept for the three hours, and Ts was up to use the toilets 3-4 times during the night, much to the heckling of his coworkers.

Juliana woke us at 23:02, with some grumbling from Tr about Ts' night movements, "No one was going to sleep anyway."

I suspect I was the only person who both fell asleep and had a REM cycle.

One of the things we do before going up the mountain is check oxygen saturation and heart rate. We have a baseline down here at Yanacocha Lodge.

Mine are 79 O₂ saturation and 75 HR. My O₂ varied from 78 to 83 while I was sitting down.

I thought I was doing better. I was expecting higher O₂, tbh. One of the climbers is at 93 O₂. Just wow!

I feel fine. No headache. No dizziness (well, not until until AFTER I had the O₂ value, and then I'm like, "Oh, are all these typos when writing because of LOW OXYGEN?"). My HR is about 10 higher than normal, but also to be expected at altitude.

Juliana, our lead guide, says she wants to know our O₂ trends. If I feel fine at 79-80 -ish, and it stays that way, I'm okay to keep going. If it starts to trend lower, I suspect I'll be pulled. Still, 79 - 83 is right on the edge of okay.