Our guide Brian Muller called in from the beautiful basin camp at 11,200′. The back carried today, which means that they hiked back down to the site of their 10,200′ cache to pick up the supplies they had buried. They carried those supplies up to the basin camp. This is a pretty easy day of only about 1.5 hours of work, so they had plenty of time to relax and make improvements to their camp.
Tomorrow, they plan to carry much of that gear up around a prominent feature of the route called Windy Corner. Windy Corner is where a steep ridge of granite drops down off the tall West Buttress. The climbers will hike alongside the craggy feature for a mile or so before turning around the corner. A short ways ahead, they will dig another hole in the snow to bury a cache of supplies in anticipation of moving up to their next camp at 14,200′.
Here’s Brian:
