Choosing between sustained winds that can tear the skin off your face and the relative sanctity of a snow cave... many hours of slicing icy snow with shovels powered by aching muscles and steel wills! On the flank of Cerro San Valentin, as the ferocity of the storm reveals itself, the icy blue hollow of the snow cave proves to be a rhetorical choice. In the blue-white belly of this hundred meter high snow drift, life for eight adventurous mountaineers takes on a fresh perspective. The adventure of a lifetime, an arena of learning through the "Mountain Guide Training School - Extremely Patagonia Ltd", an experience that will linger on with you for the rest of your life! Its day thirty-something of a forty-two day "mountaineering school" adventure on the southern Patagonian Ice Cap and patience amongst other things has become a thin, tipsy act of balance.
Breathing is one of the things that many of us take for granted, without intent! The air that we must breathe in order to sustain our lives is usually all around us and in ample supply. Those of us who choose to enter a realm where that very same air may become excruciatingly short in supply begin to understand it's vital role in our very existence! Wind driven snow drifts into the tiniest openings and packs into a solid mass which does not allow the exchange of gases in or out! In the snow cave, we breathe the life giving air, and exhale poisonous carbon dioxide... over time, if there is no exchange with fresh air, the end result is suffocation. That usually happens while one is asleep, dreaming blissfully of loved ones and more hospitable places on this planet. Death in this scenario, were one to leave the situation unchecked, becomes an eminent reality! Our goal was to live, and so breathing becomes yet another choice!
The choice becomes waking on an hourly, or as necessary rotation, to dig out the entrance to the snow cave and the advancing drift outside. From a semi-warm, semi-dry sleeping bag into wet socks, wet boot liners, wet base layers, wet shell layer and out into the raging world of yet another infamous Patagonian ice cap storm! Time to reflect on ones most inner self, ones most primal senses of survival and then later to stumble upon the fact that only a very few people ever manifest the opportunity to get to know themselves that well! Back in your wet sleeping bag, covered in spindrift which endlessly blows into the opening that you have just cleared with an urgency to transform it yet again into a smooth, perfect impervious wall of snow.
And so, you shiver yourself to sleep, knowing that your watch is not for another period of time, time in which you can salvage every tiny essence of warmth and sense of shelter from the raging wind and snow beyond these eerie blue/white walls... your castle, your prison, your shelter, your virtual oasis in a desert of ice, snow and howling wind! Yesterday is past, today has been yet another test, and tomorrow will come whether you choose to prepare for it or not!
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