“This fucked,” I think for the third time in ten seconds. The snow seems to be coming in faster than we can get “This rid of it. At this point, having lost my gloves in the snow twenty minutes earlier, my hands can’t feel the shovel; the numbness is an infuriating contrast to my stinking, roasting-hot body.
It has been an hour of digging, sawing and hacking at snow, and the area still looks no closer to somewhere I’d pitch a tent—setting camp being the objective now, after several km of snowshoeing earlier today. And just prior to losing my gloves, I had hit the ‘hangry zone’. Then, to put icing on the cake—god I’d smash a cake right now, BTW—the bloke next to me seems to be enjoying himself.
“Ahhh,” he says. “Where else would you rather be.”
It’s a statement more than a question. I continue to wish ill things on the snow. I wonder if it would be OK to just bail, somehow find my own way back to the car, and then just drive the seven hours home.
Why, I think to myself, do people put themselves in these situations?
life had been a heck of a lot more cheerful. I was driving up to Guthega in the Snowy Mountains to meet the guides and other clients of Climbing the Seven Summits (CTSS) Australian Alpine Academy’s ‘Introduction to Mountaineering’ course. Winding up the
