It is day 6 of 8 in Washington, the weather is questionable as we head in the van toward the Park Butte trailhead. The hope is that we can hike up and establish camp before more rain comes in and makes a wet mess of the day. My feet still feel horrible from the day at Liberty Bell and the day off made no difference now that they have been stuffed back into their torture chamber boots. From the trailhead to basecamp is a 4ish mile hike with 2400 feet of gain through alpine terrain and over several creeks, ending with a trek along the Railroad Grade – a ridge with a steep drop off to one side promising injury to those who lost their balance in the wrong place.

The distance, pack weight, and elevation gain are well below the level I trained myself to in preparation for this trip. This should feel like a warm up hike. My nicotine cravings are becoming less frequent and fading into a background noise, but that pain is being replaced by a searing of flesh in my heels. There is something wrong back there, and each step is making it worse. The small blisters I found after Liberty Bell —and tried to protect with mole skin and Better Blister Bandages— are not protected, and are beginning to consume every idle moment between thoughts. At this point it has been six months of training the weakness out of my legs to protect my forever injured knees. Muscles can be strengthened, connective tissue thickened. These things take time and are the focus of every climbing and mountaineering training plan. No one has a training plan for toughening and thickening the skin on your heels. At least it isn’t well advertised on climbing.com or included as an insert in every box of La Sportiva Nepal Evos. This fucking sucks.

After 3 painful hours we finally make it to a good spot on the glacier to set up camp. Staking down the guy lines of the tent into the snow provides the first opportunity to use my ice axe as I dig trenches for the thin stakes. The group then takes turn using the two available (one partially broken) snow shovels to personalize and perfect our little snow homes for the next two nights. Sleeping with only tent fabric, a 2 inch inflatable sleeping pad, and my sleeping bag between me and the glacier is the first time during this trip that I don’t overheat throughout the night.

The afternoon is spent finalizing tent spaces, setting up the kitchen and restroom spaces (read: digging a big ass hole in the snow to provide a bit of privacy), and double checking gear. Then it’s on to filling in the gaps that car camping crevasse rescue didn’t allow us to practice. Mainly this meant practicing self arrest using ice axes on the side of a slope. Honestly, this was probably the most fun “learning experience” portion of the trip as we just flung ourselves downhill from every possible angle to practice getting the axe head into the snow and reorienting our bodies to come to a safe stop. It was like being a kid on a snow hill; if you didn’t have a sled, turn your body into one.

Following self arrest practice, there’s a window to relax before dinner so I fumble my way into the tent and gingerly wiggle my boots off. There is something sticking my damp socks to my foot, I can’t be sure if it’s blood and plasma or if the Better Blister Bandages have “become one” with the sock. Either way, these are now the socks that are going to get me to the summit as I don’t want to risk opening something up on my foot by peeling them away. I hope to myself that they’ll dry out a bit overnight.

In addition to the technical, route, and safety experience guides/instructors bring to the mountains, I want to extoll one more benefit I found to going on a guide-led trip: They know how to make things far more comfortable. Instead of huddling in the vestibule of our tent, trying to get our stoves working in the wind, we had a dug in dining room that provided a warm and cozy place to eat an exquisite meal of dehydrated Stroganoff and the last of the Mazama french bread Shiela had smuggled up the mountain. This is especially comfortable considering the rain has been coming down for an hour.

Bellies full enough, we walk back to the tent with the news that there’s a weather window probably opening up between 3AM and 10AM before more rain moves in. Crawling into the tent after prepping the gear for an alpine start, we fall asleep on a glacier listening to the sounds of rain on the tent.