May 9, stationary at camp 2, no altitude gain

It’s 3am when I wake up and exchange looks with Patrick. He mentions he finds it hard to breathe and stuffy. It’s been snowing for the past 10 hours or more and the tent is half buried in snow. Not much air is getting in. Pat gets dressed and goes out in the storm to shovel us out. 9am we emerge from the tent and the entire camp site is buried under a meter of snow. Gear is wet inside the tent. Our spirits are not high. Breakfast, briefing: today is going to have to be a rest day and used to shovel the camp out of the snow. It is literally impossible to go down to the cache and carry gear back up in this weather.
Half of the day is spent shovelling snow, uncovering buried gear and food that have vanished under the white powder. Once done, we are joking on all sorts of topics in the warmest place in camp: the kitchen tent, a comfortable Hilleberg tunnel tent under which guides have dug a cooking area and a eating area for the team. Scott, aka Patch (our second guide), tells us stories of climbing. I am curious and ask him about his expeditions to Everest, Cho Oyu and other crazy mountains. Its fascinating. He has climbed them multiple times but is very humble about it, is this the mountaineer humility? Around 3pm, as I am writing the notes of the blog, the sun burns my neck from inside the kitchen tent. Xavier, Daniel (our Canadian expedition mate), and I rush out of the tent. We live for these little moments of simple happiness. We take pictures of the astonishing mountains surrounding us, gigantic crevasses in the background. All this scenery that we could not see during the snowstorm. The tent quickly turns into a sauna and the wet sleeping bags, socks, gloves and jackets get a boost of drying. Spirits immediately improve as the sun burns through the fog and falling snow. Clouds, snow and sun alternate for the rest of the afternoon.