Exhausted

This morning's climb of Huayna Potosí was very hard. But it turned out that getting to the top was the easy part. Once we reached the summit, we had to climb and hike all the way back through the ice, to the high camp; and then straight away, we had to continue hiking down, all the way to base camp. I was already dead when I reached the top of the mountain; but by the time I'd done the additional 5 hours or so of hiking to get back to base camp, I was semi-human. Mountain climbing lesson number 1: getting to the top is only half the journey. Once you get there, there's no helicopter waiting to take you back down.