Bulldozing Down the Mountain

When we woke up in the morning it wasn't even possible to leave the tent. The snow reached up to two thirds of the height of our tent thus after unzipping it we had to dig out. We were still at 7450 m and thus in the night I got the idea to try again and divide the try into two parts with one more sleeping over in between. Well, the morning cured my mind. Ten meters from our tent I ditched in the snow up to my waist and on the way back from C3 over the saddle we waded through 50 cm up to 1 meter of fresh snow. The bulldozing to the relative safety of the C2 altitude camp took us, with 20 kgs on our backs, some 7 hours. In C2 we experienced a terrific welcoming from the French expedition whose members, after seeing the two of us in the respective shape, hosted us for about two hours with tea, soup and some biscuits as the last course.... Truly some excellent people! Upon standing up Jan got a twitch from all that exhaustion so our sitting stretched by some additional 10 minutes. While we were diving into our tent we felt totally exhausted and we were glad that we disapproved a second try for the summit.