Night 18: Cold As Ice/Unwilling to Sacrifice

It’s likely the altitude, but my little Esbit solid-fuel stove has not been enthusiastic about bringing water to a boil. Two of the fuel tabs make a pot of water… tepid. Four tabs make it warm or (at lower elevation) hot. I burned four tabs while pitching my tent above Elevation Lake, and had a very lukewarm bag of chickpea masala to show for it. The metal flask of tea I like to put in my sleeping bag overnight was likewise not-hot. The peaks above the landslide-rubble above my campsite glowed rusty in the dusk, gathered a crown of clouds, then blurred out to blue-grey. It was dark. 

I was cold, in my sleeping clothes and my sleeping bag and my sleeping hat and my Injinji sleeping socks. I started trembling. My jaw tightened up then my teeth started cliche-clattering together. I kicked and log-rolled around on the silver side of my thin Thermarest Ridgerest pad. I was not getting any warmer. My entire body (nose to toes) started a violent, coarse juddering, as if I was being tased while tangled in electric fence. I was scared to go to sleep, having literally read a textbook on hypothermia not too long ago. I burrowed all the way down in my sleeping bag, cinched the hood completely shut, breathed into the red faux-down. My hands and feet were no colder than my torso, which felt like an ice-chest.  I rolled and worried for 90 minutes – a period of time during which, in off-trail world, I could have watched a whole film or driven to Vermont or had a really thorough catch-up phonecall with someone I care about. 

I stopped shivering suddenly and completely. Patches of my body started glowing warm – too hot, almost burning. An area of my chest, a forearm, one hip, half a clavicle. Although I wasn’t panicking, I definitely wasn’t a fan of this progression. Without meaning to, I’d locked both hands into a single clasped fist, clenched to my ribcage and pointed at the apex of the undulating nylon tent. A pathetic, unprecedented silent prayer was squeezing out through my knuckles: “Please…don’t…die”.

I realised this was addressed not to any interventionist deity, but to my own body. I’d got us into this situation, and now I was… asking my body if it wouldn’t mind sorting things out for us both?  This was quite a big ask, considering I have not always been kind to, or careful of, my physical self (the years of starvation, booze, working through injury, declining medical care). It would have been reasonable for my body to ignore this tardy plea for a bit of help now. 

But, as I bobbed through the night conscious/unconscious, my body took care of things. Lateral-recumbent squat manoeuvres seemed to be a key component of the rescue plan, interspersed with more log-rolling and bursts of fistymills. I woke up curled into the foot of my sleeping bag, already-blaring sun through the tent door roasting me. I packed up with snippets of ‘I Don’t Want To Die’ by the inimitable Ryan Power skipping through the mental jukebox. Though I’ve thought about lots of music and songs on this hike, I can never follow the thread through a whole song in order. 

In the light, of course, Evolution Lake was an absolutely incredible and magical place.