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VII |
The next four days were spent mostly in either the sleeping tent or the kitchen tent. The piles of fresh snow that fell in the night were unable to support the warm rain that fell during the day. If we got a lull in the precipitation or a slice of sunlight, we went skiing rather than let our clothes dry. Usually, we returned from these short excursions in a full whiteout, no visual guides other than the shallow, ski-width indentations that led back home.
On the fourth day of whiteout, I got a sunburn. The clouds had thinned enough that we could feel, even see, the fuzzy white light through the fog, its warmth trapped between the reflective surfaces of glacier and cloud. My socks were finally dry. The Thumb, which had been receiving its share of precipitation, must be baking above these clouds, we supposed. One more ski-tour, this time to see if we could climb a ridge opposite the Thumb and break through the clouds ourselves.