| To his surprise, Ralf Dujmovits woke up warm. An hour before midnight, the Garmin GPS watch he’d placed under his hat began to chirp and buzz. Over the years, he’d learned it was all too easy to sleep through an alarm. if the watch was way down on his wrist, muted in a mitten or muffled in baffles of goose down. But draped on his head, with the straps pointing at his ears, it was impossible to ignore. It sounded like a bomb. He sat up in his sleeping bag and switched on his headlamp. He’d slept three hours, propped at an angle to mitigate the high-altitude apnea that had plagued him the last few nights. The wind that had hammered his yellow North Face tent at Camp 2 was gone, and now at Camp 3, at 8,300 meters on the north side of Mount Everest, the air was still, almost balmy—a mere –8 Fahrenheit inside the tent, the warmest temperature he’d ever experienced this high on the world’s highest mountain. If he was, at last, to scale Everest without supplemental oxygen, he could not have asked for better conditions. |
