Day 48 Ultar Meadows

7:40 am and 16 degrees in the tent. It rained during the night; funny to think that I am up here in the Karakoram - in the tent I could easily been in the Lake District. Been wake for 30 minutes - so I got a good night's sleep. Feel okay, but don't know about energy levels: will find out when I actually start to move around. Definitely looking forward to climbing - even if it's just some small crag stuff as discussed by Geoff yesterday. In fact probably rather do short routes at the moment. I can hear the glacial streams and the occasional (big) rockfall / avalanches off Ultar.

7:30 pm. Back at the tent. Today: longish uphill walk - well actually just 35 minutes - but seemed longer - abortive attempt at a route with Geoff - looked good but there was a damn thorn bush thing growing out of the crack; rock has a thin veneer of crappy sandy stuff on it which doesn't help. Would have been a good route, but one cannot go around chopping trees down...Then we did a better route: slab, V groove to break; overhang to right, but again put off by loose bits and vegetation. Not bold enough to do overhang; Geoff did it and I followed. Finished off by leading Geoff's route of yesterday - a good VS 4c 4c, climbs a big crack line up the centre of a huge glacial erratic [boulder], left of waterfall at the head of the valley. Tried a variant to the right, block filled off-width, but horrible - all loose and jammed full of big loose blocks. Lowered off tape slings around loose block - scary stuff!

Currently sat about in the sun, amongst these silent mountains. Funny - it's like the Lakes in good weather - until you look up and see the high stuff. I've bogged up the food front completely: would give anything for fruitcake and custard or sunpin like that...Finally, I've decided that doing new routes is like trying to write or make music - it's easy to produce / create a load of convoluted junk which essentially leads nowhere interesting at all. Much, much harder to create even the shortest capriccio.