"Our tent is warm! 60°F. Wally is opening the tent exit now, so that warmth is temporary. I'm trying to get my polarizers on my lenses, so I have to warm the lenses up slowly, sealed in zip-lock bags, to avoid having them fog up from condensation. I can't believe I forgot to put them on before today! There's so much light reflecting off of the little cloud droplets -- all of the photos might have been more clear, I think. Oh well. We're at the halfway point between Barranco and Barafu. It's raining, of course. Wally and I are eagerly awaiting the supposed arrival of our gear. Tomorrow we head to Barafu, sleep until midnight, and begin the longest day of the climb, to the summit! We're being called to lunch now, but I'm missing my dry tennis shoes, which were packed in the bag the porters were carrying. No dry shoes! Wally is out looking for them now. I hope they just took it out of the bag by mistake because it doesn't look like the rest of the clothing in there. In fact, the bag it's in was originally theirs, so it is an easy mistake to imagine. 1:29pm
 
"OK. Got my shoes back. We just had a satisfying lunch, and are again in our tents resting and waiting for the rain to stop. It appears to stop in the evenings and for a few hours each morning. Wally has decided to attempt to summit even if our bags don't arrive. I guess it can't hurt to try, although we definitely don't have the proper equipment (enough insulated water bottles, flashlights). We'll just hope for equipment. Most of the climb thus far has been mental, so I have hope that we'll summit. Photo told us that assuming that none of us get sick, we'd all make it to the top. He thinks we're fit enough. It's raining pretty hard now. When will it stop?! Hopefully it will stop by the time I have to go pee. I wonder what Margo is doing... Oh my god. The rain is really coming down now. I don't envy the 6-day Machame route folk, who are still climbing upwards towards Barafu right now. In nine short hours they will be roused for the summit trek. All three of us are acclimitizing well, and none of us have headaches or are breathing hard at rest anymore. We'll have spent three nights at roughly 4000 meters before ascending to Barafu (4600 meters) for 10-11 hours of rest (before summitting). Wow -- this journal is not satisfying to write in. My mind feels cloudy and everything emerging from my pen sounds inane.
 
"We trekked today through valleys of shale carved out by lava. The terrain seemed so alien, and was a great contrast from the muddy rain forest we trekked through just a few days ago. By chance, Alison is also currently reading Murakami's Norwegian Wood, which was neat to discover. On the path today we saw numerous broken thermoses. I guess it's not unusual to break them; they're made of glass inside, and the path was pretty steep and rocky at times. It's raining so hard I can no longer hear the porters talking. I can also see a little river of water between the tent and the tarp it's laid out on... wait a minute. What a crappy place to put a tent! There's a channel on my side where water is flowing. On top of all of this, I still have to go pee. (Wally and I got out of the tent to dig new flow channels around the it. Oh, and it turned out that the channel of water on my side came from water flowing onto the inner layer of the tent, down a single zipper that wasn't zipped all the way shut.)"
-excerpt from my journal, 3:04pm