Loser Plateau - Setting up 76 camp
Jenny
We carried up a load of gear the night before, but sadly the water butt I'd carried up a few days earlier had only managed to collect a few inches of water. The first job was to get out the gear we left in a cave (to small to have a number or name) at the end of last year. This should have been easy, except what had been dry last year now had enough of a trickle of water to have lots of ice. Some of the gear came out easily (food was fine) but I had to sit in the drips for half an hour hammering out the tarps from the ice; fortunately we had a bolting hammer to use. Next we set up the water tarp and my hands thawed! The water we had left in the bottles in the cave seemed to have survived fine, probably due to being frozen most of the time.
We looked at 76a and noted that there was still a lot of snow and no entrance, though ~30cm had melted in the last 2 days. We walked over to 97 which had more snow than last year but looked open; reexploring this became Plan B. We headed back to 76a and whilst Ol took photos I kicked out snow from the entrance. Finally we had a cave to explore again! We headed back down the hill, me to carry a load I had left at top camp a few days before, and Olly to find a more direct route to the col not via old Top Camp - in the process he re-found some old caves (see below).