Clouds were still hovering overhead as we woke up and packed away tents and stoves. But shortly after beginning to climb up to the Inter Glacier we left them in the valley below. Soon we noticed a figure below us following our tracks and gaining on us. "Did any of you lose anything?" he asked as he approached. Brandon had left his glasses behind and earned them back after describing them. The climber then turned around and went off to join his partner who was working up to the pass headed toward the Liberty Ridge.

The wind picked up as we rounded Curtis ridge and found ourselves briefly on rock again. After a short break we dropped down off the ridge and onto the glacier before working our way up the final gain to Camp Schurman. Little Tacoma, the remains of an extremely eroded ridge on the other side of the Emmons Glacier, stood watch over our progress.

Ending our five hour climb, we selected tent platforms in the snow and erected the tents much more proficiently than the night before. Someone's tent pole disappeared down the slope and into a crevasse below us on the Winthrop glacier. Matt and the guides roped up to descend and fish the pole from whatever crevasse it may have entered.

The other Matt and I worked on melting water and improving the tent's defenses from the wind. We took exposed rocks and tied the guy lines to them and buried the bundle under a foot or more of snow. We also built up the wall on the windward side of the tent, then piled and packed more snow on top of the anchors. I'd recently heard a friend's story about losing their tent to the winds while on a climb of Aconcagua (in South America) and definitely wanted our tent to stay put tomorrow while we attempted the summit.

Other climbers began to return from their own climbs of the Emmons route while other parties descended the route after having climbed Liberty Ridge. Soon the campsite was bursting with people and our own attempts to get to sleep early for our big day were thwarted. One climber came into camp looking like he would soon need to be carried out, and our guides and others went to his aid. Meanwhile, his climbing partners managed to lose their own tent poles down the glacier. They were advised to follow the tracks our team had made earlier on our own pole recovery mission.