Day 14: Dec 27th SUMMIT DAY!!

I woke up at around 7:00 after actually getting a decent nights sleep, even with the interruptions.  I immediately checked outside to see what the day would bring... It was either good weather and go for the summit, or bad weather and we head down.  To my happy surprise, the weather looked great and Andy and Olli's tent was set up near ours.  I told Chris the good news, and also to my surprise, he got up and started to get ready, saying he felt good enough to go for it.  We both choked down half of a poptart, bundled ourselves up as much as possible, then got ready to go.  I decided to add my down booties that I had been wearing every to my hand wear due to my lack of outer gloves.  This and the fact that we left later in the day made us a little less freezing for the first part of the climb today.  For the first part of the day we trudged along, with me in front taking frequent standing breaks to catch our breath and make sure our hearts didn't get to beating too fast.  Our waters were all frozen that morning so we both put them into extra gloves to try to thaw them out.  We made our way past where we turned around the day before and it felt really good, we had no cold fingers or toes at this point (due to me using my down booties as gloves).  We made it to Independencia hut around 9:30, this is the highest refuge in the world at 6400 meters.  It was at this point that we took our first sitting break, where I realized I couldn't take to many because I just did not have enough bottom layers on to keep my butt warm sitting on the cold ground.  After Independencia, it was a short climb up to 'windy ridge' which definitely lived up to its name.  From there we could see down over the Gran Acarreo, all the way down to Plaza de Mulas.  It was a quick jaunt from windy ridge to 'el dedo'(a rock formation sticking up like a finger out of the scree field).  At el dedo, we took another break, Chris sat but I stayed standing because I was already cold.  Shortly after el dedo, we arrived at a snow field, which we decided to go around, avoiding actually using the crampons that we had been carrying for 2 weeks.  So we went around, hiking on the scree field.  On the way to this scree-scramble, we came across the first climber we saw that day.  The man had just come back from the scree slope and said he wasn't going that way and we informed him that we were going for it.  As we made our way slowly up the scree, we looked back and realized that he had decided to go for it as well and was having a much harder time of it than we were.  We made our way across the Gran Acarreo into the dreaded Caneleta, entering it around 11:00 am.  The line between the Acarreo and the Caneleta was not obvious at all, they just blended together.  The climb up the 400m high Canaleta to the summit consumed the next 3 hours of our lives.  Near the end I was trying to simply take 10 steps before stopping to catch my breath, and a few times I could only get 7 before having to stop.  I started to feel nauseous near the top and held it in, knowing that I couldn't puke because I had only drank about a quarter of a cup of water that day and was probably dangerously dehydrated as it was.  I am sure Chris wasn't feeling to much better, but there wasn't a whole lot of talking going on towards the top. I think we actually took a wrong turn near the summit and ended up doing some mild (but slightly dangerous due to the altitude) rock climbing in order to reach the summit.  The feeling you get when you finally achieve such a massive summit that you have dreamed of for years is absolutely indescribable.  Taking in the vast views and the enormity of the accomplishment, we both sat silently, cried, laughed, simply took it in realizing how lucky we were to get a weather window nice enough to allow us this luxury before getting down to the business of taking pictures.  After all was said and done, the 2 of us spent about 20 minutes on the summit, then decided to head down to where we could breathe a little easier.  On our way down, we ran into 9 others heading toward the summit.  The first was almost there, about 50 meters from the top; it was as we     were crossing paths that my body decided it could not hold in the vomit any more.  So it let the poptart and quarter cup of water that I had consumed during the day out right in front of him.  I found this kind of funny, not really sure what Chris or the man going for the summit though, I was just glad I was able to hold out until the way down.  The rest of the way down went pretty smooth; I began to realize my boots were much to small and it was causing some pain in my toes so I went very slow (this may have been made even worse by what I later discovered was some mild frostbite on my big toes).  We managed to get back to camp around 5:30 that night and were unable to get the stove to work.  Our water bottles were still frozen, so neither of us were able to drink more than a cup of water that day.  I did manage to eat one granola bar on the way down  but Chris had only the half poptart that day.  After the failed attempt at getting the stove running, we crawled into our sleeping bags.  I stayed in mine for the duration of the night; Chris managed to get out when he heard Olli come in and figured out that he, Andy and Jessica (a girl from New York who left her guide company to try for the summit with them) had all summited and he congratulated him.  From our tent we heard Andy and Jessica stumble in around 9:00 pm and congratulated them from inside and eventually faded off to sleep, completely satisfied and looking forward to heading off the mountain the next day.