Day 2 - Anchorage

Unsurprisingly, having had very little sleep for a while, I wake up early at about 5am local time.
The sun is pouring through the window and I am getting my first chance to see my roommate in some light. To my alarm there is a very definite female nature to the form there. Usually sexes do not share hotel rooms on such trips so my immediate reaction is one of concern that there has been a mix and that the poor lady is about to start screaming when she finds a strange man in her room.

This leads to some consternation as to not only what a chap can do in such circumstances but just as importantly what he should do. Quite luckily, my moral quandary is resolved when she wakes and gets up leaving without screaming. It turns out that this is Smiley, a Chinese girl studying in Kansas, who has chosen her name very suitably.

From there it is down to the lobby to harass BA staff in the UK to see what progress I can make. At first very little as I am bounced round the various automated systems getting the wonderfully helpful answer "there is no new information, please call back later" despite the fact that nowhere can I find the current position or even the starting position. Anyhow I finally get through to customer services and some excellent chap confirms that in fact my bags have been put on the flight and that he will message the team in Phoenix including the managers there (none of whom get into work until lunchtime!) to make sure that they know my bag is arriving and to be ready to pull out the stops to get it onto the flight to Anchorage.
In amongst this is catching up on all the things I have not been able to do over the past couple of days - working right up to (or being honest a couple of minutes after) the start of the first meeting of the expedition. This is an introduction to the team and a bit of a quick overview of the next few weeks.
This is followed by a kit check - mine is obviously pretty brief and then a trip into town for some Tex-Mex lunch and last minute shopping. I get the good news phone call from the BA Phoenix office that the bags are on their way and they will do their best to get them onto the flight to Alaska in the evening - the big unknown it seems is US customs who may be kind and speed the bag through or (which is just as likely unfortunately) decide to go through the contents in detail in which case the bags may not make the connecting flight and will have to come on a later one! Since we are flying onto the glacier in the morning this will be somewhat of a problem!

We also select our lunch food. Breakfast and dinner will be in camp with lunch eaten as we walk - a similar format to most expeditions. We head out to the van in the parking lot where there are 5 large plastic storage boxes filled with all sorts of chocolate bars, energy bars, dried meats, dried fruits and nuts. We need to take 17 days worth which ends up filling an 8 litre bag! Given I have not eaten most of my power lunches on prior trips I have decided to go for a selection of fruits and snacks to vary my diet as much as anything else.

This is a US trip (non-Alaskan guide companies are not allowed to operate here) and as such it will be run very differently to British trips. This has its ups and downs with the defining feature being that you generally treated as being incompetent and inexperienced.  An upside at times is that the guides cook for you. This is great if you are tired and they usually bring different food to the freeze dried packs I have been having so far. On the other hand catering for yourself makes you feel much more involved in your own expedition and not just like a passenger being led round the mountain. The real downside is that the treatment is carried into general camp activities and also the freedom, or to be more specific, lack of it that is permitted whilst trekking. This will be a real challenge for me; probably more than anything the mountain can throw at me itself!

Having not slept for a while it is time for a bit of a nap in the afternoon before going for a wander round the outskirts of Anchorage in the early evening. It is an interesting place and probably similar to many other US cities. A vast sprawl of a town on a grid system with unfortunately little effort on the charm front. This is a town based on the oil exploration in Alaska and increasingly tourist business. There is a lovely outside bar in the hotel and I have a nice salad on the shore of the lake there as the sunsets and then back to bed as I have to wake early to see if my bags have arrived and then sort myself out for departure at 07:30.