My portaledge at Camp V

The ledge at Camp V wasn't nearly, not even remotely, as spacious nor as comfortable as El Cap Towers, where we had spent the previous night. The ledge was just big enough for us to stand the pig up at one end and sit ourselves down on, with me in the middle and Aaron at the other end. But we couldn't both lie down, and furthermore, the ledge sloped significantly to the left and away from the wall. Sleeping on that ledge would have been quite uncomfortable. Fortunately, we had anticipated this, and had brought my portaledge for this reason (and in case a bad storm suddenly rolled in.)

We set up my portaledge, and then I started preparing dinner while Aaron put on some music and strung up our gear. As you can see in this photo, we weren't able to spread things out nearly as well as we had the previous night. After eating our MRE's and trying without success to make phone calls on my cell phone, we crawled into the portaledge and got ready for bed. Since Aaron had gotten the outside of the portaledge (the scarier side) on Moonlight Buttress back in December, I took the outside this time. It took a little adjusting to get the ledge set up just right, and we realized we should have tightened up the straps more carefully before getting in it, but soon we were ready to go to sleep. My daisy chains weren't long enough to clip to the anchors, and I was too lazy to extend them with a long sling, so I had to clip in to the portaledge power-point itself, which isn't the safest thing in the world, but would suffice. Furthermore, the length of the daisy chains still prevented me from zipping my sleeping bag all the way up, so I was a little cold during the night. Other than that, however, the portaledge was exceptionally comfortable, and we both slept like babies.

This photo was actually taken just past midnight. I couldn't believe we were getting to bed that late, but we agreed to wake up at 6:00 AM anyway.