torrential rain and battery replacement

I woke up in the middle of the night last night to hear perhaps the heaviest rain I've ever heard. It was absolutely pouring -- I finally understand what the locals mean by "West Coast rain;" it's like nothing you've ever seen or heard before. Luckily it cleared up this morning before we headed out. Again, today was supposed to be a rest day, but we ended up having to work again.

Over the last few days we've discovered that the GPS units are not getting enough power. Essentially the solar panels are not providing enough power to run the GPS units, so the batteries are dying. As we don't get any data when our GPS units don't have power, we needed to fix this. So today we lugged up five more batteries to replace GPS batteries on the glacier. We carried three 17 AH batteries and two 33 AH batteries -- that's about 150-200 lb right there between five us carrying the gear up. It was a rough day. Tomorrow two of us will be carrying the PPK gear in addition to two batteries, which will be even heavier.

Hopefully the new batteries will keep the GPS units alive until Saturday when we take all the gear down and wrap up our field campaign. There is supposed to a huge rainfall event on Thursday, so we'll be able to capture that event before then.

Heavily crevassed area near the terminus.