Winter in Annapurna (revised) part 1

The air was cold, as cold as I had ever experienced it. I had been told it was -45c at one point, a fantastic figure outside anything I had known before, but it was so cold you couldn’t stand outside for night for any longer than it took to pee unless you had just about every item of clothing available on so I believed it.

Me and Boz were lost, the path had disappeared from view an hour ago, so we had dug into the snow, a cave just big enough for us to crawl into and warm some of the surrounding snow over a small gas burner. We needed to find heat from somewhere, and although the thin air would not permit the water to boil, steam was now rising slowly from the surface. We poured powdered orange from a sachet into our mugs and mixed it with the…