Today, we woke up at 5:00am, prepared our equipment for Camp III and the summit, and departed for Camp III. We decided to stop in lower Camp III (6950m/22,802ft) instead of Camp III (7040m/23,100ft) today in order to allow our bodies to rest and better adapt to the higher elevation. Typically, climbers would first sleep in Camp III, then descend to base camp, rest a few days, then go up for a summit bid. But since the weather window presented itself before we had the opportunity to properly acclimate, we instead decided to sleep lower the first night. We built in a rest day to our summit bid for precisely this reason. We spent the next hour and a half digging a tent platform into the icy slope among the decaying remains of old tents that had been destroyed or abandoned here in previous years. We had a Swiss climber and Taiwanese climbers as company. In the late afternoon, the winds picked up and as this was supposed to be the day with the least amount of wind, we became concerned that the forecast was inaccurate. I confirmed via my sat phone that the winds had increased but were still tolerable for the next few days, then we made dinner and went to sleep after watching the Karakorum begin to glow red as the sun dropped behind the horizon.