Today, we woke up at 4:00am, packed up our things, ate a quick breakfast, and then began the trek down from Broad Peak Base Camp to Urdukas. The trek ended up taking us 13.5 hours (we had to wait at each camp to make sure that the porters would make it) and we arrived to Urdukas at 6:30pm. The dry cough I’ve had since summitting turned into something else on the trek down and I found it hard to breathe when I had to go uphill (which happens a lot on this trek down). I’m assuming the cough is the result of damage to the lungs from breathing in the frigid subzero dry air for so many hours at night on summit day. Regardless of its origin, I don’t see it getting any better while we are trekking down close to 20 miles a day in the blazing heat of clear August days. It also doesn’t help things that I decided to trek down with close to 25kg’s on my back. But we only have to bear with two more super long days before we are down in Askole.