Things were going all right: we had nothing to do for the afternoon except re-hydrate and prepare for our big push to the summit the next day. Then I heard a low hiss, and the tent began to shake. It was spindrift. Spindrift is a funny thing — it can be soft and cuddly, but at the same time extremely persistent. Imagine getting slowly strangled to death by a very big and very wet stuffed teddy bear. That's what it's like being caught in spindrift at an alpine bivy. 

I poked my head outside. Strange. It was barely snowing. Yet the 4,000 feet of concave mixed ground above conspired to create a raging torrent that slammed down on the tent every several minutes. Most alarmingly, snow was getting packed between the wall of the ledge we had dug and us: we were slowly, yet forcefully, getting pushed off the mountain. The clouds thickened and the avalanches increased in size and frequency. Then as if to accent the merits of our chosen bivy site, a small rock dropped from somewhere above, creating a neat little two inch rip in the tent fabric above Ben's head… Hmmmm. …

When the proverbial s@#t hits the fan, an alpinist grabs a shovel and starts digging. I put myself on a 30-foot tether, waded a little ways down the snow slope, and started going for China. A couple hours later we had excavated a sort of long culvert tube, about five feet in diameter and 10 feet in length. It was bounded on one side by a 70-degree rock wall and on the other by sugar snow. Definitely a step down in the accommodations; the evacuated tent served admirably as a makeshift door.