Entries from Vinson Massif
It is 1:30 AM, the sun is still shining brightly out and I've just crawled in the tent. It has been a long day -in lots of good ways. Once the sun runs into the western rib of Vinson at around 3 AM, we don't get it again until 11:30. That is the downside of being so close in to the massive west wall of Vinson, but there are upsides. We get an incredible view of this 2,000 meter face of rock and snow with its three immense ice strreams tumbling downward in the slowest of motion. We climbed the northern end of the wall today, carrying a load of supplies up a thousnd meters or so to high camp. A snowstorm had been forecast, but instead we got nothing but intense sun and a giant blue sky. It was literally the perect day for climbing in Antarctica. Most of our day was spent working up a long section of fixed rope. Before we'd gone very far up the steep snow we were treated to unlimited views out to the west. Ice, ice and more ice... Way out to the horizon where it usually gets tough to tell the divide between Earth and sky. It took us six and a half hours to get up to high camp, which we reached at 8 pm (we don't do early starts in such a cold place when camp is in shadow) and we were back down at low camp again by 10:30. Dinner was a welcome chance to sit around and talk over the roar of our stoves. It does take hours to melt all of the snow we require for water after such a long day out.
Tomorrow we may move up to high camp, or we may rest for a day... It depends on how strong the gang looks at our 11:30 breakfast, and on whether that snowstorm finds us.
We accomplished our move up from basecamp in fine style today. Within the first thirty minutes on the track, we burst out of a low cloud layer into brilliant sunshine and the bluest of skies. All seemed to be feeling strong and as our loads were lighter than on yesterday's carry, we cranked up the pace a notch. We cruised in to camp in just over 4 hrs. Namgya Sherpa led a rope with Tim Amos and Leif Whittaker. I tied in with John Kelly, Brent Huntsman and Sashko Kedev. I enjoyed chatting with Namgya at our rest breaks. He has climbed Everest 9 times along with ascents of Cho Oyu, Dhalagiri and Shishipangma. When I thought about those numbers a bit, I realized something peculiar about the approximately 25 climbers that make up Vinson's current population. I've got eleven, Willie Benegas and Vern Tejas have about nine Everest summits each, together with a healthy handful by guides Scott Wollums, Michael Horst and David Hamilton... Throw in a few more for the clients on our teams who have been up (like Sashko on our team) and the grand total must be up near sixty. But none of that will be very comforting if we can't manage to climb Vinson in the coming days. Luckily for us, Namgya has already been up Vinson three times this season and knows the way. He is from the eastern part of Nepal, near Kangchenjunga, but these days lives part of each year in Kathmandu, part in Cambridge, England and part in Antarctica.
The other teams on the mountain have spread out a bit, with some now at high camp, some having carried high and with ourselves bringing up the rear. Fine with us, that way. Today was a classic antarctic climbing day. The air temperature probably didn't pass 5 degrees F, but with intense sun reflected off extremely clean white snows, the apparent temperature was downright Carribean. We were treated to splendid views of the big and steep mountains to the north which are seldom climbed. Shinn, Epperly and Gardiner are massive and formidable and don't exactly beckon to those of moderate skill (we couldn't see Tyree today, but it is even more massive and more formidable and does even less beckoning).
We enjoyed a fine dinner in our new home and turned in, tying everything down in case of storm... such a thing is difficult to imagine just now as there isn't a hint of wind and the midnight sun continues to blaze away in the summer sky. It will get intensely cold in a few hours when the sun ducks behind Vinson... But as I say, who wants to think about that now?
Good weather today and perfect route conditions. We carried a load of food, fuel and gear to "low camp" and then returned -as planned- to VBC. Five and a half hours up, about thirty minutes to cache the gear and bask in the high altitude sun and then two and a half hours down. All did well, all are cheerful... More tomorrow.
A moderately stormy day on Mount Vinson. We chose not to do our intended carry because of persistent wind and cloud, which when combined with the normal cold temperatures makes travel a little dicey. Or at least a little more dicey than we hoped for for our intro to the mountain. Instead we practiced a bit with our avalanche beacons, beefed up the snow walls around our dining tent and went for a three- hour hike with light packs when conditions improved slightly in the afternoon. Forecasts call for less wind tomorrow and we'll hope to take advantage.
Just a brief note for now. It is almost midnight and these last couple of days have been quite busy... But we are finally right where we want to be, after a lot of flying and a lot of packing and preparing.
It didn't look so likely yesterday as we hung out in Punta Arenas. I took the gang up to the office of our logistics company ALE and Peter MacDowell was nice enough to give a tour and to explain just what lengths the company goes to in order to figure out flying weather in Antarctica. Winds at that time were still blowing too hard for a flight in. But as the afternoon progressed, things started to seem a bit more positive. At 7:30 we got the call to get ready in a hurry... Things were happening. We hustled out to the airport in our polar clothes... Waddled through security and onto our plane. The kazak crew politely directed us and we blasted out of Punta at 10 pm sharp. Four hours later the big jet roared to a stop on the blue ice runway at patriot hills and the tail lifted to offload tons of gear, food, fuel and machinery. And us. We got out snapping pictures of the 2 am sunshine and ice stretching as far as the eye could see. It was cold, but not unpleasantly so, since the wind had quit entirely. We walked the kilometer to Patriot Hills camp, enjoyed a fine bowl of beef stew (the traditional welcome in these parts) and then went out into the cold again to get our own tents built. At 5 am in the bright sunshine we went to bed. My head was spinning from seeing so many old friends among the camp staff and the climbers that were outbound on our jet. My old kiwi pal Sean Norman woke us at 9:30 to get us ripping down our tents. Time to fly again... This time in a Canadian twin otter on skis, to vinson. The flight through the Ellsworths took about an hour, the weather was fine and we landed at full power going uphill on the Branscomb. The day was then spent building another camp, getting a climbing kitchen going and sorting gear for a day of climbing tomorrow. Michael Horst and Vern Tejas are next door with their team, Willie Benegas is a few feet the other way with his. Scott Woolums is guiding a few folks as well. My team got to meet Namgya Sherpa who will be working with me. He came down in mid afternoon today from summitting Mount Shinn yesterday (Shinn is third highest in Antarctica).
It is calm and still at VBC as is often the case, but in the last hour or so it has gotten murky and misty and light dry snow is coming down while the temperature hovers around -10 F. Everybody is in bed now, deep in warm down sleeping bags.
Antarctica was simply not in the cards today. Too windy down at Patriot Hills, where our big four-engine jet transport has to put down on wheels on an ice runway. The prevailing winds are across the strip and it doesn't take much to make airplane landing attempts unwise. It wasn't a big storm system, just normal katabatics... the gravity driven flow of air off the polar plateau, downward and outward toward Antarctica's coast. The good thing was that ALE could tell us definitively that the day wouldn't work, rather than keeping everybody in their boots and waiting hour to hour for some calmer conditions. People were free to lounge about or to stroll the quiet streets. It being Sunday in South America, there wasn't much at all going on in the streets of Punta Arenas this morning. There were a fair number of people walking about as a massive 2000 plus passenger cruise ship was anchored just out from the city pier. Well into the afternoon, it was a fine summer day, warm and windless, but in the late afternoon it clouded up and got cool and rainy. Typically, Punta gets dynamic weather with big swings on any given day. None of this prevented my climbers from going out to visit Otway Sound for a tour of the Magellenic penguin colony 70 km north of Punta Arenas. Once the gang was back in town, we walked a few blocks from the hotel for another fine and friendly dining experience at La Marmita. Walking home to the hotel, I told everybody to plan on flying, first thing tomorrow... but we'll just see what the katabatics have to say about things.
Everything and everyone is in place at the tip of South America... ready for a flight to Antarctica. The past few days have been fun, but also a little stressful and hectic. There were the usual assortment of missed flights and lost luggage, but in the end, our team of five climbers made it down the length of the world intact. I arrived two days ago with the bulk of the team equipment and spent a day shopping for extra provisions and getting over jet lag. Today was the official start to things, as we began at 10 AM with our official introductory meeting with ALE (our logistics company for this trip) This orientation was a two-hour long gathering of all those who will be sharing the Ilyushin 76 transport plane with us to Antarctica. Roughly, there are about 25 climbers bound for Vinson who will be the big Russian jet's final customers bound for the Ice this season.
It has been fun to run into old friends and guiding partners down here, as usual. Mike Sharp, one of the principals of ALE, gave our briefing today and had me reflecting back to my first visit to the continent in 1995 when he and I spent a stormy week in a tent together at Jone's Sound on the Antarctic Peninsula. He showed slides of the operation at Patriot Hills and described the program out at Vinson Basecamp. He tried to impress on those assembled just how far from any government bases they would be and how independent and self sufficient the company and its customers must be. Afterward, I walked with my five climbers (we'll meet our second guide, Namgya, down on the ice, where he is already working with other teams) out into the bustling but friendly center of Punta Arenas. This city of 150,000 is a gateway for tourists coming to see Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego as well as Antarctica, but it is also an industrial town of great importance to Chile. We walked the few blocks back toward Magellan's Strait, and into our hotel at the water's edge. The next task was to get rid of the bulk of our gear and supplies. We brought it all downstairs to be weighed and collected on a truck. ALE will do the heavy work of loading the mammoth IL 76 out at the airport today in the hope that we'll get to fly tomorrow morning.
I got together with the team in the evening to go over maps and pictures of the Ellsworth Mountains in order to get everybody up to speed on which glaciers we'd be landing on and climbing up. We discussed strategies and expected hurdles... but I hope that we also got rid of some of the worry and nervousness that stems from choosing a goal in such a far-off and unique environment.
The work done, it was time for a dinner out on the town and a little relaxation. Punta Arenas has great dining spots... but we don't want to visit many more of them. Our hope is that we get a call early tomorrow telling us that the weather window is open and that we should get our boots on and get set for flying to Antarctica.
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