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December 9 Happy Birthday Gus Listen to Audio of Wally's Call (.wav) Today, December 9, is Adrian’s Pope’s 41st birthday. I was hoping today that my main mission would be, besides loading the Ilyushin, would be to get a message down to Fran, who’s the cook at Patriot Hills, that Gus was going to arrive in Antarctica for his 41st birthday and she should try to make a cake. But it’s not to be. We will not be going today. I sent the weather reports (see below). We all had a team meeting, not just my team with Gus and Will, but everyone off this flight. I mentioned the Canadian mechanics who are going down to try and rescue that DC3. There are other Vinson climbers. There are also some folks who are doing a really great adventure, in that they are skiing the last degree to the South Pole. We’re all here in Punta still waiting. We got together today and Rachel Shepard described to everybody, just to keep their spirits up and I totally concurred with her, when you step off the plane into the amazing silence and the size and you experience the vastness of that continent you know that it’s been worth it. And of course part of what you have to accept is the things like the ferociousness and the velocity of the storms down here sometimes. The largeness and the scale of the entire environment that’s why it is difficult to get there. It always is. It takes time and it takes patience and it is always worth it. Rachel knows that, myself and several of the people in the room know it and we’re hanging in. Happy Birthday to Gus, life is still good here in Punta and life is still amazing down in Antarctica. We’re counting on getting there and it will happen eventually. It will not be today, probably not even tomorrow the way the storm’s looking. But we’ll keep you updated.
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This BAI expedition |
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