Aconcagua Expedition Dispatch

January 24, 2014 – A Beautiful Polar Afternoon at Nido de Condores

It’s a beautiful afternoon at Nido de Condroes. It’s about 2 in the afternoon. What we see now, is really amazing, the landscape is almost polar or arctic, because what we see now is only snow and rock and in this case; a blue sky with some distant mountains.

There is some frigid air coming off of Aconcagua and we felt great that we had our secure tents last night and we are snug right now. Maria just made rounds and served soup to everyone in their tents and lunch is to follow.

We spent much of the morning walking around just enjoying the scenery. But believe me we are completely bundled up! Winds are still about 40 km an hour but we are expecting them to drop this afternoon. Guilherme in Brazil and Sara and Deirdre in the Berg Adventures office continue to send us reports on the weather and are watching the trends. We feel pretty good about what is coming ahead but Aconcagua, as most of you know, is always an extreme and challenging mountain in terms of weather.

There is no dinning tent up here. We all go into our small North Face mountain tents, very secure in these winds. And then Maria, Sergio and Alex circulate and serve us food as we need.

Tomorrow we expect it to be calmer, still cold no doubt, but we expect to move higher on to Berlin Camp. Alex and Osvaldo dropped down to Plaza de Mulas base camp today, that’s about a 1,000m descent or more. They went to take down rubbish, waste and just to clear a few more supplies we may need for our summit push. These guys are amazing, always morning up and down the mountain.

We will keep you posted as we continue to move up high on Aconcagua.

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