Update: December 1, 2006 – Reaching our High Point on Vinson

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It’s about 8 hours after we started, Larry and I are at about 15,000 feet (4570m) approaching the summit ridge of Mount Vinson.  We decided to turn back, the weather has not been very good.  Four groups started up today, 2 have already turned back and I was just on the radio with one group above and they were reporting white-out conditions above.  That combined with the fact that we had a broken crampon issue and we finally got Larry’s crampon fixed.  It’s broken twice on this trip, once unfortunately today.  That has us thinking that we better get ourselves back to High Camp. 

It’s a long way back to High Camp and as you probably know even further back to Vinson Base.  And at the end of the day the mountain has decided that we are not going to stand on the very top of Mount Vinson but 15,000 feet in Antarctica near the summit ridge, we are exhausted but we know we have enough gas to get back down to High Camp to take care of ourselves and enjoy the rest of the trip, so that is what we are going to do.  I’ll sign off for now from our high point in Antarctica and we’ll report when we get back down to High Camp.