Aconcagua Expedition Dispatch

February 1, 2008 – Everyone Arrives at Berlin Camp for the Night

It is now just past 7pm on Feb 1st. My GPS receiver, which has a lock on 9 different satellites, tells me that the Berlin camp here is a little bit over 19,400 feet and also a bit over 5900meters above sea level.

Line Jacque arrived here a few hours ago on her third try walking to this camp, walking really strong beside Leila. She will probably proclaim ‘this is higher than I have ever been’. She has climbed to the top of Kilimanjaro and Elbrus and tonight she will go to bed at a higher elevation than either of those two summits.

The entire Berg Adventures Team will be together sleeping at Berlin camp. Our summit heroes Steve, Klaus, Mike, Oswaldo and Juancho came back down into camp in quite a heavy snow storm, more than 14 hours after they left camp this morning, with a successful summit behind them.

Opus and Claire arrived at high camp with Leila and Line, and as you know the rest of us have been here at camp waiting for our summit team and for the Nido Camp 2 team to arrive. The last person to leave Camp 2 was Nelson. We had him leave our last tent up there in case someone needed to turn back to a lower elevation – no one needed to, so he took the tent down and made it up here. Now the entire Berg Adventures team is here.

It is snowing hard, but there is no wind and our weather forecast says that over the next few days we might get a chance for some of the other team members to get there shot at Aconcagua.

We are happy to be together and we are congratulating one another. The snow is falling, but the soup from Simon’s kitchen is hot, and there is going to be a lot more good food coming out from the kitchen as we settle down for a cozy night together over 5900 meters at Berlin Camp on Aconcagua.