Aconcagua Expedition Dispatch

January 11, 2010 – Team Meets in Mendoza and Heads for Penitentes

It’s a very hot day in the beautiful city of Mendoza, Argentina with its tree-lined streets and green plazas.

This Berg Adventures’ Aconcagua team, like many other Berg Adventures’ teams, is a very international group. We have climbers from 5 countries: Canada, the United States, Brazil, Bolivia, and Portugal. Here in Mendoza we’ve been gathering over the last few days. Alain and Isabelle flew in from Montreal, Quebec via Buenos Aires. Don and Kelly arrived from Salt Lake City via Santiago a couple of days ago, the old friends Line, David and Rob all arrived together having flown from Canada. Alex arrived from Portugal of course, Hugo from Brazil, and here we all are.

We’re a group of 14 climbers headed for the summit of Aconcagua. That includes the people I just listed plus myself, Wally Berg, and the five Bolivians, Berg Adventures’ Bolivian Staff who have arrived here from La Paz. All together there are 14 climbers on this Aconcagua summit team and we’re honoured to be accompanied by mountaineer Rob Dunn who is going to be trekking to Plaza de Mulas with us.

Today we did what all Aconcagua climbers have to do; we went into the National Park Headquarters office here in Mendoza. Oswald and the Bolivian staff had paved the way by doing much of our paperwork and paying the fees in advance but we still had to wait in line in a rather hot room that was full of climbers from around the world all eager to get started up Aconcagua.

We’re going to be on our way now. Our driver Raul has a cooler in the van with cold drinks and snacks. It’s going to take us several hours to drive out to the mountain village of Penitentes where we’ll be living in a hotel for the next two nights, acclimatizing and preparing to move up Aconcagua. We’ll report to you along the way. The team is happy to be together, old friends and new. Berg Adventures is going to be on Aconcagua once again. We’ll report as the trip goes along, probably every day.