Aconcagua Expedition Dispatch

January 21, 2010 – A Glimpse of Life at Nido de Condores

It is just past noon and I’m calling you from Nido de Condores at 18,300ft /5,580m, our Camp 2. We have amazingly mild conditions here: sunshine, virtually no wind and blue skies all around. In all the years I’ve stayed here, I don’t remember such good conditions. Alex, Line and David, who’ve climbed on this trip before with Berg Adventures, also remember a completely different camp experience here at Nido.

We spent our morning in the sunshine preparing to climb higher and planning for our summit attempt. After breakfast, we spent some time adjusting our crampons. Oswaldo took Hugo, Isabella, and Alain over to a snowy section near our camp for a little crampon instruction. There are sleeping bags strewn across the tops of all the Berg Adventures mountain tents, drying out in preparation for high camp where we’ll need all the warmth and insulation we can get.

Simon is now preparing our lunch over in the cook tent, and we’ll enjoy our soup together in the nice dining tent we’ve set up. After we have lunch, we’re planning to climb up for a visit to our high camp at 19,600ft/5,975m.

The weather forecast continues to be very promising for Saturday morning, which is our proposed summit date. Right now our acclimatization seems to be going great, our gear is good, our preparations are right on schedule and it looks like we have a good shot at climbing to the highest summit of the Americas, Aconcagua, on Saturday morning. We’ll keep you posted.

Note: We have received a transmission from Wally saying that everybody made it up to the Berlin Camp and are now back at Nido, feeling great at acclimatizing well.