Expedition Dispatch

November 28, 2012 – Feeling Hot on the Way to High Camp

2:15pm, and its Wednesday, the 28th of November. I’m calling you from Low Camp on the Branscomb Glacier. Now we’re all packed up, the tents are down, our packs are loaded, our sleds will stay here of course and we’re getting on the rope to begin ascending to High Camp which is 12,400ft. /3,700m. A team of our good friends from Austria, Switzerland, and Germany have set out ahead of us; some of the teams are heading out today. Rob, Namgay, and Lakpa, the Ranger team, called us from High Camp. It took them a long time to get there yesterday, but they made it, rested well, and they’re reporting they’re actually above the clouds. We actually have a pretty thick layer of clouds over us right now. They’re actually above the clouds in calm, pretty good weather up there, so we hope to find the same thing when we reach there. It’ll be many hours from now; it’s a long climb today.

If you think you can’t get hot in Antarctica, you’re wrong. Vaughan was just talking to me about how he’s going to take a layer off just before he started. Because even though this snow is extremely dry from the low temperatures, when you get the sun on you and there is no wind, you can definitely heat up at these lower elevations still. We’ll take it slow today, it’ll take us a while to get settled in High Camp, and that will probably be our home for at least three nights after this. We’ll keep you posted. Mt. Vinson is still treating us well and we’re having a great time together as a team.

By the way, if you are wondering what we had for breakfast this morning, Winslow made grilled cheese toast for everyone. But Todd and I had to use a snow saw to cut the frozen bread with, they sent fresh bread out from Union Glacier, it keeps nicely because it’s frozen. We tried to cut it with a knife, but we finally decided a saw (Lost satellite connection).

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