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Title image - BAI takes you to: Aconcagua
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Aconcagua Expedition Dispatch

January 16, 2014 – Acclimatization Hike to Plaza Francia

It’s Thursday the 16th of January and I am calling you from just below 3,900m (12,795ft), beneath the South Face of Aconcagua. We are on the approach to Plaza Francia, the base camp for that spectacular climb. Many of you may know that the South Face of Aconcagua is one of the great mountain walls of the world, reaching over 3,000m (9,845m) from the base to the summit. All we are doing is looking at it today and actually it is coming and going through the clouds. This has been our acclimatization walk from our two night camp at Confluencia, where we arrived yesterday at 3,400m (11,155ft).

I’ll tell you what, this is the warmest and the driest season I’ve ever seen on Aconcagua. Not sure what that means for us ahead but walking up here today, even in the higher elevations, we are not wearing the sleeves and warmer clothes that we normally do. It’s a pleasant temperature but not really on the cool side yet. We do expect more clouds this afternoon.

We will be returning to Confluencia Camp and later in the afternoon just before dinner we will go over and see the doctors who are stationed there and check in with them. They will monitor our vital signs and give us some words of advice before we consider going higher all the way to our Base Camp at Plaza de Mulas tomorrow.

The report is great from this team, we are enjoying being in this beautiful mountain. The services are great, they have great meals and of course Osvaldo and the Bolivian members of our team are taking very good care of us.

We are having a great time on the mountain and I am really proud of how healthy and how well each of the members of this Berg Adventures Team are performing so far.

We’ve got a long ways to go and we will keep you posted!

Message from the office:

Wally called into the office at 8 PM on Aconcagua to report that the dry spell he was discussing this morning is no more! Here is what he had to report:

“At about 6 pm we started hearing violent thunder and these beautiful storm clouds moved in. Now it is rainy quite hard and we expect it to last maybe even until tomorrow.

You will all be happy to know that we all went in to have our checkups at the medical station and everyone is looking really good. Each of us has high oxygen saturation, our pulses are all fine and our blood pressure appears to remain low. It is great to hear from the doctors that we are all looking good, even after we have spent a night in altitude.

At the moment we are all preparing to sit down for another delicious dinner. Yesterday night we had tasty steaks and tonight we are excited to have ravioli, which is the perfect warm meal for this rainy, stormy night.”

Confluencia Camp, our home for two nights before we make our way to Plaza de Mulas Base camp.

Confluencia Camp, our home for two nights before we make our way to Plaza de Mulas Base camp.

Hiking in the warm Argentine sun

Hiking in the warm Argentine sun

Our trek to Plaza Francia

Our trek to Plaza Francia

The South Face of Aconcagua, one of the great mountain walls of the world

The South Face of Aconcagua, one of the great mountain walls of the world