Aconcagua Expedition Dispatch

January 26, 2015 – Beautiful Weather for our Hike to Confluencia

Wow it’s a beautiful Monday morning, 26th of January. I’m calling from Penitentes, not a cloud in the sky. We have a forecast that says it may get a bit cloudy this afternoon but we are certainly starting off with perfect weather.

This is it! We are going to the mountains. We are going to drive now just a short distance and go to the Harcones gate where the rangers have a station and where we will enter the provincial park and we will be on our way, trekking towards Aconcagua.

This will be a slow process. I’ve got an excited team the “Dirty Dozen”. We are ready to get off to the mountain.

Our life here along the highway near the Chilean border has been really interesting. We are right across from the Penitentes ski area. The first afternoon we were here the whole team took off and they climbed about 300 metres up the ski hill just for some elevation gain and something to do. I got some nice photographs. We felt what it was like to climb a bit higher in the Andes. As you know we drove up to the pass between Chile and Argentina yesterday. Now on the way down from the pass we also stopped at the natural bridge at Punta del Inca Bridge which is a fascinating natural site. There is also a centuries old church there and it’s quite an interesting tourist spot along the highway.

After that we continued on a couple of kilometers along the road to the cemeterio de los Andinistas. This is a place where climbers lost, mountaineers lost on Aconcagua have had memorials and sometimes where they have been buried.

After we left the memorial for climbers left on Aconcagua we returned to the hotel, had lunch and then we packed our bags, our High Camp mule bags will go directly to Plaza de Mulas. Yesterday afternoon they were packed, we sent them out the door with Osvaldo and the team up to carrels. Then we thought we would go for another hike but we came down to the lobby, started talking with some climbers who had come off Aconcagua, some more people going up to Aconcagua. Steve the manager here was very gracious as he always is.

Most of us ended up taking some chairs outside, setting the along the river in the afternoon sun and enjoying some beer and social time along the crest of the Andes here at Penitentes. We are relaxing a bit before we go to the mountains.

So now we are off, like I said. We will try to get some photos out of the days past that I just described, including the Punta del Inca, the natural bridge and the cemetery. We will certainly try to get you a photo as we enter the park today. But if not in days to come we will send more photos.

We will update you every day as we climb higher.

Listen to Wally's call

Later today…

Okay it’s 10:10 AM. The dirty Dozen plus Osvaldo, Afrien, Havier, Alex, Maria and myself makes 18 of us in all. I see the group walking just ahead of us past the beautiful lagoon of the Aconcagua Provincial Park sign.

Aconcagua is in the clouds. Maybe we will have some different weather this afternoon. The sky overhead is beautiful and here we go to enjoy our first hike, just about 23 – 4 hours to Confluencia camp.

Listen to Wally's call