Aconcagua Expedition Dispatch
January 9, 2016 – We All Made It to Plaza de Mulas!
Well, here we go, we woke this morning, Saturday morning, with stars overhead and the clear’s sky we’ve seen since we arrived in Argentina.
Now that the sun is up, barely, I can still see a lot of clouds but it seems that the weather is heading in our direction. This is a big day, so that’s good news.
This trip, especially at this stage, as we approach base camp, it is all about Mules. I haven’t really described that yet but mules left with our bags for Plaza de Mules, our high camp climbing gear a few days ago, and they accompanied that to Confluencia, dropped our trekking bags off. We’ve been living out of those duffel bags in our North Face tents since. Mules are going to show up at 7:30 this morning and take our gear all the way to Plaza de Mules and we will be walking slowly behind and as I said, it looks like we are going to have a beautiful day.
Yesterday after I checked in, in the mid-afternoon, we went down at 5 o’clock for our schedule appointment to see the doctors here at Confluencia and get checked out before we continue up, we are going to see the doctors again, different doctors of course, at Plaza de Mulas in 3 or 4 days that we are living there before we move higher up the mountain.
The team is doing great, oxygen saturation levels are high. I think there is some apprehension about the long walk today but we are taking one step at a time. The Bolivian staff is down right now serving bed tea and coffee in the tents, to wake people up. The Bolivian team will drop their tents while they are loading their duffel bags and we are having an early breakfast and be on our way to Plaza de Mulas soon.
Listen to Wally's call
Well, we made it; it is 6:30 in the evening. What a day! The team is exhausted but there are big smiles all around. The entire team, age spread is from 16 to 74; we made it up here in waves, definitely, remember we have 5 guides here with us.
We got here between 8 hours and 45 minutes after we left and 9 hours and ½ after we left. We were welcomed by the same staff we have been using for years and years Berg Adventures tradition continues here at Plaza de Mulas.
Maria, Efrain and Sergio left us from our midway point; 5 hours into our day, came ahead and got ours tents up. Chris already met a beautiful mule dog, very well behaved, they are used to herd the mules, and sometimes one or two like hanging out up here and it didn’t take long for Chris to befriend a beautiful wild boy, an Argentinian Andean mule dog. No doubt we will see some pictures of Chris and this fellow soon.
I’ve taken pictures of everybody; it is going to take us a while to get the photos of the last couple of days off.
Like I said, this is a smiling team, if you could see these satisfying tired smiles right now on the shadow of the beautiful mountains around Plaza de Mulas, in the heart of the Andes, you will be impressed.
This is a great team, really long day today. Here we are at Base Camp, we got a long ways to go, take care of ourselves, monitor how we are doing and we will keep you posted as we work to move higher on Aconcagua. Good report from Plaza de Mulas, we are all doing great, we send our best to everybody.