Aconcagua Expedition Dispatch

January 12, 2016 – Rest Day at Plaza de Mulas

Osvaldo and I have always had better luck, better success with our teams that spent four nights at Plaza de Mulas before beginning to climb to higher camps rather than three.

It is always a tough decision, the team members who went to camp I yesterday, as you could see, had a very good day.

The weather has been pretty good; we did have a forecast (broken connection). Also we had more time to evaluate, acclimatize, then we made the call to not go to Camp I until tomorrow and right after we made that decision, we checked the weather forecast again, the extended forecast had flip flopped and the 18th of January now has lower winds than the 17th so things seem to be falling in place.

It is pretty serious up there though. The team who has been coming down, who went to the summit yesterday, or attempted to, said there were very, very high winds, 85km winds. We talked to a Norwegian team, great guys. They had turned back due to high winds, and one of them had very significant frostbite on one of his fingers. It is very, very cold up there.

A little bit later another team came down, and they had a different experience, just slightly different timing, they were able to wait out the real high winds and they did reach the summit. They were really happy about that. We’ve met a lot of other climbers coming and going, as you know, the success rate so far this year, has been very, very low. There are a lot of very optimistic teams at Plaza de Mulas today. It’s great to meet people from all over the world. I will tell you more stories about who is here and what is going on. Meantime Mac and our team are playing poker.

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