Aconcagua; January - February 2007 |
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I picked Aconcagua because it's in the middle of a desert, and I thought I could avoid a lot of ice and snow. It's an "El Nino" year, which is supposed to mean dry conditions for the Andes Mountains. It's ironic, then, that our summit bid was foiled by winds (25 - 30 mph sustained, with gusts to 40mph) and "more snow than I've seen in six years", according to our lead guide. After 11 days of hiking, climbing and ferrying supplies up the mountain we arrived at our high camp (19,600 feet) on the afternoon of February 1st. February 2nd dawned too stormy to climb, so we got a welcome rest day waiting for better weather. On February 3rd we left camp just before 6am and headed for the summit. After four hours of battling up through drifts and blowing snow we reached Independencia hut at 21,000 feet. After a brief rest, the group split. Three of us decided to call it a day and head down with Jacob, our lead guide. Arthur, Trent, Mick and our other guide Martine pressed on for several more hours and got within a few hundred feet of the summit before they were forced back down by time and weather. No one from any group reached the summit that day. I'm sorry I don't have a summit photo to share, but I'm satisfied that I did my best and I certainly got the full mountaineering experience I was looking for. I've got lots of pictures and my journal to put up on the web site; I'll let you know when they're ready. The good news is that we got down two days early and I flew home ahead of schedule, arriving on Thursday 2/8. My coming home two days early turned out to be a lucky break, because on Friday evening Ilana took me to the Alta Bates ER and on Saturday morning I had an emergency gall bladder removal. On my original schedule I would have been in the Mexico City airport when the symptoms flared up. I got out of the hospital on Sunday evening 2/12; everything went well. It's quite a roller coaster to come off the mountain and end up hobbling around the house in my pajamas! Ilana's nursing me back to health and has been wonderful in every way. Oh, yeah, my bags took five days to catch up with me, too. I booked the expedition through Adventuras Patagonicas and can give them my highest recommendation. The guides were excellent, the service was great and everyone I dealt with was prompt and helpful. They do expeditions, treks and ski trips around the world; check them out. This web site is based on the journal I kept during the expedition. If you'd like to read through the actual journal offline, you can download the PDF version:
I have selected 249 of the 540 pictures I took during the trip. I have also picked out 80 of the 2,885 pictures taken by other members of the group. They can be identified by a credit line under the caption of each photo. The images on the web site are "snapshot" format, about 1/4th the size of the originals. If you have a particular favorite, I can send an original by email. Twelve (12) of the pictures are "Panorama" shots comprised of two or more individual pictures merged with Autostitch, a wonderful piece of free software. The panorama shots are 528 pixels high and as wide as they need to be to show the whole view at that height; use the scroll bar at the bottom of your browser window to move to the right for more of the image. Let me know what you think, and enjoy the tour. Click on the "Aconcagua Tour" link in the upper-left corner of this page or any of the destination links below to get started.
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