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Happy Solstice
Tuesday, December 21, 1999
 Tejas | |
 Hear Vern's Call from Aconcagua |
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Buenos días, Mountain Zone. This is Vernon Tejas with Alpine Ascents' Team Milenio, hiking up the Vacas Valley, on the longest day of the year in the Southern Hemisphere — happy solstice to everyone. We're now filling up our water bottles from a clear mountain stream that's cascading down the mountainside and we're going to treat it of course because we don't want to catch anything bad. It's another lovely day: clear blue sky, calm, beautiful. The team's in good spirits and we moved out quite early; got up at six and hit the trail by eight. What a wonderful team, it's wonderful to go with experienced people. Yeah! [Team yelling in background.]
One of the things we wanted to say was that this is proving to be one of the more glorious times that any of us have had going up this valley — some of us have been here before. It tends to be quite windy and right now we are in almost a dead calm. It's going to be a hot, sunny day. We got on the trail early, so as to beat the sun; beat the heat. We've moved up to about 2,850m and I must say, here in the shade before the sun hits us, it's probably only about 40 degrees. We're having a lot of fun.
Allen Carbert who's my assistant on this trip wanted to state that he's 32-years-old, he's 5'9", enjoys the outdoors and for anybody who's interested we'll have some contact numbers later. He is single, yes [laughter in background].
The group, as I said, is in wonderful spirits and we are going to continue on up this hill. Our ultimate goal is to climb Mount Aconcagua, it's still 25 miles off in the distance, up the Vacas Valley and then a hard left hand turn up the [Unintelligible] to the west and Base Camp at Plaza Argentina, at about 13,000ft — I'll give you that in meters when we get there. So, once again this is Vernon with Team Milenio for Alpine Ascents, saying adiós for today and talk to you tomorrow, in the manana. Ciao for now.
—Vernon Tejas, MountainZone.com Correspondent
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