Pete Athans

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We're kind of looking over the town of Punta Arenas which has been described to us in two ways, one of which is a young San Francisco, or kind of a sorry version of Youngstown, Ohio in 1955 with an ocean. From here, it definitely looks like the former, and definitely more... a little bit more romantic, if you could imagine that.

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It's actually just a beautiful, crystal clear day, and we're just looking out over the bay here and I think you got Wally's earlier report that we've had some pretty good indications that we may be actually leaving this place in the next couple of days and getting down onto the ice. We're obviously looking forward to that. But today is just a fantastic day, nice to be outside and hiking around up in the rarefied atmosphere of a couple of hundred feet up here which is... is still really very nice to be outside and away from the concrete and steel and glass of being in the center of town here.

Still, we're obviously looking forward to leaving the penguino rodeo behind and getting onto the big ice here pretty quick and onto the slopes Mount Vincent here relatively shortly. But I'm going to pass the phone over here to Wally and I know he'd like to bring you all up to speed here on what he's thinking about.

—Pete Athans, Mountain Guide

Wally Berg

Wally Berg:
Yeah, we're out here, as Pete described, looking over some beautiful area. A real sense of being at the tip of the continent for me. I have that always when I'm down here, but I'll have to say this is the clearest day in quite a lot of hanging around in Punta Arenas I've ever seen. No wind, really beautiful looking out across the water at the glaciated peaks.

And it's kind of interesting for me right now, because we are at the southern-most ski area in the world; middle of the summer, of course, but I'm thinking back to Copper Mountain and my other life back there as a ski patroller and all my friends back in Copper Mountain. I know from talking to Sally that the good part of the winter finally showed up in the Summit County area in Colorado, and it sounds like it got a lot of good snow. Pretty amazing experience for me to be as far removed, geographically, from that now as I am, sitting in the middle of an astral summer, enjoying the view.

So we're going to get ahold of you guys tomorrow. We will be getting an update, I would say, in about... maybe as soon as we get back to town, another hour and a half or so, about the three o'clock scheduled radio contact down onto the ice with those guys at Patriot Hills.

As I indicated this morning, there is some momentum, enthusiasm developing down there that we're pretty excited about. We're excited about it for two reasons: One is, it sounds like they're getting snow moved and we're glad, at this point, that we're on this end of the wait rather than that end. There's a lot of very hard work going on down here. We've had a report, if they maintain their optimism that they're going to break through and get that snow, the better part of it, removed today. I'll update you on that and maybe we can have a firmer schedule about our departure within the next 12 to 24 hours.

—Wally Berg, Expedition Leader

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