Wally Berg

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Last evening, John Van Dyke, Dana Isherwood, Joe LeRoy and myself went out, had a nice dinner, and basked in our new resolve and enthusiasm to continue on with our quest to climb Vinson down on the Continent and pull off this venture that we all undertook some time ago now, being in our 12th day of delay; very high point of the trip thus far.

At that time, Koos and his crew were out at the airport planning to fly when the winds dropped, if they did. As it turned out, we came home from dinner back to the hotel to find out that the pilots had stood down for the night.

[click to zoom]

And this morning I awoke to interesting but not particularly good news for our prospects here, at this point. During the night while we were sleeping, having known that Koos and the guys went back to their house to go to sleep for some time, the Chilean Airforce, the Chilean military, I should say, did in fact dispatch two C-130s down to Patriot Hills. The Chilean military has this project underway this season to fly a helicopter from here in Punta Arenas with twin otter support to the South Pole. And they're using Patriot Hills, a camp they've established about a half kilometer from Patriot Hills, to support this effort. And these were fuel flights as part of this project.

You can imagine, with the Christmas Day turnaround people who have been down there for some time — stuck ever since I got to Chile, of course — you can imagine down at Patriot Hills the excitement that this generated. Of course it's always light, it doesn't matter when those C-130s come in, people can go out and watch.

The report I got this morning was rather discouraging for us, because these military aircraft did fly with a much higher wind speed than Koos and his crew would have undertaken to fly in. And in fact when the two aircraft landed, one did do a 180 out on the blue ice runway, and this must have been a very spectacular and gripping thing to view. I'm sure some of those folks had their video cameras out and this has been recorded.

The blue ice runway at Patriot Hills, Antarctica [click to zoom]

About all I know beyond that is that the extent of the damage is not fully known, but it wasn't bad enough that the aircraft could not take off again, and it is, in fact, now en route back to Chile, both aircraft. So at least we didn't bust a C-130 up on the blue ice runway; that would really have shot down any hopes we had this year, I'm sure.

The other thing I know that was reported to me this morning was that none of the Christmas Day turnaround people or no one at Patriot Hills asked to get on those Chilean military planes when they left, and I think that may be a statement as to how scary this was to watch. Of course, they had no slots on those, on military planes, anyway. ANI's approach down there is self-sufficient, privately supported trips. We don't rely on the Chilean government, the American government, anyone else for anything other than absolute emergency situations, and even that, there is an ethic of self-sufficiency. We are a private trip, so it's not the Chilean government's business to get us out of there. And I don't think that any of those folks would have been taken out by the Chilean government just on the basis of wanting to go. But I've got a feeling that the issue might have been broached had they not seen this little spinout. Once again, it's hard for me to imagine or describe what this must have looked like.

When you land on those runways it's quite a rough ride as it is. This ice is not smooth ice, this is an irregular, rough surface with huge, wheeled aircraft landing there. It's a pretty interesting ride as it is, when you actually touch down and run out a couple of three kilometers on this runway. But you can imagine if the plane starts to spin on you at the same time, what it must feel like. And it must have been quite the scene down there.

So winds are high at Patriot Hills. Most recently there's 35 steady wind gusting to 38. This is absolutely not flyable. Koos and the crew are standing down long enough to get some rest and sleep during the day, and certainly they'll be checking in to see if they can fly down to Patriot Hills in the evening. I will keep you posted on that.

And for now I'll just sign off and expect to check in with you when we have some more news.

—Wally Berg, Expedition Leader

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