Hello, this is Peggy Foster calling in from Base Camp, Vinson Massif, with Antarctica 2003 team. We are packing up and anticipating fly out today. One plane has left to go to Patriot Hills, and we hope by this evening we will be back at Patriot Hills, and heading on the Alleutian back to South America, to Punta Arenas.

We were looking at some interesting stats last night, and we realized the last four days of our climb, we climbed 52 of the 96 hours of time. And the other interesting stat that we found was that between last Thursday, January 2nd, our first summit attempt, and arriving at Base Camp the night before last, we had only slept 30 hours in total. So when we arrived the night before last, we actually slept for 17 hours straight, and made up for some very long-lost time.

One of the joys for us as a team was not being roped up, and another interesting fact that we figured out was we had been no more than 12 feet from each other for the last 12 days, which was generally going to the loo about 6 feet to 8 feet off from our safe approach area of our camp site. So lots of freedom felt here, by being able to walk off on to the crevasse-free area of Vinson Massif Base Camp.

The most frequent activity, we decided, was changing hats. We had 25 hats between the five of us, and that was the most frequent activity, we felt. We figured out the amount of water that we melted in the last two weeks. We melted snow to make water, and we melted 75 gallons of water, which equals 600 pounds of water we consumed for our successful new ascent.

It looks like the name of our new ascent, yet to be confirmed, but will be Double-03, meaning double--we went up twice, and 03, indicating our year of the new ascent. We're all happy and healthy.

Some of the stunning features of the Antarctic were the sound of the silence and the smell of snow falling, the vastness of the views in silhouettes of pink and blue, the 24 hour light, which usually meant we had to pull a hat over our eyes so we could sleep, the many colors of snow we saw, and the depth of blue in the glaciers.

That's it from Vinson Massif Base Camp. Thank you for being with us and stay tuned to arrival back to South America. Cheers, and much love to Steve and Steel. Bye.

— Peggy Foster, expedition member and MountainZone.com correspondent