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Monday, February 14, 2000
 Berg | |
 Hear Wally's Call from Aconcagua |
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Mountain Zone, it's the "One Mountain at a Time" team, calling you from Base Camp at Aconcagua on Valentine's Day, and probably the first thing I should say is that I least send...the four of us send Valentine's greetings to our sweethearts: Alma, Kris, Sally, and Ana.
We're right where we want to be on this particular climb. We've probably got 10 or 12 hard days in front of us, but the basic acclimatization is being taken care of. We're down here at this wonderful Base Camp scene, with the rest of the Alpine Ascents crew. Allen and Jose Luis' successful team will be pulling out of here today. Neil and Charles showed up. We had a great time just doing a guide photo a few moments ago with all the Alpine Ascents' guides that are here in camp. Great time visiting with folks on the way up and on the way down.
We've got beautiful sun here today. I've mentioned a bit about the weather here on the mountain; I've talked about it being warm, at given elevations. This Base Camp's exactly the same elevation as Pheriche on the approach to Everest Base Camp — never saw it this warm at Pheriche. And I talked about, on the trek in, the given camps at a given elevation will be warmer than the camps I know on, say, Kilimanjaro. But that's not the whole story because here we are at 14,000ft and there's 9,000 feet of ascent above us, to climb this mountain, and we look up there and we're very aware that this is one of the great mountains of the world. It is, in fact, the highest mountain in the world that's outside of central Asia — and it's a pretty different deal if you're on Kili, your highest camp is at 15,000ft.
We're going to be camping at probably 20,000ft, in a few nights. I'll keep you posted as we move up through the camps. We will move to 16,200ft tomorrow and then we'll slowly advance our camps until we can get into position to go for the summit. My plan right now is that we'll actually camp at a little over 20,000ft, before climbing the last 3,000 feet to the summit of Aconcagua. And it's all talk and big plans right now because we have a day of sunshine — I hope. The wind that I talked about earlier has definitely become much less of a factor and life's pretty good here at 14,000ft, at the Alpine Ascents' Base Camp on Aconcagua.
—Alpine Ascents Guide Wally Berg, MountainZone.com Correspondent
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