Berg

Hear Wally's Call from Aconcagua

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So we're packing up, slowly in the sun, having a little breakfast. We're going to carry down to Base Camp today. It's still a long ways off this mountain. And as I reminded Al this morning, we got a couple of precious little instruments, most notably, the Al Hanna knees, and his ankles as well, which we've got to get off this mountain and get in good shape for his efforts in the Nepal Himalaya coming up next month.

We had a wonderful climb. I can't tell you how heartwarming and gratifying it was for me to come down here yesterday and see the triumphant and proud looks on the faces of my friends on this seven summit deal. They climbed this mountain before, and I think supporting me in my seven summits thing was a big part of this trip. And to deal with such good friends has been wonderful.

And incidentally, yesterday was Mike Stencil's 30th birthday. His wife Ana, who is running the Base Camp for Alpine Ascents down below us, sent a cake up. So it was a great time with great friends. Right now Alpine Ascents is on this mountain in a big way. We're leaving our tents up here at High Camp and Neil McCarthy and Charles are moving up with their group and they'll occupy those camps and begin their final acclimatization before their summit attempt here in a few days.

Willi Prittie and Luis have a team below us as well; they went up to Camp I today. I'm looking forward to crossing paths with these guys as we go down. It's really great working on a big mountain like this with that kind of a support structure in place.

Pretty interesting for me yesterday. I described to you the really elated feeling I had being on a big summit by myself. I get the opportunity to do that occasionally and it was great being up there early in the morning, having climbed alone and quite fast through the morning hours. But descending Aconcagua, I saw quite the scene. Of course, we cross over from the Polish route — the normal route on our ascents. And coming down to Canaleta and seeing, I would say, about 80 to 100 people struggling up was a real eye opener for me. I can now tell you with some assurance that Aconcagua rivals Kilimanjaro as being the most underestimated mountain in the world. Aconcagua, of course, is a whole, big degree more difficult than Kili because of the additional 3500ft in elevation. It's the whole gain; that's how high into the atmosphere you're climbing. But I suppose because you can "walk up it" it is clearly, these days, not being taken as seriously as it probably should by people. It usually just leads to a bad time and lack of success. But, as you've heard, it can lead to much worse. I believe there have been 15 fatalities on this mountain this season. I saw people who really had no idea what climbing altitude was about, the preparation, the stakes...[transmission fails].

Yeah, I might be loosing some coverage, satellite coverage here Mountain Zone. So, I'll be quick rather than waxing too philosophical about what I saw yesterday. But suffice it to say that a seriously underestimated mountain, you need to do it in an well-organized expedition, with enough time, either commercially or on your own. Back in the '70s, we used to dream — I and my friends used to dream — about coming to this mountain and doing any number or routes we'd read about, and we considered the very serious undertaking that required a lot of preparation and time — and it still needs to be done that way. You don't need to do it commercially, but you need to do it with some time and equipment and preparation.

Aconcagua and McKinley are serious expedition peaks. They require a degree of self-sufficiency and time commitment and a tight team effort to get up. You might take mules or an airplane into the glacier on Denali, but above there you're in for a long haul — a serious expedition peak. Rewarding experience if you do it that way, but otherwise I saw a lot of people with frustration on their faces yesterday. I've talked about those blank stares on the triumphant summit that were due to hypoxia, but this was something else. This was a blank stare that was due to not even knowing where you were, probably having no chance of getting anywhere near the summit. So anyway, enough of that.

I will when I get to a landline or a very good satellite coverage, I'm going to, as a wrap-up to this effort, do something that I get asked to do about 100 times a year and I always resist. Some of the people who climb with me will smile when they hear this 'cause I was always reluctant and, I would say outright resistant, to rank the Seven Summits, in terms of difficulty because they are all great mountains and they're going to throw something on a given trip you can't expect. But for one time, I think now that I have climbed Aconcagua, finally, I am going to do that on a Mountain Zone dispatch wrap-up where I can do it clearly from a landline. I'll tell you what Wally Berg thinks is the order of difficulty for the Seven Summits.

Anyway, for now we'll check in as we get further down the mountain and I'll let you know how things are going; try to fill you in on the success these other teams are having, as they're moving up and acclimatizing. And just know that the Alpine Ascents' One Mountain at a Time team is feeling very good as we move down today.

—Alpine Ascents Guide Wally Berg, MountainZone.com Correspondent

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