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Frigid River Crossing
Sunday, January 16, 2000
 Prittie | |
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Hello, this is Willi Prittie reporting from Argentina, the Alpine Ascents International Aconcagua program. We had a couple of technical difficulties with 'system busy' signals on the iridium phone, which is why this report's a little late. We are, however, all on our final day of the approach mark into Base Camp, on the Vacas side of Aconcagua. We had spectacular weather yesterday with predominantly light winds, although there were a few pretty good gusts.
We enjoyed a wonderful dinner last night and a wonderful star display, as always, down here. And started this morning with a very cold river crossing of the Vacas River. Is that right, everybody? [In background: "Burrr!"] There was definitely ice along the sides of the river, so we all put our Tevas on and grimaced and kind of went for it. Although there was one intelligent individual who had a pair of thin...[Unintelligible]...than the rest of us on that crossing.
So right now we're about two...[Unintelligible]...from Base Camp, on another absolutely gorgeous day here, and once again eating some really nice sandwiches here with fresh avocados and tomato and lettuce, and ham and cheese, and enjoying ourselves. The...[Unintelligible]...continues to be spectacular today. The last several days we've had a northerly or northwesterly flow, which is unusual here — very very few clouds. It looks like a fair amount of wind up high, but it's just spectacular weather for the hike in. There's usually just enough of a breeze to keep temperatures down and to keep the sweat production from building up.
Everybody's doing quite well with the acclimation schedule here, so far. No significant problems, and we hope that that will keep up. There are a couple of people who are suffering from minor colds. We'll ditch their colds, also, before we head on up the mountain.
So we're looking at probably arriving in Base Camp after a nice, slow, easy acclimation walk, around 6pm or so this evening...[Unintelligible]...we hope that the beautiful weather continues for us all here right now. So we'll check in more later, and that's all for now from Argentina.
—Alpine Ascents Guide Willi Prittie, MountainZone.com Correspondent
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