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Taxed by the Sun Cups
Tuesday, January 25, 2000
 Prittie | |
 Hear Willi's Call from Aconcagua |
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Hello, this is Willi Prittie with Alpine Ascents International reporting from Argentina. We are at about 20,600ft on Aconcagua, somewhat established in our Camp IV, our High Camp, for our summit bid. It was a good carry up here. People were quite tired, a few headaches here and there, but in general people were doing very well: appetites, definitely interested in drinks, being hydrated, and preparing for the summit bid, which hopefully will be tomorrow.
This evening it's completely and totally calm, there's not a breath of wind out here any place, at 20,600ft — very much enjoying that. Also, there's several lightning storms playing to the east that are making a very beautiful evening light show for us here. We've been making water and cooking for a couple of hours here and probably have a good two hours more to get all of the water that we're going to need tonight and also for our summit bid tomorrow.
So, it's looking like the weather is going to be beautiful for us and, if that is the case, we'll be starting out toward the summit at first light, which is about 6am or so in the morning here, at this latitude.
Today we had some fairly difficult conditions crossing the lower Polish Glacier and also crossing a couple of the ice fields, necessary on the traverse to get up near Independencia, which is where our high camp is. Had a lot of penitentes, the word penitentes which translates out to penitentes snow, starts out as sun cups — any skiers in the spring are certainly familiar with those — but especially at low latitudes and at high elevations we have very, very intense sun. These things grow by a process called differential sublimation, where the entire snowpack is in fact evaporating and also melting away. But the ridges and the valleys in these oversized sun cups actually get more and more diverse in their size difference. So the actual cup, or the bottom, disappears at a faster rate than the pinnacle, or the point. And what you end up with is all of these sharp, jagged features that can vary anywhere from several inches to as much as nine or 10 feet high. And it can be quite a challenge to get through. The ones that we hit today were fairly late-season ones, so they've mostly been converted to water and it makes for a very irregular and taxing steps going up, gaining elevation — especially when you are carrying a full pack at over 20,000ft.
So we definitely had a workout today and everybody is ensconced in their sleeping bags and several people are already asleep and preparing for summit bid tomorrow morning. So, we'll call with a couple of updates tomorrow, let everybody know what's going on, and what we're doing and what the weather looks like up here. That's all for tonight.
—Alpine Ascents Guide Willi Prittie, MountainZone.com Correspondent
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