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Summit Made in High Winds
Tuesday, February 8, 2000
 Burleson | |
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Hi Mountain Zone, it's Todd back at 19.2. Sorry I've missed the last couple days. It's been quite a busy, busy time. I went to the summit yesterday, left early in the morning, and boy it took about 13-14 hours round trip, a long time. Didn't summit until three or four, no, excuse me, 4:30 in the afternoon. Just very, very, very high winds, it's been blowing here everyday. We seem to get a weather pattern here of high winds through the night and until about nine or 10 in the morning and then it breaks, but by that time it's too late to go to the summit.
So we started out early in the morning and we faced these hard, hard winds and they were high up — high winds up high yesterday, too — but I made the summit. To date, my second summit of Aconcagua and so I've got one more summit to do, either Kosciusko or Carstensz. I think I'll fly down to Kosciusko real quick and I'll have done the Seven Summits twice, which is something I've been looking forward to doing.
Right now it's beautiful. Allen's group is at 19. I just joined their group. Everybody with me went down and so I'm staying up. This is my...I guess coming on my seventh night at 19.2 and...[transmission fails].
Hi, it's Todd again. Got cut off but just wanted to say that Allen's group is up here at 19.2, so I'm joining them. As I said earlier, we've been getting a series of patterns of very, very high winds through the night and the morning. So it makes it very hard to start in the morning. To climb from 19.2 to the summit of Aconcagua, it is a long, long day, especially if you hit those hard winds. So what we're going to do is, it's a rest day today and tomorrow if it's absolutely calm — if a miracle happens and the weather's beautiful — we'll shoot for the summit again. I will and join them.
If it is blowing hard, about 11 o'clock or so when it seems to calm down, we'll move up to 20,600ft. Got a small camp up there where we can put about four tents, so we'll all pile in there. It really cuts off a large part, about a third, of the day and it puts us in a calmer place than 19.2. So, I think we can all make the summit from there. We've got nine people, plus Allen, and Jose Luis, from Ecuador, one of our guides, and Allen Carbert, from the US, and so I think we have a good chance of making this. Everybody seems to be feeling good and we're enjoying ourselves. The winds of Aconcagua, boy, they never seem to die. We'll talk to you soon and hope all is well. Bye-bye.
—Alpine Ascents Founder Todd Burleson, reporting for MountainZone.com
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