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Wet and Snowy Day #5
Friday, February 18, 2000

Stoup

The Team's Call from the Antarctic Peninsula
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Hello Mountain Zone! This is Douglas Stoup with the Antarctica Peninsula Climb and Cruise Expedition. It's the 18th of February and today was a wet and snowy day, again. Five days in a row. We tried to go out and climb a couloir northeast of Petermann Island and were up about a third of the way and realized that the snow conditions were deteriorating and decided to bail on the peak and turn around and ski back down. That was pretty much our day today and we still are psyched to go do some other projects. We're moving north today to Rongé Island and there's all kinds of peaks there that are sort of objectives for us and we're going to try to pick one out when the weather clears, hopefully by morning. And the team is excited and psyched about that.

Dave Hahn made it back to the ship after spending a wet night out on the glacier, on the Waddington Glacier. We're having a great time and the temperature is 44 degrees, the wind is 4 miles-an-hour, out of the east. The humidity is 40%. Altitude gain was 400 feet today. That's how much elevation we climbed. Hours of daylight, I'd say about 18 hours. Barometric pressure is 99... 990.8. We're at 64.52 degrees latitude, 63.15 longitude. We're in the Penola Straits, heading toward the Gerlache Straits. Continuing condition is good and wet. Our cabins on the boat are a little bit odoriferous, due to tons of wet gear. [Unintelligible] We get completely drenched and then we go climb and get wet and then we come back to the Zodiacs and we get wet again, so it's a continuous wet cycle of drying out all your gear and hopefully our Gore-Tex that The North Face has given us will hold out, because it's certainly keeping me pretty dry.

We're ready for another summit tomorrow on a couple different objectives in Rongé Island, which we've been looking at some topo maps that excites the team. Couple technical, little bit more sporty routes than what we've been looking at already. So, one is Mt. Brittania, which is I think is over 1,200 meters, certainly it's a quite hefty project and the team will probably get up early tomorrow and hopefully we'll have some good visibility and be able to have a visual on tomorrow's objective.

But we're having a great time on this luxury vessel that ANI has provided us with, and the staff of ANI and the staff on the boat, Akademik Shulyekin, has just been incredible — great food and it's an amazing experience. Tons of wildlife, we've experienced of couple of humpback whales breaching tails yesterday, which was totally incredible. And had some good turns yesterday from our first summit. So, it's been a special week and I want to say "hello" to my son Angelo, and thank you very much and have a great day. We'll talk to you tomorrow.

—Douglas Stoup, MountainZone.com Corespondent

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