Day 51
S79 45' 39.60", W82 51' 24.84"
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Pulks and skis are packed away as the team prep for the mountain.
“Hi everyone, it’s Martin on day 51 of the expedition.
We’re back at Union Glacier, and we’re waiting now, to fly to the base camp of Mount Vinson. We may be flying tomorrow morning. ALE, who’ve been running all of our logistics and safety for us have got a lot of clients who’ve climbed Mount Vinson, and they’re all waiting to get back to Union Glacier. They’re all waiting in Mount Vinson base camp. So that means that there’s flights going out tomorrow, and we’re obviously quite keen to get out there as soon as possible and crack on.
We’ve spent today repacking all of our kit, so getting all of our trekking kit for the Pole taken out of our pulks and put into storage, and getting all of our technical mountain gear, and safety equipment out of storage, to get packed up and ready to go and make a summit attempt of mountain.
Everything, as always, is down to weather. The pilots, and they aircraft they use to get into base camp, a little aircraft called a Twin Otter, are phenomenal – great pilots and great machines. However, they need clear visibility, because of the obvious risks of flying in this environment. So they need clear visibility, at both the landing site, and the take off earlier. And that is where the challenge lies. Often, in the Vinson area, because of the topography around there, you can often get a bit of fog, in the valley floor. So the reason there’s often uncertainty about if we’re going to fly is because the weather prediction software that people use to look at patterns may say one thing, but actually on the ground you could have something slightly different. So they have to wait for updates in the morning from the team on the ground in base camp. Then marry up what the people on the ground are telling them which what the weather prediction software is telling them. So that’s the situation. We’re going to get a weather update in the morning, and we’re going to be on about 30 minutes notice to move. All of our kit is ready now, we’re good to go. Hopefully we’re going to start phase two of the expedition tomorrow.
Vinson massif is the mountain we’re going to try and climb. It’s the highest mountain in Antarctica. It’s just over 4,800 metres. The other advantage of us doing the South Pole trek prior to doing Mount Vinson summit attempt, is that we’ve just been to 3,000m. So we’re now acclimatised to that altitude. Which means that when we get to Vinson base camp, we should be good to go to move to camp one quickly, without having to hang around.
When you get acclimatised during mountaineering to a specific height, you tend to hold that acclimatisation for around 7-10 days. We’re now physiologically adapted to the 3,000m mark. That should enable us to make a move fairly quickly when we get to Vinson base camp, up towards camp one. There’s two camps on Vinson above base camp. Camp one and camp two. We’ll probably go for camp one as soon as we can. Then we’ll look at what the weather’s doing. We’ll look at how we’re feeling, and that will dictate the rest of our summit attempt. We should be looking at somewhere between five and seven days to climb Mount Vinson.
Thanks very much for following. Please spread the word. The expedition’s not over yet. It’s just phase one that’s complete, we’re now on phase two. Hopefully we’ll give you an update from Mount Vinson base camp tomorrow at some point.
I just wanted to do a shout out tonight to a fantastic Service charity. An Armed Forces charity that I’m a very proud ambassador of, called Supporting Wounded Veterans.
Keep on following. All the best. Speak to you tomorrow.”
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