Day 55
S78 32' 2.04", W86 0' 6.84"
///prattling.setters.wheeze
Vinson camp at last!
“Hi everyone, it’s Martin on day fifty-something of the expedition. I’ve forgotten, to be honest [it’s Day 55].
We woke up this morning at Union Glacier, and there was much more positive news about weather. But it wasn’t quite confirmed before breakfast. Then after breakfast, we got confirmation that the weather at Vinson base camp was looking good. So we flew out to Vinson base camp, which is where I’m reporting from now.
Quite a short flight from Union Glacier, about 40 minutes, and some impressive mountain ranges. I never appreciated how many mountain ranges there were, or how many different mountains there were in those ranges, before I came. Unbelievable environment. On the approach into Vinson base camp itself, which is basically just another area, not too dissimilar to Union Glacier, only it’s on top of a lot of snow rather than on top of sea ice. It’s surrounded by mountains, and I’ve never seen such a volume of snow, in any mountain range in the world. It’s absolutely enormous amount of snow here. They’ve also had quite a lot of fresh dumps of snow as well.
We’re really fortunate in the way our rotations have worked; Lou and I are here with just a couple of ALE mountain guides, so we’ve got the whole of base camp to ourselves. Which is pretty cool. And the weather is looking good for the next few days. We’re going to leave here tomorrow morning, and go straight up to low camp, and then the mountaineering phase of the expedition, there’s a lot more riding on, dictated by, the weather than what it was on the trekking phase….. We were walking every day…. In 45 knot winds….. Up here it’s a bit different. One, the wind gets faster as you get higher, often. And there’s greater risk with that when you’re mountaineering. So weather will dictate our progress up the hill. But there is a potential for us to move from here tomorrow to low camp, potentially go to high camp the next day, and potentially go for the summit the next day. Provided our pace is ok, and we don’t suffer from altitude sickness. So it could be quite a short, sharp phase this. We’ll wait and see.
Exciting. We’re just sorting out kit out now. Obviously we’ve left all of our trekking kit at Union Glacier. When we were there we picked up all of our technical mountaineering gear. And now we’re just sorted all of that out. Getting out our crampons, ice axe, ice screws, carabiners, everything that we need for anything technical is all on our person. And getting all of our warm kit in place. Once all that’s done, we’ll be getting some food tonight, and getting our head down early, ready to get up in the morning and good to go to low camp.
We’ll give you another update tomorrow. Thanks for listening. Stay safe everyone. I know that COVID is rife back there again. Hopefully for us, we’re in a COVID-free environment.
Take care.”
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