Day 57
S78 29' 38.40", W85 44' 22.20"
///overbooked.chow.unembellished
The team reach high camp, and await the weather window for the summit push.
“Hi everyone, it’s Martin on day 57 of the expedition.
This morning we woke up in low camp on Mount Vinson, at an altitude of 2,800m. It was freezing. It was so cold. While it’s got 24-hour sunlight, the mountains were preventing the sun from actually hitting our camp area in the morning. So as we woke up, our moisture that had building throughout the night on the inside of the tent, and created a basically snow, like a snow film on the inside of the tent. So there was lots of snow where we’d been breathing, on the outside of our sleeping bags. Moisture had built up there, so there was snow all over the head area of our sleeping bags. And then the unpleasant task of getting out of the sleeping bags and getting kit ready to prepare for another climb in the cold started.
So we got out, got our kit ready. We have a centralised cook tent, so we went in there to get our breakfast sorted out. And then once we were ready, we collapsed all the tents down at low camp, and got all of our kit on; ice axes ready to go and our crampons on, and we started our climb. The route from low camp to high camp on Vinson is quite flat to begin with. You walk along this, almost like a valley floor, and then you’ve got an area where there’s a climb basically; the climb continues for about 850, 900 vertical metres. And it’s quite a steep pitch. It varies from about 30 degrees to around 45-46 degrees. Our guide up front, Wes, and Rolf, to the read, set a really steady pace. And we just go into a rhythm. And we started climbing.
As we quickly ascended, gained a bit of altitude, we could look back, and the views were fantastic. Looking back over the valley we’d just trekked through, we could see low camp. We couldn’t quite see base camp, that was further down the valley out of sight. But features and cracking mountains all around us. And again just an enormous amount of snow and ice here. Phenomenal scenery.
We made good progress up the fixed lines; the reason we used fixed lines…. Fixed lines are basically what’s called anchor points; you put an ice screw into the snow and ice, or you put a stake, a metal stake, into the ground. And through that you feed rope. And the idea of using this fixed line is just safety. If any of us where to slip and fall, hopefully you only go down as far as the last anchor point, and that holds. ”
// FOLLOW THE CHALLENGE //
Watch and listen to all the updates, live on the Shackleton map
or donate here and enable more adaptive athletes to take part in adventure challenges!