Credit: Josias Dein
Day 58
S78 29' 38.40", W85 44' 22.20"
///overbooked.chow.unembellished
Today was Summit Day. Today was a good day.
“Hi good evening, everyone, this is Lou and Martin, doing a joint blog, on day 59 [day 58] of the expedition.
As you’ll know from the previous blog, we arrived at high camp yesterday. We had a pretty rough night – the tent was getting hammered quite a bit through the night. The plan was to get up in morning, meet with the guides, and assess the weather conditions, and make some decisions about what we were going to do.
The first part of the morning, it was still quite windy, and it was quite clear that it wasn’t a good idea to head for the summit. And then we were waiting for a weather update to come in at 11 o’clock. That indicated that there was potentially going to be three days of pretty bad weather coming our way. But there was a gap before that came in. So after lots of agonising and discussions amongst the guides and ourselves, just after lunch, about one o’clock, we made the decision to go for the summit. We set off around about one thirty, and we managed to summit at just before 7 o’clock this evening, myself and Martin summited Mount Vinson, the highest point in Antarctica. We’re absolutely elated, and buzzing. It was just the most incredible day.
We were blessed with the weather. It was absolutely stunning, the scenery was truly mind-blowing. We’re now safely back down, in high camp, expecting the weather to start deteriorating from this evening, so we may get pinned down here for a few days. Definitely made the right decision; we got up there and bagged that summit. Absolutely incredible.
I’ll let Martin now pass on his thoughts and emotions about the day.
M: Yes, phenomenal; I feel very fortunate to have done a bit of mountaineering on different continents around the world, but I’ve never seen so many snow-capped peaks on a mountain range before. And the sheer volume of snow around here – we were blessed with the weather, we could see as far as the eye could see. Blessed with the team – we had awesome guides in Wes and Rolfe from ALE. I mean the rangers also came up; there are three rangers here from ALE who came up. It’s just an amazing experience. I feel so grateful for it. Just an amazing competent group of people, which adds to the value of the experience.
The whole route was amazing scenery after amazing scenery. And as we got up towards the summit ridge, we were then greeted with a whole new visual on a completely different aspect of the range that we hadn’t seen before. Absolutely fantastic.
We got to the summit, and then really an overwhelming feeling of gratitude. There’s so many people behind the scenes who’ve made this happen for both of us on this expedition. I just want to say a huge thank you to all of them involved. Keith, Keith Goddard, to Mark Slatter, to Chris Smith, to TSP Ventures, to Olympian Homes, to Round Hill Capital, to Shackleton, Chameleon, to our families in particular. It’s just been absolutely fantastic. And to BLESMA, it just shows that when you have a good team around you, and you put the time and effort in, you can achieve some pretty impressive things. And we certainly did that today…. And this man here with me, he’s got me to the Pole, I’ve learned a hell of a lot off Lou, Yes, for an old man, he’s a pretty strong lad.
More to follow, that’s us signing off. Keep following everyone.
Onwards.”
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