Monday, January 13, 2014

Hey, I'm plugged in again!

Hey gang, RC here in Los Penitentes....a new feature here is WiFi!  Anyways I thought I'd take advantage of it and save Judy blogging for the day.

The 5 of us here plus JJ had a leisurely morning and then drove up to the Horcones River valley...this is the valley that leads to Las Mulas....the base camp we will not see on this trip.  We had a very pleasant acclimatization hike of just over 3 hours.  We climbed 725 vertical over about 4-5 miles round trip.  We hit a max altitude of 10,300 feet or so.  It was brilliantly sunny and quite warm...my computer had it at 84 degrees.  We had very impressive views of the South Face of Acconcagua on the way up the valley.  I felt good, although pace was quite modest.  My back was a bit stiff but improved with stretching and it felt stable.  I think a major focus for me on this trip will be carefully monitoring and managing my back.  I'm Optimistic it will hold up.

Our other four teammates showed up this afternoon.  They all seem quite nice and I'm really pleased with the team.  A couple of updates to the intro that Judy provided yesterday:

- Bissel is 52, lives in Texas and works at Northrup.  He is much more experienced at this than I am.

- Lou is 58 and was a biology teacher in St. Louis and as a result I'm not the old guy for once.

- Bo is Danish but works in Silicon Valley.  I thought he was in his 30s but it turns out he is 48!  He looks awesome for 48 and is a big strapping guy at 230 pounds.

- Denise is a chem eng consultant from Texas and is 52.  Her sister Diane just arrived and she is 53 and her brother Randy (of all names) is 55.

- Todd and Tom are the guys from Miami who just arrived.  They are in their mid 30s and all tatted up and have nose rings and such.  They should add an element of fun to us old folks.

Tomorrow we'll leave around 10 or 10:30 and I'm guessing we'll be trekking for 5-6 hours up to Las Lenas...the adventure begins in earnest!

I now return you to our star guest blogger!













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