Saturday, January 10, 2015

There and back again!

After four days of sitting around at Union Glacier for 4 days we finally where able to lift off the Big Ice and fly in last night to Punta Arenas!  After a quick shower and some "stuff" organization the team went out for our final dinner together.  We had some nice wine and a tasty meal and celebrated our collective success--this truly was a great team!

Anders and I fly out of Punta this afternoon up to Santiago and then on to Houston where he goes left and I head right.  With any luck I'll be home Sunday night--can't wait.

It was a wonderful trip, which I'll write at length about and post a detailed trip/summit report.  At the moment my mental high is matched by a physical low--I'm pretty beat up after the climb.  It certainly was a role of the dice to try to do something as tough as this on the little training I had but it worked.  Now there is a price to pay--for probably another week or two....

I'll be posting a lot of pictures as well.  Here's a couple to give you a sense.  The first is me nearing the mid-point of the fixed lines on the way to High Camp.  Mike Hamill is behind me and behind us is over 1,000 feet of vertical--the slopes were about 35 degrees in this lower section:


And here is a pic of Anders and I on the summit together (we were on the same rope team) and Anders is holding a picture of our family during our younger days (its the same pic he brought to the summit of Denali.  Interestingly, while we have climbed a lot together and Anders has climbed 4 of the 7 summits and I 3 of 7, this is our first of the Seven Summits where we were atop together....

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