Day 1, Mendoza, 760m.  I actually arrived a day earlier, found the Aymara office, paid my balance, met our guide Weny (a tiny 23yr old chick that could out climb all of us!), and got an extra night in the hotel.

The climbing crew were Dennis, a fireman from Montreal, Reto, a swiss Italian construction worker (almost no english!), Marcel, Rolf and Christianne from Zurich, me, and basically travelling with us was Pavel from Moscow.

Reto and I were the youngest by a good 20 yrs, but we all had pretty similar experience at altitude – all barring Dennis had already done Killi and Elbrus.

After our initial meet we had a gear check, then off to the rent any missing gear.

Day 2, Puenta del Inca, 2725m.  The plan had actually been to get our climbing permits the night before, but the office closed half an hour before we got there.  So a 60min detour paying up our US$700 climbing fee, then we were on the road!  About 3 hrs to the backbackers.  I woke at about 4am cursing the fact that my headlamp was still packed away, so fumbled in the dark for the bathroom.  Day 1 of traveller’s diarrhea for me!

Day 3, hike to confluencia 3300m.  No breakfast for me in the morning, felt horribly nautious.  Short drive to the park entrance, check in, then a cruisy three hr walk to Confluencia.  Had our first doctor’s check.  Blood saturation 91% for me.  Apparently 97 is about as good as you get at sea level, and I’m sure at the time they said 80 would have been dangerously low (see later!!).

Day 4, Plaza Francia.  Actually this was a day hike to 4000m, to place with a great view of the south side of Aconcagua, about an hr before Plaza Francia.  Nice easy day, again no food for me though!  Some people do try to climb this face… though it is pretty much a huge multi pitch rock climb.  Sounds like everyone that does it ends up with frostbitten finger tips!!

Day 5, Plaza de Mulas, 4300m.  8hrs to base camp!  This was a really long day… I was a bit horrified at the pace that was set.  The first 4 hrs or so were flat, but we were marching along about as fast as I could go!  Very hot, and again no food for me!  Was glad to hit the camp, and even happier to think we had the next day off 🙂

Day 6, rest day.  Beer and reading in the sun!  US$5 per beer, not too bad!

Day 7, camp 1 Canada, 4910m.  Looked awfully steep from below, but once you got going it wasn’t too bad.  This was where we started seeing the difference between our company, Aymara, and some of the others.  We were only coming up to Camp 1 for an acclimitization, then were returning to base camp.  We weren’t asked to carry anything up, and when we did return two days later, we still only had to carry personal gear.  Our group porters carried the tents and food.  This was very different to other groups who had to share the food between them – turning a 15kg pack into an over 20kg pack right there!  (Unless you were dennis… whose upper mountain pack weighed 23kg…).  A side note, up to base camp (plaza de mulas), we only carried day gear, mules carried everything else.  Above base camp, we had to carry all personal gear (sleeping bags, mats, water bottles etc).  You could get a private porter, and in fact 4 of the 7 of us were using private porters, but the cost was about 1 grand, and I couldn’t see the point!  This left me, Dennis and Reto carrying our own gear.  Reto and I probably had about 15kg… poor old Dennis nearly died under his 23kg!!

Day 8, Mt Bonete.  5100m acclimitization hike.  From the bottom this mountain looks spectactular.  Very steep, and all scree.  As we got close however it turned out not to be so bad after all.  Slow going, but nothing too strenuous.  Coming down was the most fun, did the biggest section running full speed in about 2 mins!!

Day 9, rest day.  More beers, more reading, charged my ipod!  Also decided a shower would be a good idea, and forked out the US$10 they were charging.  Sooo worth it!  It had been 7 days, so a wash in hot water was fantastic 🙂

Day 10, Camp 1.  Heading up the mountain for real!  Good weather, easy day, arrived early afternoon.  Put the tent up then I built a nice stone wall around ours.  Heaps of time to kill, and I figured a bit of a wind break would be a good idea.  Awesome sunset.

Day 11, Camp 2, Nido de Condores, 5,250m.  Beautiful camp, but the weather started coming in.  Put up the tents in light snow.  Upset stomach decided to come back with a vengenance!  This was rather problematic as on the camp below, they had setup a toilet tent, but here they said it was broken!  That meant we had to find a sheltered place in the open, lay down a piece of newspaper, carefully aim, then roll the paper up and stuff it, along with the TP, into a plastic bag brought along for the purpose.  With an upset stomach and below zero temperatures this didn’t work very well!!

Day 12, Camp 3, Cholera, 5900m.  High camp baby!  I had run out of immodium at this point, so borrowed a couple from Dennis.  His must have been stronger than mine, cos the result was 4 days of not having to squat outside!  Perfect 🙂  Having a pee bottle for the tent was essential, nights were down to about -12 inside the tent now, and getting out was just too much of a mission!  We arrive and put the tents up in average weather, light snow, a bit of wind.  However the weather forecast wasn’t good for the next day, so summit day is delayed.  My blood saturation was 71%.

Day 13, weather day.  Spent most of the day in the tent.  Plenty of snow falling, quite a bit of wind.  We reckon about 30cm that day.

Day 14, 11 Feb, Summit day!  Alarm at 3am.  Temp -15.  Spent the first 20m trying to untangle my headlamp – damn thing.  I had put everything with batteries or liquid in my sleeping bag to stay warm – the end result a bit messy.  Ipod screen all screwed up, headlamp all twisted… oh well, at least the sprite bottles had finally defrosted!  It was about midnight before I thought of putting the two frozen bottles into woolen socks so that I wasn’t frozen every time I rolled onto them!  Skipped breakfast – too cold to deal with!  Departure 4.30am.  Took a while to realise that the numbers in our group were odd.  Two of our party had decided against summitting – Christianne and Rolf.  Then Pavel had joined us, but not his guide who was sick with a fever and Bronchitis.  So, five clients, two guides.  Off we go!

After about 45 minutes we begin to think our guides are having difficulty navigating in the dark.  Interesting.  Then comes a 15 minute pause as Marcel, in broken Spanish, tries to explain to the guide that everyone is cold.  Very strange.  The guide assumes he wants to descend, and radios for someone to come up and get him.  At which point he says no, he is fine… so on we continue… with no idea why we had just spent 15 minutes not moving…

About half an hour later we stop again, it is maybe 6am, and the guide explains that the weather forecast was for clear skies.  It is lightly snowing and she can’t see to navigate.  She wants to turn back.  Dennis argues that we should wait for the dawn.  I argue we should keep moving forward – too cold to stop, and dawn was very close.  Luckily as we have this debate the light finally kicks in and we can start making out rocks in the distance.  Now the guide can see she reluctantly continues on.

About an hour later we stop yet again.  A cloud has descended on us and visibility is down to 50m or so.  Weny explains that nobody else started that morning, and the weather is not good enough to continue.  We (rather sulkily) begin descending.  Within 10 minutes, the cloud lifts, and we are left with spectacular unlimited visibility on the entire upper mountain (and down as far as camp 3).  We stop the descent.  Another discussion between the guides.  A realisation that there are now two other groups heading up the mountain, and back we turn… to walk up the slope we just descended.  Which just happens to be the steepest section we have done so far… and in the deepest snow…

A bit later we come across a pack sitting in the snow.  It has mittens and crampons in it.  On the radio we hear that there are two polish climbers missing that were trying from the other side.  We pick up the pack on the way down and take it with us.  Never heard if the climbers were found.

About noon we hit Independencia which is the half way point of the ascent.  6400m.  There is a small wreck of a shelter there (no roof).  We scoff some snacks, drink a little, then continue up.

About 1 we hit the traverse.  It isn’t on the top of a saddle, so I can’t describe it well, but here we are told to pull out our ice axes if we have them.  (only two of us did – they’re rational, if you have to hire an axe, you don’t know how to use it, so it is useless, but if you have your own, presumably you can self arrest, and should take it).  So we cross that traverse.  I can’t imagine how anyone could possibly fall here, the track is wide, and it doesn’t feel exposed at all.

End of the traverse we stop again as the cloud obscures visibility on the upper mountain again.  Weny wants to wait for the group behind us so that someone else can break trail.  (Fair enough I spose!).  It takes about 15 mins for the next group to catch us.  In this time we are just sitting down.  Its minus 15, snowing, and we are tired.  I fell asleep twice (yes, yes, I know, very dangerous!).

Anyway, the guide behind was from another company, grajales, and continues on for about 20m breaking new trail.  He turns back and apologies to all of us saying that the snow conditions are too dangerous to continue.  We are also a bit late (the groups that started hours after us have almost caught up), and the weather looks to be closing in.  Dennis and I are almost raging.  At no point has the weather appeared remotely bad in our opinion.  A larger group comes up behind us (ten people) led by an english guide.  They are going to continue.  I ask if we can join them.  No problem he says, its 45mins to the cave, two hours from there to the summit.  He then goes on to say how this little lift in the cloud could be considered a fools window by some, but he reckoned it was an opportunity.  I ask if he has navigation gear, and he does (our guides did not).  I ask how many guides for his group, he says two.  At this I begin to have doubts… if we joined that would a a one to six ratio… i imagined it would be very difficult to get a guide to descend with us, if it were only a few of us that had to turn back.  Turko, our second guide has been waiting for us for five mins and is now getting impatient.  Time to go I think.  I thank the english guide, explain we’d probably get in trouble, and begin the descent.

Two hrs later we are within a 100m of camp and the weather gets a bit worse.  Weny tries to tell us we are in a whiteout and it was good we descended.  (I am sulking, visibility is still over 30m, the path and even tents in the distance clearly visible).

An hour after I climb into the tent (about 3.30pm) the wind gets up and we can hear fresh snow being blown hard.  I doze off.  Dinner at 8pm.  The storm is in full swing now with the tent being buffeted around our heads.  Dennis wants a cigarette so volunteers to get dinner for both of us.  I don’t move.

Dinner is soup.  Pretty much no real food all day.  Never mind, too tired to care.

Wake up in the night every few hours with ice being blown on my head.  The inside of the tent is covered in frozen condensation that is knocked down every gust of wind.  Both vestibules have been blown open, and are completely full of snow.  It is -12 inside the tent.  My water bottle long since froze solid.

The morning brings no change.  It has been snowing with gale wind for over 18hrs.  Total snow fall was probably close to a meter.  Weather forecast said wind on the upper mountain reached 70km/hr.  At first we hear we are to leave the tents behind, then we are told to pack them up.  Weny descended late the previous afternoon with frost bite to her toes.

Packing up the tent is a nightmare.  I walked outside without goggles on and was instantly blinded by snow in the eyes.  I put my goggles on, but the condensation froze, and I couldn’t see anything.  Squinting I start undoing the velcro and collapsing poles.

One corner of poles are frozen into the snow, and I can’t budge them.  I pour hot water onto them, but it freezes solid before I have a chance to pull.  Seems like a bad situation.  I then pour the entire contents of my thermos onto the poles while pulling with my other hand.  It just pulls out of the snow before freezing solid again.  Lucky.

I have the fly, and am just managing to stop it from blowing off the mountain.  Dennis is sitting on the tent, but he left his pack inside it.  We pick up the whole lot and blindly stumble into the emergency shelter.  It fits about three of us and the tent.

Dennis takes off his gloves and we are all a bit scared.  He can’t feel or move his fingers and they are solid white from the first knuckle down.  He had not had his mittens on when pulling down the tent, and just woolen liner gloves.  He has second degree frostbite to all fingers.

I pack up the tent.  Guys come in with their tents.  So much for rolling, they just stuffed them into their sacks!

We begin the descent.  Within ten mins I have to stop.  I am in my gortex gloves, and my hands are getting too cold.  Need to switch to mittens.  I tell the porter who is leading me I need five mins, but he doesn’t wait.  When I look up I am alone on the slope.  It is the most technical part of the day.  You need to hang on to the rocks as you descend.  I can’t see anything because my goggles are frozen.

After getting down to the group I find my sunglasses in my pocket.  They work much better than the goggles – anti fogging lenses make a big difference.

About another hour down we notice Rolf is having trouble.  We hear that he can’t see.  He is snow blind – we assume from wandering around the day before without sunglasses.  We seek shelter in camp 2.  Rolf stays with a doctor, Reto stays to help.

We continue to descend.  Dennis is shattered.  Calls for breaks every 10 mins.

I lucked out and scored some M&Ms at camp 2.  I feel like I’m on a sugar high the whole way down.  Not tired, not cold, and with the glasses on I can see.  At one point I watch a nalgene bottle skuttle down the mountain.  Bugger it I think, not so far and go fetch it.  The girl that dropped it seems greatful, but the spanish / english communication difficulty was a bit hard to overcome!  The lower we get, the warmer it gets, and I’m soon hot in my mittens.

After camp 1 we are told we don’t need crampons anymore.  I am dubious but did as told.  In the next 30 mins I slip over about half a dozen times.  Should have left them on!!  One slide was interesting, went about ten meters, and there was a rock in the middle.  Managed to lift my ass over the rock and skate on boots and hands over the rock.  Nice 🙂

Get down to base camp after about a 6 hr descent.  Over 2km lower.  Dennis goes to the doctor.  I ate hamburgers!

After dinner went to find the english guy that had given me the M&Ms.  We had a beer at the pub tent.  It was minus four outside, not much warmer inside.

We start hearing about the group that continued.  Confirmed two dead.  We were in our tents at 2.30pm.  They were still descending in that storm at 10pm.  At least some had to overnight at Independencia – 6400m.  A polish group was after them.  One is missing.  Presumed dead.

Next day people are still heading up.  We hear there was an avalanche.  One guide has serious injuries, including a broken arm.

The walk out the next day is 27km.  We left at 10.30am, got out at 7pm.  In time to see the first airlift of survivors from the group that passed us.  First load is three people.  One can walk.  The other two have frostbite to the hands and feet which are covered in bandages.  Another 3 in the second load.

We drove back to the hotel.  Got in at 11pm.  Shower.  Dinner.

Next three days I spend drinking by the pool.  They ran out of our liquor of choice!

At least a couple of us want to try again… and we can’t decide if our guides were soft, or if we really shouldn’t have been up there at all.  One thing is certain, we owe them our lives.  In the 24hrs around our summit attempt two people are confirmed dead, 12 people were evacuated and one is missing.