John Mascavage & David Pumpelly's:
The Aconcagua Ascent

- Day After Summit -
Pumps and I hold up a picture of Jon Hagstrom ("Hags") - one of our buddies who normally goes on trips with us, but not this one.  We did it so he could be there.  The picture is taken from Camp 2 with the Andes to the west in the background.

Journal:

"January 25, 2000 - Day 14 - Descent to Base Camp - I woke up early, around 6am, extremely dehydrated from the hike, but I did not leave the tent until around 9am - no one else was up yet and strong winds were whipping the tent until later in the morning.
    We all ate breakfast and started prepping packs for the descent.  Greg stopped by and we heard the story of their time on the glacier: basically they were huddled as we saw them, then they found a small ice cave to wait in.  Greg had brought a stove and they melted ice to get warm drinks (and warm their hands and feet), they alternated taking 5 minute naps.  The stove kept them from losing fingers and toes, but no help was needed to keep Greg's ego going - he seemed to have learned nothing from his mistake (or even admitting that he had made one).  He only quoted that "We Polish know how to survive" - my guess is that that trend will not continue if he insists on ill-prepared ascents as he did here - we were lucky not to have 3 corpses to remove.
    We gave Greg a good bit of food, which he did not have a lot of, and wished him well, then we continued our packing."

I sport a home-made (by Margaret Weichert) Achex T-shirt.  Achex is the best way to pay and get paid online - and I am one of the founders of it (check it out:  Achex, Inc.)
Since I had no pictures of the icefields we crossed (because we crossed them at night), I took some photos panning across our route.  This photo captures the right portion of the Polish Glacier and the first icefield we had to cross (we were moving to the right of this photo).

This photo looks across the face of more of the icefields.  You can see the ground alternate from ice to rock and back to ice.  The rocks we ascended after crossing all of the fields our still off the photo to the right.  In the foreground Simon packs his pack.

The final in this series, the last of the icefields and the rocks far to the right that we finally ascended after crossing them.

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