Mt. Vinson, Antarctica, 4892 m, 16,057 ft.

January 2007

by John Lohr

BACKGROUND

The Vinson Massif was first seen by a U.S. Navy pilot in 1957. He reported it to be a big muther. This report launched plans by several international alpine associations to attempt a first ascent. The problem, as it remains to this day, would be the logistics of the expedition. Although initially opposed to private expeditions to the continent, once the U.S. Navy and the NSF realized that some foreign infidels might actually beat the Americans to the summit of what was likely the highest peak on the continent, both organizations came to the rescue. In 1966, an expedition under the auspices of the American Alpine Club and the National Geographic Society and assisted by the Navy and the NSF was flown to a landing spot about 20 miles from the massif. There were 10 climbers, a lot of gear and a snow machine to help haul all the crap.

When the very successful expedition was over, the team had climbed everything in sight, from Mt. Vinson itself (4892m, 16,057 feet, renamed to differentiate the peak from the massif in 2005), which proved to be the highest peak on the Antarctic continent, to Tyree (4852m), Shinn (4661m), Gardner (4587m) Ostenso (4180m) and Long Gables (4150m). Following this, the NSF retrenched and adopted an official policy of discouraging private expeditions and tours to the continent, even going so far as to deny access to the Amundsen-Scott south pole station to adventurers, who had just traveled overland from the coast to the pole, petty acts, which even the station’s namesake rivals would not have dreamed of.

But human nature being as defiant as it is, and money speaking as loudly as it does, it wasn’t long before boat tours to the continent were available and popular. In 1981, the mountaineering world was surprised by the audacity of Dick Bass, a more or less normal guy and owner of the Snowbird ski area, and Frank Wells, then the president of Warner Brothers, who joined forces with the intent of climbing the highest summit on each of the seven continents in one year. In the end, Bass scooped the “real” mountaineers, taking advantage of his financial resources, which were considerably more than the scumbag real climbers could muster, and he succeeded in being the first to climb the Seven Summits, finishing the job on the summit of Everest on 30 April 1985. Bass followed up with his very popular book The Seven Summits, a book which every real mountaineer had dreamed of writing about him or herself. (The seven summits are Everest (8848 m), Aconcagua (6962 m), Denali (6194 m), Kilimanjaro(5895 m), Elbrus (5642 m) and Kosciuszko (2228 m).) During the project, Frank Wells had been named the CEO of Walt Disney Productions and missed climbing Everest and tragically was later killed in a helicopter crash. But Bass had done it and in doing so had established a goal for mountaineers and Walter Mittys all over the world. For me, Vinson was the sixth and last of the seven, since I’m too close to retirement to die on Everest.

Although Everest is by far the highest and most dangerous of the seven summits, in 1981 it was by no means the most difficult to climb, since there was no way actually to reach Vinson without the help of someone’s government, which was not forthcoming for Americans. So Bass and Wells had to organize all the logistics themselves, eventually hiring a Canadian pilot named Giles Kershaw and his modified three engine turbine DC-3 on skis to get them to the mountain. As they had on the other summits, Bass and Wells hired several of the best mountain guides around to help them stay alive during the adventure, Rick Ridgeway, Chris Bonnington and Yuichiro Miura.

After the Frank and Dick show and another trip to the mountain with Canadians Martyn Williams and Pat Morrow, Kershaw had the bright idea of setting up a company to haul climbers and other tourists around Antarctica. The company was the parent of Antarctic Logistics and its guiding segment, Adventure Network International, which came into their present incarnations after the death of Kershaw and several years of operation of the company by his widow, Ann.

Today, the company is owned by Australians Peter McDowell, his brother Roger, Mike Sharpe, and possibly others. The headquarters is in Salt Lake City, where employees are mostly sober and from which there may be some advantages in dealing with the largest operator on the Antarctic continent, the U.S. Government. Antarctic Logistics and Expeditions, the second largest air logistics provider in Antarctica, provides air transportation to and from the continent and within Antarctica and sets up, maintains and staffs base camps at Vinson Massif and Patriot Hills, plus caches of supplies, particularly jet fuel, at various locations. One large fuel depot, hauled overland, is located approximately halfway between Patriot Hills at 81 W, 80 S and the South Pole at the Thiel Mountains.

Adventure Network International is the client support and guiding arm of ALE. This operation employs fully qualified guides, but maintains a low profile in order to avoid the appearance of competing with other commercial expedition operators, such as Adventure Consultants, making use of the ALE services for their own trips. Although the exact deal is obscure from the outside, all adventurers, whether skiers or climbers, are strongly encouraged to go with guides. These may be part of the ANI organization or some other adventure travel company. One can also go “unsupported,” an option taken by some long distance skiers, but one which apparently increases the price charged by ALE for their logistics services.

If you go unsupported, ALE really means it. You are mildly unwelcome in the ALE facilities at the base camps and you cannot use caches. I’m not sure who deals with excrement for unsupported groups. Maybe these groups pay by the pound to have it flown out. Ray and Jenny Jardine (yes, THE Ray Jardine) were skiing unsupported from Patriot Hills to the south pole and when they returned to Patriot Hills, they were all but invisible to the ANI people. Ray then decided to hook up with an ANI group and climb Vinson. This changed him from sort of PNG to honored guest at the base camp facilities. The organization of this arrangement is no doubt born from practical business and logistics considerations and somehow seems to work just fine. But, behind the scenes, there is some sort of approval process that ALE goes through to help them avoid crises in an unforgiving environment. For my Vinson trip, I went with ANI and never regretted it.

THE TRIP

I left San Diego on the day after Christmas, 2006 after having spent six months working out to get in shape. Getting in shape involved a daily regimen of 200 situps on an inclined board, moderate weight work intended to duplicate the arm motions of ski poling and 30 minutes on the stairstepper going up 400 flights and hitting the aerobic regime. Gearing up was mostly done at REI and online, but also meant getting the necessary prescription drugs and extended wear contact lenses. My old super low temperature down sleeping bag and expedition parka dating from the Denali trips in 1986 and 1988 were still in good shape. I did buy new Koflach Expedition Extreme plastic boots, Outdoor Research overboots, new crampons for this footwear combination and expedition mittens and gloves. I asked ANI if we could ski at least part of the trip and they said that was not usual, but would be all right, so I brought my randonnee skis and skins.

At the Santiago Airport, where Erich Hoffmann’s entire kit had been lost on the first trip to Aconcagua, I was delighted to see my stuff piled up on a cart for loading onto the flight to Punta Arenas. In Santiago I began to encounter and meet other travelers who were planning to be in my Ilyushin 76 flight onto the ice. Mostly these were planning ski trips covering either the last one or the last two degrees to the South Pole, 60 or 120 nm ski trips respectively. Although these trips are pretty tough, there also had been skiers making the full trip from the ocean to the pole, a distance of about 900 nm. None of the long distance skiers were starting as late in the season as this trip, however.

Upon landing at the Punta Arenas airport, we saw a parked example of the famous Ilyushin 76TD model. The design dates from 1971 and has a 40,000 kg useful load and maximum gross takeoff weight of 170,000 kg. The Ilyushin has a cruise speed of 800 km/hr, and maximum altitude of about 12,000 m. The maximum range is 3650 km at maximum useful load and 7300 km with 20 metric ton payload. Since the round trip to Patriot Hills is about 9 flight hours at 450 kt, the trip is just about maximum range at half maximum payload. Since the long runway at Punta Arenas was scheduled for repairs during the time we would be in Antarctica, this would mean that the Ilyushin would have to stop at Ushuaia outbound to Patriot Hills to gas up when it returned to pick us up after the climb.

Happily, I unpacked all my gear in my room at the Tierra del Fuego hotel and boogied downstairs for a beer. At the bar I met Andy, a nice guy who was leaving town pretty soon with both thumbs bandaged from frostbite. Andy related how he had gotten up to the summit ridge on Vinson with his group, where the winds were getting him a bit chilled. He stopped to get out his heavy parka, but he had tied it up in a stuff sack and when he tried to get the knots untied with his mittens, he couldn’t do it. When he took off the mittens to get out the parka, he got frostbite. Andy and his group had planned to tackle other mountains in the area, but the medical officer at Patriot Hills made him evacuate. His thumbs may come off and in any case were severely blistered. Andy said that the Vinson climb was the toughest thing he had done. Crap, I thought, this seems it might be pretty tough. I like my thumbs. Let’s drink another beer.

I met two guys who were planning to ski the last degree to the pole, Richard LaRonde from Boston and Norbert Kern from Frankfurt. Richard, who had already skied the last degree to the north pole, is a video entrepreneur and Norbert had previously been the chief of the entire German freight rail system. Both these guys were great fun to spend time with, and it turned out that we had plenty of time, since it would be 10 days before we got a flight in to the ice. Norbert is a wine connoisseur and Richard and I are wine consumers, so it worked out well for Norbert to pick out the wine and for us to test it.

At the ALE briefing, we met our fellow passengers and were treated to an account of a potentially serious incident that had happened earlier that year on Vinson. A guided group had been bailing off the mountain as a storm approached and got caught in high winds and whiteout in the middle of a crevassed area at the top of the 40 degree headwall. One guy fell into a crevasse and lost his mittens, getting severely frostbitten, and the whole group spent about 24 hours in horrendous conditions calling on the radio for rescue. Eventually everyone reached basecamp safely except for the guy with frostbite. Several ANI employees, including my guide, Tim Hewette and a couple of Swedish skiers were real heroes in helping the stranded climbers work their way downhill. Doc Martin, who gave the medical briefing, said he was pretty sure the guy, a surgeon from South Africa, would lose a number of fingers. Certainly, the photo he showed didn’t look too appetizing. For me it was two frostbite cases in two days of wandering around town. As a confirmed nosepicker, I was getting nervous.

After the briefing, nearly every four hours we were on call for a flight out, until one day we had a ten hour alert and could wander a bit further afield. Joined by another last degree skier, Alexander Drozhdkov, we were able to get a cab out to the Otway Bay penguin rookery, a bone jarring 2.5 hour trip, and then spent New Year’s drinking and partying. One photo demonstrates that nobody was driving in Punta Arenas mid-morning on New Year’s Day. About this time, five days into our wait, a number of climbers were giving up and returning to being stockbrokers in New York, while we continued to supplement Norbert’s gear with additional purchases at the North Face outlet store, where a cute girl was working.

The very house at which Sir Earnest Shackleton begged the locals to supply a ship to pick up his crew on Elephant Island is still there. The Shackleton Bar has many drawings of the events of Shackleton’s remarkable trip, including a photo of the man himself presented to the bar by his son. There never was a better excuse to drink than being in that bar for a toast to survival.

We were just settling into new accommodations at Taty’s Place, a much cheaper B&B run by the fair Claudia, when a really big windstorm blew through Punta Arenas. I measured 45 kt in town and at the airport they claimed more like 70 kt. The storm dismasted a California sailor who was rounding the Horn and his impending rescue by the Chilean Navy became interesting news for us on CNN. As it turned out, the storm blew up the butt of the Ilyushin and broke something, which was going to require 5 days to repair. Another briefing was announced at which ALE broke the bad news. We all felt great despite this, since it meant 5 days during which we definitely would not be on call for an IL76 flight. Many of the stranded adventurers, including our group, rented cars and headed to the nearest fantastic place, the astonishing Torres del Paine National Park. We were told that the weather we had there was unusually beautiful and we loved the whole trip, including guanacos, lakes, mountains and icebergs.

Upon returning to Punta Arenas, we almost immediately got the call that we could finally be on our way and to get ready for the bus. I did a little dance with Vern Tejas, one of the premier Denali guides, at the airport as we cleared immigration and boarded the plane. Although Chile claims Patriot Hills, they must not be too serious, since you still have to exit and reenter the country when going there. The security arrangements are pretty funny, since you leave all your scary stuff on the bus, walk through security fully dressed for the ice, along with all the regular gawking airport patrons, then you get back on the same bus, pick up your knives and grenades that you left there and head out to the Ilyushin.

During the flight you can really stretch your legs and wander around the plane. The food, balogne sandwiches on Wonder Bread, is about as bad as on any airline these days, but at least it’s free. You’re excited as the first mountains on the Antarctic Peninsula begin to be seen peaking through the clouds and the food really means nothing.

The landing on the ice runway at Patriot Hills comes as a bit of a surprise in the nearly windowless Ilyushin. Then there’s a lot of noise as the reversers blast and then you can tell that you’re down. Everyone is a bit awestruck at the first sight of the Antarctic continent from on the ice. Around the plane there is an immediate flurry of activity as equipment and supplies are offloaded and adventurers are being loaded for the flight back out to Punta Arenas. One of these was Hannah McKeand, 33, who was leaving after setting the record, for man or woman, for the fastest unsupported ski trip from the ocean to the pole: 39 days, 9 hours. Hannah had beaten the old record by 2 days.

At Patriot Hills, the base camp manager, Fran Orio, gave a briefing on personal hygiene (they are paranoid about infectious diseases) and introduced some of the staff and aircrew. The next thing I knew, I was in a twin Otter heading for Vinson Base Camp, a little more than an hour away. When there is flying weather down there, baby, you fly.

There were to be 4 parties on Vinson at the same time, a group of Russians from the Seven Summits Club, a group of Estonians guided by Alaska’s Vern Tejas through Adventure Consultants, a Norwegian and his two sons, guided by a Norwegian guide, and little old me. Although I had been told I would climb with Patty Soto, the first Chilean woman to climb Everest, our delay in coming in changed the plans and I was assigned to Tim Hewette. Tim is an Alaska guide, who had been involved in the rescue effort for the guy whose hands were featured in the Punta Arenas briefing. The base camp manager was another Everest climber and photographer, Steve Jones. As a client of the locals, ANI, I got to hang out in the base camp tent and drink the basecamp beer. The other groups had to do their own things.

The next day, hard to define, since the sun never sets, we wasted no time. We put on skis, hooked up sleds, roped up and headed up the hill in the wake of the Norwegians. Patty was taking supplies from the base camp at 7,000 feet to Camp 1 at 9,100 feet. The Norwegians looked pretty strong, but I was on Diamox and was feeling good. It took about 5 hours to get to Camp 1. At Camp 1, Patty and I had a tearful farewell and then Tim and I settled down for the “night,” a period of time during which the sun goes behind the mountains and the temperature drops about 20º C.

The next morning the Norwegians were behind Tim and me as we headed out still on skis and pulling sleds. At the base of the 40º headwall, we ditched the sleds and skis, put on crampons and headed up. The whole Branscomb Glacier is crevassed and in this area there are large blocks that had avalanched down from the sides of the route. Tim said they would never use such a dangerous route in Alaska, but here the cold keeps the snow pretty stable. Nevertheless, I was looking up the whole time. At the top of the headwall is a serious crevasse zone, where the guy with the bad hands had taken his dive. We blasted through there in pretty good weather, with Tim saying that it was strange that the previous time he had been there it had been real survival conditions in the worst weather he had ever moved in. It took maybe 6 hours to get to the High Camp. The Norwegians had caught us, but were descending to Camp 1 to acclimatize after dropping off loads. I was still feeling frisky, although it was now 12,500 at high latitude, so was about the physiological equivalent of the top of Whitney. Tim knew there was a tent in the rescue cache there, which had meant we were spared that burden. It took about an hour to dig it out, level and bombproof a site and get situated.

There was no guaranty that we wouldn’t be stuck here by weather, but the next morning Tim looked for plumes off the top of Shinn and it looked pretty calm in good sunlight. He simply said, “We’re there.” We ate and headed up.

I guess I didn’t hit the wall until about 15,000 feet, but about then, the last movie segment before the summit, I suddenly was toast. We had moved from sea level to 15,000 feet, more like 17,000 feet in the low latitudes, and it had been a bit too fast for me. Nevertheless, I was not planning to retreat at that point and told Tim I could make it. And I did.

I was extremely slow the last several hundred feet, and it must have felt like the Hillary Step on Everest as we climbed up and over a few rocks on the summit ridge. But finally we were on top! The weather was nice, a bit breezy, but with great visibility. The next day the Norwegians summitted in whiteout conditions and moderate winds. Poor guys. We spent about 15 minutes on top before Tim decided it was time to try to get me down alive. At one point on the way down when I should have turned around and been more careful, I slipped downclimbing a little rocky area, but Tim was ready and caught me easily. While heading down we avoided a steep face where a catch would have been a bit trickier and sacrificed distance for a safer route. But by then we were about 600 feet below the summit and I was already feeling better…pooped, but better. Back at 15,000 feet, Tim let me call Jan on the Iridium phone, which seemed at the time to be a minor miracle and still does.

After 13 hours, we found ourselves back in the High Camp with Shinn, which we had been looking down on, towering over us again. I didn’t feel much like food, and snacked a bit and then crashed. In retrospect, I should have carried my own tasty snacks and eaten more during the climb. But I had had plenty to drink and didn’t seem too screwed up. The Norwegians were in camp when we arrived and had already heard on the radio that we had made the summit, so we got plenty of congratulations.

The next morning the wind had picked up and while Tim and I headed back down, the Norwegians headed up to their lousy summit panorama. By now for us the visibility was pretty bad and I had occasional trouble picking up the wands as we snaked our way through the crevasse field and down the headwall. Poor visibility in high winds was what had caused the accident earlier in the season and we were well aware of this history. At the bottom of the headwall, when we reached the sleds, we put on the skis and carried the sleds, which we knew would be infinitely easier than pulling the sleds with just rope traces.

With the whiteout we now were skiing in, it became pretty funny how you could bonk into a two foot snowdrift and just stop dead without even seeing anything. We both crashed once in the flat light, and then finally I got my act together and we made pretty good progress on down the hill, which could have been up the hill for all I could tell. After about an hour we met Vern Tejas and his Estonians moving up and I received a monster compliment from Vern, who, of course knew we had knocked off the mountain in three days. “Congratulations, you must be in pretty good shape.” I basked in it. This guy has been on Everest 6 times.

At Camp 1, the Russians, who were enjoying smokes and (pure) alcohol in their tent, gave us some tea after which we headed on down, still in a pretty solid whiteout. I crashed two more times, once while moving and once when I thought I was moving, but actually had stopped. Every crash was a bitch, as the pack was heavy and I was getting tired again. After a while Tim and I unroped and Tim, who had just saved me on the mountain, tried to kill me by saying , “Take off your skins now, it’s flatter.” I resisted, fearing another agonizing crash, but once I saw Tim haul ass downhill, I had to strip them off. Tim was right, it was easy going, just poor light conditions. He must have thought that I would make it, since eventually he disappeared in the cloud while I plodded along, determinedly. After a while, sure enough, the base camp appeared out of nothing and nowhere and there were Steve, Patty and Tim standing out there grinning at me.

I dumped the load and collapsed in the base camp tent, while they pumped me full of Tang-like stuff and a delicious piping hot stew. I was amazed to see that I was shaking and couldn’t stop for a couple of hours. But a little food and drink, including two wunderbeers and I was feeling good enough to head off to beddy bye. I must have slept pretty well.

The next morning it was absolutely still and sunny and beautiful. It had snowed lightly in the whiteout and absolutely everything was just spectacularly white.

Presently, the Norwegians appeared in camp and we shook hands all around. They had summitted the day after Tim and me and then had just continued on out, arriving early in the evening. Although at first we got the word that ALE wouldn’t send a Twin Otter for just 6 people, after a while somebody must have counted noses and realized that they would have to send a plane for 6 eventually anyway and might as well do it early as well as later. In about 2 hours, the Otter showed up. The Norwegians, Tim and I hopped on and buzzed off to Patriot Hills. It was to be the last flight into or out of Vinson Base Camp for about 12 days.

We got into Patriot Hills by flying the homemade GPS approach into the ski strip, which runs parallel to the prevailing winds. While Wally and the Borek boys boogied to secure the Otter, the passengers gathered their stuff and helped offload. Before long, we were back in the main tent, where Tim and I were assigned our tents by Fran. The Norwegians headed to one of the small but comfortable guide tents. If it had not been for the next 5 or 6 days, I would have wondered what had killed Scott and his men. But we found ourselves in blizzard conditions that lasted nearly a week and shut down nearly all flight activities.

We were stuck in camp along with the Borek flight crews, with the other camp employees and the guides and their clients scattered here and there. I was flattered to be asked to give a talk in the main tent on fusion, which I discussed in the context of global warming. We read the books in the library, we looked at the maps, including one left there by Reinhold Messner himself, we visited the workshops and the ice cave for food storage. We had a GPS class and scavenger hunt. I spent some time with Adam Brown, the radio operator, learning new ham radio tricks and, sadly, getting the bad news from a guy in Maine that the Patriots had beaten the Chargers in the NFL playoffs. Ham radio, running 100 W over 7,000 miles to find out about a football score, never ceases to amaze me.

From time to time the sun would peak out and the wind would die down, making it possible to explore the area. On one of these days, I checked out of camp and skied over to the abandoned Chilean base about a mile away. On another, Adam and I got a snow machine and bounced and slid our way 5 miles over to a DC-6, which was completely buried in the snow except for the tip of its rudder. This was our GPS scavenger hunt. The DC-6 had landed short of the Patriot Hills strip 8 years ago in a whiteout. Nobody had been killed, but the plane was hopelessly mired in the snow, and there it remains to this day.

Finally, almost anticlimactically, we got the news that the Ilyushin had left Punta Arenas for Ushuaia to refuel. It was held there waiting for weather, and then launched, with reasonable conditions at Patriot Hills. When it was about an hour out, the winds picked up and by the time it landed, the peak gusts were up to nearly 40 kts direct crosswind, about twice the 20 kt official limit. Fully expecting to see a crash, everyone headed out to the strip, but it was a group of happy campers who finally saw through the blowing snow that the plane was safely on the ice. We figured that it must be about a $200k loss for ALE if the plane has to abort the landing and return to Punta Arenas. So we were sure that ALE also was pretty relieved. The newbies disembarked and we veterans of the ice loaded up and before you could say “Robert Falcon Scott” we were in the air. The flight was just as fascinating as before, except that before too long we flew into something we hadn’t encountered for our whole time on the ice: darkness. And by the time we landed in Punta Arenas, it not only was dark, but also was raining.

I was now a solo act at Claudia’s and a shower never felt so good. The next morning, which came almost immediately, for an exorbitant fee I got my plane tickets changed to later that day, meeting several of my fellow travelers along the way. Because I really want to return some day, I went down to kiss the toe of the Indian again and, before long found myself back in sunny warm San Diego. The Estonians and Russians missed my Ilyushin flight out and then were stuck at Patriot Hills waiting for another flying day. All the delays for them meant that several of their visas had expired and they were refused reentry into Chile, an impasse which eventually was resolved with the help of Olga from ALE and piles of cash, just as in any other civilized country.

For me, it was the sixth of the Seven Summits and, since I won’t tempt fate on Everest, the last. I wouldn’t trade the experiences on those 6 mountains for anything; and this one, of all of the beautiful astonishing places to be, was the best.

Comments?

• Wed Dec 19 '07 No title! Jan (1)

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