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Tent Sauna
Saturday, September 18, 1999
 Vern | |
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Buenas días Mountain Zone, this is Team Omega on Aconcagua. Yippee, we finally made Base Camp after slugging it out for over a week with heavy loads.
We finally got into a position where we are just underneath the mountain itself. And boy what a day it is today: the sun's out, it's calm, clear, beautiful. Picture perfect in most ever way. We're inside the tent and it's 75 degrees, we're taking a sauna — goodness gracious. We're actually going to have to bury some of our food in the snow to keep it from spoiling.
Big old plan from here is to acclimate, that is the key word. We're going to rest and recuperate and build red blood cells and get ready for the big push up the mountain. So today is our rest day and boy are we enjoying it, we're reading, writing, melting water. There's so much heat here right now, we can actually melt water using our solar melting technique where we put out a black pad and sprinkle snow on it and let it melt and trickle down into a pot. Again, saving our precious fuel.
We're also going to divvy up our food today so that we're going to take everything that's necessary for our push and leave the rest for when we return to civilization.
That's it for now, as they say, luego.
Our critical numbers for today are, at 8:08 in the morning, we're at 14,080 feet; we're at 32 south 37.903, 69 degrees west 56.836, 15 degrees fahrenheit with a 3.2 mile-an-hour wind out of the west. Bob's blood oxygen saturation is 87 and his pulse was 54. My O² sat is also 87 and my pulse 41. See ya mañana, Ciao.
—Vernon Tejas, MountainZone.com Correspondent
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