Berg

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Hi Mountain Zone, it's Wally Berg. I'm calling you the afternoon of January 11th. Bob and I have been out here on the Embree Glacier for more than 24 hours now, and I'll have to say that the full impact of this experience is probably just now settling in — what a wonderful opportunity to be out here this far away from anyone else. We're in the upper portion of this Embree Glacier basin now, much higher than these guys got last year. It's awesome, I'll have to say. It fills one with awe to be in a place like this.

We've had excellent weather. Today I put on skis and headed up the basin to [Unintelligible] the area and do, as I always do, get a feel for the scale of the area I'm in and look around. At the same time, Bob started up this ridge we hope to climb on Mount Bentley, a 4,000-meter peak, that's here in the area. We had a visual of one another most of the way. I felt good about moving up the basin because Antarctica is dry and cold. I can't emphasize that enough. Even though I'm on a glacier, I felt confident that any crevasses would be exposed out here in the middle. I looked up the side, as the faces move up, towards the ridges, and certainly saw areas that will be roped if we were on these, but felt good about taking a look up there. And it was an amazing experience to me. As I moved further up the basin, I began to see some of these rock ribs come down and inspect them a little closer, very aware that I'm literally looking at sights that have never been seen before by humans. You know, this is an ageless place and we're thrilled to be able to look around here.

Mike and John, our Twin Otter pilots, left us off here yesterday. The peace, and the serenity and the scale of the place is just settling in, as I've described. Watching that Twin Otter lift off, moving back from such a timeless setting, that I've described, and I had to think about what a great aircraft that is and what it's done for us around the world in recent years. As you know, we've been flying these things around Nepal for years. I remember flying a Twin Otter to the village of Ilaga on the approach to Cartensz Pyramid in Irian Jaya on the island of New Guinea. Just this year, on a Mountain Zone dispatch, I described the Twin Otter taking off and landing on the Watkins Glacier, in east Greenland — I could go on and on. This is an aircraft that has certainly given us access to a lot of wonderful places around the mountain world, and the pilots, as always, are amazing guys. Pretty appreciate of the adventure as well, these First Air pilots were clicking their pictures. And we were pretty quiet about it, but I know that the setting and the fact that we were the first to be here was something that was on all four of our minds, as we walked around. Those guys had to fly out of here. And, as I said, Art Mortvedt, from Alaska, may be coming in on a Cessna to join us for a few days and he'll probably be thrilled — veteran and polar explorer that he is — for the opportunity as well.

Bob and I have an Explorers Club flag with us, number 155, and we realized, when we got to Patriot Hills the other day — I mentioned this Theil mountain expedition, Jim Lovell's on it, Paul Shaperia and others — and I mentioned this, these guys did successfully get off today to the Theil mountains, 85º south. So their project's underway. They're going to be looking for meteorites and doing a number of other projects in the area. They have an Explorers Club flag as well. So I think it's pretty cool that at one time, down here on the continent, the rather prestigious and time-honored tradition of carrying one of these Explorers Club flags that have been on expeditions to amazing places all over the globe and in some cases into space; we actually have two of them on the continent simultaneously now. So, that's pretty cool and I would like to keep you posted, if I can, on what's going on with those other guys.

But certainly talking about other people is part of the interest down here, but to sum it up, Bob and I are thrilled and awed, as I said earlier, to be out here alone, with the prospect of a few days of climbing — weather permitting as always. But it certainly looks good today and we'll keep you posted on how those climbs go, and other work we're doing out here as the days go by.

— Wally Berg, MountainZone.com Correspondent

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