Berg

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Good morning, Mountain Zone. It's Wally Berg on the morning of the 25th of January from Patriot Hills in Antarctica. Time moves kind of slow when you are waiting to be flown off the ice. Didn't call yesterday, but we did have some great news yesterday. Those British gals, the British women, M&G Ice Challenge Expedition, that did ski from Hercules Inlet to the South Pole, arrived at the South Pole at 6am yesterday morning. We were thrilled to hear this. Those girls had been at it for more than two months and it is great to know through a long and sometimes, it must have been pretty tedious and seemingly endless effort, that they saw their goal through and they made it. Right now, they're down at the Pole; we're all still here, waiting for conditions to allow that C-130 to come in from Punta Arenas.

It's not looking very good today, didn't look very good yesterday. We've got clouds all about. I'm sitting here in my tent looking out at three aircraft: a DC-3, a Twin Otter, and a little Cessna, all three on skis of course. The DC-3 and the Twin Otter will be flown back out the peninsula, across the Great Passage, and on north when we can get this program shut down and move out of here. It could be a matter of a day or two or it could be much longer, depending on the weather. The next thing that has to happen, in terms of those of us that have been undertaking our projects down here, of course, is that C-130, that wheeled aircraft that can land out here on the blue ice and haul us all out of here has to...the clouds have to go away, and we have to have the weather to permit that. In the meantime it is just sit and wait.

Yesterday we had Adam Petlin from Fox News talk to the group in the dining tent a bit about using cold weather cameras and other equipment in cold weather. In the afternoon, Dave Hahn told his account of his expedition, their expedition last year, when they found Mallory, of course, something we've all been interested in. The account of staging events through the day and you share stories with incredibly interesting people and you bide your time. There is plenty of food, probably too much. It is one of the ways we entertain ourselves, is eating excellent food.

And we were reminded that we are in a great and vast place and you kind of...you're thankful for the good breaks you get. In particular, this weather. We can't get flown a C-130 in here, but John Miller, the Twin Otter pilot, was accounting to me yesterday, as we just talked through the afternoon, about how just a few weeks ago in a horrible blizzard they had here, at Patriot Hills, 80-knot gust and higher, with extremely poor visibility. People were roped together just to move around camp. He had to rope up and, with some help, and go out and look for his Twin Otter, which, at that time, he had assumed had probably blown away. I'm looking across to that Twin Otter now; it's about 50 yards from my tent. But in those conditions...[transmission fails].

So, we'll keep you posted on adventures or quite honestly, I would have to say at this point, lack of adventures. It is fine to be bored and just wait until our time to get off the ice. Any adventure that might come along now would probably be something that we would just as soon not deal with. We're happy to savor a fantastic climbing and exploratory trip to the Embree Glacier, share stories with other adventurers and eat a lot of good sweets and meals, and wait to be flown back to Chile — hoping that will happen really soon. I'll keep you posted about major developments. But in the meantime, we're all a little bored but quite fine down here at Patriot Hills.

— Wally Berg, MountainZone.com Correspondent

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