Dispatches
The climbers used a satellite telephone to keep us posted on their progress. Click below to view an index of all the archived dispatches:
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Wally Berg

This trip was a highlight of my year in 1998. The opportunity to return 'to the ice' is extremely exciting for me. Nothing can compare to a trip to the interior of the continent of Antarctica. The vastness, the purity, the overwhelming expanse, are enticing. Climbing Vinson is dipping one's toe into a realm of openness and exploration that was known to the great Antarctic explorers. A stark and serene world.

In my anticipation, I am reminded of the opening paragraph of Apsley Cherry-Garrard's classic 1922 account of the Scott expedition to reach the South Pole:

"Polar Exploration is at once the cleanest and most isolated way of having a bad time which has been devised. It is the only form of adventure in which you put on your clothes at Michaelmas and keep them on until Christmas, and, save for a layer of the natural grease of the body, find them as clean as though they were new... Taken all in all, I do not believe anybody on earth has a worse time than an Emperor Penguin."

As I enjoy the peace of the Christmas season in Colorado with my wife, the white vastness beckons.

—Wally Berg, Expedition Leader

DISPATCHES