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Wish You Were Here
Tuesday, September 14, 1999
 Vern | |
 Hear Vern's Call from Aconcagua |
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Good morning, Mountain Zone. This is Team Omega in the Vacas Valley, very close to Mount Aconcagua and Argentina. Boy oh boy, I wish you could have been here yesterday afternoon. Bob and I slugged it out against 50 mile-an-hour winds — whiteout conditions — to get to our campsite.
We had to build a huge V wall to protect our tent, so it wouldn't blow away in the night. Man Alive! If you could only have been here, we needed all the help we could have gotten.
Say, we're also involved in trying to do little studies on people in remote locations and cold weather and that's one of the reasons we chose the Southern Hemisphere. One of the things we've been doing is monitoring our pulse rate and our blood saturation for oxygen and checking wind and weather. As I mentioned, yesterday was really windy. We actually clocked winds of 49 miles-an-hour out of the north while we were skiing into camp.
We've been reading in the low 90s for our blood oxygen saturation and pretty normal for a pulse rate, I'm usually low, so I've been hitting in the 40s and Bob's been coming in the 50s and the 60s. So far, we seem to get getting pretty much as anticipated — the higher up we get, the lower the oxygen saturation gets. Right now we're currently camped at 10,340ft and we're experiencing relatively reasonable weather. So, with that we will sign off and say stay tuned 'til we talk to you again tomorrow. Good-bye.
—Vernon Tejas, MountainZone.com Correspondent
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