Vern

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Buenas días Mountain Zone, this is Vernon Tejas with Team Omega reporting from Santiago, Chile.

Well, we made the last seven-eight miles of our walk out in record time, even though we had large packs. I think it has to do with a Tejas travel theory that one travels faster towards a food source than away from one — especially when one is almost out of food. Anyway, we got down amongst the friendly Argentineans again and found out that we were featured in the newspaper that day and that our sent, uh..., as reported by Mountain Zone, almost verbatim was copied by the Mendoza Daily. It was quite fun — everybody we talked to said "oh, you're the mountain climbers" so we're down and embraced by the masses, it really feels good.

On our way to Chile we, of course, were almost completely bombarded with new colors, sounds and smells. The odors, after being in a very sterile environment of the mountain, it's very exciting to come into life again, into a greening world and the spring is really hitting big time. As we drove down from the mountains, we came into the valleys with the new tender crops, just blooming out and budding — explosions of colors. Cherry trees were blossoming everywhere as we entered Chile and it was really exciting for us just to be bombarded with these visual inputs.

Now, of course, we're trying to acclimatize to the big city of Santiago, there's 5.7 million people here. Currently we're bivouacked on the banks of the Rio Mapocho, in one of their fine hotels here, and soon we'll be on our way back to the United States. I've got a spreadsheet that I'd like to share with all of our viewers of all the details of the data we picked up so stay tuned for that.

The critical numbers for today are: September the 28th at 9:27, we're at 23,000ft in Santiago, Chile. The temperature is 68 degrees — quite a change for us — and we only have .03 miles-an-hour of wind out of the east. Check this out, though, Bob's oxygen saturation of his blood is now 97% and his pulse rate has gone down to 43. My O² sat is 98% and a pulse rate of 38. Like I said, I'm going to try to get a spreadsheet as soon as I get back to Alaska and post it on this site as well.

Thank you very much for staying tuned and hopefully we'll talk to you one more time before it's all over. Bye for now. As they say, ciao, baby.

—Vernon Tejas, MountainZone.com Correspondent

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