Berg

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Hi Mountain Zone, it's Wally Berg calling you at about 1:45 on January 10th from the Embree Glacier in Antarctica. Things have gone extremely smoothly for us as we got to Patriot Hills yesterday [Unintelligible] at Patriot Hills this morning with John Miller and Mike Sutherland who are the Twin Otter pilots, with First Air out of Ottawa, Canada, who are contracted to do the Twin Otter flights for ANI down here this year. Great guys that got us up pretty high in the Embree Glacier; we're really pleased.

We are in fact right at the base of this beautiful ridge on Mount Bentley, which is, as I may have described previously, has seen one ascent by Veikka Gustafsson, from Finland, in the past, but it's certainly never been climbed from this side. This is the second time someone's been down on this glacier, with Elias, Rodrigo, Steve King, Kurt Cox and company having gotten down here last year. A few other people got in, but we're thrilled about the opportunity now that we're out in this peaceful setting. We're finally here. We're finally alone in Antarctica — in a neat area to me — and we're thrilled about the opportunity to get some climbing and some exploring underway. Bob and I are alone now and happy to be out here.

You might have heard me refer to Art Mortvedt a couple of times; Art's adventures continue elsewhere on the continent. As far as I know, he is still down at, in the Theil mountains where he's been stuck for a few days waiting for weather to clear. Art's the Cessna flyer for Adventure Network and he, the plan is: he will take us out of here, probably spend a few days with us, and we'll all fly back out of here after Bob and I have gotten our ascent of Bentley and Anderson, and looked around and hopefully done quite a lot — weather permitting, of course, as always is the case in Antarctica. We have no radio. We're able to do daily scheduled text via the Iridium phone with Patriot Hills. I just talked with Lucy, our meteorologist there, a few moments ago, to let her know we were down safely at the Embree Glacier and that John and Mike were on their way back.

But the good news is today, on January 10th, the Omega Embree Glacier Expedition is finally on the Embree Glacier and we're thrilled to be here. The weather looks good, a few clouds around, but no wind. We're going to be busy building a camp this afternoon. I'll check in with you later.

— Wally Berg, MountainZone.com Correspondent

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