Wally Berg

The 30 Year Old Cache
January 13, 1999 — Punta Arenas, Chile


CLICK TO HEAR THE CALL:

Mountain Zone, Wally Berg here with the daily update on the 13th of January. Pretty discouraging times have developed, I will have to say, here in Punta Arenas. Part of expedition life, always a possibility in the commitments you make in a climbing endeavor, to wait. Usually we think about waiting in a storm-bound tent or in a base camp someplace, but Punta Arenas has been the scene of a lot of waiting in recent years for polar adventures. With our Alpine Ascents trips, we always had virtually perfect luck with getting flown out of here, but you never know. It's a big undertaking to go down there. I'm thinking a lot about the Norman Vaughn trips that people have been familiar with in recent years and the interminable waits that have been part of their Punta Arenas experience. So, you know, we still have to hang in there, and we are doing so.

Currently, just to give you the... what may be getting to be a monotonous weather report real quickly. I've been hanging out up by the short-wave radios at the ANI office today, Patriot Hills is reporting the weather is not flyable basically. Not terrible, but not flyable, and we're trying to make a call right now whether it's going to go in an improving direction or deteriorate, but with winds at 25 gusting to 28, that alone is not acceptable to the crew. Cloud cover, visibility, and other things are not looking good.

What do you do when you're hanging out? I've talked a lot about some of the adventures I had around here. We've gotten to another old expedition thing of passing books around. We've been doing that. And Dana Isherwood is a star here because she had something better than a book to pass around that I enjoyed getting my hands on: color copies of the pages from a June, 1967 National Geographic that had been given to her by her friend about the 1966 trip that was the American ascent and the first ascent of Mount Vinson, a trip I've known about for a long time. Nick Clinch, John Evans, Barry Corbett, Pete Schoening, a lot of other really noted explorers, American explorers and adventurers were on this trip. These guys made the first ascent of Vincent. As well, they made the first ascent of Mount Shinn, Gardner and Tyree. Amazing story!

Looking at these photographs and reading about the adventures of our friends inspires us to hang on and know that when our time on the ice comes, we're going to get to savor it. And probably, thank the developments that have taken place in terms of Antarctica travel since that time.

Many of Mountain Zone fans will remember a year ago when I was talking about having run into John Evans, an old, good friend of mine down here and being reminded that I had bumped in at the Punta Arenas airport to a member of the first ascent team of Mount Vinson. And I believe you will also recall Veikka [Gustafsson] from Finland, who we've known from past Everest exploits, last year had, just before he and his partner Patrick [Degerman] made a repeat of their route on Mount Gardner, these guys found a cache [from the 1966 expedition]. [Click for Wally Berg's 1998 Dispatch on the 30-year-old cache.]

And I don't know if I ever reported to Mountain Zone, I probably didn't, but just for fun, after we ate all the candy bars at Vinson base last year that these guys got from the cache of the 1966 trip, I returned to the United States with a box of matches from New Zealand that were in perfect condition; small container of matches, still sealed up in the paper that John got a kick out of seeing when I returned it to him. Things sit down there in a very preserved and pristine state in that environment, to say the least.

And we all hope to be down there some time in the future. At this point, it's still wait and see.

I'll give you a weather report later based on some satellite obs that we hope to have radioed back this evening, and we'll give you a prognosis as to when we may be able to get underway and get down on the ice.

—Wally Berg, Expedition Leader

DISPATCHES