Danny Hall (of fame) Hero!

Danny & friends spent Christmas trekking upĀ  Aconcagua – They raised almost four thousand pounds for our guests – here’s…..

The Final Story

After arriving in Mendoza we quickly set-off for a three day hike down the valley to the bottom of the mountain to set up Basecamp at Plaza Argentina. Establishing Basecamp on day three as scheduled, everything was going to plan and everyone was generally in good spirits. The plan was for a rest day at Basecamp followed by trekking up to stock camp 1 with food. Worryingly, we lost our expedition leader for a few days to a medical at this point, however our mountain guide kept us on track.

Christmas day arrived and things started to change, a weather front was closing in, so our plan changed. To get to summit camp before the weather, we needed to skip rest and acclimatisation days to move camps in a single push.

This meant carrying everything we needed in single lifts (around 25 to 30kg) up-to 700 vertical metres per day, this was exhausting work taking us around 7 hours per day.

But, 5 days ahead of schedule we made summit camp. After a few hours rest we set off for the summit. Unfortunately after such a quick ascent, combined with the workload, exhaustion and altitude got the better of us. Staggering around unable to find balance or oxygen we turned back at around 6,500m, less than 500 vertical metres from our goal. This was the right decision, to go the remaining 500m would have taken us around 6hours and put us all in un-necessary danger.

So we returned to summit camp to get a few hours rest before descending through the other altitude camps back to Basecamp, all disappointed but safe. It was certainly the toughest experience of my life but an amazing adventure which I will never forget !

Thanks so much for your support with this adventure, and I truly hope that the money raised helps enormously.

 

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