February 28, 2008

Thursday, February 28th
8:02am

Hey guys, it’s Brenton and John here again. Today is February 28th. We just got another weather forecast today…looks like Sunday/Monday we have a huge high pressure system coming in that may last 3 or 4 days. So we spent most of the day getting around 6-7 days worth of food together and trying to scrounge up some information on the north pillar .

So starting tomorrow we hike to Rio Blanco. Then from Rio Blanco we’ll head to Paso Superior and then from Paso Superior we will head up the glacier to the knot in the base of the pillar.

So hopefully if the weather breaks Monday, we will start climbing the pillar. We plan to spend about 3 days on the route, looking like it is about 25 to 27 pitches of 5.10 rock climbing.

We have been using our Pounder sleeping bags along with what we’ve been calling the Bragg bivisac that Jeff designed, along with the Ellsworth Primaloft insulated jackets to stay warm at night and the bivis up in the mountains. Seems to be working quite well for us, actually.

I’m going to head over and try and upload a few photos. This is dispatch #3. So there should be a 2nd one out there also. Other than that everything is good here. Plan on maybe 1 dispatch a day from now on.

We’re going to take the communication equipment with us out on the trail and give you guys as many updates as we can.

Right on! Ciao!