7th January 2023
Exactly 25 years ago to the day, I was in my little apartment in Santiago, Chile, nervously packing an enormous backpack in preparation for an adventure. The challenge I had set myself was to attempt to reach the summit of the highest mountain I had ever seen – the highest peak in the Andes, the highest in the Americas – in fact the highest mountain in the world outside the Himalaya-Karakorum range of South Asia.
The adventure had been 7 years coming. My original naïve expectation of being able to simply include an ascent to the 6960m summit of Aconcagua in my 1990-91 Round-the-World trip now seemed laughable, and by January 1998 I had spent a number of weeks preparing myself as well as I reasonably could, for what I had finally appreciated was a serious undertaking.
This blog is a day-by-day recreation of the adventure, taken from the detailed account that I wrote for friends and family in the weeks and months following my return from the mountain. Posts will appear every day or two, as though I was currently climbing the mountain, with, of course, all the photos that I took.
Tread carefully and take a deep breath – the air is thin at 23,000 feet….