The first two days in Punta Arenas were centered around the trip preparation, of course. Yesterday, I got my gear checked. They were a little bit concerned about my down jacket, which is a 750-fill of LoweAlpine from my friend Jing. To be safe, I rented a bullet-proof 800 fill North Face one. They only have size XL in stock, which looks like a sleeping bag on me, but it´s guaranteed to be safe!

This morning, we had our first brief meeting. We have total 46 (or 47) people going in on this flight and are all for Mt Vinson climb, including 4 women climbers. My group under ALE´s guide has 5 members, including 2 Korean, 1 Ecuadorian, 1 Serbian, and me. This is going be a interesting group. One of the Korean member is a world famous climber HongGil Um, who was the number 8th person in the world to climb all 14 of the 8000m peaks and who has seen a lot of his team members perishing on the mountain! The Ecuadorian climber is Patricio Tisalema Torres, a professional guide himself who soloed Mt Everest last year without supplemental oxygen.

At the moment, it was snowing hard in Antarctica, and has been so for a week. The Dec 10 departure group is still waiting in Punta Arenas, because of Ilyum flight can only land on hard blue ice runway. Even if the snow is going to stop by tomorrow, it takes 36 hours to clean up the runway. The earliest possible date to fly is Tuesday. So we are talking about 72 hours’ guaranteed no-fly zone and are advised to have some fun traveling! So I’m taking off to visit Torres del Paine for the next couple days, and come back for update on Tuesday.