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A friend and I are going for Aconcagua in February next year. We are going self guided and mostly self supported except for using mules to get from the park entrance to plaza de mulas.
I already got some good info from dereferenced (peter) from his climb, but i was wondering if there were any other member that went this past year that would like to share their trip reports. Who did you use for mules, anything that was helpful to make the climb more successful, any roadblocks/problems, any sidetrips worth seeing while we're in the area, etc.
Enjoyed reading the trip report on Aconcagua. Took me back to when I climbed it in back December 1994. Obviously, it wasn't so heavily regulated as it is today. And no internet for info to boot. It was a different deal back then.
Anyway, my biggest mistake was that I went straight from Camp Nido (I think that's the first camp above base camp) and I skipped the Berlin camp. I had a perfect weather day so went for it. But in retrospect, I should have gone to Berlin camp for a night before summiting.
I was solo but met a group of italians and teamed up with them and ascended with to Camp Nido. They all got bad altitude sickness and bailed, so I went for it solo. I was a lot more fearless back then. LOL
But I made it. Did the whole thing solo. Hit the trail from the first camp above basecamp at like 4:30 a.m. (but I spent prob a good 6-7 days in base camp hiking around before making a summit attempt), made it back to the tent at around 8 p.m. and crawled into my sleeping bag. I was beat up.
So, how would I describe reaching the summit. Well, since I stupidly went really fast, by the time I reached the top, I felt like I had pounded an entire bottle of jack daniels. LOL Yeah, a lot of altitude sickness. It was surreal climbing this big mountain all day and summiting without seeing another person.
I had my crampons and ice axe but did not need them. Like I said reports back then were slim and there had been a bunch of snow near the top as of the week before. By the way, snow would have been 10x better than a scree slope which was like 2 steps up and slide 1 step back.
