A good friend of mine just achieved one of the
top items on my own personal "lifelist", that is, the list of things I’d most like to do in my life. This
item sits there at about number 21, after many diving adventures, paddling Greenland and a host of others. But it is
there, nonetheless, and I am psyched he pulled it off. He also wanted me to mention hs guiding outfit, which he says
did a superb job getting his small group to the top. The company is called South American Climbing.
What did he do, you ask? Well, he
summited Aconcagua, the 22,841-ft behemoth of a mountain in
the South of Argentina, that also happens to be the tallest mountain in the Southern and Western Hemispheres. Now, never
mind the fact that we have labeled this number one
on OUR Gadling Lifelist series. That was
just a matter of circumstance. I’d just read something about it and so posted the piece. We’ll be doing many more
Lifelist pieces in the near future, by the way.
So it took my friend Erik Riegler some three weeks to get
acclimated and to reach the summit, and as you can see by this
series of photos on Kodak (which I hope you CAN see), Aconcagua looks both brutally hard, and surprisingly barren.
But despite its enormous height, it is not THAT hard to climb, at least it’s not if yo ukeep yourself to the easiest
route up. Technically, I understand it can be done by relative novices. The key is to acclimatize so you don’t end up
with cerebral or pulmonary edema. So, here’s raising a glass to Erik and his effort. Nice job, dude.