Jonas and Maria on the Summit!

After a lot of hard work, Jonas, Maria and Todd made it to the summit of Mt. Vinson!

The Summit Ridge

Jonas climbing across the beautiful and fun summit ridge of Mount Vinson.

Heading off to the summit!

Well, we finally got our window and headed out into thin clouds for the summit.

Storm Day at High Camp

We spent the day on our tent, getting buffetted by winds gusting to 40 knots. Though it was chilly, outside, the thin clouds allowed our tent to warm up inside enough to be fairly comfortable.

Moving to High Camp

When we moved to High Camp, it was a totally different experience! We had the perfect day. It was actually hot! (Well, relatively hot...)

Stormy weather below High Camp

We climbed up the headwall between Mt. Shinn and Mt. Vinson in good weather, but the wind picked up severely when we topped out. We struggled through this to put our cache in at High Camp.

A view of our Route

Here is a view of the route we took on Mount Vinson. Base Camp is out of sight to the lower left. We followed the glacier in the foreground toward the Massif and then followed the base of the rocky wall back to the right to the spot where we put in Camp 1 (at the base of the tall icefall splitting the rocky wall). We then climbed up between the snowy peak in the background (Mt. Shinn) and the rocky wall's lefthand ridge to our High Camp.

Vinson Base Camp

Vinson Base Camp, with the Massif in the background.

The coolest plane on the Ice!

/This is the Ilushyn jet that flew us to Antarctica and landed on the Blue Ice runway!