Dispatch#18 January 3rd, 2002.  Aconcagua Base Camp, Argentina.  Team II Well here at Aconcagua Base Camp, it's snowing, and I'm sure that up at Camp III, it's snowing and blowing. This is Ellie Henke calling in from Aconcagua, and I just heard from Pat Timson and Conan Bliss, They did their move all the way up to Camp III yesterday at 19,200 feet, and luckily, just beat all of the snow that came in.  Pat said they had a little bit of wind through the night and it's been snowing most of the night so they are thoroughly ensconced in their tents, they're well dug in, nothing threatening at all, everybody is doing well, but now they'll have the adventure of living through a mild Aconcagua storm.  Sounds like the winds aren't really really high like they sometimes get, and hopefully once this storm blows through there's a good chance the weather will clear and maybe give them a really good chance for the summit.

Here at Base Camp I'm going to have to suit up pretty soon and go out and do a water run.  I'm lucky down here because it's warm enough that the water is running, and all I have to do is dip a bucket into the containers.  Up at Camp III everything is frozen up solid, so I'm sure that Pat and Conan today will be spending quite a bit of time melting water for hot drinks and soup and meals for everybody.  So that's quite a bit of work up there and I'm sure they'll be spending a bit of time up there.

Dave and Dave and Kim and Brian are also up at Camp III, well dug in, and we'll be waiting to hear from Group I, from down in Mendoza.  They took off yesterday afternoon planning on camping out at Casa Piedra, so they took two tents for five people just in case they needed a little shelter, well the storm came through so they may have needed a bit more shelter than they expected.  We'll see what conditions they ran into farther down the valley on their next report.

For now, we're well dug in, and everybody's warm and happy, and hopefully they have some books or card games going up there at Camp III, so we'll report in later of how everybody is doing once this storm blows through, that's it from Aconcagua Base Camp.