Dispatch#28 January 17th, 2002.  Aconcagua Base Camp, Argentina. Team Canusa Hi this is Ellie Henke reporting in from Aconcagua Base Camp with the latest news from Team Canusa, led by Allen Carbert and Matt Szundy.  It's January 17th, and the latest breaking news form the mountain is that Christine lost yet another time to Jorma in a game of high altitude chess. However, Allen reports that she did redeem herself by finishing her cheesecake dessert a full five minutes faster than Jorma.  So I guess that's a congratulations in order to both Christine and Jorma for their different accomplishments.

The team is at Camp I and today completed a carry up to Camp II, taking up food and fuel and things that they'll need higher on the mountain and the plan is that tomorrow they'll go ahead and move their entire camp up to Camp II which is up at a place called Amagino Col.  Allen reports that for their carry they ended up breaking trail through a few inches of new snow, it's been snowing here the last couple of evenings as we reported.  However the sun did come out during the day and Allen reports that sunlight reflecting off the surface of the snow made it almost unbearably bright, everybody definitely kept their dark glasses on all day, and it also made things very, very hot to the point of being uncomfortable.  Everyone thinks of mountains as being cold places but that's not necessarily true, they are a place of contrast.  And today proved that by being very hot.

So we have a couple of messages from people.  Carter wishes to say hello to all his friends and family in Montana, and thanks for all their support he reminds you all to shine on.  Ed would like to say hello to his friends and family in North Carolina and New York City.  We'll have more personal messages tomorrow.  And we're also saying a goodbye to Doctor Nick, the team Veterinarian, who was himself struck by a bug.  Nick unfortunately had a cold when he started out on the trip and things just didn't get better for him, he's still been coughing and had a few ugly things coming out of his lungs.  So he did end up taking a mule ride down the mountain and we're hoping him a speedy recovery down at lower elevations.  So that's it from Team Canusa for January 17th and we'll be reporting in again tomorrow.