Antarctic report is live!

A number of you have asked about "the details" on my Antarctic trip. Dave has been kind enough to post it in the News section http://www.trailspace.com/news/2007/02/13/vinson-anniversary-climb.html so you can now read all about it. Hope you enjoy it and get inspired to go yourselves!

Bill, thanks for sharing your story and photos!

Spectacular job Bill. Thanks so much for posting this story. What a great experience.

I found it funny that you mentioned the fellow carrying the Kelty pack on the glacier. My eye spotted that right away, you don't see that much anymore.

Bill S
Great story Dude. Indred says shes quite impressed... Not a lot of snow in Oregon this year but enough up at Mt Bachelor. Been downhilling a lot lately.

So anyway your Garmin lost its program mysteriously on the mountain. I was amazed as I read that - here's what happened to me. BTW don't throw it away, in about 6 months the memory will mysteriously return.

Anyway Indred and I were rock collecting in the high Oregon desert east of Bend, out past Brothers in the hills. We found some nice jasper but it was all pretty small. We were not too far from Glass Mountain a famous obsidian flow used by many to make arrowheads and other stone implements. I was strangely attracted to a group of trees and I got the strongest feeling that I was in an ancient campsite when I saw all of the debitage from obsidian knapping. Suddenly I realized it WAS an ancient campsite.

So we examined the site and set the location on the GPSR and returned to Bend. When we got to Bend my cellphone had quit working. I took it to Sprint and they wondered where I got a cellphone with the original flash memory contents - I had been using it for 3 months so it had to have been programmed, and it failed to reprogram - it was dead, so they gave me a new phone. The GPSR ALSO failed to operate afterwards but I kept it and bought an etrex. About 6 months later the garmin - a gps3+ - turned on and ran like nothing had ever happened. So 2 separate electronic devices each with complex CPUs and memory each had very strange things happen to their memory, and the GPS healed in about 6 months. As an electrical engineer I offer no theories as to why this should occur.

Jim S

Bill,What a great adventure. Thanks for the write-up and the photos. I was surprised at how civilized the facilities were down there in the middle of nowhere. And I thought going out to Dewey Point was adventurous-hehehe.