Fairfax trio scales Mount Aconcagua
By Claire Compton
Vacations typically involve relaxation and sunny beaches, but three men from Fairfax County decided to forgo comfort for a grueling hike up Argentina's Mt. Aconcagua, the highest mountain outside of the Himalayas.
Tom Hughes, 51, of Vienna, Bob Gaskins, 41, of Chantilly and Ken Stringer, 60, of Reston, flew to the state of Mendoza in Argentina on Jan. 16 to tackle the eight-day climb to the summit, which peaks at 22,841 feet. Mount Everest, the tallest mountain on earth, measures 29,028 feet.
The trio had previously tackled Mount Rainier in Washington state in 2004. While that peak reaches 14,410 feet, Hughes said Rainier is technically a bit more difficult than Aconcagua.
Rainier is additionally much colder throughout the entire climb. While the peak of Aconcagua was covered in snow, the base of the mountain was enjoying an Argentinian summer.
“It was a big change within two days, you didn't know what you were going to be wearing from one minute to the next,” Hughes said. “We started out in shorts and short-sleeved shirts ... and by the time we got to the high mountain we were wearing big thick down coats.”
All told, the hike took eight days from base to summit and two days to descend. The ascent is more difficult because of the obvious incline, but also because the acclimatization the climbers must make to the altitude. To ease their bodies into the altitude, they used a “leapfrog” method of climbing up with gear to a base camp, unloading, and descending a bit before setting up camp for the night.
Climbing too quickly can cause altitude sickness, which includes nausea, headaches and more seriously, pulmonary or cerebral edemas.
None of the climbers experienced any serious symptoms, but the altitude produced other curious effects beyond the morning headaches.
“We had crazy, crazy dreams. High altitude plays a crazy effect when you relax, they were vivid, there's just no way to explain them,” Hughes said.
Gaskins was the only one of the three who was unable to reach the summit. At 20,900 feet, his toes and feet went “completely numb” and did not respond to nearly an hour of efforts to warm them up, a problem he said was due to the wrong equipment.
Although physically the climb was “truthfully kind of miserable,” the achievement was well worth the effort, Gaskins said, and he's now set his sights on Mt. McKinley in Alaska, which rises to 20,320 feet.
“These individual endeavors are in some way a test to see how far you can push yourself,” he said.