The major­ity of our team gathered last Fri­day at Zwickauer Straße to pre­pare to upcom­ing exped­i­tion and to dis­cuss the list of equip­ment. Some ques­tions about the energy– and tech­nical concept have been almost a too hard nut to crack. Should we choose rechargeable or nor­mal bat­ter­ies? Will the power, provided by the solar pan­els be suf­fi­cient even when it rains for a whole week? Is the trans­fer rate of the satel­lite phone good enough to send even pic­tures from Tierra del Fuego to Ger­many, or not? All ques­tions we do not have to ask our­self in the highly con­nec­ted envir­on­ment we are nor­maly liv­ing in. At the other end of the world though these ques­tions are essen­tial, because it is no fun when you can’t use the satel­lite phone in a case of emer­gency because the bat­tery is broken. Espe­cially if you think about the fact that we will be sep­ar­ated from the rest of the world for almost four weeks. But of course the remote­ness has its own charms — we have chosen our goal for a reason!

Food was also a highly debated topic and a prob­lem not easy to over­come. Nobody wants to carry food for four weeks in a back­pack with him, but com­ing back star­vied out like a stray dog is also not what we have in mind.

Often the ques­tion was raised how much energy we will need to cope with the patago­nian weather while moun­tain­eer­ing and for how many days of good weather we should count. Many books call a num­ber of 3.000 — 5.000 kcal per day as nor­mal energy con­sump­tion while trekking. To cover this every day we would prob­ably have to carry a small corner shop with us. ;-) Cur­rently we plan to have full board at least in the base camp , while we will have dry rations with us on the moun­tain. Just at the right time the door bell rang and the pizza boy delivered five pizza: fam­ily size!!!

After this short break we tackled the lay­out of the post­card. It fellt as I spend 1.000 hours lay­out­ing the post­card, but of course we want to send a remark­able post­card from the other end of the world to you! The plan­ning of the trip took the rest of the even­ing. We com­pared the maps and pic­tures with the new­est satel­lite imagery avail­able. Each Pic­ture or piece of map will allow us to com­plete our men­tal map more and more and cre­ate a vage scen­ario for the ascent.

At the end of the even­ing we still had some time to sit together with a glas of wine in a cosy atmosphere.