where the david was

The David is back home again!  He’s a little tuckered out after the 8 hour bus ride to Santiago, the red eye into Miami, the 6 hour flight to San Francisco and the 5 hour time difference.  Not to mention the billion days of hiking and camping.

Acancagua is the highest mountain outside of Asia.  The climb is not technical (so no belaying and climbing up cliff faces with ropes and harnesses and stuff), but is still highly challenging and not for everyone.  The altitude definitely contributes to the difficulty; they had to get prescription meds to combat altitude sickness.
On this trip, they went up about half way up, but had to come back down to camp at the base of the mountain for a few days due to high wind storms.  One day was spent entirely sitting inside tents.  The David described this as “not so fun.”  In fact, he dubbed the whole thing as “Type 2 Fun,” which means it was only fun in retrospect.
After waiting it out for 4 days, the winds abated and they did make the trek up to the top of the mountain, but had to extend the trip by an extra day to do so.

But home he is, and all is right in the world again.

26 days without him, most of them without any sort of contact at all, was far too many.  During all of the pathetically sad missing, I was having some very stern “Never again!” sort of thoughts.  But he’s just so pleased with having done it, the accomplishment of reaching the top of this 22,829 foot mountain, that I’m not sure I could really say no.

Now that it’s all over, I’m actually quite proud of him for doing it.  He really is pretty awesome.

On the way up.
Little orange tent and lots of mountain.
Tent near the top.
David at the top.  He got a little teary up here, a bit overwhelmed with having made it.
Back down again at the end of the trip, looking at back at Mount Acancagua.