Hello cybernauts, this is Vern Tejas, down here on the continent of Antarctica, reporting in from Patriot Hills transfer camp. This belongs to ANI, which stands for Adventure Networks International, and today I got to go around and actually have some interviews with some of the different staff members here.

Chris Jacobs, the Chief Mechanic for Adventure Networks, was able to walk me through some of the waste removal techniques that they go through, at least from the mechanical end, and told me that they recycle any of the waste oil from the machines here. They've got snow machines, a snow blower, and also a tucker?, all for maintaining the runway here. All that waste oil is recycled through the washer melters, so that rather than flying it out, or burning it with no purpose, they actually get real purpose out of it, and melt the water that we actually drink later on.

At the end of the season, he informed me that the shop oil drippings are dug up by hand, and put in bags and flown on the Alleutian aircraft all the way back to Punta Arenas, Chile. So there's no oil left on the continent after a season of work down here with different machines.

I also interviewed Fran Orio, who is the client relations person for Adventure Networks, and asked her about the environmental impact that their operation has down here. She says that they've actually been inspected by a third party scientific analysis company that has come down here and actually rated their operation to a higher standard than most governmental organizations that are down here.

One of the things that we do down here, according to her, is to put down a "still" mat, made out of a silicon cloth, underneath the different vehicles, the airplanes, the snow machines, the snow blowers and things as they fuel them, so that no fuel is spilled on the snow. Those mats, then, are bagged and marked appropriately and shipped back to South America as well.

Human waste, which includes leftover food matter, urine and feces, is all bagged up and put into large drums and again is evacuated back to Chile, so that at the end of the season there should be no signs of man's impact here at the Base Camp on Patriot Hills.

This is good news to us climbers who have a wonderful desire to live in a pristine environment. We go, all the way around the world sometimes, to get these beautiful places, and to see obvious signs of misuse and abuse by other humans is a very sad, sad thing to experience. So I personally, and also looking at this from the point of view of Omega, which strives to lessen man's impact to pristine environments...I'm very happy to report that, so far, I've seen a lot of care being taken to lessen the impact.

Recently, I also took a tour of the radio room and the weather station, and I'm happy to report that those are, for the most part, dependent only on solar energy coming in to run those facilities. They do have fuel generators as backup, but they rarely need to use them here at Patriot Hills. So I'm happy to report that it's a wonderful situation here.

The weather is clearing, and soon we hope to be going off to Vinson Base Camp. There are several groups here that I'll be reporting on, and one of the more interesting developments is I've run into my good old friend Conrad Anker, and we've had many good times, playing the mandolin and guitars, and sharing stories about our past. Also, Skip Horner's down here with his team. Skip and I actually summitted Mount Everest together back in '92, my first time.

And so it's a good gang down here, and we will be reporting about them and what their challenges are on the mountain, and what we're doing to protect the environment as well. So stay tuned and join us again. Ciao for now from Patriot Hills, Antarctica. Vern Tejas, saying good-bye.

— Vern Tejas, expedition leader and MountainZone.com correspondent