Hello there, MountainZone cybernauts, this is Vern Tejas on the flanks of Mount Vinson with team. We woke up this morning to the dull roar of wind rushing overhead. Are we glad we used our discretion yesterday and trusted our intuition and stayed in bed. Indeed, sometimes gut feeling is all that you have to go on. We thought it out rationally and we decided we would have gone, but we didn't feel very good about it, hearing that wind yesterday morning and sure enough it turned into a full-blown storm. We're guesstimating speeds of 60-80 kilometers out there.

Fortunately, where we are it's pretty calm. We can see the main glacier about a half a kilometer ahead of us, and it's got little white tornadoes spinning down its flanks. And we're very happy to be right where we are, sort of out of the main bulk of the wind and just kind of snuggled down. We worked on our walls early this morning and they're coming in handy today. This afternoon we've been hit by several violent gusts that shook the tent, and we're thankful that we have thick blocks of snow surrounding the walls and keeping us...

(transmission breaks up as Vern is moving around, approximately 22 seconds)

...2840 meters above sea level, the pressure is 688 millibars. We had negative 15 degrees centigrade today, so as you can tell the temperature has risen by about 15 degrees. We think that's all caused by the nice warm front that's blowing overhead right now. We have some huge, beautiful lenticular clouds up over Everly and Mt. Shinn. Just kind of a little warning: "don't get too excited about leaving any time soon."

I just recently clocked the winds here at 30-40 clicks here at the tent. We've got about 7/8 of the sky covered with clouds. And other than that it's just windy and wonderful. For anybody that's interested the wind chill is about 41 below. So that's all for now so stay tuned, and keep your fingers crossed that we don't get blown off this hill. Ciao.

— Vern Tejas, expedition leader and MountainZone.com correspondent