Carlos Soria on Aconcagua

The Spanish eight-thousander arrived a few hours ago in Plaza de Mulas, with the intention of climbing Aconcagua and fine-tuning his preparation to tackle Manaslu in spring

The legendary Spanish climber, Carlos Soria, is in Argentina. He arrived a few days ago with a very clear objective: his preparation to face a new challenge in the Himalayas, this time, on Manaslu, in order to commemorate the first Spanish expedition to an eight-thousander, which is fifty years old.

Carlos, together with Luis Soriano, arrived in Mendoza a few days ago, and last Saturday, they arrived at the Plaza de Mulas base camp, to face the Colossus of America through their normal route. This is what Carlos said yesterday, through his social networks: «Yesterday we walked the last stage of the approach to our base camp, known as Plaza de Mulas (4,300m). The environment that surrounds us is of singular beauty. Mountains and steep, arid ravines form a unique landscape, stark and barren, but full of nuances of multiple colors. Today we walked around the base camp, at the foot of Aconcagua. Tomorrow we will climb up to Camp I and go down to base camp the same day, to improve our acclimatization. The weather seems stable and we are feeling very well. We will keep you posted!»

The objective, as we said, is to climb the mountain to «test» himself and see what his condition is for a much more challenging objective, within a couple of months. Also, logically, as a previous step to contribute to acclimatization. We know that Aconcagua is a very precious objective for those climbers who intend to undertake some project on eight thousanders at the beginning of April. A practice that has been carried out for several years now.

Regarding his Manaslu project, we can say that Carlos reached the summit of Manaslu in 2010, at 71 years old. Currently, he has crowned 12 of the 14 eight thousanders, still leaving Dhaulagiri and Shisha Pangma. In 2005 Carlos climbed the central summit of Shisha Pangma.

However, this summit is not usually taken into account in his history of eight-thousanders because its altitude is lower than the main summit of the mountain, as there are discrepancies regarding the true altitude of this central summit.

We will follow in Soria’s footsteps on Aconcagua, during the next few days.

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