The High One

... is a translation of one native name, Denali. Lhawang and I spent the last couple of days packing food and sorting gear for our trip, and are ready to fly on tomorrow with our crew, weather cooperating. The internet at the guide house is down at the moment, so no pictures, but here's the cybercast link, at least. We're Team 2, now only with 5 climbers, one having canceled at the last moment. http://www.alpineascents.com/denali-cybercast.asp

It's raining at the moment, so we'll see if we actually get out tomorrow, or if we spend some time enjoying beautiful downtown Talkeetna. Here goes...

Go Team 1!

Nice to be able to give Alpine Ascents a summit for their first team on Denali for the year! And nice to finally be able to stand on top and take some pictures. Team 1 was little, just me and three climbers, but we worked hard, got along well, took care of ourselves, and made it up and down safely.

Our fly-on day was delayed by weather, so we ate, drank, sat around, ate some more, waited, and did actually get to fly on the next afternoon, through some clouds that were borderline acceptable to fly in. (I sharpened my crampons while we were waiting at the airstrip.) On our first few days working up the mountain, we encountered lots of teams coming down who hadn't been able to get a day of good summit weather, and had to come down. Only two teams in our first few days had been successful, the first summits of the season.

The weather for our overall trip worked out perfectly. We had some pretty nasty days in the middle, between 11,000' and 14,000' camps, but the team dealt with the strong winds and snow quite well, staying warm and functional as we carried gear and moved camp. It prepared us for summit conditions, which were less windy than those we encountered down low!

Once we reached 14,000' camp, things cleared up a bit, and we were able to actually see some of the amazing scenery around us. We moved to high camp at 17,000', took our rest day, and were duly rewarded with a seemingly suitable summit day. The winds died down to almost pleasant for the second half of our day (OK, it was still cold enough to wear my down pants, balaclava, and goggles) and we were able to stand on top at about 8:30pm. Go Team 1!

Fortunately, it doesn't ever get really dark there this time of year, so we got down around 1am and cooked some dinner before going to bed. Two days later, we arrived back at base camp, drank the beers we had stashed there for our return (only good ones - Alaska Amber and Moose Drool), and got right on a 4-seater

plane back to Talkeetna. Sweet!

Third time's a charm. It was nice to finally be able to stand on top and take some pictures. A big thanks to my team for persevering and making it up there. Nice job, crew! And huge thanks to everyone back home for your thoughts and prayers - we aren't out there all alone...

Those last 15 feet...

It's funny - I put in my last cybercast from Nepal about two weeks ago, and just finished typing up the first one for Denali. For being somewhere else all the time, I sure feel like I'm always letting people know where I am!

Island Peak stands at 20,305 feet above sea level. We were joking while we were there that we should just bring a really tall ladder to make it to the same elevation as the summit of Denali, which is at 20,320', and how different the two climbs were. Island: a different language, rocky trails, animals to carry your gear, people to cook your food and carry the kitchen, a day from base camp to the summit. Denali: US land, entirely ice from the moment you start, 120 lbs of gear that you are responsible for moving up the mountain, a shovel for making your own sleeping place level (and protected from wind and snow), and 15+ days of walking slowly uphill carrying lots of weight, hoping the weather will give you a break so you can go back down. It would be difficult for them to be more different, but it's all the mountains, and it's all good.

So we're off, weather permitting, tomorrow afternoon. We'll spend the next full day at base camp, by the snow runway, going over crevasse rescue and building a strong camp and all the other stuff we need to be ready for the mountain. It will be a few days until we have phone reception and can call in again, but posts, as always, will be at www.alpineascents.com/denali-cybercast.asp See you soon!

Konichiwa ... Sayonara

Wow - that was an interesting trip.  Three weeks on the glaciers, two different languages, one very frustrating trip, and no summit.  Actually, the weather was not too bad (one 5-day storm at high camp, but not crazy) and everyone seemed to leave OK with how things went, but we had the perfect summit day and weren't able to capitalize on it.

The problem: an older group with inaccurate expectations combined with a trip leader/translator who wasn't willing or able to guide effectively.

Denali is perhaps the hardest of the well-known mountains to climb.  Everest is higher, harder to make it to the top, but Sherpas carry all your gear - you don't have to haul heavy loads, just stay healthy.  Denali is two weeks of carrying 60+ pound packs, often coupled with 40-pound sleds - not an easy thing even if you've trained for it.

Instead, several of our climbers kept asking for lighter loads and slower travel speeds.  But you can't leave your food behind (and I'm not paid enough to carry a 120-pound pack), and we were already the slowest group on the mountain.  There are some things you can't change if you want to make it.  35-pound packs were referred to as "heavy" and our already conservative pace was too fast.  Not a good sign.

We lost one climber on a carry to 16,200' to chest pain - not good in an older smoker!  His teammate went down the next day when he couldn't make it to the first break without sitting down in a heap in the middle of the trail.  The rest of us made it to high camp (17,200') just in time to wait out the storm, but in all honesty it wasn't brutal, just long.  Our fearless interpreter nearly lost heart, but our last possible summit day dawned clear and calm.  Sweet!

Unfortunately, one of our climbers pooped out after half an hour, and park regulations require that clients be accompanied by a guide even in camp.  I turned around with him and another we didn't think would make it and warned repeatedly: If anyone else has to turn around, we're out of guides and the summit bid is over.   If you don't think you will make it the whole way, spin now or risk the group's success.  Sure enough, two hours later another climber was done and the only person who actually should have been on the mountain (the guy with the vodka below) had to come down without the summit.

What to take from this?  Robert and I are both pretty culturally sensitive, have travelled extensively, and want to get people to the top if it can be done safely.  But we couldn't communicate directly with the climbers, and the translator often wouldn't manage the group as we knew needed to be done to have a successful climb.  He hadn't been on the mountain before and didn't like to be the bearer of bad news - a bad combination for a place as demanding and potentially dangerous as Denali.

But I met a bunch of other guides and rangers I'd seen in passing before, built some relationships with them and got more comfortable on the mountain.  Robert was great to work with, and everyone came back with all their fingers and toes (how do you ask if someone can feel their fingers if you don't know their language?).  My nose didn't fall off this year, and we flew off the mountain just in time.  So we'll send some extensive notes to the office, hope there are more realistic expectations next year, and avoid the Japanese trip if not!

It's beautiful in Seattle and I'm back, and life is good.

Off to Denali, round 2

I had gotten time off this past weekend to go do a triathlon with Mary, but this spring's injury meant I couldn't train.  So Mary, after an epic time getting a functional bike at the race location, rocked the house without me.  (Nice work!!)  Instead, I did a reprise of last year's glacier skills weekend with some friends I'll be climbing Rainier with after Denali.  More beautiful weather in the mountains!

This stretch of sun is more than a little unusual for Seattle, and everyone is a little loopy with it.  The highs in town were up into the 80s, and the day I flew to Alaska the forecast was 90 degrees!  Heat advisories were being issued, skirts and shorts and bikinis were being wantonly flaunted, and I finally wore the pink dress that I bought in India last fall.  Yes, pink!  Especially crazy is that 90 F (32 C) is relatively balmy in most of India, but in Seattle, a heat advisory is actually probably a good idea.  Ha!

A few days here in Talkeetna, packing food and getting ready for our expedition, however, has made us ready to fly into the land of glaciers just to escape the mosquitos.  Mosquitos!  So many of them it's hard to sleep; I'm looking forward to being in a tent just so I'm not woken up by their signature whine and inopportune landings.  The lack of night in town means eyeshades are a necessity; on the mountain it means we don't have to bring headlamps.  Ever.  It's so light at 2am you could read a book outside!  Wierd.

Track us at http://www.alpineascents.com/denali-cybercast.asp  We're Team IX, Rob and Suzanne with the all-Japanese team.  Yep - should be interesting.  See you on the flipside!

Denali

Whew! That is a big hill, and a lot of time to spend in the snow and ice. For a first trip, it was almost too nice as far as conditions are concerned - we didn't have any major storms, no weather delays, and the lower glacier was still very closed up, unusually so for this late in the season. A late trip often trades warmer temperatures for worse weather and open crevasses, but this year seems to have provided the best of both worlds for our team; a couple of earlier trips ran out of time waiting for the weather.

I'd been to Alaska seven years ago, so knew what to expect generally, but hadn't gotten into the mountains, just looked at them. The Alaska Range is amazing. What struck me most was not its size, in area or height, but it's steepness. I'm used to smaller mountains here in the Cascades, and the sheerness of the rock and ice that surround the glaciers you stand on is intense. Not only is the place huge, but even once you understand that things are on a whole different scale, everything still towers over you, making you wonder if you would ever get used to it. For one thing, you don't have to fly onto many other glaciers - the flight gives you just a taste of how big it is going to be...

A three-week expedition requires enough food and gear that you can't carry it all at once, so sleds are used to get everything where it is going. Sounds fun, but is really a pain to deal with! Contrary to what one of our climbers (who left on the third day) thought, 50 pounds in your sled does not feel like 15 - it feels like 60. It still takes two trips most of the time, so except for summit day, you're really climbing the mountain twice!

We flew in on summer solstice, the longest day of the northern year, so the darkest it got was kind of a dusk, between about 1am and 3am. On the lower mountain, we moved during this time so the snow wouldn't be too soft to walk on.

Working our way steadily up the mountain, we moved first to 7800', then to 11,200' where we could get back on a day schedule, being high and cold enough for the snow to be good throughout the day. A rest day or two, then up to 14,200' camp, where the park service has a medical tent and rangers, and where most teams rest and wait for good weather for going up high.

From here, the terrain gets quite a bit steeper - a section with ropes pinned to the snow to use as a hand line and backup, and a beautiful ridge up to 17,200' camp.

High camp is cold and windy, and really just a staging ground for going up to the summit. We carried loads up, went back down, moved our camp up, and took a day to rest in the half-pressure oxygen of the high atmosphere, acclimatizing and gaining strength for our summit bid.

Winds were blowing a bit too hard when we first got up on summit day, but after an hour lessened enough for us to go for it. Not too cold, about 10 degrees, and we and another team left camp about 11am. We moved steadily up to Denali Pass, up to the long ridge, and eventually to the broad field below the summit ridge. A little slower, we climbed to the ridge crest and along it to the summit, stopped a few feet short, literally, by the tragedy described below. Not too many pictures that day...

We made it safely back down to 17,200', spent a might recovering physically and mentally, and made a long push down the rest of the mountain. Guide friends of Mike's made us water and dinner at 14,200' and we kept going to 11,200' for a couple hours of sleep before taking advantage of the colder nighttime hours to keep the lower glacier firm. We got back to the base camp airstrip 24 hours from when we left high camp - 2 vertical miles in that time. Wow.

Our climbers were amazing, staying strong and pushing all the way back down to beat a weather system we knew was coming that could keep us from flying off the mountain for several days. At base camp, we packed up all of our things and waited for the small plane to return for us.

Because it's not over 'til it's over, however, one of the gauges forced our pilot to make an emergency landing on the glacier below camp just after takeoff, and we piled everything out, prepared to camp where we were or climb back up to base camp. He did a test flight and decided the gauge was faulty, and after a second takeoff we made it back to Talkeetna. That's a lonely place to be standing on a glacier all by yourselves.

Many personal thanks to my lead guide, Mike, and everyone else I had the opportunity to work with, both on and off the mountain. Many, many thanks, as well, to everyone who believes and understands that this is what I do, what I love and, hopefully, am good at.

Summit note

One tragedy marred an otherwise great expedition: on summit day, at the top of the highest mountain in North America, Jim, one of our climbers, suddenly and simply collapsed. We gave CPR for over 35 minutes in an effort to revive him, but he never regained a pulse. Due to the steepness of the terrain, our quickly-chilling group did not have the resources to conduct a complicated recovery to bring him down; we simply had to say our goodbyes and bury him as best we could at the request of the Park Service. Two other Alpine Ascents teams summited a few days later, and were able to rebury his body in a more secluded spot, where it will likely remain.

Here's the Park Service's press release: http://www.climbing.com/news/hotflashes/fatality_on_mt_mckinley_july_4_2008/

As much as accidents and deaths in the mountains are often subject to endless debate and scrutiny, this is a rare case when there's really not much to rehash, fortunately for those of us involved. We may never know what caused his collapse, particularly if he remains buried on the mountain; he was climbing as strongly as anyone else, and had shown no previous signs of anything out of the ordinary, no trouble with altitude. He was climbing with a friend who was also on our trip, and as traumatic as it must be for him, hopefully some small measure of closure and comfort can come to his family through this friend's presence at his death.

We were able to get the rest of our team safely off the mountain with the generous help of many other guides and people both on and off the hill. Everyone we worked with has been incredibly helpful and supportive, particularly the NPS staff. They have to deal with this sort of thing regularly on a professional basis, but manage to do so while being incredibly human and caring on a personal level as well. Huge thanks for everyone's help, and many condolences to those who will feel Jim's loss.

Off to the (other) big hill

Spring has been cold and wet and long in the Cascades this year, which has been great for the glacier snowpack but not great for my soggy boots! Courses led for Alpine Ascents went well, managed to tag the summit of Rainier a couple times, and now have left the northwest, just as summer is setting in, for Denali.

Writing from Talkeetna, I'm excited to get up on a new mountain. I've spent the last few days checking out the tiny town (a tiny little cemetary with figures from Denali history), watching the group before us get ready and take off, and getting everything packed up for our expedition at the little Alpine Ascents compound about 10 miles outside of town. We meet our climbers tonight, one of whom was on my trip this winter on Aconcagua, and hopefully fly on to the glacier tomorrow. Weather controls the flying here, so let's hope it holds.


We will have a cybercast going again, posted with several other Denali expeditions on the Alpine Ascents website: http://www.alpineascents.com/denali-cybercast.asp We are Team XI (eleven), and I may be calling most of the posts in, so look for me or the lead guide Mike online.


We fly the day before summer solstice, so enjoy the summer! I'll be trying to sleep in 24 hours of daylight...