Day 5: Cache at 10,300ft

Resting on our way up Ski Hill.

Today was the first day that we actually used our “cache-move” expedition style itinerary. This means that, unlike the move to Camp I, which we did in one single push, from now on we would carry up half of our gear and leave it a cache close to the next camp and then move up the following day. In addition to reducing the weight we are carrying each day, this also helps with acclimatization.

So we woke up early again—2am this time—and packed up half our gear (our summit stuff, most of our snack food, our crampons, et al.) and carried up to 10,300ft. The route begins with an ascent of Ski Hill, which rises right out of camp. (This hill gets its name due to its popularity with the skiers on the mountain. A lot of climbers bring their skis to climb up and ski down Denali.) The route then ascends over several other smaller hills before making a sharp right at Kahiltna Pass. We dug a big pit in the ice there and left all of gear in it. We then returned to Camp I, which took significantly less time but was pretty tough on the legs.

The rest of the day was unscheduled. I decided to take a snow bath because a) I was starting to get and feel dirty, b) I had sweated a lot on the way down from the cache and c) it was a freakin’ hot day. I stripped into my skivvies and scrubbed my skin with ice. It was cold…but the ice had a scratchy quality before it melted that made it almost feel like I was exfoliating. Imagine that…exfoliating on Denali!

My Denali snow bath!

Each day is difficult for a different reason. The first day (Base Camp to Camp I) isn’t especially steep, but you’ve got so much weight on your back and in your sled that it’s still very hard. In contrast to that, this cache day was much lighter weight-wise, but much, much steeper. Ski Hill was our first taste of the steepness that will only continue to increase as we progress up the mountain. Bring it on! The weather looks great still, but we’ve had some ominous forecasts so we’re very keen to move up to Camp II tomorrow. 

Day 4: Move to Camp I (7,800ft)

What a day, or should I say, night. Only a couple hours after I last checked in, we woke up and packed up our entire camp—tents, kitchen supplies, food, personal gear, etc…—and loaded onto our backs and sleds. Apparently the weight per person is approximately 120-150lbs. It definitely felt like a lot… We left camp around 3am and began the journey to Camp I. Though only an altitude increase of 600ft, it is a long, rolling, 6-mile journey that often has to weave around massive crevasses.

But it’s also incredibly beautiful. The lower Kahiltna glacier is massive and stunning. It’s a frozen sea of ice that stretches as far as one can see, up to the mountains that rise up on either side and down South towards the greenery we had left behind.

Night travel on the glacier carrying 120lbs+ of gear!

The peaks of the Alaska Range are beautiful in their own right. Mt. Foraker towers to the South, often with massive lenticular clouds crowning its summit. (6 people attempted Foraker this season. None summited.) Mt. Hunter rises right at base camp and is constantly aweing with its huge avalanche slides and the tempting but dangerous Moonflower Buttress—one of the world’s most famous and epic climbs, and het mountaineering equivalent of a Siren.

Mt. Francis shows the path to Camp I, and it seems to never end as you walk North next to it. Francis, because it is not as high as Denali, Foraker, or Hunter, is often overlooked. This is unfortunate, because I hear it is a beautiful peak and fun climb.

We arrived at Camp I at around 7am, just as the sun began to start peeking over the mountains and the temperature began to rise. We’re going to relax for the rest of the day and then put a cache in at 10,300ft tomorrow early morning. 

Day 3: Skills training at Base Camp

Today was a second skills day, this time with the rest of my team participating as well. For most (if not all) of us, it was merely a refresher course, but it’s still good to be 100% confident with your skills before progressing up the mountain. We got to know each other better too. A couple interesting facts about our team: We have a 48-year age difference between the oldest and youngest members of the team, and none of the clients drink coffee. (Though all of the guides do.) We also have a diverse team: Shlomo, the oldest of the climbers at 67, is originally from Israel and now resides in California. He climbed Denali two years before but got stuck at High Camp due to weather and was unable to summit. Arkhom, Shlomo’s tentmate, is from Thailand and is a doctor (always good to have on an expedition!). He successfully summited Everest last year. Greg, my tentmate, is Canadian and has three boys, the oldest of whom is around my age. He is a very successful lawyer, and you can tell why; he is very, very smart and well-spoken. We’ve already had some great conversations and discovered we’re both into sci-fi and fantasy literature. Silvia is originally Peruvian and now lives with her wife in California. She and I discovered that we are both climbing Everest next spring for charity! She is raising money to support women in the Congo. She might also be the first lesbian to climb the Seven Summits if she continues to climb them the next couple years. Her tentmate is Nancy, from outside Boston, who is an excellent photographer and brought a massive camera onto the mountain. I had tried looking her up before the trip and found a woman with her name who had competed on a game show but, alas, it was not the same Nancy. Bummer. Anyway, we have a fantastic group and I’m very excited to be spending the next two to three weeks with these guys and gals. 

Day 2: Skills training at Base Camp

So after waking up to a delicious breakfast that I’ve already mentioned (the frosted cinnamon French toast…mmmm), Ted, Yoshi, and I roped up and snowshoed out to a small peak on the edge of Base Camp called “The Control Tower” due to its shape and proximity to the runway. We walked up the hill (carefully choosing our path to avoid the seracs and other potentially dangerous features), and carved out a rest spot to do our skills training. First on the agenda today would be self-arrest. Though I’ve learned the technique of self-arrest before, I had never actually practiced it in person. I felt that this was a must-have skill for Denali, as you never know when you might fall…or when someone might pull you down. Unlike Aconcagua, where we were never roped up, you are always roped up on Denali except when at camp. This means that you not only have to watch your own steps, but also pay attention to the other people on your rope. It means keeping good rope tension—usually not too difficult—but also being prepared to arrest yourself when someone else falls. Suffice it to say that self-arrest is very important to know for mountaineering. It can literally mean the difference between a close call and an emergency, between life and death.

When in the field, self-arrest is essentially taught by doing. Which is how I found myself face down, sliding at high speed down an icy slope with my ice axe clutched in my hands. I thrust the pick of my axe into the ice and gripped the shaft tightly with my other hand. As my axe lodge deeply in the ice, my lower body swung around and I stopped suddenly. It was exhilarating! I walked back up to my starting point and did it several more times so that the movements were all second nature to me.

We then returned and talked about knots, ropes, and avalanches. I peppered my guides with questions ranging from “Is there any legitimate way to prepare oneself for surviving an avalanche?” to “Uhhh…how do you use this CMC again?”. The CMC (an abbreviation for “Clean Mountain Can”) is where all human excrement goes. Yup that’s right, we were shitting in a can. A CMC is a green, cylindrical container measuring roughly a foot and a half high and a foot-long diameter. It has a screw on lid (thank goodness) and it never smells good, even when it’s empty. Anyway, I learned how to use it pretty quickly and, thankfully, without any issues.

I will say though that going to the bathroom on Denali is not the most private of experiences. Each campsite has a bathroom, with a spot for the CMC and a pee hole (pretty self-explanatory…). But the walls surrounding these bathrooms are not very high and, in the case of ours, can be mere feet from tents and/or your kitchen area.

Anyway, I learned a lot from my excellent guides and was very excited to greet the rest of my team who arrived in the early evening. We all helped each other set up their tents and then went to bed after a delicious Mexican-inspired dinner.

Day 1: Flying onto the Glacier

After our NPS briefing, we ate a delicious lunch at The Roadhouse, the famous Talkeetna eatery, and I stuffed my face since it was my last meal before flying onto the mountain. Luckily, the clouds stayed away and so Yoshiko, Ted, and I were able to fly the hour to base camp in a single-engine Cessna. We landed on a glacier runway—a first for me. The scenery was dramatically different at Base Camp compared to the vibrant greenery of Talkeetna. Forests were replaced by rock, snow, and ice. Lots of ice. The plane had massive skis attached to its landing gear so that it wouldn’t punch through the glacier.

Yoshiko, Ted, and I offloaded all of our gear and bid our plane and pilot farewell. We dragged it on sleds (our first of several experiences with them…) to the main base camp area and selected a campsite. Because we were starting in late June, past the peak season of May-early June, many of the good campsites were empty. We snagged a great location with a well-developed kitchen area and solid, flat tent platforms. Despite the fact that our location was already in good shape, we still spent three hours polishing it off and building more tent platforms. Since Denali is entirely surrounded and covered by glaciers, this was a good learning experience.  I was most impressed by the difficulty of building a good kitchen tent. You actually dig deep into the snow and ice to carve out your kitchen, including a stove area, seats, cubbyholes, and a water hole. This takes more than just brute strength; this takes preparation and a good mind for design. Our kitchen even had a table in the center! In other words, it was basically a hollowed out donut. Usually we cover this with a “mid”—a teepee-like tent, but we chose to forgo this at Base Camp since the weather was looking very good and even at worst the weather isn’t too dramatic there.

Following this, we retired to our tents to unpack and prepare for the following day’s skills session. Before I went to sleep I was treated to my first taste of the Mountain Trip culinary experience. I was shocked. It was so delicious! I knew from that moment that I would be in for a couple weeks of pigging out. (How can someone expect me to not pig out when we’re served frosted cinnamon French toast…that’s better food than I eat at home…!)

It was also my first time sleeping in 24 hours of daylight. Though it took a couple minutes of adjustment, I fell asleep very quickly. I didn’t even wear my eye mask! If this first day is any indication of how the trip will go in its entirety, then I am very excited because I couldn’t have asked for a better day!

A quick Denali update (more coming soon!)

Just wanted to post a quick blog entry summarizing my Denali expedition. All of my Denali blog entries were accidentally deleted and so I have to rewrite all 30 of them from scratch...not a very appealing prospect.

Anyway, as you know if you've been following my Twitter, I did not summit Denali this July. I was on a Mountain Trip expedition and we spent five days at High Camp waiting for the weather to get better so that we could summit. All we needed was 15 hours. We didn't get it. (The biggest issues were wind and snow.) Then we went down to 14k camp (the second highest camp) and I joined another Mountain Trip team that still had 10 days on the mountain. We managed to put in a high cache at 16,200ft in a white out storm that ended up dumping over a meter of new snow on the Headwall (a very steep, 2000ft ascent between the 14k and 17k camps) but then waited another six days for the avalanche risk on that wall to decrease. It never did.

Me at 14k camp after over three weeks on the mountain, with Mt. Hunter behind.

Part of mountain climbing is dealing with weather and the effects it can have on your itinerary and on your entire expedition. Denali was definitely a learning experience in this respect. All things considered, though, I am actually incredibly excited by the prospect of returning to this great mountain next June and July. I had a fantastic experience this past month that I spent on the mountain, and I would strongly recommend Mountain Trip to anyone who is interested in climbing Denali or any other North American peak.

Up next is Kosciosko--the hill in Australia that some people consider to be one of the Seven Summits--and Carstensz Pyramid, in the remote and exotic jungles of  Iryan Jaya--the other mountain that people consider to be Oceania's Seventh Summit. I start this journey on August 1st. Until then, you can look forward to reading a more detailed account of my Denali journey and checking out more beautiful pictures from the mountain. 

Flying onto Denali...!

And I'm off! I'm about to fly onto the glaciers of Denali on a 1:30pm Talkeetna Air Taxi flight. I arrived in Anchorage yesterday and did my gear check with my six expedition guides: Joe Butler, Yoshiko, Ted, Ian, Sam, and Travis--my Aconcagua guide. We went out to lunch at a fantastic restaurant called the Bear Tooth Grill. Yum! I went to see Snow White and the Huntsman with Greg Harris, an expedition teammate who arrived early. I'm actually heading onto the glacier a day earlier than everyone else so that I can do a skills course with Yoshiko and Ted. We are going to focus on crevasses and avalanches. On that note, I wanted to extend my condolences to the families of the four Japanese climbers killed in the Avalanche on Denali two days ago. Mountain climbing is a dangerous sport and at moments like this we must pause to reflect on our choices and make sure we have said all that we would like to say to the people we love. It is very sad that the climbers died, and very amazing that one climber was able to survive. I hope he is able to recover from his injuries and grief. We will go on the same route as these climbers did, and I am praying that we and all the other climbers on the mountain have a safe and successful trip. On a happier note, I am very excited to be heading onto such a beautiful mountain. I never expected it to be this beautiful. Soon the lush green forests of lower Alaska will be replaced by snow and rock. Before we fly, we ate at the historic Roadhouse Cafe. The portions were huge! I had the lasagne. It was delicious. Ok well this will probably be the last blog post for a while. In the meantime, you can stay updated on our expedition progress through my Spot tracker, on the RS Facebook page (Facebook.com/rainbowsummits), or on the Mountain Trip website under Trip Dispatches. See you on the other side!