Denali-Day 12

From: Scott Steffens
To: team-mango.org
Subject: big dogs
Date: Wed, 28 May 2003 10:45:16 -0700 (PDT)

I believe this is the second day for a possible summit attempt for Jeremy & Co., which happens to be the 50th anniversary of Norgay & Edmund's climb of Everest. btw, forecast for 17000' on Denali is a high of 5 degrees today.

and my response later once down, alive and well:

For this day we actually had a horrific forecast. It was supposed to be -20 to -40 F (at 14,000'!) with 60-100 mph winds and much precip to follow. We had got to the 14 camp on the 25th and needed to acclimate anyway. While lying in the tent, not even considering going higher due to forecast and not really being packed for it, I stayed up late reading. As of 1 a.m. there wasn't even a puff of wind. Odd, I thought. I woke up at 5 a.m., same thing. Huh, this seems odd, I bet it's absolutely perfect out. I set a record and was out of the tent before 6 a.m. that day and it was drop dead gorgeous (and cold). That was the first night I slept in my 'Action Suit' so getting ready didn't take too long (everything takes a long time up there).

My partners were groggy and thought me crazy. Off I went and soloed up to the fixed lines and that was a snafu in itself. Topped out 16,200 with the masses (there were a few other early birds who jumped on the good weather, too) but everyone was caching. Since this possible storm still might come, I carried on solo up the most impressive part of the West Buttress, the long airy ridge leading to the 17,200 camp. The snow and ice conditions sucked and there were some extremely exposed places. The guide services had preplaced pickets in the snow to safeguard rope teams. But they don't do a soloist much good. On the otherhand there were a few fixed lines in places. One of them was only 15 feet long, and by the time you reached it, you had already traversed an icy slope that was 40 degrees and a boy are you fucked runout that dropped 6,000' down to the Peters glacier. The snow/ice conditions were far from ideal. On this day I shattered my previous altitude record of 14,495' (Mt. Whitney) and reached the impressive yet too scary to boulder up Washburn's Thumb at 16,800'. I felt good and the views were marvelous.

Naturally, I considered going all the way. If I'd had a stove, I would have considered it. I shot lots of pics up there on that day, since with Alaska you never know. We could have been spanked the rest of the trip so I shot a whole roll. On the descent of the fixed lines I caught Glenn. He and Geoff had finally got out of the tent and moving by noon. We used Tiblocs on the fixed lines instead of heavy/bulky Jumars/Petzl Ascenders. They worked great going up and mine was so-so on the descent. The last chunk of rope on the down line was damn fat and the teeth wouldnt' let up. After that I never used the Tibloc for descending again, just clipped in a biner and walked down the 40-45 degree ice slope...

Just another day on the mountain, and I think we made Geoff do stove duty that night and naturally went to bed after 1. It's hard to go to sleep with it so light out...

jr

btw, the forecasts up there (for us via the cb radios/airstrip manager) were so inaccurate the first 2 1/2 weeks it was ridiculous.

How a Super Human climbs Denali via Cassin Ridge

This is from Joe Puryear, a great guy I used to work with at REI many years back. Joe is a monster and has been climbing all over the world the last decade. He and his partner Mark Westman put up a new variation on Denali when they were 20 years old, and they haven't stopped kicking butt since. He had climbed the Cassin Ridge a few years earlier, and was a tremendous source of beta for us. btw, his equipment list is sick. He only used the Feathered Friends Helios jacket for a parka (that keeps me warm in Seattle, and is borderline in Chicago!)

Little Joe...

"We did the route in 4 days round trip from the airstrip with no caches on the mountain. We had acclimatized by climbing Foraker and spent about a week at 14,000 on Denali earlier. We approached via the N.E. Fork, which is certainly dangerous but the risks are managable. I'd say descending the West Rib has its own set of dangers and problems as well. Basically your options are: if you just want to plod on up a glacier and be scared by hanging glaciers, do the NE Fork; if you would rather descend snow and ice for 5,000 ft. and worry about falling and getting down in one piece, descend the Rib.

Basically our schedule looked like this:

We left the airstrip in the evening and hiked all night up the NE Fork and reached the base of the Jap couloir in the mid morning. Being pretty tired we relaxed for several hours here (great bivi spot) and then climbed the couloir that afternoon. We reached Cassin Ledge and slept there. Our Bibler tent fit fine and I think you could probably fit another, but it may be a bit tight. We slept for about 12 hours then headed up and made it to the top of the 1st rock band that night for a small bivi (passing a beutiful bivi spot at the end of the knife-edge ridge). Left about noon the next day and climbed to about 17,800 ft, excellent spot. Then summited the following day and descended all the way to the airstrip and arrived that evening (about 10 hours from summit to airstrip).

We had pretty good conditions on the route up until about 16,000 ft. From there to the summit was shitty and variable post-holing which sucked ass. We were completely alone on the route and it was several weeks since the last party had been on it, so it was breaking trail the entire route. Oh, and we did it in late June."

When Glenn, Geoff and I were planning on doing the route, we expected anywhere from 2-5 days on the route, hoping for enough fuel to last another 2-3 days if we got stuck...these guys are bad asses! Congrats Joe and Mark!