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.