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!