5/30/02 (Day 1) - Jason, Josh, and I flew from Seattle, WA to Anchorage, AK arriving at about 1AM with about 140 pounds of gear each. "Wild Bill", who you will hear more about later, picked us up at the airport and drove us to the fun little town of Talkeetna, AK. On the way we stopped by a 24hr grocery store at about 2 in the morning to buy 10 pounds of butter and 15 pounds of cheese. The cashier did not think this was strange at all. We spent the night in the Talkeetna Air Taxi (TAT)'s bunkhouse.

Jason and Josh organizing gear at the Talkeetna Air Taxi bunkhouse.

5/31/02 (Day 2) - This day was spent organizing gear and waiting for a break in the clouds around the mountain so that our plane could land on the Kahiltna glacier at 7200ft on the south side of Denali. The weather had been pretty bad for the last few days, so there were a lot of people in line ahead of us, but we eventually were able to fly in the evening. The views from the plane were incredible and intimidating. There was more dramatically jagged rock and broken ice tossed together than I have ever seen before. We flew by the Ruth Gorge - the deepest gorge in the world, though it is filled with 4000 to 5000 feet of ice. Mt. Dickey's 70-80 degree rock walls tower 3500ft above the ice, making the total height of the gorge in the neighborhood of 8000 feet. The landing on the glacier was bumpy, but not as bad as I had imagined. After landing, Josh and Jason drew my attention to the remnants of a crashed Cessna at the end of the runway. Apparently, one of TAT's planes had done a summersault while trying to takeoff. One of the passengers was the TAT secretary who later told us, "I survived an airplane crash! How many people can say that?". After landing on the Kahiltna glacier, we found Lisa, the "air-traffic-control-officer" for the glacial airstrip, and gave her a bag of fresh fruit. We hoped this gesture would help us in getting an early flight off the glacier upon our return, but I don't know that our gift stacked up well against the competition. After digging a big hole and depositing our "cache" (supplies for our return trip which included a bottle of Jim Beam) Josh, or "Cookie" as we would later call him, made a promising-sounding meal called "Asian Noodles". Based on the bland and slightly sour taste of those noodles, I felt he was off to a bad start as our chef. Unfortunately, we had three more meals of Asian noodles to look forward to!

Looking up the Kahiltna glacier from near the landing strip towards Denali. The West Buttress route roughly follows the long ridge descending from the summit to the left edge of the photo.

6/1/02 (Day 3) - The air taxi services provide plastic sleds which climbers tie to their backpacks or harnesses and drag behind them. This allows the climber to carry an extra 40-50 pounds of gear than would otherwise be possible. In this way, the air taxi services act as facilitators for climber's masochism. I have never been so burdened down with food, ice axes, snow pickets, jackets, extra gloves, sleeping bags, ropes, ice screws, repair kits, ski poles, sunscreen, goggles, facemasks, and other various shit as when leaving the Kahiltna airstrip bound for the summit with that ~130 pounds of gear. Despite the heavy burden, we made it the 5.5 miles to the 7800ft camp without too much cursing and no threats of mutiny. This relatively flat section of the glacier is heavily crevassed, though the crevasses were well covered by snow bridges. The views here were amazing and very intimidating. Denali and the West Buttress loomed over us and I was a bit nervous. Josh redeemed himself from the previous night's culinary failure by whipping up a filling and tasty, and soon to be famous, "pasta with tons of cheese and butter".

The steep rock wall of the West Buttress Direct route looming over the snowy 11K foot camp.

6/2/02 (Day 4) - This day we carried some of our gear up to 10,000 ft, and buried it in the snow marking it with personally inscribed wands so that we could find it again. This is called making a "cache" and allows a climber to break up his load into manageable chunks. It would have been very difficult to carry all 130 pounds of our gear up to 10,000 all at once, because the terrain was more steep than it was between the 7200 and 7800 ft camps. That night we returned to 7800ft to sleep.

6/3/02 (Day 5) - This day we left the 7800ft camp, climbed to 11,000 ft and dug ourselves a new home. This was a pretty tough day; we were all dragging when we finally pulled into the 11,000ft camp. A few hundred feet below the camp, I spotted something dark in the trail ahead of me. After what seemed like hours hiking towards it, I discovered that it was the lid to someone's backpack. I picked the lid up and carried it the rest of the way to camp slung over one arm. As we neared the first available campsite, a guy ran up and said, "Hey! Thanks for carrying that up for me!". Being pretty tired and irritable at this time, I was a bit annoyed with this guy, so I threw his pack down in the snow toward him and said, "You owe me something!". He promised to come give me some kind of reward later; a prize I would soon regret. When this thankful gentleman, Craig, came over and handed me a candy bar and some dried fruit as my hard-earned pay, he didn't leave until he had talked to me so long I thought I was going to get heat stroke standing around in the sun listening to him blab. Craig would similarly torment us again at 14,000ft camp, and then again, just for good measure, at the 17,000ft camp.

Jason cooking in the vestibule of the tent.

6/4/02 (Day 6) - We did a bit of back tracking on this day and headed back down to the 10,000-foot level where we dug up our cache and hauled it back up to the 11,000ft camp. This was a fairly easy day and we spent a good deal of time enjoying the scenery and worrying about what was ahead of us.

6/5/02 (Day 7) - This day we carried about 20 pounds of gear/food/fuel each over "Motorcycle Hill" (a 800ft tall steep snowy slope), around "Windy Corner" (famous for high winds and the scene of several deaths and frostbite cases) to the 14,200ft camp which was bustling with about 150 to 200 occupants. Along the way, we passed the some of the largest crevasses I have ever seen. A couple of them were a hundred feet across and many hundreds of feet deep. Obviously we didn't cross them, but just skirted along their edges. The 14,200ft camp boasts several amenities including two very nice toilets (boards with round holes cut in them), a National Park Service Ranger camp, and an emergency medical tent staffed by a rotating volunteer physician. The physician when we arrived was Chad, a friendly young guy from Colorado. Upon reaching the camp, we dug a pit, buried our cache, and then returned to 11,000ft for a good night's sleep; the last good night of sleep for Josh and Jason for many days.

6/6/02 (Day 8) - On this day we took down our tent at 11,000ft, packed up all of our gear and committed ourselves to the upper part of the mountain by moving up to 14,000 ft. Josh started feeling a bit of acute mountain sickness (AMS) shortly after we arrived at camp, but was able to help level our tent platform, set up the tent, cook, and it didn't seem to slow him down too much.

Lenticular clouds to the south of Denali foretelling a brewing storm at the 14K foot camp.

6/7/02 (Day 9) - Rest Day. We spent this day reading, eating, drinking, and walking around the camp talking with the other climbers. I met a young physician named Eric who was finishing up his residency at Yale Medical School with a research project on vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) levels as a predisposing factor for acute mountain sickness (AMS). He was collecting blood from AMS-affected and healthy people and comparing them. Josh, Jason, and I donated 2.5cc to the project. The day ended with some beautiful and ominous lenticular clouds forming over Foraker, Hunter, and Denali.

The storm hits. High winds scoured all of the snow off of the Denali Headwall leaving it as a shiny wall of pale blue ice.

6/8/02 (Day 10) - Storm Day. This day we awoke to high winds (40-50mph) and blowing snow, so we spent yet another day cooped up in the tent reading and sleeping. Josh was feeling a little sick with AMS on this day and the next.

6/9/02 (Day 11) - Carried to 16,200 ft. This day the weather was good and Josh felt strong enough to do some climbing, so we packed up about 4 days worth of food and fuel and carried it up the fixed lines on the Denali headwall and cached it at 16,200ft. The night before, the wind had blown most of the snow off the headwall, so there was a lot of bare blue ice under the fixed lines. This made the climbing a bit more difficult than it had been for the people ahead of us, but all in all, it wasn't as challenging as I had expected. I think I was motivated by the thought that with each step I took above the 14,000ft camp, I was setting a new personal altitude record. We returned to 14,200ft that evening.

The toilet facilities at the 17K foot camp. That snow wall doesn't offer much protection or privacy.

6/10/02 (Day 12) - Rest day. We spent this day resting because Josh was very sick with AMS. He was nauseous, weak, and spent all day sleeping and not talking. Jason and I started making alternative plans considering that it didn't seem as though Josh was going to be able to climb anymore. Should we dig a snow cave for him and leave him at 14,200? Should we all descend to 11,000ft camp and wait until he felt better? Should we all turn around and call off the trip? In the evening, Josh paid a visit to the medical tent and got some advice. He took a 500mg time-release Diamox that we had brought along and amazingly, was feeling better within a couple of hours. This dramatic change gave us hope.

6/11/02 (Day 13) - Josh woke up feeling much better, so we decided to test him and moved camp to 17,200 picking up our cache along the way. After picking up our cache, our packs were very heavy (mine was probably about 70 pounds) and negotiating the steep 0.75mile-long rocky ridge between 16,000 and 17,200 feet was difficult. This turned out to be the most difficult day for me. I was absolutely exhausted by the time we reached our new home at 17,200ft. I remember staggering past the short fixed line below Washburn's Thumb and thinking that I should take out my camera, but I was just too tired to stop and dig through my pack. I just wanted to get to camp. We finally did reach camp, but I nearly passed out a couple of times while trying to flatten out our tent platform and build a snow wall. Every shovelful of snow took tremendous effort to move and every time I would stand up after bending over I would get tunnel vision and dizziness. It was quite a relief to finally crawl into the tent and collapse. That night it reached about -15 degrees with high winds. The minimum temp with wind-chill was around -60 degrees making this the coldest night we would spend on the mountain and the only night that I zipped my -20-degree Marmot Col sleeping bag all the way up.

Josh sitting on some of the beautiful red granite rocks near the 17K foot camp.

6/12/02 (Day 14) - Rest Day. This day was cold (-15 low/-5 high), but with moderate winds at 17,000ft camp. We spent the morning fortifying our snow wall around our tent and getting ready to sit out the 2-3 days of stormy weather with 40-60 mph winds that the forecast predicted. Josh and Jason spent the afternoon playing cribbage and reading, while I met my friend Eric the Yale medical school resident that had hiked up from the 14,000ft camp and together we hiked up to the top of Denali Pass (18,500ft). We were hoping the weather would be clearer around the pass and we could go for the summit, but when we reached the pass, it was a whiteout with ~40-50 mph winds and my hands were very cold. We decided to turn around and Eric descended all the way back the 14,000ft camp. The weather had been like this for more than a week, so only about 4 people had summited in that time. I was doubtful about our chances for success on the (2.5 mile, 3100 vertical feet) trip to the summit in such weather.

Looking down from the 17K foot camp towards the 14K camp, large crevasses, and the ever-beautiful Mt. Foraker.

6/13/02 (Day 15) - Summit Day! Josh woke up very early to answer the call of his bladder (I guess he had filled his pee bottle already) and noticed that the sky was completely clear and there was no wind. We tried to get ready as quickly as possible, but it takes a while for three guys to get dressed one-at-a-time in a small tent, make breakfast (stoves don't work well at altitude), and gear up for the day. We hit the trail by 5:30AM and started climbing up to Denali Pass. Based on my previous day's reconnaissance, I had convinced Jason and Josh that ropes and protection were unnecessary and would only slow us down. I also convinced them that we should not take any "bivy" gear such as sleeping bags, bivy sacks, shovels, etc with us. I felt that leaving this stuff behind would allow us to reach the summit and back without becoming exhausted, but if we did become exhausted or injured without this gear, we would probably be in trouble. Since we were unroped, we didn't travel together and I quickly left Josh and Jason behind.

Self-portrait at about 18,700ft. Frozen snot, yum!

They seemed to be going very slowly and though I waited for them at the top of Denali Pass for about 20 minutes and again at about 19,000ft, they didn't catch up. Josh finally caught up with me at about 19,300 ft and informed me that Jason was having severe AMS and possibly food poisoning, and wasn't sure if he could continue. His vision had been blacking out and he felt nauseous. Josh had given him a Diamox and said he would wait for him a bit up the trail. Jason eventually caught up with us claiming that he felt much better and wanted to keep going. When we reached the "football field" a 0.25-mile plateau before the summit headwall, I could see the summit and knew we would make it. However, climbing the summit headwall and negotiating the 0.25-mile long summit ridge took much more time and energy than I expected. I was fairly exhausted by the time I rounded the last little bump on the ridge and realized we were on the top at almost exactly noon. There were two other people on the summit that had climbed the "West Rib" route, so we were the first people of the day to reach the summit by the West Buttress route. The weather on the summit was incredible; warm (-5 or 0 degrees) with no wind! We spent about half an hour on the summit taking photos, and relaxing. I took a ragged prayer flag from the summit as a gift for my sweetie (don't tell the mountain gods about that please). The trip back to 17,200ft camp was uneventful, though we passed about 50 people headed for the summit.

On Denali's famous knife-edge summit ridge. The exposure here was tremendous, but the kicked in steps were very secure and, for the most part, were not right on the edge of the ridge.

Jason, Pax, and Josh on the summit of Denali June 13th, 2002.

6/14/02 (Day 16) - This day we descended the fixed line down the "rescue gully" to the 14,200ft camp. Dug up our cache and gave away about 20 pounds of food and fuel. Then we descended to the 11,000 ft camp, dug up our cache, gave away about 15 more pounds of food. After a bit of rest at 11,000ft, we descended the rest of the way to the airstrip at 7200ft making this a very big day indeed (10,000 vertical feet over 14 miles in about 13 hours). This was one of the most surreal and visually stunning parts of the trip because we saw so much of the mountain in such a (relatively) short period of time. As the sun went behind the mountains and we cruised down the lower glacier, the pink and orange alpenglow on Denali, Foraker, and Hunter was stunning.

With rock walls rising thousands of feet on each side of us, we were in a land of giants. On the lower Kahiltna glacier, Jason and Josh informed me that they were having visual and aural hallucinations (seeing flashes of light come from the rope, hearing "laugh tracks" when they told jokes to themselves). This was a bit unnerving for me, but since I was leading and I was feeling fairly lucid and knew we weren't far from the airstrip, we kept going arriving at the airstrip (7200ft) at about 2:30AM. We dug up our cache, had a quick dinner, drank some wonderful Jim Beam, and looked forward to flying out the next day.

The Moonlight Buttress of Mt. Hunter, shrouded in fog/blowing snow from the Kahiltna airstrip.

Early morning light on Mt. Foraker from the Kahiltna airstrip.

 
6/15/02 (Day 17) - Josh and Jason woke up at 8am and got our names first on the list to fly out. Around 9AM the first plane landed and since it was a larger plane (a DeHaviland Beaver) we were told that the group of 4 on the list after us would get this plane and we would get the next one. Unfortunately, the pilot reported that the glacier was very firm and bumpy, so he recommended that the other pilots wait a few hours until the snow softened up. So, a few hours later, our plane arrived (the same DeHaviland Beaver that had left us behind earlier) and we flew back to Talkeetna. The flight out was just as amazing as the flight in, and we had some great views of Denali, Foraker, and Hunter. Getting off the plane in Talkeetna was a sensual overload. We hadn't smelled flowers, trees, grass, dirt, etc for two weeks and it smelled wonderful. The dense air with plentiful oxygen, felt thick and wet. We spent the afternoon lazing beside the Talkeetna River and staring at Denali now 60 miles away, but standing huge and white against the clear blue sky.

Our chariot to civilization, showers, real food, and loved ones; a DeHaviland Beaver piloted by Paul Roderick, owner of Talkeetna Air Taxi.

Summit of Denali over the tail of the Beaver.

 
That night a band was playing at the Fairview Inn and the whole town was in attendance including "Wild Bill", our shuttle driver. Wild Bill looked as though he hadn't showered in several weeks and hadn't passed up a beer in several years. I guess there isn't much to do in Talkeetna, Alaska for most of the year, so the residents do a lot of quiet, peaceful drinking. They make up for this in the brief summer months by doing a lot of noisy, boisterous drinking. The band played until sometime after 4AM with all kinds of bizarre things happening. Someone paid the $5 cover charge with a ziplock baggie full of salmon fillets, which the bouncer threw on our table for some reason. At some point during the night, the bartendress got a call that "a grizzly was headed toward Sally's house and she better be careful on her way home". The Fairview is not a big place and couldn't quite contain all this activity, so the party spilled out onto the street with people dancing in the deserted main thoroughfare.

Coming in for a landing at "Talkeetna International Airport".

What can I say. It was HOT! (80 degrees) and we were pumped!

6/16/02 (Day 18) - Battling raging headaches, we managed to pack up all of our gear, get picked up by our shuttle driver and make it back to Anchorage, AK in time for our flight back to Seattle. Our girlfriend/fiancée/wife met us at the airport and we were all smiles. Throughout the whole trip I didn't crave any particular food or amenity as I had anticipated, but I missed Kim and my friends more than I expected. It will be a while before I do any more long trips. I'm thankful for the newfound sense of appreciation I have for things like running water, heat, space, and easy access to food, but most of all I'm happy to be back with my best friends and Kim and I'm not going anywhere for a while.

Mt. Foraker, Mt. Hunter, and Denali across the Talkeetna River. Oh, what a view!

Parting shot of Denali from somewhere on the Kahiltna glacier around 7500 ft I think.