I've Had Big Dreams Come True...

6/7/08 - Saturday - We made it to the summit. I was the second person on our four-man rope team, and we were the first team to the summit that day. While our guide, Todd, was coiling the rope; I had the summit to myself for about 90 seconds. 90 seconds alone on top of North America - it was amazing. It was quiet and peaceful and honestly, it seemed like a dream. I could see for it seemed like a thousand miles in every direction. The cloud ceiling (floor) was about a thousand feet below where I was sitting. I just sat there breathing hard and looking around. The pictures from the summit don't show what it was really like. Actually, none of the pictures come close to showing what it really looked like. But more than what you could see was what it felt like. It was a long, hard struggle - the culmination of 2 years of planning and training, the achievement of a big goal, but more than that - it was the trip of a lifetime. The summit was just a bonus.

Timeline. This is my second experience with mountaineering outfitter Alpine Ascents International. I left Baltimore on Saturday, May 24. I arrived in Anchorage around midnight (US Airways delays). Arrived in Talkeetna on the morning shuttle on Sunday, May 25. We flew onto the mountain on Monday, May 26th, day 1. We summited on Day 13, which was 7Jun08.

We climbed the West Buttress Route from base camp at 7,200 ft to summit at 20,320 ft. Our team was called Local Cooling 62. Local Cooling - as in the opposite of Global Warming - and 62 is the latitude of the mountain. I'm expecting my teammates to send me copies of the pictures they took since my Canon Powershot SX100 didn't work past 14,000 ft, but my tent mate, Ron, sent me some of his pictures, I've posted them here. I hope to post more once I get more pictures from other teammates.

Since I've been back, I've gotten a lot of common questions.

Was it cold?

Comparative to east-coast mid-Atlantic summers, yes, it was cold. Temperatures summertime on the Alaskan range vary with altitude, but the sun shines almost constantly. In the sun, the temperatures are mostly bearable. On the lower glacier, daytime temps are like the beach on snow - well, not humid sea level beach, but a dry air, around 60 degrees. Slushy, wet snow. At high camp, in the sun, during the day, the temperatures are around +5 F. If there is no wind. At night at high camp, it can be minus 30 or colder, even without wind. We were lucky the entire trip and didn't get any significant wind or stormy weather. It was cloudy some days. By 'cloudy' I mean we were climbing IN clouds, which makes the air damp and cool, blocks out the warming rays of the sun, but lets through the sunburning rays. We wore sunscreen constantly. Everything freezes - sunscreen, water bottles, toothpaste (which is actually kind of refreshing, to brush with toothpaste with ice crystals in it).

Was it hard?

Yes. Very, very hard. Physically, mentally, psychologically. Some of it is the steepest terrain you can hike before technical climbing (ice axes and front pointing), you move slowly for many hours each day, for days on end. You climb twice between all of the camps - so psychologically, you're climbing the mountain twice. I felt sick almost constantly - coughing because pressure changes affect the capillaries in my lungs, sore throat because of the cold, dry air, and headache from the altitude. Because of the altitude, I lost my appetite and had to force food down the whole way. When you're climbing, half of the people passing you going back down didn't make it to the summit. Some of them are injured, frostbitten, sun-burned, wind-burned, limping. Sick with altitiude, sick with cold. That's hard emotionally and mentally - seeing so many strong people fail.

Did anyone die?

Not while I was up there, as far as I know. The weeks before we flew onto the glacier, a pair of Japanese climbers went missing and they still weren't found by the time we flew out. They're presumed dead. They weren't climbing our route, they were doing a more difficult alternate route elsewhere on the mountain. They were very experienced and had been up the mountain several times the weeks before they went missing. Another climber had to be rescued by the park service when we were there. He fell 800 ft into a bergschrund below the ridge at the top of the fixed lines. He was lucky to have his satellite phone in his parka and was able to call for help. No one had seen him fall, he was climbing solo and unroped. He was very, very lucky. About a month after we summited, two men died in the same week on Denali.

"A climber collapsed and died on the summit of Mt. McKinley on the evening of July 4, 2008. James Nasti, age 51, of Naperville, Illinois was a client on an Alpine Ascents International expedition that began their climb on June 20. According to the two expedition guides, Nasti exhibited no signs of distress or illness throughout the trip, and was climbing strongly immediately prior to the collapse. The guides administered cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) for up to 45 minutes, but Nasti did not regain a pulse." Source

"For the second time in one week, a mountaineer collapsed and died while climbing Mt. McKinley in Denali National Park and Preserve. Pungkas Tri Baruno, age 20, of Jakarta, Indonesia was descending the West Buttress route the night of July 7, 2008 when he collapsed approximately one quarter-mile from the 17,200-foot high camp. Baruno’s guides initiated cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) and immediately called for assistance from another guided team at high camp via family band (FRS) radio. CPR was performed for over one hour, but they were unable to revive the patient." Source

Interesting article about the deceased climbers.

Was it fun?

Well, it was rewarding. It was fun sometimes. A trip like this isn't really an amusement park trip. I expected it to be a lot of work, and it was. It's a constant, relentless task to keep yourself dry and warm and hydrated and refueled. There were patterns we fell into - tedious, everyday patterns of changing clothes, drying clothes, keeping water melted, reapplying sunscreen, foot care. Gathering snow for cooking, digging camps, building wind walls out of snow blocks. It was fun to be away from my regular job, but I wouldn't call it fun like a day at the spa with a tropical drink.


I've been having a hard time trying to decide what to write about the trip on the blog, and there are a lot of stories that I'd rather not post on the internet - so if you want more details about the trip, you can buy me a beer and I'll tell you. Thanks for all the support and all the well-wishing emails. I thought about my friends and family a lot while I was up there, especially when things were tough. And they were tough a lot.

There was a 59% summit success rate on Denali this climbing season with 1,272 climbs completed and 755 summiters. The average summit success is 52% over the period of the 105 years they've been keeping track.
Annual summary of Denali climbs

Well, til next time.....