WANDERING NATIVES
The dead of night is a long drawn dusk. The light is dull and the streets are nearly deserted. I half expect to see throngs of the undead emerge from behind the buildings of downtown Talkeetna like some sort of Alaskan zombie movie. Even with this stillness there is an air of excitement as we walk down the street toward the West Rib Pub & Grill. As we step inside the energy hits us. Mountaineers are raising their glasses in celebration of tough expeditions or like us are fattening themselves up in preparation for one. In less than 48 hours we are scheduled to fly onto the Kahiltna Glacier of North America’s highest peak 20320-foot Denali.
I am especially excited. This is my first expedition on Denali and as one of the assistant guides on the team I have a lot to learn. Fellow Rainier Mountaineering Inc. guides include Dave Hahn Geoff Schellens and Lindsay Mann. They are among the strongest hardest working and experienced guides I know. This is Dave’s 28th Denali expedition and I intend to absorb every bit of his knowledge that I can. Studying books and maps have built my expectations but living and climbing the mountain for the next three weeks is going to be nothing like them. I am here to discover what this mountain is all about.
The four of us are guiding a group of eight. The next morning we pile a mass of climbing gear tents cooking equipment and food into the K2 Aviation hangar before flying onto the mountain. We divide meals up by day and weight. Everyone digs through their gear one last time. The goal is to whittle gear and food choices down to around 100 pounds per person. This means making smart decisions about what to bring. I’ve heard horror stories from past trips of clients dragging 25 McDonald’s hamburgers or three Clif Bars a day for lunch. They soon find how hard it can be to trade food when you’re offering week-old frozen burgers or tasteless energy bars.
But we don’t have these problems. We have the right gear and the right food. Now we just need a weather window to fly. Breakfast is interrupted with a call from K2: ‘Visibility is good to go on the glacier. Get to the hangar.’ We wolf our final bites and rush to the airport. The gear is divided and crammed into two twin Otter planes. We abandon the carefree summer vibe of Talkeetna to embrace the glaciated world of the Alaska Range.
The little red bush plane feels rickety compared to commercial aircraft but I hardly notice. My eyes are wide and glued to the window as we bob through the rugged mountains leading to the Southeast Fork of the Kahiltna Glacier. I snap pictures realizing that even a professional photographer couldn’t do justice here. These are cartoon mountains like some insane climber artist dreamt them up smattering glaciers excessively over jagged granite ridges. The 36-mile-long Kahiltna comes into view winding miles and miles toward base camp.
Our ski plane skims to a stop on the glacier. Hundreds of pounds of gear and provisions are unloaded the bush plane’s engines whir and within minutes the tiny red dot of the plane is swallowed up by the massive peaks surrounding us. It’s just us and a couple National Park Service staff on the Kahiltna.
The brutal cold of this mountain is no secret but it’s a different story now — it’s July and we’re only at 7600 feet. The heat of the sun is sweltering and when clouds come in they only trap the heat. The lower glacier is soft making the snow bridges covering the gaping crevasses too dangerous to cross. We wait agonizing consuming our rations baking in the sun ticking off days not moving up. The pace of expedition climbing is something that takes getting used to and this adjustment is hard.
Ideal conditions or not we need to move. Joined by another large team we wait for the cold of night to freeze the miles of soggy glacier that lie between us and our next camp. On the fourth day we are stalled again by storms after reaching Camp 2. The pace is excruciatingly slow but we can’t justify moving up during a storm. Even a small storm where we are could be a full blizzard at the 9500-foot Camp 3. The massive snows in this zone the birthplace of the Kahiltna are unrivaled on the mountain.
On day eight we’ve made it to 11000 feet where we cache food fuel and gear that we’ll need for our descent. We’re moving faster now and two days later we are at 14000-foot Genet Basin. This place is amazing. The West Buttress Messner Couloir and Orient Express stretch 5000 feet above the tent city which is built annually on this flat plate of ice. To the south is the Edge of the World where the land drops 7000 feet straight back down to the Kahiltna. It’s impossible to fathom this scale. When a climber on the rim of the basin is pointed out they appear no bigger than a period on this page.
After a rest day we slog up the fixed lines to cache food for our move to the highest camp at 17000 feet and our summit push. Unfortunately our luck takes a turn for the worse and it begins to snow. The 17000-foot camp isn’t the place to be in a storm. Even if your body tolerates the altitude retreat might be cut off by avalanche conditions on the fixed lines. Once you move up it’s summit or bust.
It is day 17 and we are all anxious to move but we’re in a holding pattern while we wait for the weather to clear. Food is running low we’re one of the last groups on the mountain and the route across the lower Kahiltna is melting out. I unzip the tent door — Mt. Hunter and Mt. Foraker jump out of the landscape against a deep-blue sky. We might just pull this off! Spirits are high at breakfast but we still have 7000 feet of climbing left to reach the top.
We get the NPS weather forecast and confirm it via satellite phone — it’s the kiss of death for our summit push. Thirty inches of snow is due to fall in the next 36 hours. We have enough food to wait out the storm but there is no guarantee that conditions will improve afterward. Our resources are getting smaller and the unknowns are getting bigger.
It is a tough call to make. We’ve poured everything we had into the climb for two and a half weeks and now we are going to descend the mountain tails between our legs on a beautiful bluebird day. It feels wrong and it’s crushing on a day like this. But this is the smart call and it is as I’ve come to learn what Denali has to teach you. It is the mountain that calls the shots and she doesn’t always obey your desires.
Are you a wandering native with a great travel tale? Send your story idea to mountainlife@moonshineink.com. Comment on this column below.
