Message from Joe

Joe called in the following message from 11,200 foot camp last night at about 5:30 Alaska time. It sounds like the team is doing very well and had a really nice day yesterday as they carried food and supplies up above camp to the 13,500' elevation.

To give you all a bit more of an idea of what Joe describes, they loaded up their packs with roughly half their food and fuel and any additional clothing items that they won't need until they get to the next camp and carried them up a moderately steep snow slope called Motorcycle Hill. They are wearing crampons now, as the conditions on and above Motorcycle Hill generally warrant the extra traction of steel spikes.

It takes a bit under an hour to top out above Motorcycle Hill and they would have taken a break somewhere with views of the immense Washburn Wall and the Father and Sons Wall, both of which rise for thousands of feet out of the Peters Glacier which flows just to the north of the team's route of ascent. After their break, they climbed up a series of rises, that get a bit steep at times, and are often firm neve or wind scoured ice. They weaved amongst some rocks, and it's at a bout this point where climbers get the sense that the "approach" of the Kahiltna is over and by Golly, they are climbing!

Topping out the rises known as Squirrel Hill, they begin a long gradual ascent that skirts the broad snowy (yet crevasse strewn) plain called the Polo Fields. They follow a path that keeps them off to the left of the crevasses, yet right of the avalanche runoffs from gullies that pour down from the granite crags of the West Buttress proper, which rises thousands of feet just to the left of the ascending climbers. It is pretty straight forward route finding and Dave Staeheli has seen 30 years of slide activity, so he knows where to take the team.

After the Polo fields there is another fairly steep climb up to the wind swept and often challenging Windy Corner. This steep ridge line comes down off the West Buttress and forms the western most border of the immense South Face of Denali, one of the biggest faces on one of the biggest mountains on the planet, so, as you might expect, it can be a magnet for incredibly harsh winds. Yesterday, Joe described it as "a lamb," meaning they were probably trying to hide from the sun under their sun hats, bandannas or light scarves.

As they turned Windy Corner, they needed to negotiate some persistent crevasses, which have given more than one climber a hearty surprise. There is some rockfall hazard for a few hundred meters and then they would have rolled into a safer zone where they dug a deep hole in the snow and buried their supplies.

After a rest at their cache spot, they would have boogied back down to camp, which takes a bit over an hour. This is an exciting day during the course of an expedition, and it is a real transition, as I mentioned, from the approach of hiking the Kahiltna to actually climbing!

OK- enough prattling on. Here's Joe: