Bonus: The Denali Episodes - Part 2

Part 2 of 2: The Denali Episodes

We've arrived back in civilization and are excited to recap the expedition on Denali. 

We spent 20 days climbing the tallest peak in North America through the worst weather season in years. 

Listen in to hear about all of the wild details of the climb, from near-death experiences to  the struggles of dragging over 100lbs up steep alpine terrain. 

Transcript

[Ben]: 0:02

This is the athlete dad podcast. I'm your host Ben Gibson and you're listening to a special bonus series. This is part two of the Denali episodes where we recap the expedition to Denali this year. Uh, this is a two part series. Part one, if you missed it was giving everything about the lead up to the climb, all the details of climbing the routes, the logistics, the preparation. So highly recommend that you go back and listen to that episode. If you missed it, if you're just interested. just interested in hearing about the climate itself, then this is a perfect episode for you, where we pick up where we left off from episode one and talk about the actual climate itself and the experience now that we are back in civilization in the land of the living and trying to figure out what the heck just happened on this climb in Alaska. So please enjoy part two of the Denali episodes. The question I most get asked after something like this is how to go, which is unfortunately the most difficult question to answer because a climb can tend and tends to, because a climb can and tends to run the full spectrum of experiences and those experiences can mean very different things. And the experience on this climb on Denali this year really ran the gamut. You know, the one experience that underlies the entire trip was that this was an absolute grind. There were no easy days on this climb. You know, just the amount of weight that you're carrying at any given time is more than you'd ever be carrying on any other climb. So it just creates a hard day out of most days. And so that was the theme that really underlaid the entire expedition was just what a grind it was. You know, there were moments of pure awe, especially when it came to the scale of the landscape and the mountain itself. You know, from one aspect, there's, you know, so much rich history of climbing on this peak. And again, you're way out there. Denali is an extremely remote peak, just over 20,000 feet tall. And so not only are you just in this incredible amphitheater of mountains that is super remote, but then you finally pull in and you see Denali and it is just striking in its size and its scale. And it's really hard to fully articulate the scale of all of the peaks that we were working with. The pictures just don't do it justice. There's this weird thing with mountains where when the scale is so big, themes, things seem much closer than they actually are. So it's like, it throws things off, it warps the perspective. And so when things are so big, you know, it's a 20,000 foot mountain surrounded by 14,000 foot mountains. You know, it's hard to really put it into words what the experience of just witnessing this place was like. And you know, when you're up high and you're looking down, at 14,000 foot peaks when you're looking across at 17,000 foot peak summits. It's pretty surreal. And there were lots of moments like this just spent in awe of even being there. And especially as you know, you'd sometimes like turn a corner, and it would unveil a whole section of the mountain that you hadn't seen. And maybe there's some like really interesting aspects of the mountain that you've been looking forward to these features that are like features of a face on the mountain. Um, and it's just indescribable, but there's not all good experiences. There's not all awe and wonder the entire time. You know, there's a lot of moments of frustration and definitely fear and doubt and anxiety, you know, all the above. And so when somebody's like, Hey, how'd it go? I don't even know where to begin sometimes because it's either a... an incomplete short answer that's just like, great. Yeah, it was pretty cool, it was amazing. Or it's gonna take something like this, like a long format deep dive to really tease out, like here's how it went. The good, the bad, the ugly. And it always takes me a while mentally to work through all the aspects and the events of a climb and to tease out that meaning and how it's impacted me. I've talked about this before, this idea of like the person that goes up the mountain is not the same person that comes down the mountain. And we were on the mountain for 20 days on the whole trip for just about a month. And so when you're that inundated with something, especially when it's a big goal that it's just been consuming your time and your energy and your resources for so long, you know, it takes a while to figure out like, who came back down the mountain? And I think I'm still figuring that out. Especially coming straight from living on the mountain for a month and then right back into civilization. I'm kind of in a funk, if I'm being honest. There's this fog that's hanging around my head as I'm trying to reintegrate back into quote unquote society. It's a bit overwhelming. You know, with just the regular day-to-day life going from living in a tent, surviving and climbing to then like just being plugged back into working on my laptop and being around a city and all that goes into that. It's really overwhelming. You know, I can only equate it to what people who must have survived being stranded in remote places must feel like when they return to society. Because life on the mountain was very simple. Survive and climb every day. Every activity was related to one of those two things, even rest days. It was all very simple and with consistent focuses. And life is much more complex back home. And it's one of the most stark contrasts that I can experience is going from big expedition peak climbing to the day-to-days of life. It's complex back home. It's louder, faster, more colorful, more complicated, more responsibilities beyond just like surviving climb. especially as a dad, you go right back into the thick of two kids, wife, all the home responsibilities back into your chores. It's hard not to feel like my head is in a fog or at least like I physically left the mountain but definitely a part of my brain is still sitting on the Cahiltna Glacier trying to navigate this experience. We're just bombarded on a daily basis with the changes of it. So it's very strange. I think part of a normal process of getting reintegrated, especially after a very meaningful experience like this. And today I wanna talk about how the full expedition unfolded, all the good, all the bad, all the ugly, all the terrifying, the drama, the excitement along the way. talk about some common themes that came up throughout the trip. I think that the thing that's clear from the moment you arrive is that you are learning and the faster that you can learn and implement some of these new learnings, the better this trip is gonna go, but also the more meaningful the trip becomes from an educational standpoint. The goal here is to become a better climber over the course of the trip. So that's one thing you know for sure is that certainly whoever came up is a better climber now that they've come down. And then we'll talk about just a lot of things that come top of mind. There's so much nuance and detail to this trip that, you know, I don't want to get bogged down too much of the weeds and that's what we'll focus on key themes and key events, but there's a lot that's just going to come that I think is really helpful in shaping and painting the story of what it was like to attempt to climb this 20,000 foot monster in remote Alaska. And one of the key themes that was evident right from the get-go was this idea that you heard often of hurry up and wait. hurry up and wait. And I think that also is really impacted by the weather. We talked about in part one that Denali is notoriously bad for its weather. That's one of the things that makes the mountain most difficult. It is such a massive peak that it creates its own weather systems. And forecasts are, in our experience on this trip, sort of relatively inaccurate. in the sense that like they could be accurate at one point, but the weather can change so quickly and so dramatically that what might be an accurate forecast at one moment is suddenly no longer relevant because the weather has shifted so drastically. It also depends on like where you are on the mountain. Weather could be forecasted for a range from 14,000 feet to 17,000 feet or 17,000 feet to the summit. But depending on where you are on the mountain in that range, things could be wildly, and I mean wildly different. But this idea of hurry up and wait hit us right from the very beginning. So really the only way to access the mountain is by plane. So they have these bush planes that regularly fly through the mountains to get to the makeshift airstrip on the glacier where they drop you off and pick you up. And Basically from the get go, we were stuck in the small town of Talkeetna just waiting for a weather window that would open up so we could get on to the mountain. And it's pretty agonizing when you have all this excitement built up to go climb. And you're just stuck waiting, watching the clock. And especially when you're working with these air taxi services, you know, the best they can do is give you like a couple hours increments of like, okay, it's 8am. It's not good now. we'll check back in at 10am or 11am. And so you're literally watching the clock with all this anticipation and all your gear packed up and ready to go waiting for good news in a couple hours. You stay busy, you go do some stuff, grab some food and come back. And it's that excitement of anticipation of we're going to get on the mountain and okay, weather's not good yet. We're going to wait, we're going to check back in two hours. And see like, okay. And so it's this roller coaster of emotions of just even trying to get onto the mountain to try to see it, to try to, you know, get started working on it. Um, and one day turned to two days, turned to three days, turned to four days waiting for good weather to clear on the mountain. And then finally at the end of the fourth day, good news came and we were able to get on a plane. to go and land on the glacier. And there's two sides of this, right? Like we were complaining about being stuck while being in the town of Talkeetna with a hotel, restaurants, you know, we want, we wander around, I think we went into every single building in the city of Talkeetna and it could have been worse because we could have been stuck on the mountain. And there were in fact teams that were stuck and some of them very high on the mountain for that four day span when weather was bad, depleting all their resources. And so we definitely had it much easier than most folks waiting, but nevertheless, four days, a long time and the anticipation of getting all our gear, getting it onto the plane and finally stepping on that plane and taking off and, and charging into the mountains. Like, you know, I'm, I was never in the military and I can't speak for that experience, but it felt very much like something military adjacent of like going to war. finally with all your gear getting on the plane and like we're marching into the chaos of the Alaska rains. We're about to land on a glacier. And when you finally get on a plane, you understand why they need good weather to land these planes because they don't fly over the mountains. They fly through the mountains. So as you're flying, it's just the most insane views outside. You're literally flying between the mountains. right next to ridge lines. And I mean, some of these pilots cut it pretty close to some of these ridges. And I don't know if they do that on purpose or it's just tight windows all around, but like it was pretty epic. Just the flight in and out was one of the most remarkable things I've ever seen, especially with how close you get to some of these ridge lines. But then you get to the airport on the Southeast Fork of the Kehiltna Glacier and you... fly over right next to Mount Hunter over this giant 10,000 foot ridge line. You pull this full loop and then swoop back down right onto the airstrip, which drops you off at base camp, landing directly on the glacier. And it's quite the experience. So we land, it's sometime maybe 8, 30, nine o'clock at night. But of course it's daylight because it's 24 hour daylight. We grab all our stuff and we immediately start setting up camp at base camp. But you're a little distracted because one, you finally are starting to climb and you're grabbing all your gear. And that's also when you're typically like the most disorganized on the trip because you have the most stuff and you kind of work out more systems as the climb progresses. But also the fact that like base camps and the airstrip is sitting on this fork of this glacier with just these amazing peaks all around. So you can see Mount Hunter right at the end of the glacier, you see Denali kind of wrapped in clouds but peeking its head out, you see Mount Foraker, and then of course the Kahiltna Glacier, like these glaciers are like a mile wide. They're these enormous weaving rivers of ice that just skirt their way through the mountains. And so it's just like constant distractions. of seeing all these incredible things around you while trying to frantically get set up with your tent and cook tent and get situated so that you can start, you know, getting settled in for the evening. But getting into base camp was sort of a surreal experience. Got set up, ate dinner, got to sleep. Um, and, uh, you know, immediately got ready for what would be the first big day on the mountain, which is the next day, getting everything from base camp on the all the way over to what's called 7800 camp or at the base of Ski Hill. And this is a hard day because one, you're traveling, kind of a long horizontal distance, but mostly it's just the amount of weight that you are carrying. And I'm gonna stress this all throughout the episode, but the amount of weight you are carrying the entire time is significant to the point where when you only have like 50 pounds on your back, you're pretty stoked. because you're like, oh, it's a light day today. I only have 45, 50 pounds. So this first day we load up the sled, you've got 40 pounds on your back, maybe 70 pounds in the sled, some sort of ratio of that. We're a little less on the pack, much more on the sled. And right away, the sleds are an ordeal. We hear a lot about the sleds. on Denali and really what it is in most instances is just almost like what you think of like a kiddie sled that has been rigged to strap down all your extra gear and a big duffel and some extra stuff strapped to it. And then you attach it to the backpack, your backpack through a little bridle system with the carabiner in between so it can slide. And you're just dragging the sled. Like there's really nothing sophisticated or fancy about it. But if the sled is not rigged the right way and the right way is totally subjective, I actually was kind of geeked out and interested on all the various ways that people would rig their sleds, especially if they were skiing on the trip and everyone has kind of their own little flavor and theory of how they can rig the sled the best. But if the sled is not rigged the right way, because there are some general principles that apply to all rigging setups, the sled can kind of do a bunch of shit that is not efficient and just really frustrating. And so one of the things that happens is that if it's not squared away behind you, the sled starts to wander a bit. And especially as you're going kind of like up and down, very terrain, the sled starts to wander to the side or it could slide into you or it's just like, it's not totally squared up. So like one side is pulling more than the other side. And like that might be okay for a little bit, but when you're carrying this weight for such a long time over such a long distance or up such high elevation, it really starts to matter right away. And right away, as soon as we start our first sled rigging out of camp, just chaos ensues, we're constantly stopping having to fix our sled and adjust the sled and adjust the ropes and things are getting tangled. The other thing that sleds can start to do sometimes is they can start to roll, which they call a death roll. And the rolling sucks because then everything gets tangled, the sled is sliding. And because it's got so much weight in it, whenever the sled makes a jerky movement, it yanks on you, right? So if you can imagine like 70 pounds randomly getting tied up and yanking on you at like weird angles and like unpredictably. One, it's, you know, it's not cool from like, you know, you know, trying to be safe standpoint, because you know, 70 pounds is yanking you all over the place, but it's also incredibly frustrating because it's incredibly inefficient. And efficiency is the name of the game on these climbs. And so the sleds, the sleds were sort of a constant burden right from the get go. I made a mental commitment that I was not going to allow the sled to get into my head. You know, as nickname in my sled, I was talking sweet to it. I was saying nice things. And generally, I didn't have any issues on the front end other than just the fact that it was like super heavy and it started to wander. But the sleds are in hindsight like kind of a kind of an ordeal. So we're navigating from base camp. We're walking across the Cahiltna Glacier, which is again like a mile wide giant white river of ice. And we're surrounded on both ends of the glacier by some of the most insanely beautiful peaks that I've ever seen. There are planes flying people in from above, which just And we take a couple of breaks along the way. It's a beautiful day. It's one of what we would learn is only a few good days on the mountain. And we finally managed to navigate our way to the bottom of Ski Hill at about 7,800 feet. And we get settled for camp for the night. And right away, this is where we start to realize that so much of what goes into this climb that makes it successful has very little to do with climbing. I was talking with Alex Panko, who's one of the guests on earlier episodes. He completed the Explorer's Grand Slam, and him and I were talking about his experience on big mountains, and he said something to the effect of, what makes it really hard is that oftentimes, you're only climbing. for like half the time, half the amount of days that you're on the mountain. And that actually turned out to be very true here. And what makes that important is that, that means that if half the time you're not climbing, that all the things that you do in that time either help you climb better or take away from your ability to climb well. And so you'll hear this idea of like self-care and efficiency. And those in a lot of ways, and especially on certain days, important than the actual climbing that we would do on the route. And so we get to 7,800 camp. First thing you have to do every time you get to a camp is you have to set up camp, which means you've got to probe for crevasses on the camp because you're on a glacier and so you don't want to be camping right on top of what might be a giant crevasse. You start digging out tent platforms. and making them as flat as possible so that you can sleep well and so that things are organized. And then of course, setting up your tent getting the cook tent situated and you know, you're we climbed with a with a guided group. And so you're trying to also kind of chip in for the team to help people get situated as quickly as possible. Because the sooner that everyone gets situated, the sooner we can start doing nothing, and just eating and relaxing. You also have to figure out like, where is our bathroom going to be? which is, man, we could do a whole podcast episode on just the nuances and logistics of going to the bathroom on the mountain. But so we get situated, we get everything going, and coming back to your self-care, like your daily routine of self-care and keeping organized goes a long way. So you get everything done, you get your platform set, your tent set up, you get all your stuff organized within the tent, which like pro tip, I would say if you're on a long expedition or even just on a climb that's multi-day, having a little stuff sack for everything. So everything has a home that's organized by kind of category goes a long way in keeping organized in a small space, especially if you're probably finding yourself sharing a tent with someone. So like all your stuff stays organized and not just like poured all over the tent. makes it easier to find things, but like the mental benefit you get from going to sleep in an organized space is huge. It makes it easier to sleep and especially if you get stuck in the tent for multiple days, waiting on a storm. It's it's a much better way to live much more organized way to live. It's also nice to be able to find things when you need to find things because oftentimes, you need a lot of little things. to get ready and sometimes you have to move pretty quickly. And so you don't have time to wonder like, where are my base gloves? And where are all the things that I need if it's all organized and stuff, Saks goes a long way. And then of course, the other thing you're trying to really get to with self-care is your feet. Because you're climbing, your feet are sort of the most important piece of your body generally speaking. And a lot of what that means is trying to keep your feet dry. When your feet are wet, they're more likely to blister. You could get, you know, itchy feet, you know, all kinds of bad stuff happens when your feet get wet. All right, so trying to keep your boots dry and your liners dry and your feet dry is one of the first things you would do to get situated in a camp. So you get to camp, you work on getting your feet dry, you get to maybe it's maybe a couple pieces of clothing that you want to swap out for others. But you're trying to get dry. And then of course, it comes down to like food and hydration. And They always say in climbing and mountaineering that lunch starts as soon as breakfast ends. And that is also very true, you know, especially as you start to get at higher altitudes, like your body will burn an insane amount of calories just existing at a place like 14,000 feet or 17,000 feet. Just the amount of work it takes for your body to like get acclimatized and to live at those altitudes burns an absurd amount of calories. So you're constantly trying to just eat. And so as soon as you get situated, you get your feet dry, you are just eating, and then getting ready for dinner. And hydration especially is, is important because the more hydrated you are, the faster you and better you acclimatize. Um, and that's where a lot of your energy initially comes from too. It was like being well hydrated. Um, so oftentimes when you feel like garbage and you feel tired, it's cause you're, you're dehydrated. So you're constantly eating and you're constantly drinking. And these things. as simple as they may sound of like the efficiencies of like getting set up with camp efficiently, getting all your self care in and being efficient and then making sure that you're constantly eating and fueling and hydrating efficiently are some of the most important things that you can do because it's easy to get away with this stuff doing a sloppily on a multi day climb on like Rainier. When you're doing this thing for a month, all this stuff compounds, especially when you factor in that the higher you go up the mountain, The less energy you have, the worse you're gonna feel and the less likely you are for your body to actually heal and rest and recover. So starting to get these things in an efficient routine from the get-go is one of the most important aspects of it. So we wake up and the next day from 78 Camp, going up Ski Hill, we are going to be setting our first cache. And what makes these climbs on these big mountains really interesting is that you effectively climb the mountain twice, if not more on different peaks. But Denali, you essentially climb the mountain twice. And the reason why is that because you have such bad weather, you're on the mountain for a long time. Because the mountain is so tall in elevation and there's so much of elevation to climb, you're on the mountain for a long time because you have to acclimatize and you have to travel a lot of. a lot of you have to cover a lot of ground, you have to go up a lot of elevation. And so all of that, because you're on the mountain for a long time, means you have all this stuff. You know, you have about 120 pounds of gear all in, and you can't just lug 120 pounds of gear up in like one push. So what you're doing is you're effectively climbing the mountain twice because you'll go and leave caches. up on the mountain in regular intervals. And the interval is pretty consistent throughout the entire climb. So from 78 camp, the next camp up is 11,000 feet. And so in an effort not to do what's called a single carry, where you carry all of your gear up to the next camp in one push, we would do double carries where we would go up and we would leave a cache just shy of the next camp. So in this case, I think we left our cache at you know, 10,200 feet buried it. And then we would go back down to 78 camp. And then the next day we would bring the rest of our stuff pack up camp and go and pick up our cash in route to the next camp at 11,000 feet. So and so there's a couple ways to do this. So whether you do it like we did, where you basically take half, go leave it in the cash, or take it all the way, you know, you're bringing half the stuff up. And then the next day, you can do what's called a drive by which is where you pick up your cash and then take everything to the next higher camp. The third option, which is less common, but sometimes happens when you're when you just had a really hard day on that second day of bringing up the rest of your stuff, the team's fried, the weather was bad, whatever. You can do what's called a back carry, where instead of picking up your cash, you just go straight to the next camp. And then the next day, you would go backwards down the mountain, pick up your cash, and then come up because it's a little easier to go back down and and grab it than it may have been just to do a full drive by to pick up all that extra gear to get to the next camp. We did a double carry with a back carry to 11 and basically the next day went back and picked up our stuff and brought it back to 11,000 feet. And 11,000 feet is beautiful. I mean it's really where I think the climbing starts because you're kind of tucked into this little gully. You're officially like worked up. onto the mountain and you start to see some of those classic Denali views of Foraker and the valleys below. But the problem being is that this is one of the first places that we got stuck. So we knew we were taking a rest day the day after we did the back carry to get all of our gear back to 11,000 feet. And then it starts to snow. And it starts to snow for one day, two days. three days. And again, you're just stuck in this small camp. And because it's snowing, and it's snowing quite a bit, your camp is just constantly getting dumped on, which means you're constantly digging out your tent, you're digging out the bathroom, you're digging out the cook tent, you're navigating through all this snow. And so it's just like this mental grind of living being stuck in this location with the anticipation of wanting to get farther up the mountain, wanting to start moving, but just like not being able to navigate outside of this camp. And so you have to find ways to kind of mentally stay occupied on those days, whether that's reading or listening to music or podcasts or watching movies or talking with the other people that are climbing or just eating and drinking all day. It consumes quite a bit of your mental capacity, just being stuck. Now I mentioned that there's 24 hours of daylight and the weather windows are so important because that's the only time that you can move on the mountain. And so in this season, which was notoriously the worst weather season in anyone's recent memory, meant that these tight weather windows were the most important times regardless of when they would happen. And the 24 hour daylight sort of helps you out with that in that like you could theoretically climb at any time, any hour of the day. Granted, it's still much colder at quote unquote, nighttime during nighttime hours, especially when the sun just goes behind the mountain or behind ridge lines, you feel it immediately. But that also means that you might end up climbing at like not ideal times. And so finally on the third day, we're stuck at 11,000 foot camp, which we had dubbed New Talkeetna. given a little nod to our initial time being stuck in Taquitna. About three o'clock in the afternoon, it looks like there might be a weather window. It might be an opportunity for us to go and leave our next cache up higher on the mountain. And so about four o'clock, after everyone is packed and ready to go, we start moving. And that's a rare thing, is starting to climb at 4 p.m. So it was kind of a... So the day after arriving at 11,000 foot camp, we got kind of a late start. It was dumping snow. It buried everything in what felt like two feet of powder in just a few hours. And we were just getting settled in. And one of the things that is interesting about this climb that I mentioned is the 24 hours of daylight. That the 24 hours of daylight means that you could theoretically be climbing in clear sun at any hour of the day, even at quote unquote night time. And granted, it's still much colder at night time, or I should say during the night time hours, because sun often goes behind the mountains or behind ridge lines. And so it's still much colder at those hours. But it means that you could theoretically be climbing pretty efficiently at any given time. And so on this day, after, you know, arriving with our full gear load at, you know, So we get settled in and the day, especially in the morning, looked like it was gonna be pretty bad. It's very windy looking up the mountain. Some people are coming down and they're just looking hammered from the weather they just walked through and they're telling us it's pretty bad. But because it's 24 hours of daylight, we're sort of on call at any time to be able to start moving, especially today to go leave our cache up at around 13.6 and then come back down to camp. So we don't have to break down camp. We just have to get stuff up and then come back down before things get too hairy. And so we kind of like hang out at camp during the day and around four o'clock, we get the word that, I think the forecast is clear enough and think it's gonna be time to go and leave for the cash. And so we grab all our stuff, pack up, 60 pounds worth of gear, load it up, rope up, and we start heading up what's called Motorcycle Hill. Motorcycle Hill is a pretty straightforward hill all in all. There's some crevasses on either side that you end up, you know, poking through if you get a little bit too close, but not too, not too bad of a climb. And then we got up to a part of the mountain where we got to what's called squirrel Hill. Now squirrel Hill, apparently there was a squirrel who lived on the rocks of this Hill at anyone at some point. Apparently there was a squirrel that lived on these rocks at some point. And on the surface, it sounds like Squirrel Hill, you know, how bad can it be? And it ended up being on both the ascent and especially on the descent, the worst part of the entire mountain. And we'll talk about sort of the harrowing experience we had trying to get down Squirrel Hill on the descent. Oh, as soon as we get to the top of Motorcycle Hill and we're about to navigate to Squirrel Hill, we start getting hammered with, you know, 25, 30 mile an hour winds. that are just basically trying to flick us off the top of this, which wouldn't be so bad if the fact that Squirrel Hill wasn't just like sheer ice that dropped off straight down thousands of feet to the Peters Glacier. And so we get to the top and we immediately realize like we cannot stop, we have to keep moving. There's no spots for a good break here. And so we work our way up this tight little edge of Squirrel Hill. It's... extremely icy, extremely windy, and there's people coming down. So there's really like nowhere good to stop there. So we just keep pressing. And so this is now several hours that we're just kind of hammering through this wind and trying to find a level spot for us to be able to take a break. We get to the polo field at the top and we finally take a break, kind of keep hammering from there up across windy corner, which at this point was just sheer. like windblown blue ice, blue ice being like the hardest surface that you could possibly try to climb on outside of just rock. And so your crampons are not sticking very well. You're navigating around this very exposed corner of windy corner on blue ice, making your way up to about 13.6 to leave the cache. And the views are just incredible. Forikers opening up, hunters opening up, it's just totally surreal. leave our cash, start heading our way back down to 11 Camp. And all in all, super solid day, felt really good. And that was the beginning of our time getting stuck in Talkeetna. So we get back and the next day, what was supposed to be another big day, carrying the rest of our gear up to 14, ends up being us stuck in a snowstorm, spending the day. unburying our tents, unburying our bathroom, trying to keep occupied and trying to stay busy. Again, hurrying up and waiting for some inevitable weather window to open up for us to be able to move. And we ended up getting stuck at 11,000 feet for three days, just waiting for something to open up. And what's crazy is that everyone else on the mountain is waiting too. So as soon as these little weather windows open, the entire mountain comes to life. People are moving up, people are moving down, people are flying around. There's just this sudden burst of life that happens all over the mountain. And now finally, we get another clear day and so it's time for us to take up all of our stuff from 11,000 feet and move all the way to 14. we get to 11,000 feet and basically everything. So our first day at 11,000 feet, basically everything just got dumped on. Heavy snow, buried everything in what felt like two feet of powder, and we start getting settled in, but we've got a back carry. We've got to go back down and get our stuff, and the 24 hour daylight works for you and against you in some ways, I guess you could say. So like in a positive sense. So that meant at about 4 p.m. when the weather window starts to open up, we had to move. We had to move down to go grab the rest of our cash and bring it back to 11,000 camp. Now the move to go from 11,000 feet to set the cache upwards at about 13.6 was a very hard day. We had a very small weather window opened up in the early afternoon, which meant we were climbing relatively late to go set a cache. And we first navigated our way up to the top of Motorcycle Hill. Motorcycle Hill was pretty chill. We get to the top and we get, we start to get, hammered by winds coming from behind us. And it wouldn't be so bad, but the top of motorcycle hill and the base of squirrel hill sort of drops off a little gradually and then almost extremely steep down. the top of motorcycle hill and the base of squirrel hill kind of drops off slowly and then it completely falls off into a near vertical cliff, thousands of feet down to the Peters Glacier. And so if there's any wind, it's pulling you towards that precipitous drop and it's a little unnerving. We get to the top of motorcycle hill, we realize we cannot stop, we've got to keep hammering. We get through the icy. you know, turn of squirrel hill and there's just no good place to stop. We're still getting hammered by the wind. We've got to keep moving. We finally get to the polo fields and are able to start taking a little bit of a break before navigating our way up the mountain across what's called windy corner. Windy corner, as you can imagine, is notorious for being very windy. It also happens to be a very different experience depending on what kind of terrain you're working through, whether it's snow that's been pretty well traveled or whether it's like wind swept blue ice, we got the ladder some pretty wind swept blue ice, very little winds. It was more of just the fact that like you're walking through a highly exposed area that drops down into what I absolutely love is called the Valley of Death. And when you see it and the way that this glacier sort of unfolds and all these serex and whatnot open up, it really does seem like a valley of death. It's highly unstable terrain. And so although we were relatively safe and we're walking on not ideal blue ice conditions, the drop off and walking over that was actually pretty cool. We get up to the top about 13, 6, bury our cache, start to see some incredible views of Foraker and Hunter and all these other peaks opening up and make our way back down to 11,000 feet. So pretty hard day, just carrying a lot of weight. Again, it's one of those days that's a real mental grind. And then we get to, back to the 11,000 camp. You know, the thing I think that makes these views that we get to witness so incredible, is not just that they're beautiful scenes, but it's, it's really about like what it takes to actually put yourself in the position to get to view those. You know, at this point, we've been on the mountain for almost a week, grinding up several thousand feet with hundreds of pounds, and to finally get to the pot, the and to finally get to the point where we can start to witness these things. It's again, not just beautiful, but it's like the work that it took to get there makes it all that much better. So finally it's the third day, we're stuck at 11,000 camp. We've got half our stuff set in a cache up above and I'm taking a nap in the afternoon and I'm awakened in my tent by the warmth of the sun. And it was such a relief. And like everyone else felt the same way because everyone starts coming out of their tent like lizards ready to bask in the sun. And we are feeling pretty optimistic about our chances the next day for finally getting up and getting to 14,000 foot camp. And this was another big day, you know, another big day of pulling like 100 pounds, you know, 80 pounds at least on your pack, on your sled. And man, you get to the cache and you only have about 500 feet from the cache at like 1360, you get to 14, but that last 500 feet or so was agonizing. And I'm just trying to focus on getting my mind into. what I would just call like a meditative state through the repetition of my breathing, through the repetition of my feet, through just moving consistently in a pattern and a rhythm so that I just start to stop focusing on the discomfort and kind of like the mental boredom a little bit of just doing the same thing for hours and hours and hours and having very little of it be like an enjoyable experience. So finally we pull over the hump of the crest of 14 Camp and we pull in and it just feels like victorious being there and finally being at the camp where you can start to stage going for the summit. Like it was such an incredible relief to finally be at 14 Camp because what you also hear about it is it's sort of like Shangri-La. And that was the joke was that. You know, we finally arrived at this like mythical city in the mountains where, you know, there would be commerce and camaraderie and all these various things that would take place at this wonderful city of, you know, 14,000 foot camp. We get there, we get situated, we ended up getting an excellent camp location. Um, and, and you can see that the weather starts to become a much bigger issue right away by the fact that people, uh, across the camp have built. these walls of giant ice blocks to protect their camps from the impending weather. And so it's a pretty cool experience just knowing like, wow, things are getting real now that we've actually finally arrived at 14. The other aspect of 14 is those classic views that you see of Denali are visible now from a very clear vantage point. There's this point called the end of the earth with basically again, just drops straight off the mountain and gives you this full view of the Keltner down below and all the peaks around it. It's also cool looking up because from 14, this is where all the classic ski lines drop into. So you're seeing like the Messner Couloir, Rescue Gully, Orient Express, like all these amazingly classic ski lines that come down from the upper mountain drop into 14 foot camp. And because it's sort of like the middle point of the mountain, this is where it also starts to get a little heinous in terms of the reminders of how dangerous the mountain can be because most of the stuff that goes wrong on Denali from what we've learned happens from 14,000 feet on up. And so oftentimes when things go south, the goal is to get people down to 14 camp. So almost immediately being at 14, the rescue helicopters are making regular rounds around the mountain to perform rescues to pick people up to supply resources. It's kind of an ominous experience to go from, wow, these amazing views, and we finally made it and feeling good to like seeing the National Park Service have to long line a body that you don't know if it's alive or dead off the mountain and pluck them to bring them back down to 14. And then of course, bring them down lower on the mountain. So it's just, it was a really heavy reminder. that this is a real deal. Like this is, they're very serious consequences if shit goes south on the mountain and that you've got to really like refocus yourself for what's coming ahead because the hardest climbing has yet to begin. The next move is a big one. We're gonna go from 14,000 feet. We're gonna navigate our way up the fixed lines up to 16 ridge, and we're gonna try to leave a cache of supplies at around 16 to 16,600 feet, somewhere up on the ridge line. And this was hard right from the get-go because I think the nervous anticipation coupled with the coldest night on the mountain led to a very horrible night of sleep. You know, somewhere our... The temperature this night got down to somewhere between like negative 15 and maybe worse, which meant that even with all of your stuff on in your sleeping bag, you still like weren't comfortable. So you didn't sleep that well. Side note on that thing is that as you breathe outward in your tent, there's water, there's precipitation coming out with your breath. And what happens to that is that when you're in these freezing temperatures, that water starts to freeze to the inside of your tent. So the sheet of like rime ice starts to envelop the inside of the entire tent. And it slowly gets shaken loose and starts to snow on you. So you're not just cold, but you're also now like being snowed on from inside your own tent. You know, that with the first night sleeping at altitude, you know, is always rough. And the nervous anticipation of the big day that we have coming up is, you know, makes it hard to sleep. And so... Overall, I think I slept just like a few hours max before this big push. We load up our gear. You know, we've got very heavy packs because we don't bring sleds any farther up the mountain than, than where we are at 14. And this is where we start to approach the fixed lines. The fixed lines are these fixed protection lines that the, uh, mountain has so that you can clip in and use. And it was called an ascender to ascend your way up the mountain. And the problem was that there had been so few people that had traveled right before us on the fixed line is that there were really no steps kicked. And the terrain is so steep that your ankles are essentially your feet are essentially fully splayed outwards so that they're almost like perpendicular with your body and they're pushed at this other angle backwards so that it's kind of painful to navigate up the fixed lines in this way. without good steps being kicked in. And efficiency is the name of the game, but especially on something like the fixed lines. But because what happens is that you work your way up this, you know, several thousand feet of this face. And, you know, I think a thousand of it being on the fixed lines. And if you do so in an efficient way, then you'll have a lot of energy at the top. And if you don't, and of course, this being our first time on the fixed line, so we weren't, you know, don't navigate this in an efficient way. You just fry yourself. getting up to the ridge. And so by the time we got up to the top of the ridge, I was absolutely dusted. Like I was having a hard time catching my breath. I had blown all my energy, really didn't take very many breaks because of just the steep terrain. And we just kind of had to keep moving. So it was a very long day with a very heavy pack plus inefficiency, plus not sleeping. Like I was dusted at the top of the ridge. Thankfully we set our cash very nearby just before what's called Washburn's Thumb. And then we were headed back down. And this is, I think, the first moment on the mountain where I started to experience some real uncertainty and some doubt. I'd busted my ass in my training. I'd done a lot of heavy, heavy days. But part of what makes the mountain so hard is that it's just a grind, like I said. And so it's like, not just can I do this once, can I do this twice? But it's like, could I do many, many more of these days? Like how many more of these big days? do I think I've got in me physically but also mentally? Not that I'm like, I don't think I can do it, but like that desire being there, the desire to do it is actually the most important part. Like physically you could be less prepared, but if mentally you have this just burning desire to accomplish it, you will get it done. 100%, no doubt about it. That's one of the biggest takeaways from this trip. But if that mental desire is not there, Just no matter how physically prepared you are, you will not be able to push through. And it's just as simple as that. And so having that big day, I was like, oh dude, like we're supposed to go back and do this again tomorrow? Like, I don't know. I don't know if I've got that desire in me right now. And I've got like eight hours to figure that out. And so I just remember I messaged a buddy of mine who had previously climbed Denali, and I was like, yo, I'm in kind of a funk right now. And I could use a sounding board message my wife, sort of journaling, just trying to get these thoughts on paper to just kind of release and get back into a good mental state. And then really got right back to my self care. You know, making sure that I was focusing on what I could control and getting right back in the mental headspace that I needed to be in to go and do another day. And the big thing that I was focused on too, was being much more efficient. Every single step was going to be efficient, my rest step would be crisp and clean, my breathing would be fully intentional the entire time, I would be maximally efficient on the fish lines, fixed lines not wasting any energy, you know, messing stuff up. Because here's the wild thing is that in your climbing, like one bad step can drain you. of so much energy. And that can happen for a lot of reasons. Like you didn't have good footwork, you got a little sloppy, you didn't use a rest step efficiently, but sometimes like you step on some snow and the step gives out and just like slides. And it's unbelievable how draining that can be, especially as you start to get to these higher altitudes. And so I was just like, efficiency is gonna be the name of the game. We did take a rest day the next day to, you know, kind of get settled in. get more acclimatized, get some more fueling in, and then it was time to rock. And that morning I can remember feeling just almost like the butterflies in my stomach, the nervous anticipation of, am I gonna be able to muster the desire to get up today? Because what's gonna happen today is not just going to 16.4 or 16.6 or wherever we left our cash, but we're gonna get up, we're gonna pull all the rest of our camp, we're gonna navigate all the way up to the cash, and then we're gonna have to go. across the 16 ridge all the way up to 17,000 foot camp. And then we have to set up camp. And I've never been that high, you know, up to the 16, four, 16, six, wherever we were the day before, that was the highest in altitude I've ever been in my life. And so this fear, this uncertainty, this doubt, coupled with the fact that we are not just going there, but we're going higher. And it was pretty rough last time, you know, was putting a lot of anxiety in my body. But I tried to separate that, you know, I tried to really separate that and focus on the task at hand. And, you know, fortunately, it ended up going much better right from the get-go. And I think it really was that focus on efficiency that made the biggest difference. And so basically every single breath was intentional. Every single step, I focused on exactly where to place my foot and exactly how to place it. try to get into that meditative kind of trance state. And man, once we got up the fixed lines, I still felt great, had a ton of energy. And then we got to climb my favorite part of the entire mountain, which was the 16,000 foot ridge, or just 16 ridge. The 16,000 foot ridge is essentially this very narrow, and at some points knife edge ridge that drops off completely 3,000 feet on both sides. And so you're navigating this very fine ridge line, which is much more interesting climbing, I think, to do than just working your way up a steep snow or ice pitch. But then you also have these incredible views from such an exposed location. And so the altitude was starting to kind of wear on us. We were just feeling a little tired, but no headache, no nausea, none of that. And just kind of slowly navigating our way up this incredibly exposed ridge until we finally found ourselves at 17,000 feet. And that alone felt like a lot of what summit day often feels like, just because one, to make it to 17,000 foot camp after such bad weather and such long days and such hard pushes, felt like a victory all in itself. But to know that I was able to overcome that uncertainty, that doubt, and to really muster the desire and feel more reinvigorated than ever, I felt really, really pumped. And the thing about moving to 17 camp is that you don't want to stay at 17,000 foot camp for very long. So typically the reason that you move up to 17,000 foot camp is because you are very shortly thereafter going to be going for the summit. And that was exactly our plan. We were going to get to 17,000 feet. We were going to establish camp. We were going to do one night of sleep. And then that next morning we were supposed to have a pretty clear weather window and we were going to go for the summit. So that's two big days back to back of carrying all your heavy stuff back to 17,000 foot, setting up camp, and then immediately the next day going for the summit. Now getting to 17,000 foot camp was a different experience too because this is where real altitude started to settle in for me. Fortunately, based on the way that we acclimatized, I didn't have any nausea, a little bit of a headache, but most importantly, I guess most significantly, I should say, is that I just felt drunk. I felt totally intoxicated. I can remember trying to tie knots to my guy lines on my tent to stake these things out. And I was like, blurred vision like drunk person trying to tie knots. Like it was insane trying to do just the most simple tasks, like do something like that, that I've done a million times. And you know, but overall was feeling great and feeling really optimistic and just had it set in my brain, like tomorrow we are going to summit. We've basically at that point in the route, we've got one more really hard section called the Autobahn, which brings us up to Denali Pass. But beyond that, man, once we're past the Autobahn, it's kind of the home stretch. And as long as you feel good with the altitude, you're not having any negative symptoms about it and you can push through, like you're pretty much. You know, there's no guarantee, but you're as guaranteed as probably possible to be able to get to the summit at that point. The morning comes and I come out of my tent and thankfully I'm able to witness the sun breaking over the summit of Denali. And as it does, it clears away all the fog and all the clouds that are hanging. upper portion of the mountain. In hindsight, I really appreciate that moment because I realized how short-lived that clear weather would end up being and especially how the rest of the day would go and knowing that was not a foreshadowing of things to come, but that really was the clear moment that we would see. We pack up all of our stuff. nervous anticipation in my stomach. I'm feeling anxious. I'm feeling butterflies. My stomach isn't sitting well. I don't know if it's the altitude or if it's the anticipation. Probably a little bit of both. But we are fully suited. I mean, I have every piece of gear on to battle the cold that's about to come and the cold that we're already starting to experience. So I've got my base layers, my soft shells, my hard shell. I've got my full expedition grade in my space suit ready to go to the fucking moon. And we start marching, working our way up the Autobahn. And the Autobahn is this highly exposed section of the route that you have to traverse upward across these steep sections to get to Denali Pass. And you're clipping into fixed protection. There's not a really well laid trail, but there is some boot track that we can use. because the Autobahn is so steep and so exposed, we can't take a break. We've just got to keep hammering through for several hours to get to the top of Denali Pass. And the Autobahn is really ominous because this is where most of the accidents on the upper mountain take place. People don't clip into protection. People are making the traverse down Denali Pass and not yet clipped in, or they are clipped in, and bad stuff happens still. But this is where a lot of the deaths and a lot of the accidents happen. And there was this very kind of spooky moment where I talked about when we were 14 and somebody had to be long lined off the mountains. So there was a body in a cage on this like, you know, 50 yard rope coming from a rescue helicopter that we didn't know if it was dead or alive. We knew they fell on the Autobahn. And we get to the near the top of the Autobahn, what we saw was one ski sticking out of the ground and two tent poles just scattered on the snow. And it was this moment of like, wow, that's dude. That's kind of a heavy reminder of like, shit gets pretty real on the mountain. And that guy was right here, right where we are. And now it's just one singular ski sticking out of the snow. And it was just kind of a weird mental moment to just kind of keep moving and keep pressing past this very weird, weird spot where something bad happens. Like you hope it was a miracle, but probably something much worse. And... We start to get to the top of the Autobahn. Things are feeling pretty good, but all of a sudden you start to feel these gusts of wind building at your back and building at your back. And you start to see these clouds settle in and with the clouds comes precipitation. And every step as we get closer to the top of Denali Pass, the wind is getting harder and heavier. and the snow is getting more significant and the clouds are dropping down on us and our visibility is getting worse and worse and worse. And so by the time we actually manage to get up and turn to the right to pass up through Denali Pass, we are just getting absolutely hammered by the wind and we have little to no visibility of what's coming in front of us. And we're very slowly. very painfully taking our steps through this weather to get up and around and at least underneath these little rock overhangs to get some shelter from the wind. And we start having really tough conversations. You know, we occasionally can peek out from behind this rock with wind hammering you in the face and freezing all your extremities, just to get a glimpse at the upper mountain. And I just remember distinctly this moment. looking around this rock and looking up the route to the upper mountain and just seeing this massive lenticular cloud Squatting down on the upper mountain. What a lenticular cloud generally tells you is that there are extremely High winds beneath the cloud and if the summit is socked in it's not just high winds its precipitation It's low visibility and these knife-edge ridges that take you to the summit, you know, that's a very dangerous situation to be finding yourselves in. And the lenticular cloud, it wasn't getting any clearer, it wasn't getting any smaller in fact. It had this very ominous look as it was pulling in other little clouds around and had this crazy swirling effect. And it just looked like it was getting meaner and meaner and meaner. And I think that was the moment we all kind of knew in our hearts that, you know, at about 18,600 feet, that was about as high as we were gonna be going on this trip. Because what we knew beyond this, what was supposed to be our good weather window was a forecast of very, very bad weather. And so we put our heads together, we're talking to other teams, and ultimately the decision is made that, you know, this is it, this is as far as we go. And then the ordeal of the day really begins. Because here's the tricky part about things like the Autobahn is that they are basically a one-way road and that if somebody is coming up the Autobahn, you can't really be going down the Autobahn. You have to wait for people to come up before you can go down. So it creates this bottleneck on the mountain. But every second we're sitting here under this rock on Denali Pass, the weather is getting significantly worse and worse and worse and your fingers are starting to freeze and your toes are starting to freeze. And despite the fact that you have every piece of clothing you have with you on, including your Expedition puffy's, you are starting to get extremely cold and people are starting to puke from the altitude and the wind is picking up and it's just the scene is starting to really degrade. And so we have to sit and we have to wait in this for teams to come up, but it gets to a point where we realize that we've got to start going down. We cannot wait up here any longer. It's getting worse. We're too exposed. It's time to figure out a way to kind of like slide by some of these teams that are coming up because they're taking too long. We rope up, we clip in, and we have no visibility. Very little of what we have in front of us can we see. We see nothing about the exposure and the drop off, basically just the foot track in front of us. And then as people are coming up the route, you start to see them slowly emerge from the mist. So we're getting hammered by the weather on the way down. And now when we encounter a team coming up as we're going down, we have to do this very delicate dance of un-clipping from protection and them going around us and staying clipped in and navigating. So it takes like 20 minutes just to get past a team that's coming up the mountain. We're trying to tell them, you know, the weather's bad. You know, everybody's turning around. You know, it'd be better if everyone just turned around now and went down. But because it's so exposed and steep, there is no place to turn around. So these teams had to keep coming up all the way to the pass before they could finally turn around and descend the mountain. And because we're on this exposed section that we can't really see anything, we just have to hammer our way until we get back down to 17,000 foot camp. So we hammered our way all the way up the Autobahn with no breaks, very, very minimal break at the pass. Now we've just got to hammer our way all the way back down to 17,000 foot camp through low vis, through wind, through cold weather to get there. And it just takes forever. It just takes forever to navigate this terrain with the visibility we had. A few people took a spill, took a fall. Luckily, they were roped in, they were clipped into protection. So, you know, all the worst case scenarios were minimized. But just hours later, we finally managed to schlep our way into 17 Camp. And this is where the debate begins, because there's a potential weather window in several days. But we know that for the next few days, the weather is supposed to be very, very bad. And so we start going through the normal deliberations of, okay, like, do we stay knowing we're gonna get stuck? for a potential weather window in a few days, only to know that we might get stuck again afterwards because that's a very small window. We have time to get up, but do we have time to get down off the mountain? And several people were in favor of staying and sticking it out, but it might be another week or more. Others were pretty committed to going down. It was just kind of a chaotic conversation. We tried to take a vote, tried to see where everyone was at. And ultimately with more forecasts, brought into the conversation, it was pretty clear that the weather wasn't going to get better anytime soon and that it made the most sense for everybody to pack up 17 Camp and head on back down the mountain. That ended up being the right call, despite how tough that decision may have been to go down and to realize that that's the trip right there, that there would be no summit. It's much easier when it's the right call. when it's not something that was like, I physically couldn't do it, I mentally couldn't do it, logistically we couldn't do it, but just, it's not meant to be. It's not meant to be, man. And I had made peace with not summiting the night before because I knew that we had such a small window and you just never know. Like you just never know what's gonna happen. Weather, fitness, altitude, anything can go wrong. Somebody could fall, somebody could get hurt in your group. Like just everything under the sun could go wrong I didn't want to hang my trip entirely on the fact of whether I summited or not, as whether it was a successful trip or not. So I remember lying in my tent and making peace with the fact that I might not summit while also being supremely confident and at peace that we were absolutely going to summit if given the opportunity. I think that was the most disappointing thing is that at that point, especially having gotten past the Autobahn, we'd climbed all the most difficult parts of the climb. All the most difficult parts of the mountain, we had done it, it's done. We'd gotten to that point and now it was just time for us to have our victorious day of marching with a light pack to the summit. And had we had a clear window, we absolutely would have done it. There's no doubt in my mind, but it just wasn't meant to be. And very much in keeping with the theme of Denali, the weather dictates how this trip goes and Denali decides when it opens up and when it allows you to summit. There's no conquering of Denali. There is simply the mountain allowing you to pass through on good weather window days. So we pack up our stuff and we've got to head all the way down to 14,000 foot camp. So that's the day. That's how long the day was is that we woke up, got all our stuff, attempted to go for the summit, got stuck, had to come down back to 17,000 foot, deliberated, deliberated. packed up the entire camp and now we have to navigate our way all the way back down from to 14,000 foot camp from 17,000 foot camp. So it was a very, very long day. The benefit of this is that we get to go back down 16 ridge, which on the way down is almost cooler than on the way up. Knife edge ridges, high exposure, and we just happened to be underneath the storm at this point so we had a lot of really great visibility, just the most insane views that I have ever seen. And again, I'm not a religious person, but there was something. almost like spiritually, religiously uplifting about these views and how surreal they were and, um, indescribable. I'll put pictures in the show notes, but, um, you know, it just doesn't quite do it justice. We get down to the top of the fixed lines, navigate our way down the fixed lines all the way back to 14 camp. And we just crash because that was a long, long day, but also there's still sort of this air of, I wouldn't say defeat, but just disappointment and knowing they're like, That's it. That's the climb. That's the peak of where it's going to be. And getting to 18.6 is no small feat and the highest I've ever been and the most remarkable experience. But again, there's still the lingering doubt and disappointment of, did we make the right call? And it's unfortunate that we couldn't summit. And it's hard as a climber. I think we- We try to balance that fact of like, you know, there's that cheesy statement of like, the journey is the destination. And you really have to subscribe to that belief as a climber, because if you climb often enough and you climb hard enough, inevitably you're going to have days where you just, you can't summit that whether it's you or whether it's the mountain, you're not submitting all the time. And, um, you know, that helps you sort of still find meaning and purpose in, in climbing, um, if it was all about just summiting, then when you don't summit. It's very disappointing and I've absolutely been there. It was one of the hardest lessons I've learned early on in my climbing career. But despite the fact that we subscribed to this idea that the journey is the destination, it still kind of sucks not to summit once you've done all the hard parts and it still means that the mountain is waiting for you to go back to. Now here's the thing, just like when we got to 17 camp and we had to find our way down to 14 camp, just because you're done climbing doesn't mean that you are done being on the mountain. And much like the ordeals with weather on the way up, we had some ordeals with weather on the way down and almost much worse. So then anything we experienced on the way up in terms of wind, visibility, precipitation. And so we get to 14 camp, we've rest up and our thoughts are immediately on getting down. We got to get down from 14 all the way down to the airstrip back on the, you know, lower. you know, Kiltman all the way back down to the airstrip. The next day we're going to navigate down from 14,000 feet down back to 11,000 foot and hopefully navigate much lower than that. The thing is now we have the storm bearing down on us from above so we're racing the clock and almost as soon as we start finishing packing up from 14,000 feet, the snow begins to fall and it became an ominous foreshadowing of what was to come the rest of the day. So we get down to 14,000 feet and we get down to windy corner. And the, get down to windy corner. We get down to Windy Corner and we have to step off trail to let this team go by. And I fall into what I know is my first crevasse. I didn't fall too far. There was a pretty significant snow bridge, but I fall waist deep almost immediately and have to be plucked out of this crevasse by a passing climber so that I can get back on the route. And at this point, my sled is just giving me hell. The problem here, let me paint the picture for you of what's happening. So I'm on a three person rope team with two people in front of me. So I'm at the back of the rope. I have my sled behind me, which is a little bit lighter than normal. It was kind of an afterthought sled. So it's got, you know, 40 pounds in it, but it's not crazy significant like how our sleds are normally rigged. There's also a sled from the climber in front of me. The climber ahead of me, who is actually my brother, has his sled behind him, but our rope between us is attached to the sled. And you do this for a few reasons. One, this allows me to keep tension on his sled through the rope so that his sled doesn't start banging into him as he goes downhill. It's also helpful when you're going around something like windy corner where there's a drop-off to one side, because the sleds naturally want to slide down. those drop offs. And so if I can keep tension on it, I can help control the sled as it's sliding around and make it so that there are as few jolts and tugs as possible and that I can I can control the weight from behind. But what we found in hindsight is that the way that the sled in front of me was rigged is that it allowed me to take tension, but it never really allowed me to release the weight entirely so that the climbers in front of me could take the weight. And this is normally not a big problem. It's not a big deal, but it became a big deal once we got past a windy quarter and we started finding ourselves in worse and worse weather. We get down to the, we get down to the polo fields and we're about to start going down Squirrel Hill. And at this point, the weather has degraded so badly that there's actually a chance that we might have to turn around and go up to 14. But we're also so close, we're so close to getting back down to 11 and getting out of this exposed terrain and getting off the mountain that we decided to just go for it. But every step we take as we get towards Squirrel Hill, the weather just gets worse and worse. the gusts get heavier and heavier to the point where as we're looking around, there are softball sized chunks of ice being whipped through the air like it's a piece of paper flying in the wind. And it's hammering us from our left side as we begin to navigate down the first stretch of Squirrel Hill. Now, as I mentioned, Squirrel Hill on its surface doesn't sound scary. And it's actually not that bad of a section to go up and down on. normally in good conditions. But the problem is that it slowly drops off and then completely drops down, plummeting 3,000 feet off this cliff down to the Peters Glacier. And this heavy wind pushing us from the left is pushing us slowly towards this inevitable drop off down the glacier. And the biggest thing with the wind too is that it's very rarely this consistent push of the same miles per hour weighing against you, but that the wind blows and then settles and then blows and then settles and the settled wind was like 35 miles an hour with gusts up to what we anticipated with gusts up to what we with these 50 mile an hour plus wind gusts that would just hammer you to the point where on certain sections of the terrain, it was so exposed and we were getting hit by so much wind that our crampons are fully dug in and I'm all the way tilted back with my ice axe crammed into the ice and my crampons start to slide. we start working our way the hill, and we're trying to move at a pretty significant pace so that we can get out of this exposed section and down to the top of Motorcycle Hill where it starts to plateau a little bit. The problem is that it seemed like every single step the wind is getting worse and worse, and we're in more exposed terrain and more exposed terrain. And these 50 mile an hour wind gusts are just hammering us over and over and over. And this is where the sled configuration started to become a problem. The problem being is that now I have no one behind me. So my sled swings wildly over to the side and has now become basically sitting in front of me at a slight angle, edging towards this drop-off, pulling me down. And now I also have the weight of the sled in front of me, which I am unable to release entirely to the climber in front. So I have one sled on one side pulling me down and now I have the other sled on the other side. holding me down. And because we are trying to move so quickly through this steep terrain, we're now moving at a pace where I'm having trouble getting my footing, which in this exposed section is giving me a lot of anxiety. And the problem starts when my sled starts to death roll. It's light enough and at an angle and getting blown at just the right angle with the wind that it starts to roll and tangle. And the problem with that comes when it starts knocking things loose from the sled. So slowly the contents of the sled starts to become loose. And unfortunately, I realized now in hindsight that I didn't quite strap things down as well as I needed to for the conditions that we were gonna find ourselves in, which I don't think anyone anticipated because stuff starts to come and fly out of the sled. And so first thing I see rolling down towards the edge of the cliff is my bag of all of my clothes except the ones that I'm wearing on my body and the puffies that I have in my pack. And as soon as that flies out, everyone just stops and realizes like, oh shit, stuff is starting to fly out of this sled. And we're hoping it stops before the drop off, but it picks up speed and launches off sort of into the abyss down the glacier. Other things start coming loose from the sled and flying off. Now at this point, the wind is pushing me so badly that my crampons are having trouble sticking in the ice. And then when these gusts hit my back, I have to stab my ice axe back behind me and lean back into the mountain and wait for the gusts to pass so that I can actually start moving again. And then as soon as that happens, I'm jolted forward over and over by the weight of the sled oscillating as we're moving down the hill. And the problem with the wind is that Part of this means that the route is blue ice, hard to get your crampons in, while the other half is protected a little bit more and still has some snow. So I'm getting to the point where not only are my crampons having a hard time gripping, but one foot is starting to slide down the mountain and one foot is barely scraping the top of the ice. And I quickly realized that it's not just the wind, but I'm literally being pulled down the mountain. by my sled, by the sled in front, by the climbers pulling the rope, the speed we have to go, and then the gusts of wind are hitting me. I'm yelling at the top of my lungs. We have to stop, we have to slow down, I have to get settled, but the wind is just taking my voice and sending it off the cliff with the rest of my stuff. So I just start yanking on the rope in front of me to try to get the attention of the climbers in front. Finally, I do. We kind of get settled, I get my footing. I realize in hindsight that I've now sprained my ankle. I'm contorting my body so hard to try to stay against the wind and stay up and keep from getting pulled off that I've sprained my ankle. And the problem being is that like, you know, losing my footing would be bad because again, I'm carrying the weight of two sleds and I'm at the top of the rope and the climbers below me cannot hear me. So there would be a long pause with all this momentum before they realized that I had begun falling in, especially if I wasn't able to self arrest, all that momentum would then jolt the next climber. And hopefully one of those two would be able to stop our downward momentum. But again, nothing is for sure. And it's just this very surreal moment of like, oh fuck, I have got to keep my footing. I have got to get my shit together. I have got to stay mentally calm and focused and just get down. one good step at a time. And then here is where shit really hits the fan. My sled has now lost a bunch of weight. And so what happens is it starts acting like a sail in the wind. And the wind picks up the sled and it's now literally airborne, catching in the wind, spinning in the wind, coming back down, death rolling on the ground, catching in the wind. So every gust Is this that much heavier? Because now my sled is catching the wind and being pulled down even further. I'm yelling to slow down, I'm trying to get my steps. And we just like, we have to get out of this section. We've got to get down the mountain. And so I just try to calm myself as mentally as I, I try to calm myself down mentally and focus on the task at hand, knowing that like, these are the moments. where you've got to fucking step up and deliver. And so step by step, we inch our way down the mountain till finally we get out of the exposed area and at the base of Squirrel Hill. And I am just like beyond relieved to be out of that section. It was far and away the worst moment I've ever experienced climbing. Certainly the scariest moment I've ever experienced climbing and the closest I've ever come to near disaster in any sort of outdoor. experience across the board. But the day is not over yet. We realize that most of our team is still stuck and pinned on squirrel hill up above us. And we can just barely make them out in the storm. But what we can make out is these little black dots that are not moving. And we sit and wait for what felt like hours, but was probably 1015 minutes just waiting, begging, praying for them to start moving, but they are not moving. They are completely pinned by the wind trying to navigate their way down this exposed icy section. And then next thing we know this massive gust of wind pelts us and pins us down and you know, there's ice flying in your eyes you can't really see but what you can hear is somebody yelling falling. from up above and falling is what you yell when you are falling or when somebody else is falling. And so all we know is that they are stuck. They've been stuck. We just got hammered with this massive gust of wind, probably the biggest one yet. And now somebody has fallen. My heart just sank. And I didn't really wanna look up at first, but I knew that I needed to know like, if I look up, will I see little black dots climbing on the route or will they be gone? Will it just be white? And I look up and thankfully I still see little black dots. And what ended up happening is somebody's crampon blew. I mentioned I sprained my ankle, contorting it so hard to try to get traction in the snow, while somebody was also doing the same. And in doing that, it just popped the crampon off and away where the crampon starts sliding and joining the rest of my stuff down at the bottom of the glacier. Now, thankfully we were able to get the team. down one of our guides, I have to give a huge shout out to Justin Sackett because he heroically set an anchor and went back up to provide support to the rest of the team to help them navigate their way down. But it was honestly like the, again, the scariest moment of my climbing career and in no way, shape or form an enjoyable experience, both in the moment or in hindsight, which sometimes dangerous it can be, right? You look back at it and you're like, actually, that was pretty cool, but like definitely sketchy. This was like not positive at all anyway we looked at it. Now we're still getting hammered with wind and we still have to make our way down to 11,000 foot camp. And so we gather our stuff, my fingers are starting to freeze because we've been now stuck here waiting for this other part of our team to get down. Again, probably another 20, 30 minutes. I'm shaking my arms and hands violently to try to get blood flow in it. And finally we start moving down motorcycle hill. And that was an ordeal in itself because now it's just not my sled that was loose. It's everyone's sleds have shit that's loose. There are sleeping pads sailing in the air like birds. There are dehydrated meals sliding down Motorcycle Hill from behind. A sled got loose and got airborne, launching off an ice cliff before landing just shy of a 11,000 foot camp. And we basically just trudge our way. like people coming out of war down to 11,000 foot camp and just take a moment to pause and be like, what the hell just happened? That was absolutely insane. We paused briefly at 11,000 foot and it's pretty much like a unanimous decision that like, we just gotta keep going. We gotta get down. We gotta get off this mountain. And we thought that the worst of the weather was behind us, that the worst of the terrain was certainly behind us. But as we navigate our way from 11,000 foot down to 78,000 feet, we get socked in completely. Meaning that our visibility is so low that we can barely see what's right in front of us. You can see the climbers that are just in front of you and beyond that is just totally engulfed in the mist. The problem with that is twofold. Is that one, the route wasn't wanded very well. Wands, there are these things called willow wands which is effectively like a bamboo pole that you would stick in the route. every so often so that if you find yourself in a whiteout, you can still navigate the route. Well, this particular section of the route hadn't been that bad, so it wasn't really well-wanted from people that had already been there. And so we're literally wandering in the mist, climbing back and forth, back and forth until we stumble upon the next wand. And then the same thing, okay, we wander back and forth, back and forth until we find the next wand. But the second part of why it's dangerous is that we're on a glacier. And the route's different every time. So you can't just GPS your way to be like, oh, here's the route. And because we're on a glacier, there are crevasses all over the place. And the route has typically been put in where it is to minimize your likelihood of falling into a crevasse. The problem there being, as we have to navigate back and forth, back and forth off the route, we're putting ourselves off route deliberately to be able to find the route and where the next wand is because there's no real boot track from the teams that have come up ahead of us. We're putting ourselves in this crazy situation where we can't see anything. We're wandering across the route aimlessly in this mist for hours on end on a very simple part of the mountain just to trying to get down this hill. And hours later, the wands start to sink up, the path becomes a little more clear, and we finally make our way at around like eight o'clock at night at this point down to our 7,800 foot camp at the base of Skeet Hill. There was some deliberation around whether we should set up a spike camp to contemporary camp for a few hours, rest, eat, and then go for the airstrip. But again, unanimously, we were all like airstrip or bust, baby. It's 11 o'clock at night. We've got 24 hours of sunlight. Like, let's just get to the airstrip because if the weather's bad, we might get stuck somewhere waiting. And it's better to be stuck at the airstrip waiting for a plane that can make a small window than stuck somewhere else in the mountain before we can even get out. So we have a quick snack and at this point now, we're so low on the mountain that it started to warm up quite a bit. And so it's not snowing, it's now basically raining. And so we are getting absolutely soaked. And so again, this has just been the longest day. The day before we went from 17 to the summit, all the way back down to 14, breaking down camp. And then today we broke down 14 camp, we're all the way back down now 78 camp. We've covered a huge amount of horizontal terrain. So total distance traveled. And now we're going to travel for about three and a half, four more hours at eight o'clock at night to get to the airstrip with our sleds and all the rest of our stuff. And thankfully, mentally, I was feeling pretty good at that point. I have a lot of optimism when I'm coming off the mountain. And I know that if I have an end goal and I just have to like pull my shit together for a few more hours, like I can be pretty good about that. Put in some music. Just started feeling like I was... able to mentally commit to a, you know, a four more hour ordeal and just start stepping one step at a time, one step at a time. Thankfully the lower Kahiltna hadn't really opened up that much. So there weren't many exposed crevasses and none on the route that we had to navigate. We get to the base of what's called Heartbreak Hill, which is where right before you're about to go up to the airstrip, after you've been coming downhill this whole time, you have to go back uphill to get to the, the airstrip and get to base camp. And so. sort of this heartbreak at the end of the climb where you're like, oh God, one more hill. But really what it was just one more hill. And we just kept our heads down, we kept grinding, we dragged our sleds, we got into camp. We got into camp, I think just before midnight. And now we've got to dig out tent platforms from four feet of snow and get our tents set up and get our cook tents set, eat some food in our tent. and just crash and just pray that at some point tomorrow, a plane is coming to pick us up. But here's the thing about the weather like we talked about is it's often a hurry up and wait and the weather's very unpredictable and can change on a dime. And unfortunately, what would become that one day at the airstrip turned into several more days of just waiting and waiting and praying for a weather window good enough, both at the airstrip and at Telkina. so that an airplane could come pick us up. Unfortunately, after the first day that day did not come. We found ourselves on day two, still feeling pretty good about the anticipation. And I will mention that like it was super victorious still feeling that second day we had burgers and beers at base camp that we had stashed when we first arrived in the mountain. Like that was heavenly. But then it becomes the third day and you're starting to get depleted of your food. and you're starting to get a little mentally fried and the climb is over. So you're ready to just be off this mountain and all throughout the third day, you're staring at the clouds and you're basically becoming an amateur meteorologist trying to be like, is this a window? Is this a window? And checking the forecast and no, nothing after the third day. And man, after that third day, we're starting to feel like, oh dude, I don't know how much more mentally I can do stuck. stuck here on this mountain and the forecast is not looking good because that third day was supposed to be a good day and it wasn't clear enough for a plane to make it. The planes can only operate during certain hours of the day and the fourth day was so that if that day didn't work, the next best day wasn't going to be for another three days, meaning that we were going to be stuck there for a week. just waiting to get off the mountain, like we are stranded on some desert island, hoping for a rescue to come get us. And then finally on the fourth day, all throughout the day, weather was bad. They start sending out some test planes to see if they can even get to the airstrip. And if they can get to the airstrip, if they can even land on the airstrip, and they send one test plane, very small plane, it does successfully land on the airstrip. And as it's taking off, the fog starts to engulf the entire area. And granted, this is about four o'clock in the day. So our hope of getting off and being stuck is just magnified. This is four o'clock in the afternoon, so our hope is just completely shut. And at this point, because they had started sending test planes, we had packed up our entire camp. So we are sitting on all of our bags, just waiting, just looking at the clouds and waiting, hoping that in the next three hours, a miracle occurs and the skies part like Moses parting the Red Seas, and that we can actually get off. But we're just sitting on our stuff, waiting, an hour passes, two hours pass. Pretty soon, the reality of like, not only are we gonna be here another night, but I've gotta get all my stuff out again and remake my tent and get all, ugh. Like, I can't tell you how mentally defeated I was feeling in this moment. I was trying to pull it together as best as I could. And then finally, for the first time, the weather changed in our favor. Normally when it's changed, it's changed for the worse and it's changed very quickly. And finally, very quickly, the lower cahiltena starts to open up. It starts to become clear. We start to see the sun kind of peeking through the clouds and all of a sudden it becomes as clear as it had been almost since the first day that we arrived. And we finally get the word. There are three birds in the air headed to us right now to come pick us up. But I didn't want to let myself believe that it was true until there was a damn airplane on the glacier. And sure enough, you start to hear the most beautiful sound in the world, which is these otters, these planes, their engines echoing in the massive valleys of granite and ice as it comes close. And then it very victoriously flies over the ridgeline, makes that final turn, and comes in for a landing. And man, loading our stuff onto the plane, I don't know that I moved faster than that one right there because I was like, we are not getting stuck again because that has happened is where people have been able to land on the glacier, but the pilot can't take off and they get stuck. And the pilots tell you, they bring enough stuff for about 10 days because on average, they get stuck when they get stuck for about a week. But we got off that plane and we sailed through the ridge lines. And as we're making our way out of the mountains, We start to see the most beautiful site, which is green, lush land. And I always say that coming off the mountain of just dead granite and ice and cold and no life and coming back into the world, it's like entering the land of the living again. And it just felt like such a relief to finally get out and to land in Talkeetna and to be on terra firma in civilization. So the question now that I get, now that I have answered probably overly thoroughly of how did it go? Knowing that we did in summit, the question I get most often now is do you think you'll go back? And honestly, I don't know. I think the farther that I get from the climb, the more I start to lean towards yes. But that was a lot. That wasn't just a lot on the climb and the preparation, but it was a lot on my family. You know, I have to give a huge shout out to my wife, Cherie, for... really being the reason that this trip was able to happen without her support, not just in everything that led up to it and being on the mountain, but without her support and basically watching our two sons managing the house while working for a month with an unknown end date while I was gone. That is no small feat and that is quite the ordeal to be alone with two small kids, especially two wild little boys. Um, so she really made it happen. And so it's not just a question of, you know, can I do it, but, um, can we, and is that possible, is that fair to even ask that? And I think that's really the struggle of the show is like, how do we balance these ambitions of ours? And I know for sure that, you know, no. Next trip to Denali is anywhere on the, on the near term time horizon. Um, and then I think I want to spend most of my time this next season, climbing a bunch of the local stuff in Oregon and just spending time. with my family in the summer and finding other things to be ambitious about athletically. Not that I'm done with climbing, but that was a big ordeal and a big deal on everyone in the family. So I think at some point, going back to Denali to take another crack at the summit is in the cards, hopefully with much better weather, but you just never know. That's I think one of the reasons why it's hard to commit to going back is that it's just, man, if we get stuck with just another bad weather window season, just a s***. to slog hundreds of pound of gear up to 17,000 feet and not even have a chance. Like, man, am I, am I fully ready mentally for that reality again? And, uh, right now it's certainly no, but I think at some point, um, I will be. So that's a sort of a, a non-answer to that, that very important question that may evolve over time. And it's a good chance. I may never go back. There's a chance that my desire of what I want to climb changes and that Denali is just a great memory. great experience that lives in the logs of my climbing history. But I do think there's a good chance at some point I'm loading up a big heavy sled again and going up for that summit. This has been an episode of the athlete dad podcast. As always, we'd really love your support in helping to get this podcast out into the world. 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