By this time, even though I had yet to ever climb the Cassin, I had raised my goals in accordance with my accrued experience, and we set our sights on the speed record. These slopes to gain the crest of the ridge looked intimidating from down on the glacier, but fortunately turned out to be easy terrain all the way up to the ridge, and I passed some old relic pitons and bits of fixed rope along the way. Going up the hanging glacier I was again greatly aided in some places by the tracks, and completely unable to find them in other places. In hindsight, however, I think approaching by the Seattle Ramp would’ve been the best choice, because it had tracks from multiple parties on it (which I wasn’t aware of).On June 5 I woke up at 5am, ate breakfast, and at 5:57 I crossed the bergschrund just above my tent and started climbing up the original start of the Cassin Ridge. September 10th, 2018. A couple days later, Rob caught the sickness as well. It took me 8:31 round trip, which isn’t particularly fast, but seemed not bad for my first trip to the summit, considering that I broke trail from the 4,000m camp all the way to the “football field.” Rob has significantly less high-altitude experience than I do, and he made it just to the football field before heading down. Supervision and documentation. We chatted for a minute or two, and then I headed up where I could see some tracks going.
On Denali, on the other hand, pampering is only available to the uber rich, all camps are on snow, all water must be laboriously melted from snow, and all the heavy loads one must carry oneself.Growing up in Seattle, which in many ways is a portal between Alaska and the rest of the contiguous US, I often heard older friends talking about their expeditions to the Central Alaska Range. I packed up my camp, skied back down to basecamp, and a couple hours later was on a Talkeetna-bound plane, very exhausted.In my experience, speed climbs are a controversial subject. The Japanese Couloir was not in ideal condition, as it was mostly hard ice and other times I have seen more nevé in it, but it was not in terrible condition either. Our main goal for the trip was a new route on Sultana (and that went down: http://www.colinhaley.com/alaska-2010-dracula-and-cassin-simul-solo/), but we also came for the Cassin Ridge. Logan). ), but we had lost so much time at the beginning of our expedition that we knew we needed to acclimatize as fast as possible if there was to be any chance still of climbing the Slovak route. ), it is valuable to many of us, and rare in North America, as really there is only one other mountain with similar factors (Mt.
In addition, Denali’s far northern latitude makes it much colder than an equivalent altitude in the Himalaya or Karakoram – temperatures on Denali are more comparable to 8,000m peaks. IRATA courses in Brasov, Romania. These factors, combined with Denali’s large scale (the south face is nearly 3,000m high), make climbing on Denali an experience similar to that one would find on 7,000m and 8,000m peaks in Asia. At 1:12pm the tracks I was intermittently following joined with Anne and Chantel’s tracks, who had clearly finished the technical portion of the Slovak Route. National Rope Access.
This blog post is finally making it online 3 months after the fact…], the highest mountain in North America.
Since departing the 4,000m camp we had done about 8,000 vertical feet of knee-deep trail breaking, and felt too exhausted to continue safely to the summit. Combined with relatively easy and inexpensive travel to Alaska, Denali provides a great big-mountain experience to North American climbers that is much more affordable than similar mountains in Asia. We both had lingering coughs though, so even though we started to take some gear up to the 3,000m camp on Denali we didn’t dare sleep above basecamp, for fear that we might prolong our coughs. Some people think they’re awesome and inspiring, and other people think they are lame and trivial.
I generally like to take my time acclimatizing (headaches are a great way to ruin an otherwise fun climbing trip! This was at something like 5,300-5,500m, and I felt there was no longer much mountain left to save my energy for, so I started pushing myself a bit harder.At 3:33 I arrived on the summit ridge, where the Cassin joins with the standard West Buttress route. As for me, my focus was immediately narrowed on the Cassin Ridge, and climbing it before any new snow fell.I spent June 3 getting organized and resting in basecamp, aided greatly by a large pizza that Rob kindly bought in Talkeetna and put on a basecamp-bound plane. Photo by Nicholas Gantz.Near the top of the Second Rock Band. It’s fair to say I was already pretty familiar with the mountain when I arrived in Kahiltna Basecamp this year!Rob Smith and I began planning our 2018 trip to the Kahiltna several months in advance. Unfortunately decent conditions were not to be, and Bjørn-Eivind and I topped out after 17 hours, climbing most of the time in bad weather, and wallowing through a huge amount of deep snow.In 2011 I went to Alaska with another Norwegian friend, Nils Nielsen.