Denali 101

It occurred to me that many of you reading this blog may not be familiar with mountain climbing or climbing in cold Alaska. So I will post some on what a climb up Denali entails. I will try to hit on some of the major points and keep post short.

Denali was first climbed in 1913 by Hudson Stuck, Harry Karstens, Walter Harper and Robert Tatum. The elevation of Denali is 20,320 ft. We will be traveling on the West Buttress route which is the most popular and considered the least difficult (relatively speaking of course). First we fly into the Kahiltna Glacier (7,200 ft) on a small plane especially equipped with skies for landing. I am still learning the route details, so I will save that for another post. We will be on the mountain for 2.5-3 weeks. Initially we will travel by skies, carrying sleds full of gear and food behind us to about 14000 ft. After that we will be shuttling gear between camps without the skies and sleds till we reach the high camp at 17,200 ft. The day to day physical requirements of climbing followed by building snow shelters, to protect us from winds up to 100 mph, requires our team to be in top physical shape.

Denali is known to be an extremely cold environment. We can expect to see temperatures as low as -40 F. There is a massive amount of gear we must all take to protect ourselves from such conditions. I will write more about the necessary gear in another post.

On that note I better throw another water bottle in my pack and hit the stairs.

Cheers,
Garrett