Here is a short pre-expedition post from Reykjavik. I have packed my wool underwear, down jacket and down pants, and I’m ready for this year’s adventure: We are going to climb Denali (aka Mount McKinley), North America’s highest mountain at 6168 meters. We, that is a team of two Norwegians, one American, one Englishman and myself plus Mr. Nansen together with three American guides. I know two people on this team from before: Marius who was a part of the Greenland team last year and our guide Ryan with whom I climbed Kilimanjaro two years ago.
My plan for the next days is arriving in Anchorage late local time tonight, staying there for one night, watching Germany win against Ghana tomorrow and then taking a shuttle bus to a small place called Talkeetna. There we will have a mountain skills workshop on Sunday and start our expedition on Monday.
The expedition follows the West Buttress route which is the most common route on Denali. We are going to fly in to Kahiltna base camp with a small airplane which can land directly on the glacier. The base camp is at 2200 m altitude, and we’ll have a total of three weeks for our expedition which will hopefully take us all the way to the summit and back.
That means three weeks of winter camping which I am looking forward to a lot, although Denali is notorious for its bad weather (which means mostly storms and extremely low temperatures). Then again, I am quite confident that the weather can’t be much worse than on our trip across Greenland last year. Otherwise we follow Anne’s word of wisdom: “Either it goes well, or it goes over.”
Note on the name of the mountain: It got its McKinley name as political support for Republican presidential candidate William McKinley from Ohio in 1896. Today in Alaska and among mountaineers it is more common to use the traditional Athabaskan (Native American) name Denali which translates into “the High One.”
I may drop another note here before we leave on Sunday or Monday. After that you can follow our expedition on Ryan’s website http://www.ryanwaters.net/dispatches.html (see the dispatches section).
