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Desire & Ice: Challenge on Denali
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WE'RE SLATED FOR A REST DAY before our summit push tomorrow. Okita, with his young clients, has decided to climb today. They leave camp at 8:30 a.m., pressing our guide, Wagner, into service. It's a perfect summit day, warm and sunny. The team ascends to the pass then disappears from view on the upper mountain.
The rest of us lounge in the sun, read, and try to force down food and water, even though the altitude has destroyed our appetites. Dave Johnston, who has stripped off his shirt in the unusually warm air, fortifies the six-foot walls around his tent, while his son, Galen, looks haggard and pale. By evening, the day's calm gives way to stiff winds and sub-zero temperatures, and by 8 p.m. we're ensconced in our sleeping bags, listening to the wind lash the tents. We hear Wagner and the other climbers descending from the summit. I can sense the happiness in their voices, and I'm suddenly filled with envy.
"The wind's picking up. We're screwed," I say to Coffey and Brace. "We missed our shot."
For the first time since I've known him, Brace doesn't offer encouragement. Coffey stares straight ahead, listening to the wind.
"The weather report calls for 30-50 miles-per-hour winds on the summit tomorrow," he says. "It's supposed to blow for the next couple of days. But maybe after that ...."
I'm tired. I've been wearing the same clothes for 18 straight days. My fingertips and toes are constantly numb. My hair feels like it's been slathered with Crisco. Even the smell of camp food on my gloves makes me sick.
My irritability gives way to summit fever, an ailment that clouds judgment and can lead climbers into risky, even fatal, decisions. In my jaundiced mood, I begin to regard the past 18 days as a meaningless black hole without the summit.
My mind begins swirling with contingencies and counterplans. If the team chooses to descend, I'll offer Wagner $1,000 to stay on the mountain with me a few more days. Or I'll hook on to someone else's rope—it really doesn't matter whose—and beg a ride to the top. Then I delve into the Ziploc bag that holds letters from home, and suddenly I gain perspective. At heart, I realize, I'm just a soft, middle-age father who misses his girls.
"Daddy, don't let your nostrils freeze," says a note from 12-year-old Challen. "No mercy!" writes 10-year-old Logan, who seems to favor brute force over finesse in negotiating her way through life.
My partner, Danielle, writes, "My heart is with you. Come home to me soon; we have so much to live for."
I drift to sleep thinking about home.
WE DIG OUR WAY out of our tents through an accumulated two feet of snow and are greeted by high winds. Wagner is poised over his stoves, seemingly none the worse for wear after covering 6,240 vertical feet over 12 hours the day before. Talcott advises us to hold off on packing our summit gear.
"I think we're going to wait and see what the weather's like tomorrow," says Dave Johnston, now clad in his cold-weather gear, before returning to his camp and piling more protective ice blocks around his tent. It's hard to argue with a guy who spent a week at 18,200 feet on Denali in the winter and endured temperatures that plunged to minus-148 degrees. As it turns out, Johnston and his family will gain the summit tomorrow, and Galen, like his dad, will enter the record books.
"Well, maybe this isn't our shot," Bowers says.
Listless from the altitude, I mill around camp, gulping air, peering up at Denali Pass, wondering if I'll ever get there. Then, at 10:30 a.m., Talcott calls us together.
"It's blowing pretty hard up there right now, and it's probably pretty tough on the summit, but let's pack our gear and get up to the pass," he says. "This may only be a training climb, but we won't know till we get up there and put our noses into the weather."
Suddenly, our movement has purpose. We stow water bottles in our packs, insert chemical heat packs into our boots and gloves, make sure goggles and face masks are accessible, cinch tight our crampons, don bulky down summit parkas, and pull on heavy mittens and shells over liner gloves.
By 11:30, we've formed into rope teams and started the slow slog to Denali Pass at 18,200 feet. We arrive in two hours, and frigid wind and blowing snow belt us in the face. I'm expecting Talcott to turn us back. Instead, he gathers us together.
"Boys, this is our summit day," he says, grinning, before urging us to pull on our goggles and face masks and cover any exposed flesh.
Soon we're climbing again, passing the South Peak's notable landmarks: the weather meter at 18,900 feet, the nob of Archdeacon's Tower at 19,650 feet, back down a bit to the broad expanse of the Football Field at 19,500 feet. Then we're ascending to the summit ridge, and a whole new emotion overtakes me.
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