Before Denali: 7 days to Anchorage

I put all the Alaska gear I have prepared and set it out to sort, organize, and check off the list.

This is most of it in one place, ready to go. Today I did very light training, had a checkup at my family physician, and did a lot of work at my place of employment to make sure things will go mostly smoothly while I'm gone. I also did a little arranging of my small music player I'll be taking, and have previously loaded up my Kindle with a handful of books that I hope to keep myself amused with in case I end up in the tent for a week or two ...

Tomorrow I hope to sort my gear, check it off the list, and pack it. I'll show more about it then. This is just a teaser of sorts.

Northwest Buttress Route

I've been looking at the route in this book: High Alaska: A Historical Guide to Denali Mount Foraker and Mount Hunter, by Jonathan Waterman



There are some really good pictures by the inimitable Bradford Washburn, with little lines on them (mostly correctly labeled) where the historical routes passed.

Perhaps it is because the Northwest Buttress leads to the North Peak instead of the higher South Peak that this moderately difficult ridge is seldom climbed. However it is a classic Alaskan route because it offers the full spectrum of climbing snow and ice cornices, a knife-edge ridge, couloirs, frost-fractured schist towers and pink-speckled granite. Last, but not least, it has an awe-inspiring view down the biggest wall in the world and across the vast Alaskan tundra.

Our anticipated route has the following elevations:

Plane Lands: 7,200'
Glacier Low Point: 6,700'
Kahiltna Pass: 10,000'
Peters Glacier, foot of Northwest Buttress: 7,800'
North Summit: 19,500'
Camp between summits: 18,500'
South Summit: 20,320'
Plane Pickup: 7,200'

The ridgeline should involve a couple thousand feet of up and down as we ascend the various peaks and spires along it, so we'll probably have to ascend over 15,000' from our plane dropoff.