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.

Solar Power for Denali - Part 1

I'm going to be on the Northwest Buttress of Denali for about a month, and between the music, audio books, Kindle, Spot, and who knows what else, I'll need some serious power.

I'm an Elite Team Athlete at Goal0, so I'll be proving the ability of their equipment to work on an Alpine Expedition like this. They have some great larger solar panels, and some great battery packs and inverters, but those are all pretty heavy. For this I'll be taking a Nomad 7M panel with USB charging ability.

In the picture above, while hiking up Quandary, a 14,265' mountain in Colorado, I took one with to test (one of the first beta models I've had for about a year). At the 13.200' break spot I pulled it out and hooked up my Droid Pro to see if it charged regardless of angling the panel directly perpendicular to the sun. You can see the summit ridge in the back of the picture.

The answer is a happy yes. Though I won't be taking the phone on the mountain, it shares similar USB charging characteristics with many of my other gear.

A few days later I dropped by the Goal0 office to talk to some of the great people there and pick up a Guide10 kit - which has a newer model 7M panel, with a special plug to charge the included AA battery pack that stores power to charge small electronics. I also got a Luna 1/2 watt LED tent light - which might come in handy for the few hours of total darkness during the May Alaska nights.

I'll show some tests of that in an upcoming post.

Goal0 Guide 10 Kit
Goal0 Luna Light

More Denali Training - Video

Just a quick shot of myself hiking along the fire road at 10,000' in Colorado.

As a fun note, in the lower right corner, the disturbed snow is from where I stepped off the road to place the camera and sunk to my waist. I had to cross my poles as a brace to mantle off to get out.

Pentax w80
Joby Gorilla Pod

Training for Denali

I've been spending the past week in Summit County CO, and while here, I'm continuing my training for Denali. Right now I'm doing some fast walking on a fire road behind a ski resort that the ski patrol hauls sleds down from the backside lifts.

I've been able to get in 3-4 miles per day at an average 3.3 mph pace (both up and down at an average 5% grade). It's been snowing pretty much every day I've been here, with about a foot last night so I got to do some trail-breaking training today.

I hike in my Lowa 8000 meter boots with poles. Pretty cool overall. I was going to do a 14'er in them last weekend, but the weather and avalanche danger were more than I wanted to deal with. I talked to some friends that tried it last weekend, and they didn't make the top and they said the weather sucked.

In this picture:
Lowa 8000 meter system boots
REI mountaineering socks
Pearl Izumi windproof tights
UnderArmour Coldgear medium weight fitted top
The North Face running shell
Outdoor Research beanie

Audio:
Creative Zen MX
Skullcandy cheap earbuds
Android Lust

Denali/McKinley - Not the standard route

Okay, just a quick post that I'm going to do Denali this May via the Northwest Buttress Route. This is the next ridge to the North from the standard West Buttress "tourist" route, and is considered between West Rib and Cassin in difficulty. Going to go train now, so I'll say more later.

Elbrus Race 2010 - What Happened and Why?

Now that I've had a month to recover, rejuvenate, relax, and sort out my thoughts, I'm going to talk about the different things I discovered on this particular phase of my journey. Note that I'm not blaming anyone or anything, just pointing out some simple basic facts that had an impact on my performance or lack thereof, in retrospect.

My acclimatization schedule was pretty good, overall, and instead of spending a few days in Colorado at 10,000' prior (I didn't receive credit for the days I worked from home in CO while acclimatizing or recovering), I would prefer spending more time in the barrels. I did a hike first thing after lunch on my first day, and it probably would have been better to just wander around taking pictures, and have a couple more days to do the hiking. The second day I went up to nearly 1000' above the Qualifying checkpoint, which was probably one day early. I should have had two more days, one to go to 17,000' and one to 18,000'. Then relax for the Qualifier.

As I had experienced in Argentina, I have a tough time working around some random foreign eating schedule that breaks the day up into periods in which I cannot possibly recover or train. I would take a lot more food, especially meal replacements like Shawn Phillips' Full Strength, and arrange to only have Dinner, which really didn't interfere with my training much at all.

I trusted the water that the cook was giving us in my first stay at the barrels. I used my SteriPEN Classic Handheld Water Purifier until I managed to break the tabs off the lid. I'd had it for a few years and used it in several countries, so I didn't feel too bad. I did finally figure out how to hold it so the batteries made contact.

In that gap time, due to the complacency of the first cook, since she wasn't boiling the surface water they were gathering from a pipe near the barrels, I managed to contract a major case of diarrhea (our second cook was great and I managed to get only boiling water from her). While I was sick everything I ate went straight through as water. Yuck. Totally sapped me of strength, and I had to pause in my Qualifier to let some out, after very tightly holding it in all the way up. If you look at their video on Youtube you can see how weirdly I'm walking uphill.

Sleeping in the barrels with the officials sounded cool at first, but in typical Russian fashion they partied late watching movies and stuff, and then twice started up to the checkpoints at 2 AM, which resulted in my not getting a lot of sleep for my second stay at the barrels. That, with the diarrhea (and starving) really impacted my acclimatization.

For one reason or another I don't really want to go into the food issue in the second stay at the barrels. Maybe I'm just being nice ...

Staying on the wrong side of Cheget added about an hour or so to all transportation events. For purposes of normal training and acclimatizing, it would probably be a lot better to stay in Azau. Especially if you're doing the Extreme.

My music issues totally confused me. I managed to have no music because of some mystery with my Nano locking up until I could plug it into a PC. Because of some glitch in the programming of Creative Centrale that allowed my Zen MX to believe that the hard drive had more stuff on it than existing space until I could plug it into a PC and delete the imaginary files. Because I hadn't put any music on my phone. Because I had trained with music and it threw me a bit to have none.

I had some major babysitting problems, which of course I allow myself to get sucked into, and have for a few trips now. Alas, I think I'm going to just skip all group endeavors forever. And skip offering niceness. You hate to flush all the traveling and money and training.

This isn't the Boston Marathon, where you can show up two days early, fly to in less than 5 hours from most of the USA, run around in nice safe prepared park trails to figure out the climate and kick the very small amount of jet lag to the curb, stay in a hotel 5 minutes from the start and finish, eat whatever and whenever you want, and buy anything you want or need within a 10 minute cab drive. Best of all, your boss probably wouldn't even miss you.

Again, not blaming anyone, just pointing out some glitches that for the most part I could have worked around if I'd been more alert and prepared myself. Now I know.

Elbrus Race September 2010 Photos

My photos are up on picasa:

Picasa Web Album

Most are captioned. Enjoy ...