When I mention that Mount McKinley kicked my tail this past July, I sometimes get an odd reaction. I've seen it many times over the years, that in-the-know look followed by the question, "You mean Denali?" As if in my 17 trips to the Alaska Range I'd somehow forgotten the other name for the 20,000-foot tail-kicker. Yes, I know that some people object to the name of a presidential candidate having been pinned to the continental highpoint which already was being called "Denali" by the locals. I do agree that the common translation — "The Great One" — it's a fitting description, but I have a few quibbles with being corrected on my name calling.

For one, I think that mountain is easily big enough for two names. For another, I suspect that too many people want to call it Denali as part of some sort of secret handshake that puts them in the hip club of fashionable mountain people. They have my sympathy in this... I too want desperately to be admitted to the club, and I know that the hip folks can't very well go naming their dogs "Mount McKinley" if they want to impress the neighbors. But my main reason for refusing to call the big glacier-maker solely by one prescribed "original" name is that I figure it had even earlier labels. My guess is that the first people to see it just pointed and said "Ughhh!," which is most likely what they said about a lot of things back in the days before multiple words. I'd hazard a guess that it meant "Dang, that thing is big." Or it could have been interpreted as "Guess we aren't going any farther in that direction." And I wouldn't even rule it out that some guy called it "Ughhh!" in honor of some Stone Age candidate for president.

Yeah, I know, I'm just trying to confuse the issue. The fact is that whatever you want to call it, that mountain thoroughly rejected my advances last month. We didn't even get close to the top. It got snowing and snowing and snowing some more, so that in our third week up the hill, I finally gave our pilot back in Talkeetna a phone call. It still is a goofy thing to me, standing there in a snowstorm at 14,000 feet on Denali, running out of books, food and fuel, trying to keep your climbers from rioting or getting sleep-injuries, and dialing up Talkeetna on the cell phone. Jay Hudson has been flying planes at least as long as he has been driving cars, and he isn't really a guy prone to exaggerating and embellishing... he has seen a lot, and he takes it all in stride and puts it all in perspective... an Alaska Range perspective. And this time, when I talked to him, I was just a little shocked to hear him say that we were getting a hurricane. It being well into July, there wasn't anybody else on the mountain besides my group and Phil Ershler's group camped alongside us. We were working together, that was part of our "late season plan" for dealing with the absence of any Park Service installations and basecamp facilities. But we weren't getting the weather reports or observations from anyone that regular-season climbers can expect to get.

So Jay saying "hurricane" brought out just one word from me..."Ughhh!" and then the cell phone ominously cut out. I shrugged my shoulders in resignation and a little avalanche of accumulated snow sloughed off my head and shoulders. I started thinking then that my guided Denali climb had slim chance of getting up near the summit and down safely. The feeling built as the days of snow went on. I hadn't previously known that hurricanes visited the Alaska Range. It was a new thing to me. The snow was a lot like any other snow, just kind of dependable from one hour to the next. The wind up above was good and hard, blowing like, like, well, like a hurricane. And before long, the avalanches were coming down like freight trains running free of their tracks.

We got a lull in the snow one evening and were able to see the slopes we wanted to climb peeling away and rushing our direction in big, fast, white smoke clouds of violence. Phil and I had some powwows then during which we both pointed toward the West Buttress and said "Ughhh!" It wasn't going to work. And now we were cut off from more than just the top. We had joyfully and easily carried food and fuel up that way before the imperfect storm arrived. That is standard stuff, you do a carry up high to acclimate and to lessen the load when your team finally moves to 17,000 feet and the assault on the top. But we weren't going to see our tasty summit food again.

Our gang of climbers understood the problem. Avalanche slopes need time to stabilize. Hurricanes need time to stabilize. Avalanche slopes need non-hurricane time to stabilize. Non-hurricane time was in short supply. People need food and fuel to climb. Given enough time passage, people won't have any more food and fuel which, at the very least, could make them cranky and irritable. We needed to go down.

So we picked a little lull in the hurricane, packed up a pile of packs and sleds and got wallowing on down the new snow where the climbing route had formerly been. Phil took the lead at first, which made my life about a hundred times easier. It meant that Phil could worry about falling in the snow-disguised crevasses that we would encounter. I was free to ponder the implications of descending through a place called "Windy Corner" during a hurricane....a little bit like going to a place called "the Beach" for a tidal wave, but our choices were somewhat limited. We did okay, all in all. We battled on down through the wind, and deep snow, roped together with each climber knowing that he or she couldn't sit down and cry without inconveniencing his or her teammates. It is a policy that sometimes allows us to get a lot done. There were a few scary moments of trying to figure out — in worthless visibility — just what kind of avalanche snow we were waddling in. But for the most part, we just had to contend with wind in our teeth, frost on our faces and noise in our ears. I was so glad to have Phil out front that I decided to double my pleasure at one point by also letting my assistant guide, Lisa Rust, swing her rope team past us. This worked perfectly; those two rope teams could figure out nearly any problem before it got back to my insulated position. It also gave me a perfect view of the action when Jamie Weed, the big, strong anchor to Lisa's team, walking just 10 feet ahead of me, started finding holes in the snow with his legs. Sure, enough, one foot sank, the other sank and then Jamie sank and was gone.

I screamed above the wind for all to hear, but I knew that most didn't know what I was screaming about, unless they were doing enough math to figure that Lisa's rope was down a man all of the sudden. I edged toward the void where I'd last seen Jamie and gave a yell. I got a really cheerful reply, which encouraged me, no end. It was a little like "That was GREAAAAAT! Can we do it again?" This calmed my racing heart. Jamie did say not to come any closer, though, as from his angle, he could see that I'd be on about four feet of overhanging goo-snow that would give way and fall, with me, on him. He could tell me that the crack seemed to pinch closed 10 feet to one side and that I could get over it to begin hauling him out in that more promising direction. When I'd gotten over and then gotten a look at him, he wasn't so far down, but he sure was white. Chock-full-of-snow was Jamie. And smiling away down in his private crevasse out of the storm. We got hauling and made Jamie start clawing upward at the same time, and before we knew it, we had landed a big and happy climber on the surface once again. And then we were at 11,000 feet and life was getting easier.

The lower slopes of Denali get stormed, but they are protected from a lot of the bigger winds, so we just had to strap on snow shoes and find our way through dense snow clouds on the big and vague confines of the Kahiltna glacier. I led for a while, strictly by satellite, thanking Bill Clinton over and over for having removed the built-in error from my GPS readings. I promised not to lob a cruise missile using the new accuracy as long as I could just get us down to 8000 feet safely. My prayers were heard and in just another handful of hours, we were slapping up a safe camp on the lower glacier.

The next day had us trading leads out the sometimes badly busted lower glacier. In late season, it usually just doesn't pay to stick to where the "normal season" route has gone. One finds too many sinking, sagging and just plain old missing snow bridges on the old path in late July. The bad bridges are tempting to try then because detouring around them is no longer an appealing option from up so close to a half-mile long split in the glacier.

In an effort to resist temptation, we strike out on our own in late season, figuring the lay of the Kahiltna and sometimes playing a little "crevasse pinball" when we bounce back from one unworkable direction and slam into another and another before we get the right bridge and make a go of it. Nothing like the tension of throwing your 70-pound pack a little higher on your back, cinching the waist belt a little tighter, stepping out to drag your 60-pound sled a foot or two, mushing a big awkward snowshoe down into some snow that feels a little more hollow than it should, stabbing your ice axe and ski poles into the surface to try getting a read on its composition and strength, taking another testing and tentative step, peering from side to side to ascertain that "yes, there is a crevasse lurking about" and "no, there is not a better way to go."

Dropping one's sunglasses to one's nose to look again in either direction so that one can get one's mind solidly around the idea that if this snow gives way it will give way big and make for a heck-of-a-dangerous fall... and then looking back to see your rope-mates back there urging you on, and to see Lisa watching you intently, and beyond her, Phil... Master Guide that he is, 30 years into his career... watching you right back, waiting to see if you screw up or don't have the guts to do your job. And then back to the bridge, taking a step, stomping hard to test things for those who follow, taking another and another and getting onto "solid" glacier again on the other side. Repeat it all again about 10 times in the next half hour of walking. But we did that all just right, and Phil took his turns at the helm and after about six hours of such fine tension, pulling through the murky twilight of the Kahiltna, with the giant mountains standing by like the planets of our solar-less system, we made our way to the airstrip.

Back in Talkeetna a few days later, recovering from hours of gear-sorting and restaurant-eating and bar-drinking and life-celebrating, I allow as how I feel a little guilty for not getting Lisa on the summit of Mount McKinley. She had, after all, come with me for a third time in three years. She had worked like a dog once again and, once again, the mountain had shut us down. I resolved to make it all right. We booked a "flight-seeing" cruise over the 20,000-foot summit in the now-improved weather. A perfect take-off and steady climb took us humming easily up through the 14,000 feet we'd just spent 19 days attaining the honest way. It popped us up through the expected low cloud deck and into position for what should have been a spectacular view of North America's highest mountain. That was the plan, anyway. It was all thoroughly obscured by a new and unanticipated storm of gray cloud. The pilot pointed at the clouds, shrugged his shoulders, said something un-intelligible into his headset and started heading back for Talkeetna. I'm almost certain he said "Ughhh!"