Berg

Hear Wally's Call from Denali

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A pretty wild night up here last night — I called you from Windy Corner and excitedly reported the unusual situation of having calm skies there. We continued on up to the 14,000 foot camp and arrived here about six or seven in the evening, which is of course no big deal for light in Alaska this time of year. But it was the end of a long day for us. We basically got hammered by some high winds up here at 14,000 feet. My team is learning to deal with coming in and setting up a camp. We cut our own blocks; there aren't many established camps up here this time of year yet. We knew we were going to have to do that and we went right to work; it took us a couple of hours.

We woke this morning, after a pretty long night, to quite a lot of disarray around the 14,000 foot camp here. In particular, the rangers lost their radio antenna; it was broken in half. A number of tents were destroyed or at least messed up. And in fact, in our haste to build walls last night and with the limited amount of good block building material (in early season conditions, the snow is not that dense), we had a wall come down on two different occasions onto our tent. Quite a rude experience to have nylon pressed against your face at a pretty catastrophic moment, with a few pounds of snow behind it. But that, in fact, did happen to both Jamie Pierce and later to Basil Skordinski in the other tent. Of course, you get out and you dig it out.

The North Face tents have extremely strong and resilient poles, so we're back in business this morning. We are just sort of picking up the pieces. I think the mountain has given us a statement. This is a serious place and we knew that when we came. We're happy to be here, but we are going to have to get our act together and get ready to go if we are going to go any higher on this mountain. We are going to have to be really good at digging in, cutting blocks, using our equipment well, and taking care of ourselves.

Early season climbing on this rock can be very serious. No one is going up, moving up high, now. We're all just sitting down here, listening to the wind blow. It sounds like what, on Everest, through the South Col, we often call "The Freight Train." The wind's roaring. You can lay there, and through the stillness between gusts down here at 14,000 feet, you can hear a consistent roar up at 17,000. No one is up there, in fact, which is a relief to the rangers down here, knowing that no one is exposed to those kind of conditions.

Specifically down here last night, we had 50 mile an hour winds, which could have been much higher, up high. Certainly we've seen a lot worse, but that's enough to blow some tents down and, up high, there is just no telling. But winds are definitely a factor on the upper mountain here on Denali, the West Buttress, and I'm sure elsewhere on any other routes for this period of days right now.

We'll keep you posted. Our spirits are high. Everybody is really happy. Of course one of the things that is going on here, at 14,000 feet, is acclimatization. We may be stuck for awhile, waiting for the wind to stop blowing, but all of that while our bodies are making the adaptation that we need to go up there and deal with the lower air pressures, and climb to 17,000 feet to the summit — when we get the chance. Thanks, I'll be talking to you soon.

— Alpine Ascents Guide Wally Berg, MountainZone.com Correspondent

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