Thanks For Joining Us!

Climbing big mountains demands a lot of climbers. They train for months and sometimes years for an ascent of a peak. We all climb for our own personal reasons, and we all have complex lives outside of the mountains, which often limit our ability to follow our passions to the full extent of their depth and breadth.

Every so often, climbers get compelled by the siren song of an adventure, in the truest sense of the word, and the planets and life line up so as to permit them to embark upon this journey. This is the case with five climbers from around the world, who are joining two guides from Mountain Trip to attempt to not only climb Denali, the highest peak in north America, but to traverse it.

To put this in perspective, Denali has a higher vertical rise than Mount Everest. The vast majority of climbers who climb on the mountain, ascend and descend the very challenging West Buttress route. This route begins at an elevation of 7,200 feet on the Southeast Fork of the Kahiltna Glacier and climbs just over 13,000' to the top of North America. It takes about 12 days (if weather, health, and fitness align correctly) to reach the top and about 2 days to descend.

Our team will ascend the West Buttress and then carry their entire load of supplies and camp up and over the 18,200' Denali Pass before descending over 18,000' to the tundra below, crossing the formidable McKinley River and hiking 15 miles out to the sublime Wonder Lake, well to the north of the mountain. Only one or two teams a season attempt such an endeavor, and Mountain Trip has a long tradition of being the only guide service to regularly organize these truly epic adventures. We're climbers and we love to indulge ourselves when the sirens sing out...

On May 23, 2010 our team will assemble in Anchorage, Alaska and to finalize their preparations for this climb.

Let's meet the climbers!

Guides:

Dave Ahrens of Silverton, CO
Michael Burmeister of Anchorage, AK

Climbers:

Carsten Pedersen
Michael Balster
Scott Balster
Abed Al Saffar
Nathan Weil

We will update this blog as often as possible so as to both provide you, the reader, with an accurate description of what the team is up to each day, and also to provide future readers with an account of what it is like to climb Denali. Please keep in mind that communication from the Alaska Range is not always easy and that weather could easily conspire to prevent us from hearing from the team.

Comments posted to our reports will occasionally be passed along to the climbers on the mountain, but we cannot always guarantee that messages will always be relayed. Please know that all of your kind thoughts and best wishes will be read and deeply appreciated by the climbers when they get back to "the real world," so we encourage you to post them frequently. If you should ever need to contact one of the climbers, please call or email our Colorado office.

Enjoy the posts!