Everyone is off the mountain!

The whole team flew out of Base Camp to the green, fragrant town of Talkeetna, Alaska. It is an amazing sensation to leave the dry air of the Alaska Range and descend into the moist air of Talkeetna. The scents of trees and flowers are very intense, and you suddenly become aware that you and your climbing partners really stink as well!

Some of the crew hopped aboard a private shuttle service and headed into Anchorage yesterday. The rest of the team decided to decompress in Talkeetna for a night and will head back in our van today. It is a pretty big sensory overload sometimes to go from the glacier to Anchorage in a push. It can result in a sort of out of body experience as your soul takes a day or so to catch up.

I hope you've enjoyed these posts and hope that it helped you feel a bit more connected to your friends and loved ones who were climbing with us. Thanks for your trust and hopefully we'll see them in the mountains in the future.

Todd- out.

They made the summit and are heading down!

Well, the rumors of two days ago were indeed correct. The team made the summit on the 1st of July and descended to Camp 3 at 14,200' yesterday. They left Camp 3 in the evening and were going to try to push all the way to Base Camp. They are hoping to fly this morning, but a quick check of Talkeetna Air Taxi's Webcam of the Range does not look too favorable for getting out anytime soon.

Everyone made the summit except Cheryl and Mike. Cheryl stayed back at Camp 3 and Mike descended from High Camp with the sick climber from the other team that I mentioned in a previous post. Don't fret, Mike is fine. Sometimes spending a long time on a big, challenging mountain gives one pause for reflection and a reconsideration of one's priorities. They both flew off the glacier a couple of days ago.

Hopefully the team had an uneventful hike down the lower glacier. I heard that conditions on the Kahiltna have improved a bit from what they were like a week ago. I'll make one last post when we hear that they all flew off the mountain.

Congratulations to everyone for a hard worked, well earned summit.

A Probable Summit!

I received a call from one of our other teams on the mountain that Zach's group left high camp at about 1 pm yesterday for the summit. We didn't get confirmation, but our other guide said it looked like a good summit day and figured that they made it.

I think they are having trouble with their satellite phone. Sorry for the vague posts, but all my information is second hand.

No News from the Summit

Hi Everyone,

I haven't heard anything from the team since the brief and cut-off message of their assisting with a rescue the other day. I hope I was clear: the HAPE victim was not a climber from this team.

I do have some disappointing news, however. Cheryl is currently descending from 14,200' camp with one of our guides, Roe. They are in traveling in the company of another Mountain Trip Guide and another guided team led by a friend of ours. This will enable them to have a bigger safety net as they travel the heavily crevassed lower Kahiltna Glacier.