Expedition Denali-Team: Double Bag Your Jelly

View from the Rescue Gully looking down at 14,000’ camp, Mt. Foraker in the distance.

Despite my initial doubts of the goal, there was an unassuming seriousness which escaped from behind my young teammate’s faces. Andrew’s sarcastic nature gave way to reveal a spirit impassioned by the mountains; and Zac’s humble character could not hide his insatiable appetite for the alpine. Our tenacious teammate Jimmy, a Marine Corps veteran and the embodiment of the word ‘outspoken’, rounded out our unlikely team.

Two years later, I found myself squished inside a small bush plane, flying over the Alaskan Wilderness with Jimmy, Andrew, and Zac. Our young Colorado team was affectionately named “Double Bag Your Jelly”. Our unique title was derived from a mistake made on a training expedition to the Emmons-Winthrop route on Mt. Rainier. Andrew left a jar of jelly inside his checked luggage which, to our dismay, broke and covered the entire contents of the duffle with sticky grape residue, climbing gear included. Surprisingly, the jelly incident was the only thing to go wrong on our first expedition as a team; we left the Cascades with a successful late-season summit and an unexpected installation of confidence.

L>R: Andrew, Zac, Jimmy, Anika. Our team before our flight onto the Kahiltna Glacier.

May 24th, 2019. We arrived at Kahiltna Base Camp in the heat of the day, our gear and food (distributed between a pack and sled) weighing in at about 120lbs per person. Although safer to travel the lower glacier by night (in colder temperatures), we wanted to push on as high as we could before getting hit by the forecasted storm the next day. To uphold a tradition passed on by our mentor Rodney, we each took a shot of whiskey before setting off across the glacier.

Our first full view of Denali from 7,500’.The summit sits at 20,310’.

In the Athabaskan language, Denali means “High One”. Its summit reaches far above the clouds, and when viewed from afar it even steals attention from its much more technically formidable neighbors. Skinning across the lower glacier was slow and hot, but I had never been so captivated by a landscape. The sound of seracs collapsing and Mt. Crossen’s rocky north face crumbling away created a cacophony around us.

The forecasted storm caught us just as we reached our second camp at 11,000ft. It held us - and most other teams on the mountain - camp-bound for two days. We used this time to rest and practice the art of pooping in a “clean mountain can” (i.e. plastic bucket).

When the storm finally cleared, we found ourselves perched perfectly above the cloud ceiling, as if on an island of snow overlooking a sea of clouds.

We double carried our gear to a cache near 13,500’ and skied back down to 11,000’, making our first ski turns on the mountain. We reached our high camp at 14,000’ the next day. From here we planned to make our pushes for the summit. I stayed behind on the first acclimatization run to 16,000’, as I had come down with a sinus illness and was feverish, weak, and could not stop coughing. The next day however, we climbed as a team up the standard West Buttress route for Denali Pass (18,200’). At the Autobahn (a steep section below Denali Pass) we found ourselves stuck behind a team moving much slower than us. Unable to pass safely, we followed behind the team slowly until we found ourselves facing a traffic jam with descending climbers. We chose to turn around and descend back to 14,000.

Our team waiting to descend at a bottleneck near Washburn’s Thumb. We decided to rappel around the ascending teams to alleviate traffic and waiting.

Back at camp we were all quiet. The reality of Denali’s West Buttress popularity and traffic jams was now apparent. We knew there would be other climbers on our route, but had underestimated the lines of people and the resulting traffic at bottlenecks. What was once wilderness and solitude was now a carnival of climbers, eagerly waiting in line for their turn to climb a 7th summit. And now I realized we were only contributing to the problem… unless we traveled at night.

In an effort to avoid all other climbers on the mountain and dangerous traffic jams, we decided to change our plans for a summit push. First, we would leave in the early afternoon in an effort to reach the summit in the middle of the night, when most other teams were sleeping. Second, we decided to attempt a slightly different route, the Rescue Gully, a steep couloir which ascends from 14,000 to 17,000 feet and skips the headwall and ridge traverse which were proven bottlenecks. We knew it would be much colder to summit at night, so we chose to leave our skis behind and climb in our warmer double boots.

Anika in the Rescue Gully. We swapped leads breaking trail up the deep couloir. A line of 36 other climbers was on the headwall across the valley. No other climbers were on our route.

Around 11:00pm, at ~19,000 feet, Jimmy decided to turn around as his toes had become numb, an issue precipitated by a previous non-freezing cold injury he developed while in the military. Zac, Andrew and I continued up the mountain into the night until Zac, who could not eat food and was becoming increasingly cold and out of energy, decided to turn around just below Pig Hill (~19,600’). Andrew and I pushed on and finally reached the summit at 2:00am on June 5th. The temperature was negative 35 degrees F, and negative 50 degrees F with windchill. We were all alone. My happy tears froze upon my cheeks. We knelt beside the summit plaque for about 10 minutes before heading down on the long, cold descent.

The summit photo just before my phone froze and died. Anika in green, Andrew in red.

After two days of rest, Zac returned for a solo climb of the upper West Rib and Orient Express. He reached the summit at 9:55pm on June 8th and skied down from the summit.

Zac on the summit after impressive solo ascent. This time he claims he ate more food.

We all skied the slopes surrounding our high camp for the next week, enjoying fresh powder in the couloirs above 14,000’. We ate good food, told stories, and enjoyed our final days of mountain paradise.