The Summit Ridge of Denali has become a familiar place for Tejas
For most of its time in the spotlight, from early sightings through early climbing, until well into the 2000s, the tallest mountain in North America was called Mount McKinley. Although for decades Alaskans preferred the name Denali, the native description of the 20,310-foot peak, the English name of McKinley stuck.
Mount McKinley was named after President William McKinley by a back-country prospector in 1896, and was formally adopted as the name in 1917 when Mount McKinley National Park was created by the National Park Service. It was an honorific since McKinley never went near Alaska and certainly had no history with the mountain. Over the century following his death, the Congressmen who represented his Ohio district zealously guarded this portion of his legacy. Periodically, there would be stronger movements to rename the peak Denali. Ebbing and flowing over time, they never carried the necessary weight to lead to a change.
In Alaska, one was just as likely to hear usage of Denali as McKinley, even though the designation was unofficial. The meaning of Denali appealed to all: “The Great One” or “The High One.”
During the summer of 2015, President Barack Obama wielded the executive authority of the White House to change the official name of the admired mountain to Denali. For most, it was surprise news, and in Alaska, it was definitely welcome news. The announcement came on the eve of the president’s visit to Alaska.
In recent years, about 1,200 people annually attempt to climb Denali with a success rate of about fifty percent. An estimated 32,000 climbers have tried to reach the top and about 100 have died trying.
Vern Tejas owns the distinction of being the first person to make a successful solo climb of Denali in winter. He also has the most ascents with fifty-seven.
After first viewing Denali (as he has always called it) before his twentieth birthday and being awed by the peak, the mountain became a huge part of his life and only rarely has a May-to-July climbing season passed without his making a visit to the summit.
When I first climbed and began guiding on Denali, I had no idea it was going to be my career. The solo winter ascent opened up opportunities, and then the climbing world became fascinated by the Seven Summits. To climb the Seven Summits, you must climb Denali. So I became a guide in demand. I knew the mountain, and I got to know it better and better from repeat ascents.
The weather can be anything on Denali. You can run into minus-forty temperatures, high winds, and terrific storms, but I also believe climate change is altering the picture. If you are up there often enough, you are still going to get whacked some of the time. The main climbing season up the West Buttress route, the one where we guide our climbers, is primarily May to July, with some starts in April. I wonder if we will be climbing in March if it keeps warming up.
The West Buttress route was established by Brad Washburn in 1951. He was a brilliant aerial photographer, and he knew it was actually the best and easiest route to the top even though when he went to climb it that year, everyone said it was impossible and he was going to die trying.
It actually should be called the Washburn Route. He defied the impossible and gave us a great route. If he had not, a lot fewer people would have made the summit, and a lot more people would have gotten hurt trying.
The last couple of years, I have not always worn my warmest clothing to go to the summit. I haven’t worn a down suit on top for several years. I still have it with me. I wear it sitting around camps. I just wear finger gloves, not my warmest mittens. I wear two shirts and a jacket, but not the down suit to climb in because it is too warm. Minus-forty is head-scratching cold, and I remember a Summer Solstice Day, June 21, some thirty years ago when it was that cold. But that has not happened recently.
Such change is noticeable in all of these places where I climb. The snow is melting more, exposing rocks, and in some cases taking down big hanging glaciers. It is like that on Denali, in the Himalayas, on the Matterhorn. Things are falling apart. Places that are only held together by ice are melting and freeing rocks. They can fall on you. People are getting killed by these circumstances. The glaciers on top of Kilimanjaro melting away might have only twenty years before they are gone. It still snows near the top, but it goes away in a day. It’s not permanent. In South America, it’s the same thing. Where there used to be ice fields, there are pocket glaciers here and there.
In Indonesia, where climbers go for Carstensz Pyramid, the snow melt is so extreme that it’s changing the heights of the triple-summit peak. The snow is melting so fast on top that people are no longer sure which one is the second-highest peak and which one is the third.
The world is warming up. I don’t care if it’s manmade or God-made. If you don’t get out of the way, you can get hurt. The boom in climbing has continued since 1996, although I don’t know for how much longer. But even on Denali and Everest, fewer people are getting frostbitten, getting hypothermia, or freezing to death.
In my early days on Denali, one of my trademarks was a big, bushy beard. I started growing it in high school and it made me recognizable. I finally had to shave it because of a job where I had to wear an air mask. Then I was working on oil platforms, and hydrogen sulfide was a potential threat so nobody was supposed to grow one. I had to cut it off so my mask would be air tight. It took me several days to get used to not having it. My first reaction was that I didn’t like being told what to do. But some gray was coming in, and somebody said I looked ten years younger. I still shave my head. I’ve been doing that for a long time. Sometimes people think I’m on medicine for cancer and lost my hair. Ultimately, I’d rather look crazy than old, so I’ve kept shaving. It worked with girls, at least for a while. Now I’m old and crazy.
Early in my days on Denali, I was on a climb of the Northwest Buttress with three other guys. One turned back and was accompanied by his friend. Two of us continued to the top. We climbed west of the top of the Kahiltna Glacier, dropped over the pass, and crossed the Peters Glacier to the right-hand side of the Wickersham Wall. The Wickersham Wall was the site I fell in love with when I first saw Denali, so I had come full circle to be climbing on it. Others, including Heinrich Harrer, had made the first ascent of the Northwest Buttress route, but we went to the true South Summit. I’m very proud of that first full ascent. A lot of people don’t know it ever happened, or care, but it is important to me.
At base camp, I ran into a strong climber named Marty Schmidt, and although it was not planned, he asked if I wanted to climb the Cassin Ridge. We had extra food and fuel because some people had left the mountain. I was getting ready to fly out and was supposed to rendezvous with my girlfriend of the time. Although she was beautiful, he talked me into it. I confess he did not have to twist my arm too hard. The Cassin is a phenomenal climb, and I was acclimated. We skied over to the Northeast Fork, the area is sometimes called the Valley of Death because so many people have been buried in avalanches there and never found. There are hanging glaciers on both sides, and when they calve, they tend to fill the whole valley.
One day later, I was putting a belay stance into the seventy-degree slope of the Japanese gully. I chopped a ledge for my feet to stand on and was almost finished placing an ice screw, which I would then clip into, when the ledge broke away. The one screw I had placed halfway up the pitch actually arrested my fall. When my vision finally cleared, I was hanging upside down looking at Marty. He was five feet away, frantically turning in a screw. Apparently he had pulled his belay anchor anticipating I was just about off belay. Then I fell. That jump of the gun could have killed us both if that one remaining screw I was dangling from had popped when I dropped. Chastened, we climbed on.
We hauled ourselves up and bivouacked that night. Marty took the outside and I lay on the inside of a ledge about three feet wide. Don’t roll over in your sleep and don’t nudge your buddy. Above that, it was a series of mixed rock and ice, but I was still in bunny boots from the other climb and they are quite useless for technical climbing. They were warm, though. However, being made out of rubber, they offered no support. You can’t lean your lower leg forward to rest on the cuff of the boot, so you hold your weight with your calf muscles.
I was putting all of my weight, including the pack on my back, on my calves, and they were starting to burn. Marty wanted to do a ninety-degree pitch. It was dead vertical. The snow had melted on the rocks and run down, turning things into a vertical waterfall. Marty wanted pictures. I said I would take them, but he had to lead because I definitely couldn’t while wearing bunny boots. He pulled off the climbing moves and belayed me up with a rope.
My legs were on fire before I got up to him, ever thankful for the belay. The beauty of following is safety. It’s not safe for the leader. That’s the challenge of leading. If something goes wrong and you fall, you’re going to see God in the process. It’s going to be exciting. I was on a snug rope, so if I fell it would only be like five feet. I did not fall, but boy, my calves were screaming at me.
I took the camera out, shot a picture, and put it back inside my jacket to keep it warm, and did it again. Though I took a mess of photos of Marty on the crux, they were rather disappointing. Putting the cold camera in my warm jacket was a bad idea. Condensation never rests.
In those days, there was a hanging glacier on the Cassin. I was leading across it when I saw this oak dowel sticking up out of the blue ice. Italian Riccardo Cassin and his partners made the first ascent of the Cassin Ridge (definitely a difficult route) in 1961. It was amazing to think they may have placed this archaic anchor. I thought it had been there for thirty-something years. However, it was free protection, so I clipped my rope to it as I climbed past. No more than two steps later one of my boots squirmed out of the crampon. Bunny boots are so flexible that they are known to do that. Maybe that is what happened to Naomi on Denali Pass. It was quite spooky, but there was this old dowel I could rely on to help put my crampon back on. Grazie, Riccardo.
We continued our climb and eventually topped out. It was really blowing at the top of the ridge. All we could do was make camp. Over the next few days, we got three or four feet of snow. The wind whipped at us. Marty had chosen a camping place in the shadow of a serac that helped protect us. It was just the right angle so our tent did not get buried. Meanwhile, Marty was having trouble with a frostbitten toe that was really blistered up. We really needed to go down, but we were so close to the summit. It was only about forty-five minutes away. We were in good shape with little gear, so we took a shot at it. But we got hammered by the wind and turned back. On the fourth day, it was quiet. We ran up and tagged the summit. We were really booking it. Then we ran back to our camp, scooped up our stuff and started down.
The storm had been so fierce that no one else was on the upper mountain. There was no trail. We had to plow our own path. We changed our route over to Fantasy Ridge so we didn’t start an avalanche. We were going down, so we had gravity on our side. But there was deep snow. It was up to our waists and we had big packs on. We descended all of the way to 15,000 feet, to the bottom of the head wall with its fixed ropes, before we saw anyone else headed up. It was only then that I started thinking maybe we wouldn’t get caught and die in an avalanche. I got home about a week-and-a-half late for my date with my girlfriend.
A little later, after she started to talk to me again, Marty, our girlfriends, and I went down to the Delaney Park Strip in downtown Anchorage for a kite day. We were just laying around on the grass watching all of the kites in the air. This little boy, about seven years old, was guiding his kite. He kept backing up without looking anywhere but the sky—you could not have choreographed this better—he backed up and stepped right on Marty’s bad toe really hard. Marty screamed. The frostbite blister exploded. There was pus and blood everywhere. If his girlfriend wasn’t there, I think Marty would have throttled the kid. He was in excruciating pain, but he lived through it and kept all his toes. The kid was probably scarred for life.
One year, I decided I wanted to see if I could do a speed ascent of Denali on my own. Someone had set a record. They did it round-trip from the Kahiltna Glacier to the top and back in around twenty-three hours, with about fifteen hours, twenty minutes of it spent going up. I just wanted to see if I could do it faster. Alex Lowe had been on pace to break it once, but he stopped to carry an injured climber down, and that slowed him.
The first time I tried it, I got to the top in fifteen hours, forty minutes, about twenty minutes behind the record. I passed some National Park Service rangers when I was running, and they seemed a little resentful that I was flying past them. They wanted to know what I was doing and I did not want to stop for a chat. I was trying to make time. They change the rules about climbing permits all of the time, and I made sure I was legal and acquired a permit for this solo.
However, on the way down, a snowstorm came in and I could barely find the 14,200-foot camp. By then, I was worried about avalanches because so much new snow had come down. I had to go over to the ranger tent and ask, “Uh, you guys got a spare sleeping bag?” Fortunately, they were very understanding. Another guided group had some extra food. My original goal had been to sled all of the way down to base camp. Now it was just to survive. It never pays to get too smug in the mountains.
I tried it another time with a buddy from Hypoxico, the makers of special tents you can sleep in for altitude training. You can set it up at home, or in a hotel room while you’re traveling, and it will deprive you of oxygen so that you are training in thinner air while you are sleeping at sea level. My friend Brian lived in New York City and I was impressed how strong he was at altitude. You breathe more nitrogen and the oxygen is reduced in those tents. There is a canopy over it and a hose running inside. We tried speed climbs twice and both times we had issues that interfered with going fast. The second time we skied down from 14,000 feet. We just ripped it and had a great time. Best run of my life. The snow was perfect. But my speed ascent attempts never really paid off. Eventually, the record got faster and faster, beyond anything I could have come close to, and I was thinking that yes, eventually you do slow down when you get older. Though none of my speed attempts broke records, I learned I could cover the thirteen miles and 13,000 feet pretty fast. It did let me know what I was capable of doing.
Although the main guiding season on the West Buttress is pretty much May through July, given my winter ascent and guiding trips on the edges of the season, I have been on Denali eight different months of the year. I’ve never been there in October, November, December, or January. I’ve been there in September, but only leaving the mountain. Mostly, the severe weather dictates you not be there in the deep winter months. And you don’t want to climb later in the summer when twenty-four hours of daylight has been beating down and causing melting. Snow bridges melt, crevasses open up, seracs slump and fall. The snow gets saturated with water and doesn’t hold together well. Being there in August was doubtful, but lately, August weather has moved into July. July has warmed up. Just a couple of years ago, it was so warm in June we had people on the climb dropping into holes.
There are also more rocks falling down, especially in the Windy Corner area. A couple of climbs ago, we were at 14,200 feet, and a group was coming behind us. We heard some noise and looked down the ridge. It seemed as if a bunch of big mining trucks had dumped a load of rocks down the face; there were tons of rock. I got on a satellite phone and we alerted the Park Service about what happened. Rangers took a helicopter up to look at the situation. Things that had been in a deep freeze for 10,000 years were thawing. A few years earlier, rock just let loose and killed a couple of guys at Windy Corner.
From a distance, you can also see water on top of the glaciers, blue water forming lakes or ponds. For a while, they were at 5,000 feet. Now they are at 6,500 feet. More recently I have seen them up past Mount Francis. That’s another half-mile higher. I’ve been going there for thirty-nine years, so I can see changes. I see rocks fall. I see the water ponds moving higher on the glaciers. In 1989, when I went to the top of Denali as part of a measuring program for Dr. Bradford Washburn, we stuck a pole on the summit as a benchmark. I always thought someone would steal it, but no one did. For years it was buried in snow, but for the last couple of years, it’s been sticking out. More than a foot of snow has disappeared. At 17,200 feet, there’s more rock exposed. There’s less snow higher on Denali.
Since I have seniority, I can pick and choose when I want to guide on Denali. For a long time my sweet spot was June. I wanted to be up there for the Summer Solstice on the longest day of the year. We had lots of sun and it felt good. But over the last ten years, it has been getting warmer and warmer in June. When it was minus-forty in June, you didn’t see melting snow bridges.
My definition of warmer is minus-twenty. I do wear a lighter wardrobe. If you are moving, you are not going to be cold. You don’t want to hang out at the summit for an hour dressed lighter at minus-twenty. You will get cold. In my lifetime, that temperature difference is a huge amount of change. Glaciologists have said we are going to see more crevasses open up on the Kahiltna Glacier. It will no longer be just a straight ski hill. There is one crevasse there I used to see periodically over the years. Now it’s open every year and is bigger. I worry about it because it could actually swallow a guy pulling a supply sled.
This does not mean climbing on Denali is going to come to an end. Climbers adapt. If there is a wide crevasse, they will just put a ladder across it. There will be more danger from falling rock. Also, if the snow cover has melted, it will be tougher to dig in and make a snow shelter in a storm. More snow bridges will melt during the earlier part of the season. Climbers will take up the challenge and find a way to get through it all. But worldwide, what are we doing about it? We are the cause of it. I don’t care what the politicians say. This is happening all over the world.
I have seen photographs that compare the same places on terrain between fifty and seventy-five years ago and the present. You can see the stark changes. Hundreds of feet of ice fields have disappeared in a generation. What happens when there is no more water coming out of the Himalayas? There are three billion people who count on that to water their crops and to drink. The ocean waters are rising, and there is going to be a collision in the middle. We have to wake up as a species and realize we are changing the planet. We’re going to be overwhelmed by the lack of water where we need it, and a profusion of water where we don’t want it. There will be a sandwich between drought and flooding. That’s not a good combination. We’ve got to figure out something. Hopefully, the light goes on. We have changed the world so much, that now we have to change.
Denali can still be a great adventure for people. There are so many known quantities in the world. You go to the right school, get the right job, punch the clock, get your paycheck, watch your TV. In the mountains, so many things are weather-dependent. I think sailors face some of the same factors of not being in control, of facing unpredictable weather conditions. The environment dictates if you have success on whatever mission you undertake. When you are no longer in control is when the adventure begins. Things happen that you didn’t count on. I cannot make dreams come true, but I can help. I am a facilitator. I can make it more fun, and I can help take some of the risk out of the adventure. I promote the camaraderie, tell the jokes, play the harmonica, and make sure you get to enjoy the vistas. I try to settle the soul down a little bit.
In my earlier days on Denali, I played the fiddle. Marty Raney and I made music together. We put together a CD called Strum It from the Summit. That was great fun. We are one of the finest glacier bands in the world if you are planning a mountain wedding.
Many people are basically risk adverse, but they still want to do things. Denali is the big mountain with the reputation, but it is actually more difficult to climb Mount Foraker and Mount Hunter in the Alaska Range. Foraker stands 17,400 feet high. Its native name is Sultana, and it is referred to as Denali’s wife. Hunter is smaller yet, but very demanding at 14,573 feet. Up close, they both look forbidding to a climber. Some climbers take a look at them and go, “Maybe I’ll get back on the plane.” Really. I’ve seen it happen on three occasions. It’s intimidating. I saw a soloist turn back right away saying, “I’m in way over my head. There’s too much risk here for me to be comfortable.” There’s nothing like the reality of a mile-and-a-half vertical mountain towering over your head to put things in perspective. All of a sudden, you seem really, really, really small.
Why go to the mountains? I go for the sheer joy of it; that’s what keeps me going back. There’s a delicate balance between risk and reward, and that determines how you choose to live your life.
You can say Denali is a sort of my specialty because I have climbed it more than anyone else. Trips are planned for three weeks, but you can adjust a little. When we are flown into the Kahiltna Glacier, we are at 7,200 feet. Then we camp at 8,200, 9,500, 11,200, 14,200, 17,200, and then at Denali Pass at 18,200 feet. The first day, I typically don’t take the group all the way to 8,200. I advance to a half camp, about three miles, to 7,800, because otherwise it would be five miles and the climbers would be hurting. That way their bodies are not overwhelmed by the altitude right away. I buy an extra day of acclimating. I do a skill review. I go over rope knots, anchors, and pulley systems. We learn how to place anchors, set up tents, take down tents, demonstrate how to pack a sled and set it up so it is efficient and won’t flip over. We’ve got a day to do all kinds of things. From Half Camp to Camp I at 8,200 feet, it’s a short and easy haul.
My Camp II is higher, at 9,500 or so because it is less likely to be hit by storms than the regular Camp II. I’d also rather have my group camp away from a large number of people. It helps me focus on my team. We also get one additional day of acclimating. We spend two days at 11,200. Once you are above 10,200, you are no longer on the Kahiltna Glacier and have turned onto the West Buttress. The spot at 13,500 would be a great place to camp, except that is Windy Corner, the windiest place on the mountain. A big jump day is between 11,200 and 14,200, a 3,000-foot elevation gain. The area at 14,200 is a big camping area and it is flat. It is usually protected, but on a 2016 trip we had eighty miles per hour winds through there. That’s the biggest camp. There are rangers and a weather station, plus a heliport. People hang there. Once, I think an Air Force team was there for eleven days because of storms. That is way, way too long. Below 14,200 is the lower mountain. Above it, all of the difficulties loom. That camp is right about as high as the other tall mountains in the rest of the United States.
Spots above there include the Autobahn, the Football Field, which I take credit for naming some thirty years ago, and Washburn’s Thumb. Pig Hill is the last place before you get onto the summit ridge. Guide Nick Parker called it that. That’s because it is such a pig to get up. You just suck it up. Most people go for the summit from the 17,200-foot high camp. Going up from 14,200, gaining 6,000 feet in one day, is just too much for most climbers. The old-style way of trying for the summit was to get up at 3 a.m. and go for it. Not me. My groups start at 10 a.m. now. The sun is up, and it is not as cold.
There is more room at the summit than on many mountains. It’s like a group of rooftops put together. It is not a steep angle. You can take off the ropes and walk around, although you’ve got to stay away from the South Face. You can walk twenty or thirty feet in most directions. Long ago, I installed a brass disc benchmark that reads “U.S. Geological Survey.” It doesn’t say it is the tallest point in North America. There is no elevation number on it, either. At the time, the height was referred to as 20,320 feet, but it has been changed to 20,310. The top of the mountain is right where it has always been. At one point people left mementoes at the top. Dolls, trinkets, belt buckles, and stuff like that piled up at the summit. Climbers did the same thing at the tops of other mountains. But I think the Park Service cleaned it all out on Denali. And I think somebody does that on other mountains, too. There used to be a trip log on Vinson and when I guided a group up there I put everybody’s name in it. Somebody decided to take personal responsibility to remove the historic “trash.” Something was lost and something was gained. There are ashes on summits, too. I have taken people’s ashes to mountain tops.
I would like to spend more time on Denali’s summit, although often it is a fifteen-minute reward for a three-week trip. But it can also be freezing and other groups might be edging their way in. I’d like to be able to hang out—it always feels like too short of a stay—but you have to move on.
The most dangerous part of the climb is often the descent because you are exhausted. People move a little faster and they get sloppy and forget to breathe. If your boot squirms out of your crampon, that can present a problem, especially on a downward slope. You can fall a thousand feet off the Autobahn. You can usually survive frostbite, but not a fall like that. We don’t take as many breaks on the way down. You are trying to get to lower altitude and avoid any brewing storms.
I do take a break before descending the Autobahn because that is the place most likely for people to slip. I make them eat and drink. Then I slow things down and give a lecture about self-arrest use of ice axes. I want people fully energized, not gasping for air. We remind our climbers that a lot of people have died there. We clip into fixed ropes for safety. Typically, I prefer moving quickly on the descent, but for that part it’s worth dialing it back.
Sometimes at the very end of the descent back to base camp, hauling two sleds, I am pulling 100 pounds. You traverse a short uphill stretch, Heartbreak Hill. In 2016, I was pulling hard and I was tired. I told myself I was getting old because I was really feeling it. But I have been saying that since my twenties. I’m not going to admit my age may finally be catching up to me. But man, I could never remember working so hard up that hill. Turned out when I flipped over one sled, there was a rope caught underneath it. I was pulling the sled with the brake on. It was like pulling a truck all the way up the final hill.
Decades ago, there was a scientific expedition studying cosmic rays, and they needed lead bricks as filters. Nobody in their right mind is going to carry lead bricks up Denali. So they dropped them by parachute. On one of my climbs at 18,200 feet, I saw a bright outline of cloth under the snow. The nylon parachute was so frayed that it broke apart in my hands. Beneath it was a cache of lead bricks. I thought it was nuts. There were some tools there like screwdrivers and saws as well. The cache may have been dropped in 1932, or in 1947, on one of Brad’s climbs. I think it was from the 1932 expedition because those guys died lower on the mountain on their climb and never made it to the bricks. I thought one brick weighed twenty pounds, but one guy in our group wanted one for a souvenir and put it in his pack. We were making a long traverse of the mountain. Days later, we were cutting across the mushy tundra, and he couldn’t carry it anymore. Somewhere out there on the tundra near the Muldrow Glacier is a lead brick lost to history.
About eleven years later, I was on another climb where some guys from Alaska Pacific University were doing some altitude measuring. While we were up there, I asked if they wanted to see a scientific cache and I took them to the bricks and tools. I buried a saw in the area just in case some day I needed one to cut snow blocks in a storm up there. One of the guys went, “A lead brick. Cool. I’m going to keep it.” I said not to do it and definitely not to leave it along the way. At least we were not on a traverse, so our descent was going to be much shorter. “I’ll carry it all of the way,” he promised. “I’ve got it covered.” A few days later, I was paragliding off the edge at 17,200 feet, and they were to carry my pack down since I couldn’t fly with it. Flying is why I went. They agreed to carry my stuff if I flew. I did fly and then was way below them waiting. And waiting. Hours passed. I was starting to get cold and I was wondering why it was taking them so long to pack up and get down to 14,200. I started walking back up to meet them. I went up 500 feet. Nothing.
I kept going. Finally I was almost at 17,000 feet when I met them. They said they made breakfast and then had crampon problems so they were delayed. But now, as long as I was there I could help carry stuff down, they said, so I inherited a sled to lower down. As soon as we started going I couldn’t believe how heavy it was. I was fighting with it all of the way. They were moving faster than me. The sled was practically pulling me over. They got thirty minutes ahead of me. I clipped the sled to the fixed line thinking I could catch up fast on the steep downhill. I let it go and the sled zipped down to the next anchor and blew up. Stuff flew all out of the sled over the place. There was a down snowsuit and I watched it roll down the hill like a medicine ball. It kept right on going like a pool ball into the corner pocket of a crevasse.
There was crap all over the mountain. The guys ahead of me didn’t even notice. I was having a bitch of a time. They were going along, dum dee dum. “Hey, I could use a little help up here, boys.” They had to see me. I was picking up parts, tent poles, the food bags. I was going along and saw this hole in the snow. I stuck my hand into it and it was that damned lead brick. That’s what unbalanced the sled and tore it apart. The contents vomited themselves all over the snow. I was pissed off. I picked up everything, including the lead brick, and repacked the sled. When I got down the next camp, I let them have it. I also made the lead brick guy go back up with me, go into the crevasse and fish out the down suit. And I made that guy carry the brick the rest of the way.
When we got down, the calculations were studied. We revealed the new height of Denali over dinner. Brad Washburn was there and very pleased to hear our measurements were so close to what he calculated in the 1940s. The brick guy whipped it out asked Brad to autograph it.
At this stage of my guiding career, I do one trip a year on Denali. That is plenty. Of nine climbers on a recent trip, five of them had requested me personally as their guide. They either knew me or my reputation. Two of the guys signed up with me specifically because they knew I would be slow and deliberate on the slopes. They felt that was the approach they needed. The other four climbers, I suspect, were just plain lucky.
I have had people who really study the situation and want to invest in hiring the best guide for Denali. They researched it and chose me. I’m honored they thought that way. Somewhere along the way, I became determined to become the best high-altitude mountain guide. I’m pretty close to where I want to be. I’ve done each of the Seven Summits at least ten times, most of them many times more, and no one else is really in that category. It’s a self-defined niche for me. I’m happy with it. I want to be known as a quality guide who can get you where you want to go and have fun doing it.