Peter Stanley Mt. McKinley

It's now 10:00 a.m. on Sunday. Several of the ridges on McKinley have become very clear in this light. I got some really good pictures which show the Cassin and the West Rib and one just beyond the Cassin that's very clear and that should be apparent in some photographs I've taken... one in particular with Sam in the foreground. Eric has decided that we will break to double load mode of transportation... full sleds only for a couple of hours with light packs, return and spend the night in our tents, having left the sleds, just taking pack loads. The wind seems to be picking up a little bit... and incredible avalanche that we can see right now (audible sound of avalanche).

(At Camp II, 7,900 ft.) It's now 9:38 a.m. on the first of July. That was an avalanche we were watching yesterday. After we got through packing up our gear, we loaded everything that was in our packs, practically, plus all the food and headed up over two fairly steep ascents pulling a sled... steep for sled pulling anyway... and carrying loaded packs. It took us, I would guess, two and a half hours or three hours of hauling. We dug a deep hole and buried everything making a cache and put wands on top of it after covering the gear with snow. A lot of stuff bags, it seemed to me, were covered with that snow and I was concerned that if it rained it might get them wet. Eric didn't think that was too likely. Anyway, we headed on down. It took us 38 minutes on snowshoes. We had gone out on snowshoes and we came back on snowshoes... 38 minutes on snowshoes to make it back to camp coming downhill using ski poles and snowshoes and lightly loaded packs with the sleds stuffed down inside the packs. The sun was as bright as it could be, and I pulled the sleeves up on my polypro lightweight undershirt with a turtleneck so that I'd get some sun on my arms... also it was hot. The sun was really beating down on us going up and I pulled the sleeves down when I got to the top. So I guess I have two and a half hours of sun on my arms, and they feel like they are fried. The interesting thing is that they were burned as much from the bottom as they were from the top. The sun on this snow reflects up almost as brightly as it shines down. A climber passing the other day said that the place he had been burned the worst was on the inside of his earlobes! My nose has begun to peel... the smile mark on the left hand side of my face is probably the worst burned of all... it's pretty puffy, and I've had some blisters on my lips. In any event yesterday we got off at 6:00 or 7:00 and got back to camp certainly by noon. We watched it get colder and colder, and it looks like we're going to have a good packing day today to take the rest of the gear up... which isn't very much... we don't have much to take up, but as you can hear from listening it's raining, and this is the Alaska that I remember. This reminds me of the eleven days on the ridge (in '72) when it rained solidly and Christopher and Virginia and I were in our tent listening to a tape recorder and singing "Bobbie McGee" and Tom and Judy Harvey and Steve and Chris Mahay... everyone was suffering like mad... but we made it through. So here we are in Camp II at 7,900 feet. We stashed our gear at 9,400 feet... and I expect Camp III will be higher than the cache. We want to get up and around the corner up there. Camp I, I believe, was at 6,860... or something like that. I will double check that for the record. I've discovered a method of taking a picture through the lens of my goggles which produces an interesting effect. It certainly brings out the sky versus the clouds more brilliantly... to the eye it does... I don't know how it's going to work on film. I've been reading "To Have and Have Not" by Ernest Hemingway. We've torn it up into pieces so that each person can read it. Matthew is reading it. I've read the first 74 pages and finished my first tear section, so I've got to get up and go get another section from Matthew. Sam and I have had two games of chess. He won number one and I won number two. We are tied in the great chess tournament of the McKinley expedition. I've been taking careful care of the blisters on my feet. I've got them on both ankle bones on my right ankle and the left heel and they are healing up well. By and large I've felt really good. I think the thing that's been the key to my feeling better made a very wise decision three nights ago to take that sleeping pill. Somehow I had all this nervous energy and I just couldn't get to sleep. It's like battle fatigue... I think it was really a wise decision.

Go back to Peter Stanley