Peter Stanley Mt. McKinley

It's now 5:00 in the afternoon on July 3rd. I'm back at Camp III and I'm in the tent... and you can hear the snow/rain coming down. Eric was ambivalent about our taking off given the way the weather is, and we finally ended up leaving at 12:15 p.m.... correction, 12:45. We wore crampons... were packing personal gear plus food that could be stashed up higher, and I was pulling a sled with a couple gallons of fuel on it. We used crampons going up the initial pitch, which is very steep, and as we climbed the wind got stronger and the snow blew harder. We reached the top of the pitch in about an hour, I guess, maybe a little bit less than that. We finally turned right and headed up another pitch ending up caching our gear under a massive granite boulder. It looked like igneous rock... first piece of rock I've gotten close to on this mountain. The snow was really blowing... we were in blizzard conditions. The temperature was maybe 20-25, not very cold... winds maybe 30-35 miles an hour. The incredible thing about this kind of mountaineering is that weather can change so extremely rapidly. You can be baking in the sun one minute and be hit by a blowing, snowing blizzard twenty minutes later. In any event, as we were dumping the stuff in the cache Eric really wanted to get out of there. He wanted to get down. We were a thousand feet above our camp which we figure now is at 11,200 feet, so we were about 12,200 at the cache. We headed down on snowshoes. I think it took us 2 1/2 to 3 hours to get up there. We went on snowshoes to the last pitch... which was the first pitch going up and on which we had used crampons... and again, we used crampons going down. Eric commented that this is one of the most problematical expeditions he has been on from a weather standpoint. We have certainly had a terrific variety. We have had conditions that threaten hypothermia, but we haven't had anything where we have been in severe danger of frostbite... on McKinley, anyway. I'm a little concerned having awakened this morning with a headache and I've had one most of the day. Eric has asked me to keep him apprised of that because that could indicate... well, he thinks that's a really important symptom of altitude sickness. If you get over 'em that means you're acclimatizing. If you don't, you're not. He says it's not a good idea to take bad headaches higher.

(At Camp III) It's now the fourth of July... an absolutely gorgeous, crystal... not crystal clear but just a gorgeous morning. I'm standing over here by the "relief" station, as we shall term it. We moved our tents after we got back. We did not, however, move the relief station, and I realize that the reason that the tents were moved... or rather, Larry's and Eric's tents... was because the tents had been pitched directly under an absolutely incredible avalanche wall, and I'm standing under it right now looking up at it. I must be looking up at a... I would guess a seventy degree angle at a snow bank that could come tearing down at me. Except I don't think it will because it's cold this morning. It's 14 according to Larry's thermometer and that's been reading high. It read 20 yesterday morning. And with the temperature low I don't think the wall's going to go... and with the sun not on the wall. But if it did go I would have to run... very fast! The sun is over the West Buttress which is clearly visible here. I'm looking now at Stuart and Matthew's incredible snow cave that they built, which has been our place of eating for the last two days. The tents were moved yesterday by Eric and Jeff. Also Larry moved his tent. Sam and I had pitched ours in a place that was safe. It looks like it's going to be a gorgeous day. I have the feeling that at the end of this day we're all going to know what to be tired is because our current plan is to go given good weather, which it seems to me we have, from 11 to 14 thousand and sleep at 14 picking up our gear cached yesterday at twelve. From an altitude acclimatization consideration we will be violating the rule of "climb high, sleep low". We'll be going to 14 and sleeping at 14. Normally, when you carry a load up you carry to the higher altitude and then sleep at the lower altitude. But I feel fine this morning. I don't have any headache... everything seems to be in great shape so I would presume that I am acclimatizing well.

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