Peter Stanley Mt. McKinley

[At Camp IV, 13,500 ft.] It's now July 5th. Last night the sun disappeared behind a corner of the mountain at 8:24 p.m. and within a half an hour the temperature had dropped certainly 30 degrees. It was "shirtsleeve" or "no-shirt-at-all" warm when the sun was shining on us, and then when I got up at 3:00 a.m. I'd estimate that the temperature was around zero. Larry's thermometer, which was inside his pack, registered 4 during the night, but I don't think it got down as low as the actual temperature was. So once again we have another example of how the temperature... weather conditions can be extraordinarily extreme from one minute to the next. When I woke up at 3:00 a.m. I had a throbbing headache... got up... looked at Foraker, took a picture of it... tried to do some heavy duty hyperventilating, although I am not persuaded that that necessarily does much good. I think the thing that helps the most is just spending time. This morning we headed down with empty packs and sleds to the 12,200 foot level where we had a lot of gear stashed [the cache beneath the granite boulder]. It took us one hour to get down there and pack up our stuff and two hours to pack our way back up. We are planning to lie low for two, or three, or four hours maybe, and have dinner and then pack it up to 14,000 feet with a supply of stuff and then come back down here and spend the night. Last night Sam commented that during that final traverse into camp (IV) just above Windy Corner he was really at the point where he was counting steps. He was trying to figure out if he could make the next forty or the next fifty... or whatever. That was a rough time for me too... though I seem to recall that coming into Camp III was worse than coming into this camp, Camp IV, and if we'd had to push that much further, I don't think I would have been able to do it. There's another party on the mountain here... Genet Expeditions... led by a guy named Harry Johnson, I think, and they are traveling Alpine style, which means they pack everything all at once, and they kill themselves... and they try to make a lot of altitude fairly fast. They are moving up from 11,000 to 14,000 with a full load. Eric says he has seen that done before and watched pulmonary edema develop. He has really urged us to be careful to watch for symptoms of mountain sickness or altitude sickness. Feeling the altitude is normally reflected in a severe headache plus the recognition of breathlessness and, boy, I've certainly had both of those symptoms! But a hacking cough followed by raspy respiration and congested lungs is a sign of pulmonary edema, and... I don't know how you know you're getting cerebral edema. I probably ought to do my homework, but I'm just going to tell Eric what I feel and trust that his judgement is good. I am sure it will be. He's an impeccable guide, I'd say.

(At Camp V, 14,200 ft.) It's now 6 July at 7:42 p.m. We are getting down to the nitty gritty here. Last night we packed about 700 feet up from our 13,500 foot campsite up to a new one at 14,200 feet (Camp V) about, which is a gorgeous bowl that looks out at both Mt. Hunter and Mt. Foraker... plus an incredible view of the West Buttress and the chute that has been termed "The Orient Express". Looking in, I guess, a northerly direction is the ascent from here... 2,000 feet. We use the Jumar ascenders at the top where there are fixed ropes, but according to Eric it's about a five hour haul up that 2,000 foot, very steep pitch. There is a bergeschrund about two-thirds of the way up. That's where the glacier breaks off. Today we saw some people sliding down that...just literally sliding down that section without ropes...which I find genuinely terrifying. This morning we got off at about noon and it took us about two hours to pack up to here where we dug up the stuff that we had cached last night and just lay around in the sun. The temperature this morning, we all estimated, was about zero, though Jeff thought it was below zero. It's incredible because I had been shirtless in the afternoon, and then it went to zero last night. We packed up to here, and the sun was so bright that Eric, Jeff and Matt put on bathing suits and walked around... got scorched. The temperature in the sun according to Larry's thermometer was 115. Right now, I guess, the temperature's probably dropped... the sun's beginning to head for the hills, and when it goes behind that chunk of the Buttress... I guess that's a portion of the Buttress... the temperature will very rapidly drop, and I imagine it will go down to zero again, anyway. Eric figures we lose about four degrees of temperature for each thousand feet of ascent, so, between here and the summit it should drop off another sixteen degrees or so. From an acclimatization standpoint... last night I woke up at 3:00 a.m. but I felt great! I felt just fine. I did sleep rather fitfully after that but I have gotten tons of sleep on this trip. I slept some this afternoon. I woke up this morning and checked my pulse... it was 62. Yesterday during the day it was hard for me to get it below 90. Clearly the altitude has had its effect, because I can tell even in dictating here that I am shorter of breath than I would be at sea level. The push at the moment... we are anxious to climb 2,000 feet in order to get the use of a snow cave (at 16,200 ft.). Eric doesn't think this good weather is going to last but so much longer. The weather forecast from Anchorage suggests that about Sunday, which is tomorrow, things should start clouding up. For it to stay like this would be marvelous, but it's not likely, judging from my experience with Alaskan weather. So we probably ought to expect a storm, and maybe we will have to hole up for a day, or two, or three, or whatever, waiting for a good summit day. But we'll press on, probably the day after tomorrow, from 16,000 feet to 17,000 feet, and from 17,000 feet we will make our assault on the summit, which normally is a fourteen-hour day. We did pass a group last night that had made it on the fourth of July. They seemed to be euphoric and ecstatic... said that the summit had been windless and that it had taken them, I believe, eighteen hours on summit day to go from camp to the summit and back. Of course, they had spent three days, he explained, in a snow cave waiting for a storm to clear.

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