Peter Stanley Mt. McKinley

(At Camp VI, 16,200 feet) Well, the time now is 7:36 p.m. We are at 16,000 feet, about, and it's Sunday, the 7th of Janu... July. Today was certainly one of the toughest days I've had on this mountain and expect I will have in the future... I hope! We had decided to "put the pedal to the metal" in our conference about what to do... actually Eric had, yesterday. And the plan was we'd get up at 4:30 a.m.... s et the alarms for 4:40... get up as soon as possible and get off heading up that 2,000 foot climb from where we were going to where we are now... (verbal slip due to malfunctioning brain)... and I don't know what the names of them are. But this is right up at the top of the buttress... we're at sixteen something...and one more day and we will get to seventeen and from there we can shoot for the summit. In any event we did get off at about seven or shortly thereafter with packs. We're not taking any sleds so that means we had to pack everything up precisely right and discard all the stuff we didn't need so that we wouldn't carry too much weight. I culled over everything in the afternoon. I found that terribly stressful because I just haven't had enough experience knowing well enough what I will need under these kinds of conditions. We could see the full expanse of where we were going today... from the bottom to the top. Well, off we went... (getting off at 7:10 a.m. ahead of the Genet Expeditions group)... and we went up the first pitch and took a little rest, and Eric figured it would take us five hours. And then we got to the fixed lines... the only part of this climb where you really have to have fixed lines to get up. We needed Junar ascenders to tie in. Never having used a Junar ascender before, I had gotten Eric to put the necessary stirrup or strap on it to hook into my harness. I hooked in and snapped onto the rope and began heading on up. My left leg went right spank into a crevasse and I was caught by the Junar ascender and the fixed rope. Anyway, on we pushed, and there was a Genet Expeditions group... very practiced... I think they had cached a lot of gear up here. They came smoking up that trail trying to get by us, it seemed to me... though, perhaps not. They started after us but caught up enroute. In any event I don't know when I have been so tired and so frustrated. We made it to the top. My pack had seemed to be off balance all the time. It was very hard to do a French step or a rest step or anything. When we got here Eric had found two snow caves and I am rendering this report looking out of a snow cave. It's ten degrees in here. I guess the ceiling is about three and a half feet high and I'm about to climb into my sleeping bag. I also have a throbbing headache from the change in altitude which is to be expected. Eric seems to be a little bit concerned about my acclimatization, and he suggested that I take some codeine tonight for the headache and see if it is still there in the morning, and if it isn't... that's good! (Eric also gave me a Diamox tablet at dinner.)

(At Camp VI) Well, it's now the afternoon, (Monday, July &) and we are at 16,200 feet. We are taking a rest day today. And we have spent a lot of time talking to the folks in the Genet party. I guess what I have come to note is that everybody goes through a lot of the same experiences, and I was talking to this gal named Holly Parker in this group... I think it's Harry Johnson who is the guide. There's a party of about eight... plus the couple that's been sort of following along seems to have joined up with this group. They are in kind of rough shape, and what I conclude is that the folks in the Genet group are probably not as well fixed as we are even though... from a distance when you see a group climbing it seems they are doing just fine. But they've been suffering from. I think I've been suffering more than anyone else from the altitude, and I've suffered also, I think, from an absence of knowledge of how I would respond to going to heights higher than I've ever been before, because I have never been as high as I am at this instant before now. But I was talking with Dave and a guy named Scott von Eschen... he went to Dartmouth, he's now in the investment banking world in mergers and acquisitions at Morgan, Stanley. He's in the Genet group. We were talking about emotional highs and low and he said it was absolutely incredible. It's so different, he said he's done triathalons and marathons, he says, but there's something about a mountain like this and the conditions that you run into where... how one's going to get out of the situation one is in is so less predictable. There's always a hot shower and a hot bath at the end of a marathon... you're not going to freeze. But there is no easy way to get warm here. It's just not as predictable. The view from where I'm standing is absolutely incredible. From this campsite right now there are... one, two, three, four, five tents which is the Genet party plus a couple that joined the Genet party. And then there are the snow caves which we are inhabiting. As I look out in a westerly direction or northwesterly direction I see cloud, just a huge thick cloudbank at 10,000 feet, and I can see for miles and miles and mile and miles but I can't see anything but clouds. Foraker and Hunter, both of them stick their heads above the clouds but they seem so much lower than they did a couple of days ago. The people in the Genet party had a thermometer out this morning that said it was 15 below... was the low point. In our cave it has been a consistent 10 above. I would guess the temperature now is about fifteen above. It's still plenty cold an a little windy. But it's just a gorgeous day. Last night I woke up at 2:00 a.m. As I was going to bed... turning into my sleeping bag in that ice cave, one of the things that I was plagued with was a sense of claustrophobia because I couldn't breath. Eric told me that this would be my worst night on the mountain from an acclimatization standpoint and, by golly, he was absolutely right. But a lot of this is psychological. You can rationally say, "I'm not going to expire at 16,000 feet in a snow cave," but when you get there and you recognize you can't breath and you can't sit up because there isn't room, it's very easy to feel claustrophobic. And I finally borrowed Sam's book that had been given to him by his mother in 1961 called "The Practice of the Presence of God." And I read through that. Even that's hard to do because your hands get cold at ten. It's hard to read a book. And there's no light in the cave except what manages to filter through the snow and a little through the entrance. But that was a source of great help to me and I recognize the validity of the program of AA and, I mean, that's where the ultimate sense of peace comes from, for me. I miss the meetings. I could've sure used a meeting last night because my head was really going bananas, and I think at about, just before I went to sleep if someone had said, "There's Cliff Hudson's plane right out there on the strip. Would you like a flight back to Talkeetna?", I might have just jumped right on board. And the hardest part was that last night I didn't feel very comfortable about sharing with Sam and Larry how screwy I felt, whereas today it's been easy to walk around and talk to the people in the Genet group and talk to Larry and Sam. Everybody was willing to acknowledge that one of the most characteristic aspects of this life in the high mountains is the very high highs and the very low lows, and somehow you have got to have the wherewithal within to recognize that the rough times will pass.

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