Denali - Day 0

This is the trip report for Denali: I'll start this now although I don't have the photos yet. I'll use whatever I find on the interwebs (with links of course) and replace them as I get photos. I'll skip the landing in Anchorage, the day spent in Anchorage buying food stuffs and gear, and the time spent travelling to Talkeetna.

We start our journey in Talkeetna, at the National Parks Service Ranger Station. We went to tell the rangers that we'd arrived, and to get briefed on the route. Long story short, you can camp anywhere on the route but there are established camps throughout. Established camps have the advantage of (hopefully) being probed for crevasses, and/or other reduced objective hazards such as avalanche, serac and rock falls, and, of course, human companionship. Americans measure everything in feet, so by the end of the trip I had become accustomed to using feet as well - I have to admit though, it's still a pain! Anyway, the camps and my notes are as follows:

1. Base Camp - 2200m
* equipped with pee latrine and landing strip
* base camp manager (NPS ranger) present - her name is Lisa, she's very very nice!
* sleds and fuel to be collected from here
* cache food for 4-5 days in case of bad weather

2. Camp 1 - 2400m (7000 feet) - Base of Ski Hill

3. Camp 2 - 3000m
* do not camp on shoulder after 2900m - too much wind

4. Camp 3 - 3500m (11000 feet)
* camp away from the ice fall but not too close to the rock face (rocks fall if too hot outside)
* need to wand towards rock face
* throw faeces in crevasse
* squirrel point (called so because in the 90s there was a squirrel living here from the caches at windy corner): do not attempt to rig your sled RIGHT here as there's a very good chance that you will drop it (either off squirrel point or off motorcycle hill - and it will not be found!) -- the ranger then told us of this guy who tried to re-rig his sled - loose it, try to jump on it to arrest fall and then fall with it to his death. Oh joy.
* cache food for the way back

5. Camp 4 - 4400m (14000 feet) - Advance Base Camp

6. Camp 5 - 5200m (17000 feet) - High Camp

* travel roped from the start to the end
* don't lose the CMCs - use CMC throughout (A CMC is a plastic can for storing solid faeces): throw faeces in crevasses if present, otherwise bring down (the mountain beyond 4500m is crevasse free)

Talkeetna is a wonderful little village with nothing much to do. It has a mountain gear shop that stores some basic gear for Denali, and a grocery store (Nagley's) that has some food in case of emergency (no toilet paper though). The mayor of Talkeetna is a ginger cat called Stubbs, and he hangs out around Nagley's. There are roughly six bars/pubs/coffeeshops in Talkeetna, and three have wifi. The best breakfast is at the Roadhouse (order the half standard, please!) and the best coffee is at Conscious Coffee (you will find out why I know).

Our flying company was Talkeenta Air Taxi - they are THE best company in Talkeetna. They even have a free bunkhouse that climbers can use while they wait for their flight. Rocking!

Back. Alive.

No Matterhorn summit for me, but my team and I are alive and safe and that is all that matters. Will be back with updates shortly.

Iz done.

Bearing any unforeseen circumstances and all that, from 14th July - 28th July I will be here. Attempting Matterhorn (the mountain on the Toblerone chocolate) or any other mountain in the area, if Marius decides he doesn't want to climb it (again) just for my sake. I have to train. I have to save money, because I am out of money (payed the ticket). I have to work to make up for the lost time (which means that my saturday and sunday afternoons are now officially booked). I have to train (did I just say that?!) for the 1531 m of climbing/scrambling. This mountain (i.e. all the work, training, saving, work that I have to do) scares the shit out of me.

Training and such

Hey Fen & Nita, this is for you! I wanted to post a comment on each of your blogs to tell you how I trained, but realized that it would be too much of a hassle, so here goes.

First of all, I don't know if you are going to carry your stuff up there or if your trekking company will provide for all of that. I heard that on Kilimanjaro there are porters that would carry just about everything (including a toilet seat) for a given (affordable) price. Anyway, I think the basic training for any mountain (carry or no carry of load) should consist of hiking at a high speed uphill carrying loads. Yup. I'm not kidding. This will increase your lung capacity (critical at altitude, remember kili is almost 6000m) and also increase your endurance.

Not so many hills here in singapore, but MacRitchie is a good place to start. If not, bukit batok reservoir is also nice (i miss took bukit batok for macritchie at one point). For MR, there is a 10 km route that is just nice for the start.

I think at first you should have about 5 kg of load - what I did was to carry 1.5, 2 and 0.5 l bottles filled with water - to up to 12 when you're done. This way, if the going gets tough, you can dump some of the water in the jungle or even drink it if you're desperate (i think water becomes undrinkable after a couple of weeks of being kept in a container - i did not spill it cause it seemed like a waste). Since the water bottles didn't fill up the backpack and i didn't want them to wiggle around, i put some bed sheets for padding (i kid you not).

And you should walk as fast as you can. You should hike in the boots you plan to hike in during the trip itself, to ween them in and sort out any problems that might arise (blisters, etc) As for boots, I think any trekking boots should have a hard sole, from a good material (preferably vibram), should hold the ankle and have a hard tip (for when you hit rocks). Running uphill is also good training, but i did it only once a week. This load carrying trek should be done twice to three times a week - i think WE (yes i need it too) should start in early May or even next week, woohoo!! I volunteer Sunday evenings, yay!

If you plan to hike using trekking poles, which I seriously advise you to, you should adjust their length correctly: they should reach your shoulder or higher when you go downhill and they should be lower when you go uphill.

The same goes for your backpack: you should carry the backpack you plan to have with you. There's a whole theory about how you should pack you backpack, and how it should be adjusted. Basically your hips should carry most of the weight. I will show you if you don't know how.

For the rest of the gear, I suppose the trekking agency will give you a list of gear which I suppose you will need to buy. Lemme know!

Aconcagua - The Romanians

[Not such a happy story though - the reason I didn't write about aconcagua in such a long time] Yup. We met some Romanians in the permit office, a big loud bunch of them :). They were planning to bypass the mule companies and hire mules without intermediaries, but we finally convinced them not to, and introduced them to Osvaldo. Two of them were with a all expenses paid company, so we only saw them in the office and a bit around Mendoza when we went shopping.

The rest, ah the rest. Two of them were from a mountain rangers office back home (Sasha and Emil from Salvamont Arges), one is a professor in Educational Sciences (wtf is that!? They all called her Madame), one poor guy was wondering wtf he was doing there with those people, and the last one, namely Ovidiu (Popescu) from a mountaineering club (Clubul Montan Altitudine). Now. I will not go into stupid gossip about how: Madame found a dead mule's horseshoe and tied it around her neck with a white string, Emil was bragging about how he went to Pamir and climbed some 7000m there, and how he shouldn't have headaches here (but later when the doctor told him in Plaza de Mulas that he had a murmur in his lungs, we would go to the doctor's every 2 hours), Madame was taking sleeping pills (!!!!!) at 4300m because she couldn't sleep* and even though I told her she's fooling herself she wouldn't stop, Madame tore a numbered sheet of paper from the summit register (found yes, on the summit) just so she could give her email to some dizzy polish guy, how after we all came down from the summit, they spent the whole night in the mess hall arguing about who was right or wrong during their messed up trip to Mont Blanc the same year - you don't want to know the acoustics of the mess hall, or how Madame wore a black thermal suit in Confluencia, at 30 degrees... No, I will not talk about that :)

Ovidiu had a 13 year old daughter with him on the trip and he was planning to take her to the summit. She had been to various mountains and she looked pretty fit and tough enough for the job. But MINORS ARE NOT ALLOWED to climb Aconcagua. He knew about this rule but was planning to somehow get through. And got through he got. What they did (we found out much later about this) was that they used Madame's passport to get a second permit in her name, and gave the second permit to Coca. In order to by-pass the rangers in Confluencia, they did not stop to rest in Plaza Confluencia, but instead spent the night under some rock in the Horcones Valley. Then, if this wasn't enough, they messed up the trail and ended up having to cross the Horcones river about two or three times. If you do this around noon, when the glacier is melting, the water is pretty damn cold. The poor girl had just gotten her period + crossing the cold water in sandals => you know what this means ...

So she arrived in base camp with horrible abdominal pain which kept her in her tent for three days. She could not take antibiotics, because you cannot take antibiotics higher than 2700m - Madame had given her, of course, but then Catalina found her out. She would cry to Catalina and tell her that it hurts like a horrible toothache, even when she just stands and doesn't do anything. This of course meant the end for her father's summit dreams, because he could not take her with him, they could not evacuate by helicopter because this would mean a medical check-up. So Ovidiu would sit around camp moping around and begging for compassion. Then one night, other members from our Explorer club heard (adjoining tents, what can you do?!) her poor excuse for a father swear at her (as in really really bad, if you have ever heard me swear those are just rose petals), and then tell her that she should use her mind to heal herself!!! Then more swearing, etc!! This nearly made one of the other romanians (from our club) want to kick this guy's ass. Marius was also not happy about it, as in, we were keeping an eye on them such that they do not cross paths. Sasha said that Ovidiu was a good father, and this is how he raised his daughters, my, you should have seen the smaller one how much she swore, Madame said that it's not our place to mess ... Luckily she was so bad that they had to leave base camp (on foot, 35km more to the park entrance, she was sick!!) and head on for Santiago, were she went to a doctor and got better in two or three days.

In the picture (Romanian and Argentinian teams) Madame is the one to the right of Catalina (blue down jacket) wearing a black thermal suit and a white cap, Ovidiu is the bearded one right behind her, and his daughter is the one holding the white sign, wearing a red down jacket with a red cap.

*yes, you shouldn't take sleeping pills. It will trick your body into sleeping without acclimatization. It's like taking painkillers for your knee, let's say, and then running.

Preamble to Aconcagua

Now, where were we? Ah, yes ... We had just had an amazing lomo alo pobre and camped by the highway for the night. Marius drove for another 900 km to reach Los Andes and from there the border of Chile with Argentina. The border is somewhere in a mountain pass, surrounded by very impressive stone peaks. To get there, you have to go up this road that has about 26km of very tight curves. The chilean customs is not, as you might think, next to the argentinean one. What you do is, you go through basic checks at the chilean border then, in about 20km or so, you find the argentinean one, in which your bags are checked, etc. Our problem was that we did not have an authorization to get out of chile with our car and as such, someone from our mule company was supposed to wait for us at the chilean border, namely Jose. Of course, Jose was waiting for us at the argentinean border, we couldn't get out of Chile, we couldn't walk for it and we didn't have any phone to call Jose.

In about one hour of so of talks and walking around (it is a customs office in a mountain pass, it was of course 9 pm - sun sets at about 10-10:30) we finally managed to get through to Jose and tell him to come and rescue the girls and the BAGS (omg so many bags!!) After much talk with the customs because the girls were getting out of Chile on foot which was unusual for that particular checkpoin, the girls were up in Jose's car and then safely in Penitentes, enjoying Jorge's cooking. Penitentes is called that way after the stone formations that guard it that are similar to the snow penitentes I showed a while back.

Marius and I returned to Santiago to return the car and get our moneys back - for replacing the clutch. We ended up spending another 4 hours arguing at the rental company, but we finally got most of them back, even though they were in form of a cheque. And it was Friday. Of course. The night before we could not find a hotel (again) and so Marius slept it a hostel - they had only one bed left, and again, it was 11 plus when we got there - and I in the car. In the morning, when I went to Marius's hostel to shower, guess who I bumped into?! Guess, guess ;;) Nevermind ... DAN, of course! He was leaving on the same day for Romania. The ticket change had cost him about 300 Euros, but he was happy to leave. He didn't even say congratulations for Tres Cruces. His voice trembled when he talked about how his little girl was asking for him. This would have impressed me at some point but now I was disgusted. Then he started saying how "time will tell who was right" and "what will we tell the people back home" sort of crap. How Dan got home and what happened is the subject of another post :)

We took a bus from Santiago to Mendoza, in Argentina, but decided to stop in Penitentes, where the girls were. They were staying at our mule company's skiing refuge, called Cruz de Cana. Our mule company is called Lanko. The company is run by Osvaldo and Jose. They are great people, even though remarkably different. Osvaldo si the calculated, mellow, kind type, whereas Jose is the forgetful, easily distracted type. They run Cruz de Cana together with Lucia, who is responsible for the bar, the rooms etc, and Jorge, (or Coky) who is the cook. Both Lucia and Jorge are students who only work there in the summer. In the winter Cruz de cana is absolutely full. In the summer it's just us climbers or tourists to aconcagua that keep the place barely running. Jorge's cooking is amazing!!! Wooha!! And Lulu is extremely kind and friendly.

There are three main routes and three main ways of climbing Aconcagua. The three routes are: the normal (easy in mountaineering) route (which we took), the Polish glacier (which I wanted to do), and the south face (south wall pictured - which i would love to do but it is extremely hard, so maybe in another life or so). As it is with climbing high mountains, you have to do it following a series of camps. For the normal route, the camps are: Plaza Confluencia (3300m), Plaza de Mulas (4300m), and from there on a couple more with the last two being (in general) Nido de Condores (5380m) and Camp Berlin (5700m). For the polish and the south face the only camp that I can remember is Plaza Francia (4200m) and Plaza Argentina. You can do the polish glacier from the normal route as well, taking a sharp left turn around Camp Alaska (5100m). All the routes start from Confluencia.

For the normal route, to get from Confluencia to Plaza de Mulas you have to walk the valley of the Horcones. This valley has more or less 25 km long, with a difference in altitude of 1000m. You can feel this difference when you get just bellow Plaza de Mulas where you have two massive slopes to climb. You have to carry a lot of bags up, of course. The weight ranges from 20 to 30 kg. To walk. For 25 km to the base camp. Wooohoo. This is where the mules and the mules companies come in. As I said, there are three ways of climbing Aconcagua: go with a full service company - including guide, all food provided, etc; go by yourself or employ mules to carry your load up to Mulas. If you go full service you will of course pay more but at least you don't have to worry about anything. However, expect to eat pasta with a bland tomato sauce for as many as twenty days. Furthermore, you have to do everything with the group. If you go by yourself you will have to carry everything up that bloody valley. The whole 8-9 hours of it. Plus, you still have to pay for the toilet at Plaza Confluencia and at Mulas. There are ecological toilets both at Plaza de Mulas and Confluencia and they MUST be used even though they stink to high heaven at Mulas. One thing that I liked was that they change the camping spot at Confluencia to allow the vegetation to regenerate, good for them!!!

What we did was to hire Lanko to take care of the luggage to Plaza de Mulas. Also, at Plaza de Mulas we were met by two great guys, Carlos and his wife Vanessa, who take car of the Lanko tent and toilet there. If you go with a company they will also have a reserved tent space in their name. DO NOT however, pitch your tent next to the mess hall. Anything is better that than, since you will not be able to sleep if there are some argentinians there enjoying some mate de hierbas or some romanians having their usual squabble. They will talk you to death. Also, DO NOT assume that you can negotiate with the muleters on sight and get a better price (as some romanians thought they could, sheesh). They will not negotiate because they are working for their companies. Furthermore, the competition among companies is fierce, so the prices are all right.

As I said, Osvaldo and Jose are really nice. They will even show you around Mendoza and help you with the formalities for getting a climbing permit. The climbing permit for Aconcagua costs 330 US (for foreigners) or 300 pesos for argentinians. Write to Osvaldo at osvaldocarbahal@hotmail.com or at info@lanko.com.ar

Tres Cruces Central (6629 m)

Bah. I think one of the biggest problems with going in long holidays is the loong stories you have to write afterwards. Just two more people and we're done. Then I can start talking about my ordinary [boring] life again.

After we so narrowly escaped being stuck in the wintery desert for like three months, we had to replan our moves. First, we arrived in Putre only to find that Dan had fled to Arica leaving a tearful note to me trying to justify his flee. And I quote "I was feeling devoid of friendship and marginalized", this coming from a 40 year old man. I mean give me a break!! We were having a bit of a problem figuring out what to do next. We had to return the car on the 11th of January and proceed to Aconcagua from Santiago. Apart from that, we had not yet summited any serious mountain. To say nothing of the fact that they had attracted sponsors (I had none, of course) by promising some Romanian premiere some 6000 m peaks. So, we decided that the best thing to do was to go the Tres Cruces National Park and climb a mountain there. Marius and Catalina had been there before when they climbed Ojos del Salado (68 m), also being the first romanians to do so.

Our target was Tres Cruces Central in the Tres Cruces Massif, with the height of 6629. This is the second peak in the Tres Cruces Massif, but the first one, at about 6700m, had already been climbed by another romanian. For me, I really don't understand the point of being the first one to do something. I think that what should matter is the difficulty of the mountain and the struggle of the climber, not who gets there first. Ah well ...

We caught up with Dan in Arica. He already had his plans made up (including a change in plane tickets) to go back home. He would later come to say that we abandoned him and that he felt that we only wanted him in the expedition for the money his sponsors gave him. (sheesh) Although we ended up paying a whole lot more on things (the price was now being divided by 4 instead of by 5), I am so glad we got rid of that little weasel that no amount of money that i subsequently spent is going to make up for it. In Arica we saw a beautiful church built by Gustave Eiffel (yes, of the tower) before he became famous. The church was built in France and all the pieces were sent to Arica by boat and assembled there.

To climb Tres Cruces, or any other mountain in the National Park, you have to get a permit (free) from the national park authority of Chile (DIFROL), from the lovely (not!) town of Copiapo. Unfortunately, we arrived to Copiapo on a Saturday, and, even though we could apply for a permit, we could only get in the following Monday since the Difrol office in Santiago does not work on Saturday. Thus I think there are still permits in our name uncollected from the office in Copiapo. :) Marius knew a way into the Tres Cruces park that bypassed the permit official. Instead of going by Laguna Verde (Green Lagoon), an absolutely lovely lagoon, you have to take the road towards Laguna Santa Rosa. We stayed at Laguna Santa Rosa for one day. Unfortunately for us we did not drink as much water as we should have and also did not spend as much time as we needed there. The view at the Santa Rosa Lagoon faces the three Tres Cruces peaks. Together with the lovely lagoon populated by flamingos it was stupendous!!!

From Laguna Santa Rosa we moved to the base of the Tres Cruces Massif. Before that, Marius and I had a lovely bath in the Rio Lama Waterfall, with Catalina and Lili not wanting to get their feet wet. Too bad for them, the water was great! To get to the Tres Cruces Massif you have to negotiate hills and valleys full of boulders. Again, thanks to Marius for his extraordinary driving! [When going towards Tres Cruces, our green salad bowl jumped from the back of the car. We saw it when we returned, because it was the only spot of green in that desert]. We camped for one day at the base of the massif, at around 4800. Lili grew so tired of sleeping in the tent and decided to sleep in the car. This was a bad call because the car was extremely cold during the night.

The plan was to move camp from 4800 to around 5700 the next day. We got up early again and had to face a horrible cold which exhausted us before we even left the camp. We only managed to leave camp in about two hours because we had to wait for the sun to come from behind the mountain, otherwise we could not move. Our backpacks were extremely heavy since we were moving an entire camp. We had not had proper breakfast, only two low calorie cereal bars (stupid Dan had bought the low calorie ones which only had 87 (tops!) calories - how on earth is that supposed to nourish you?!?!?!) - for those who could eat that is (me, me!). We ended up stopping every other 10-20 minutes for long rests. I think we only managed to climb about 200m difference when we decided to set up camp again. It was horrible, we were very tired but we should have continued, but it was already about one o'clock and the weather was getting cranky (yes, here too!)

It was a good thing that we stopped though. This way we could hydrate and nourish ourselves properly, which we did throughout the day. It was good that we were close to a penitentes flake and we could get snow from there. The next day we would have to move camp to 5700m, if we wanted to get to the summit, that is. Of course, here too, we were running out of time.

During the night Catalina had an attack of asymptomatic paroxystic tachycardia (i hope i got it right!). In other words, her heart is beating VERY fast and she couldn't breathe. It seems she gets these things sometimes. She was ok now but she really had to get down and so she descended back to 4800m. This left only the three of us to climb. We attacked the horrible slope ahead of us and succeeded in about 8 hours to get to 5700m. Here we found a lake which saved us the trouble (and the gas!) of melting snow for our tea and food. Lili and Marius could not eat (again) but I enjoyed my freeze-dri sweet and sour lamb to the max!! The bad thing about that was that my meal had 1400 calories which got me so warm that at first I couldn't sleep. We prepared our gear and food for the next day. I was relieved that Lili had offered to carry the camera (until sunrise), as she had nothing else to carry.

Come 4 am we got up and started to get dressed and go. Lili had not slept a wink because she was feeling nauseous, same as Marius. I had slept like a baby. We left camp at about 5 in the morning. It was dreadfully cold, even though we were wearing down jackets and down gloves. I hate down gloves, even though they keep my hands so warm! However, you feel like you have tennis rackets for hands! You can't even hold your walking sticks, to say nothing of pressing the camera button! At around 05:30 am Lili nearly fainted (she told us later) and decided that she could not go on. While I was taking care of her Marius started puking his stomach out. Lili went back to the high camp to take a rest and proceed downwards from there. Marius and I decided to go on.

I wasn't feeling cheerupy either. The thing with my body is (I guess) that it does not like to exercise in the wee hours of the day. It likes to sleep i guess. I was having severe palpitations, that only allowed me to walk for a little while. I made myself walk for either 8 or 16 paces then rest for 8 or 16 heart beats. The first slope was incredibly hard, both for Marius and I. I was feeling dizzy and extremely sorry for myself. Marius was still puking and could not eat any of the powerbars or powergels that we had with us. I was so sorry for myself that when we got to the end of the slope and I saw another one exactly as hard as the first I started crying. Literally.

About two hours after sunrise things started to change for me. I don't know if it was Marius's support, the powergels or my body finally waking up (or a combination of the three), but I was allright from there till the summit. Marius was still feeling extremely bad. However, he did manage to make the right call when I was lobbying for the wrong call. You see, we were faced with a huge snow slope that could be tackled either directly - on the snow - or to the left, on some rocks. The climber in me chose the rocks. Marius said it would be better to go on the snow because we didn't know the conditions of the rocks. I was convinced the summit was towards the rocks, but that proved in the end to be a false summit.

Thus we tackled the snow slope. It was a very abrupt slope. Marius was cutting steps for the both of us, but he was so weak that I had to take over. This was a first, and only shows how bad he was feeling. So bad that at one point, with our last powergel, he was drinking tea first to see if he pukes it, and then take in the powergel.

We finally got to the top of the slope and there found the summit ridge. The problem was now determining what point on that ridge was the summit, since there was absolutely no sign there, not even a cross or a stick or something to show us the highest point. We spent the next half hour measuring and comparing rocks, until we finally decided on the tallest one. Yey!! We were on the summit at last!!! And the first romanians to do that, too! We could see Ojos del Salado in the backround and a lot of other 6000m peaks around us. Since the local guides had said that the peak had no name, only Tres Cruces for the three of them, I actually named it, "Trei cadane" or "Three odalisques" because one of our favorite jokes was that of Marius being a sheikh and the three of us his wives :))

The descent was even worse than the climb. We were dead by the time we got to the advanced camp and even deader when we got at 4800m. Even so, by 12 am we were eating a delicious lomo alo pobre in Copiapo (yes, restaurants in Chile stay open until 2 am). We could not find a place to stay and so left Copiapo and camped three hours later by the highway (actually only Marius did, the rest of us slept in the car).