2011 Denali Quest Expedition via West Buttress

Welcome to another blog of the 2011 Denali Quest Expedition, in this blog we'll bring you some information of the West Buttress route. The route the expedition will be attempting. As we mentioned in the last blog, the West Buttress route was pioneered in 1951, by Barry Bishop, Bill Hackett, Bradford Washburn, Henry Buchtel, Jerry More, Jim Gale & Mel Griffiths. Today is remains the most popular route on the mountain with around 80% of climbers attempting Denali using this route.

It is the easiest route lacking many of the technical difficulties that other routes have. However these statements are decieving. The mountain is big, cold, and has unpredictable weather. Around 1,000 climber attempt the West Buttress route annually and only around 50% summit. Statistically around 100 acquire altitude sickenss (AMS) or frostbite, and twelve rescues are made. Despite the relatively large numbers of climbers the Denali National Park Service encourage a philosophy of self-sufficiency amongst the expedition teams Unfortunately around 40 climbers have died on the West Buttress route since records began.

Getting there, from Anchorage the team will drive for around three hours to Talkeetna. A frontier town known as a 'happy drinking town with a mountaineering problem!' From Talkeetna the team takes a ski plane for a 45 minute flight to the mountain. It is possible to walk to the mountain but this takes 5-6 days, the team are subscribing to the Alaskan adage 'fly and hour or walk a week!'. The team lands at Kahiltna Base Camp at around 2,200m.

Camp 1 'Ski Hill' will be established at 2375 m at the confluence of the main Kahiltna Glacier and the heavily crevassed Northeast Fork. The first part of this trip is down hill and is known as 'Heartbreak Hill' and will skirt around the base of Mt Foraker and Mt Crosson and the west side of Mt Frances.The journey is around 9Km long and will take 3-6 hours from Kahiltna Base Camp.

Camp 2 'Motorcycle Hill' is at 3,350 m and will take around 4-9 hours to cover the 7Km. After this camp the ground gets a lot steeper so the snow shoes and sledges will be left behind here and the team will 'cache-and-carry' loads of food and equipment up the mountain.

Camp 3 'Basin Camp' At about 3,700m the team get to squirrel point, named after a red squirrel that was spotted here. Then up through Windy Corner at 4040m to camp as Basin Camp at an altitude of 4,330m. This will take between 4-8 hours and gain 980 metres.

Camp 4 'High Camp' Is the last camp before launching the summit bid. Getting there covers steep angled snow slopes and a massive headwall of ice and snow fixed lines are in place for protection. The camp is at an altitude of 5,245m and will take 3-8 hours to reach from Basin Camp.

Summit attempts will be made from High Camp. There is 950m to gain and it will take anywhere between 8-16 hours to gain the summit. Despite only being 4Km away from camp. The team pass through Denali Pass at 5,545m and over a flat section known as the Football Field at 5,945m then towards the summit at an altitude of 6,194m.

If successful then we descend from the summit down to Camp 2 rest, pick up food and equipment and then onto Camp 1 rest here and then back to Kalhitna Base Camp.

Then blogs on the expedition will be a lot shorter because of character limits using the texting service, but we hope these early blogs give you a taste of our adventure.

Thank you for all the support and encouraging texts and emails already. Please do tell all your friends to follow our blog – it can be a hard and lonely place up there on the mountain and those messages of support give the team a big boost.

You can contact the group via SMS go to http://messaging.iridium.com/

Type in the satellite phone number 00 8816 325 30073 and enter your message.

Be safe in whatever you do.

Lee Farmer