Climbing Denali, Day 3
Post categories: Denali
| 14:48 UK time, Friday, 5 June 2009
Hey, It's Mark calling on the sat phone from halfway up .
Day three on the mountain and the expedition is going really well, the team are doing great and all seem fit and able. The weather's been really hot on the lower .
We flew in two days ago and did a long hike pulling all our gear with sledges and backpacks. These are the longest, heaviest days we have to do along the flatlands and up the glacier, you only gain four or five hundred feet in each day.
Today we took about half our gear and went up quite a height, 1500 to 2000 feet and cached our gear, which meant digging a big whole and burying all our stuff. Then we came back down so we're at the same camp as last night. We've had to take our kit up because it's too steep and heavy too move it all at once. This style of climbing let's us acclimatise gently and we'll be moving steadily up the mountain in the next week or so.
It's clouding over today and there's meant to be about 6 inches of snow coming. It's been pretty clear so far so the trail itself is fairly obvious. There's lots of crevasses around but the path is so clear that there's nothing really to worry about.
I'm feeling great, getting some sunburn down here on the glacier, but I got my first glimpse of the top yesterday!
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