It’s Tuesday morning, we are still waiting in Talkeetna

We drove up to Talkeetna yesterday morning. After enjoyed a sunny weekend, we got a cloudy anad breezy start for the week. On the way up, the condition looked very
marginal for flying. We stopped by the airoport first once we got in Talkeetna. To our excitement, it was said that the “airport” on glacier is open. But we still
have to check in with the park ranger’s office first. There we got a brief introduction about the climbing routes and leave no trace practice. There’re brochers
about Denali in all kinds of language, including Japanese and Korean, but no Chinese. I talked to the ranger, Chinese climbers are rare on Denali.
 
At noon, we checked in at airport, but it’s already closed because of weather on glacier. Anyway, we all changed into our climbing clothes, so we could jump on the
plane immediately when the cloud breaks. Unfortunately, the whole afternoon passed just in waiting. Lead guide Dave used this time to teach us glacier travel and self
rescue. I volunteered to be the first victim. But there was one little move that required me to do a quick short pullup with my 50lb pack on my back. I couldn’t
even move up a few inches. So we had a good laugh and had to modify my self rescue system. Dave spent quite some time to cutomize my system to accomodate my
narrower chest size and weaker arm strength.
 
We waited until 7pm when the pilots all went home, then called off the night.
 
Tuesday morning, it’s again cloudy. Pilots require line of vision to land on glacier. So we are just waiting here for a break in the clouds. Yesterday, only one
flight was able to fly in and fly out. Sometimes, the flight had to turn around half way when the condition sunddenly changed. Sometimes, half of the team was able
to fly in, the other half was left behind. So we had to be flexible and be ready to jump on plane at a short notice. 

This entry was posted on June 12, 2007 at 9:21 am and is filed under Denali June 2007 Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.