No go again tonight

The weather has been improving over the day, and we got more and more optimistic as time passes by. Earlier in the day, we were told to check back every hour if we
were to wander around in the town. So some people made several back and forth walk between the town of Talkeetna and the little airport. Later in the afternoon, we
were told to stick around, no one goes anywhere. 7:30, we were told to get ready. 8pm, we loaded up all our luggage by the loading area, changed into climbing boots.
Then Dave came back with a “cut-off” signal, no go again! The sky is definitely clearing up, but the word is that the cloud is still hanging around at the base camp level
that can’t land the airplane. We were a bit dissapointed, but think about those tired climbers who had stuck in the storm for weeks, now stuck at base camp waiting for
their flights out, how much dissapointment they have. At least, we can still enjoy a bed and shower here, and nice meals and drinks. Hopefully, we will go early
tomorrow morning, then possiblly skip base camp to go for camp 0.5 or camp 1 directly.
 
This morning, Dave went over the techniques about rigging sleds. There’re a lot of tricks to make sled traveling safe, especially when one falls into crevasse, it’s
important to prevent double jeapody (sled hitting the fallen one), rather, by using the double tag line connected by zip pull, sled can be used to help hold up the
fall, and make it easier for the person behind to hold the fallen one. Dave also shared funny stories of sleds traveling by themselves. Often climbers left the
sled unattended after untied it at camp site, the sled could start going by itself, and dissapeared off the crevasse . Once a sled with three sleeping bags on it
went off by itself, the unlucky three climbers had to call off their climb. So at least, don’t put your personal essentials on the sled!
 
Stories from yesterday, just in case I forgot later: Dave once discovered a cache at high camp marked “THEMIS project”, which had many air-dropped millatary style cardborad
cases of all kinds of supplies. No one knows what that project is. Until one day, in an accidental chat, someone said “I used to work on THEMIS project”, turned out it
stands for “The Men In Space” project the government (NASA) secretly experimented during cold war (1960s?) crisis time. They were trying to simulate human in space
by doing that on thin-aired mountain top.  There were a lot of abandoned cache stories.

This entry was posted on June 12, 2007 at 9:23 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.