Guides: Alasdair Turner, Chad Cochran, Aili Farquhar
Climbers: Maria Conceicao (Dubai), Stephen Martin (UK), Christopher Kulish (Colorado), Zlatko Filipovic (Sweden), Steve Bain (Colorado), Lorenzo Baraldini (Italy), Christopher Heywood (Oman), Sergey Dmitriev (Russia), Vitaly Simonovich (Russia)
Alasdair called at 2:30PMPST on 5/7 with the following dispatch:
“Hey guys, we’re living the dream at 14,200 feet on Denali! I think we’ve figure out our electronics issue, and hopefully we’ll be able to make longer dispatches over the rest of our expedition.
We are here at Camp 3 with the whole team right now. We successfully made our move to this yesterday, and performed a back-carry today to pick up cache right before windy corner. Today we are going to stay in camp and make sure everyone is acclimatizing well. A few of us are feeling the effects and the high-altitude drug acetazolamide is our friend right now! This drug, no longer branded under the name “Diamox,” more or less increases the rate of respiration while we are sleeping. This allows us to acclimatize more effectively through the night, however one side effect is that it increases how much we urinate! So today we are in camp, making sure to drink lots and lots of water.
In addition to hydrating, we are making sure to eat lots of calories to make up for a difficult day yesterday. This morning we treated ourselves to big bowls of hashbrowns. For the rest of the day, we are going to fortify camp as we prepare for a mild system that may turn into a bit of a storm over the coming week.