Denali Team 6: June 5 to June 25
Guides: Aidan Loehr, Andrew Yasso, and Erin Smart
Climbers: Simon Thomas Gower (Australia), Richard Van Der Sprenkel (UK), Alan Laidlaw (UK), Anna Koufos-Slade (Virginia), Chok Lin Lui (Australia), Luke Richmond (Thailand), and Bill Strycharz (Oregon).
Andrew called at 3:16pm on June 13th with this dispatch:
“Today was an Aiden Loehr rest day; which means we didn’t do any resting. We did a short acclimitization hike to the base of the fixed lines. And then we got back to camp and started to build snow walls around the cook tent which is an excercise in excercise….but of course, if we don’t build the walls the wind will come so we have to build them.”
On a side note, you should all know that Aiden is a super endurance athlete. Occasionally he wakes up in the morning and decides that he’s going to run from the bottom of Death Valley to the top of Mount Whitney…
Andrew continued, “we’re going to do some fixed line practice this afternoon. And then we’re going to get ready for tomorrow. We’d like to put in our cache tomorrow…potentially at high camp.”
“Paul and Marion just came back into camp after their successful summit of the Upper West Rib. We popped up their cooktent as well as Forest’s tent in anticipation of them coming back soon.”
“We’re looking forward to a big AAI reunion tonigh and getting ready for the big day tomorrow.”
“The weather outlook isn’t great. It’s supposed to be marginal tomorrow and then then next day is supposed to be bad.” Andrew chuckled, “that will be an Andrew rest day, which means that we’re not going to do anything until it blows through…”
Andrew tried to tell me something funny about playing video games on his cell phone, but the connection died.