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), Kevin Fourie (South Africa), Luke Richmond (Thailand), and Bill Strycharz (Oregon).
Andrew called at 4:30pm on June 10th with this dispatch:
“Hi! Just calling in to make a dispatch. We woke up at 4:30 am to make our cache, but it was so cold, we really didn’t want to leave our tents. I mean, it was really, really cold. REALLY cold.
“So, we slept in for an hour and Aidan treated everyone to Denali sandwiches…which is bacon, with bagels fried in bacon grease, then cheese, then more bacon grease. Needless to say, we were warmed up after that and headed out a 8 am.”
“Our cache around Windy Corner went well – actually it wasn’t super windy up there today! It took us 4.5 hours to get up and 47 minutes to get down. When you turn around, you can fly!”
“Everyone’s doing really well. Our Team is really enjoying each others company right now. Tomorrow, we’ll move up to 14,000 camp.”
“Here is a message from Bill – I touched rock on the West Buttress today. And, the whole team misses Anna, who went down safely yesterday. Talk to you later.”