Where in the world is John Henzell?

Well, I’m now off the mountain. In the space of about 24 hours, I lost about 5000m in elevation and have returned to the land of thick air, hot showers and cold beer. Life is good.

I reached the summit of Denali on Saturday, after covering the top 2000m in two days. A bit faster than ideal but it meant we could take advantage of a low-wind day, which is possibly the single most important weather characteristic for reaching the top. As it was, the temperature at the summit was -25degC but at least there was not much windchill to go with that.

Or views, for that matter, but you have to take the rough with the smooth.

First view of the hill, on the flight in.

It was a fun two weeks on the hill. The defining moment for me came on the eleventh day, when I was slumped over my ice axe gasping for breath as I headed up the ice headwall between Camp Four and the high camp from which you head to the summit. As I tried to extract as much oxygen as I could out of the thin air at around 4700m, I heard an indeterminately eastern European climber behind me say: “This is craziness… but it’s magnificent craziness.” I agreed and would have said so if that hadn’t required me to divert breath from replenishing my blood-oxygen levels.

There’s a lot of talk about Denali being “harder than Everest” but that’s just American hyperbole. Part of the theory is that the high latitude — 63degN — is supposed to make the atmosphere thinner than for the same altitude closer to the equator but the difference didn’t feel noticeable to me. As one foreign climber noted, if Denali was in Texas, they’d claim it was higher than Everest.

The truth is that it was little more than a walk, albeit a cold and long walk.

I flew in on May 19 with about four weeks worth of food and ended up climbing with a pair of Norwegian adventure guides, Urpu and Steinar. It says a lot about how small the climbing world is that we quickly worked out we had several mutual friends. They’re good friends with the Mt Cook glacial lake guide woman who helped us put our kayak in place for the Cook-to-coast trip last November. (It had already been a place for odd reunions, with me meeting a former New Zealand flatmate, Yvonne Cook, at base camp as she and Guy McKinnon headed to climb Mt Hunter.)

A particularly snowy spring in Alaska meant the mountain was in superb condition and we didn’t bother roping up on all except for one section and that proved to be overly cautious. I didn’t bother roping up when I covered the same area on the way down.

Urpu, towing a load that weighed 9kg more than she did.

The ascent is pretty simple because your ability to acclimatise to the altitude is a lot slower than your ability to move up the mountain, with the result that you go from one camp to the next then spend several days adjusting to the altitude. This work-then-days-of-slothfulness works pretty well for me and of the 12 days en route to the summit, five were spent loafing around listening to audio books on my iPods.

Things worked out pretty well, and the only sustained bad weather on the way was just as we arrived at Camp Three at 3400m so it was no great hardship to sit it out in the tent listening to Catch 22, The Curious Incident of the Dog at Night Time, In Cold Blood, The Life of Pi, Krakatoa, and Ian McEwan’s Saturday. The nature of the country here is that you build snow walls around your tent to protect them from the winds. At this camp, that worked a treat and the gusts only rattled the top of the tent but the downside is that anything protected from the wind becomes a snow deposition area. At one point only the top 20cm of my tent was clear of the snow and I had to leave the warm enclaves of my sleeping bag on several occasions to shovel snow off the tent to prevent it being completely buried.

Urpu: John, I think it might be time to dig out your tent…

I had three nights at 3400m then we moved to Camp Four at 4300m.

I spent another four nights there, where sun combined with serious wind tempered enthusiasm for moving to Camp Five, the top camp, at 5200m. The section between camps four and five is the only technical section of the climb, with a 45 degree headwall of ice on which the national park staff install fixed ropes each season and then a really nice steep rocky ridge to a small bleak ice shelf where the top camp is located.

At 5200m, you’re on the edge of the physiological threshold — the one that the breathy-toned climbing documentaries dub “the death zone” — where you deteriorate faster than you acclimatise. Still, it would have good to have some time there before heading higher but the weather forecast that evening said the weather would be OK the next day then deteriorate.
That was Saturday. Steinar and Urpu didn’t feel strong enough to go but I figured it’s best to take chances when they’re available because you don’t know if one of Denali’s trademark two-week storms was on the way.

The route to the summit involved nothing worse than some steepish snow slopes, although I was down to 25 steps between breaks because of the altitude. (And that was a lot better than on Aconcagua, 750m higher, where I was doing one step for five deep gasping breaths.) By the time I reached the final 500m or so, the summit was hidden in cloud but the routefinding was straightforward. The summit ridge is a serrated series of peaks, at the end of which is the true summit at 6194m.

I saw some other climbers taking photos on one of the minor peaks and it was only when they didn’t eventually join me on the true summit later that I realised that they hadn’t known they weren’t on the actual top! They’d climbed more than 4000m and gone to a peak about 15m lower and 300m from the actual summit… Hopefully they never found out the truth.

Normally an ascent of 1000m would take me an hour or maybe two but this took me seven hours to reach the summit, by which time it was about 5pm. I was joined soon after by a pair of Spanish brothers for whom Denali was the fourth of their quest to do what’s known as the seven summits, the highest peak on each continent. And then by an Ecuadorian woman who was the first woman from her country to reach the top of Denali. And then by an American climber who’d brought a friend’s ashes to scatter on the summit because it was a place the friend had always wanted to reach. For my part, I took out the prayer flags I’d had blessed by a monk in the Annapurna region of Nepal back in 1995 and let them flutter in the breeze.

After the summit, I had a rest day at the high camp at 5200m but should have left that afternoon when the weather was calm. Instead I wanted to see how my friends Urpu and Steinar had got on with their summit attempt. (They were successful and returned at 9pm and 10pm) Packing up the next morning in the bitter cold and strong winds took an hour and a half, two thirds of which was spent with my hands stuck in my crotch or armpits trying to regain feeling. After being so careful on the summit day to protect my hands, this is the only time I sustained cold injuries, with minor frostnip to the thumb and forefinger on my right hand. Frostnip’s a stage before frostbite and involves temporary numbness on the final centimeter or so of each digit and which resolves itself in a few weeks.

In the end, I stuffed the still-frozen tent into my pack and headed down the ridge to Camp Four at 4300m. The crosswinds made life interesting on this occasionally razorback ridge when my pack was acting as a kind of spinnaker and I was trying to work out how much my ability to do an ice-axe arrest would be compromised by the combination of chilled hands and the unwieldiness of insulated overmitts, gloves, and then a layer of closed-cell foam mat over the head of the ice axe.

There was a forecast for bad weather coming in so I pushed on all the way down to base camp, arriving just before midnight. (It was, of course, still light then. The darkest it ever gets is around 2am, when it’s still possible to read without using a torch.)

It’s interesting to see how much different life was 3000m lower. Instead of squeaking, the snow was mushy and wet. The kilogram or so of ice I’d been unwillingly carrying around with my tent for the last 10 days soon became a puddle on the floor. I automatically moved my water bottle into the sleeping bag to stop it from freezing but I doubt if it got below 0deg that night. And I realised I could put on both boots without having to spend several minutes between them gasping for breath. The air is definitely thicker here.

I was on the third flight out that morning. The first skiplane landed in marginal flat-light conditions then a group of Russians watched as their skiplane made three attempts to land before abandoning the attempt and returning to Talkeetna. By then I could already taste the burrito and beer in town, so it was with relief that the weather cleared when our plane arrived and took us back to a place where you don’t have to carry everything on your back or your sled and where the simple necessities of life — drinking water, staying warm — don’t require hard work.

I realised during the trip that 6000m peaks have become decadal obsessions for me, with my first (Island Peak in Nepal) when I was 27, the second (Aconcagua in Argentina) when I was 37, and now Denali, although at 46, I’m a year early. But I must admit that the mental hardiness, which is 80% of the key to getting up these bigger hills, isn’t there to the extent it used to be. I remember thinking that I didn’t have the same hunger for the experience that I did even on Aconcagua. But I suspect everyone says that when they’re just back and still regaining weight and condition. I lost enough weight to have to put two new holes in my belt but I also lost a lot of muscle too.

But now I’m back in Talkeetna and planning to take a couple of days to get used to normal life again. I’m aiming to spend a few days at the Anchorage Daily News shadowing some of their reporters to see how things are done here, and also to see which government agencies might be hiring since the ADN definitely isn’t. (They sacked 13 journalists while I was on the hill) Not sure what to do after that. Since I’m about to have my sixth midsummer’s day in a row, without having a midwinter since June 2005, it seems almost right to do so above the Arctic circle so that I’ll have been to both polar regions.

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