Brian Okonek photo of some climbers on the "Audubon", above 17K, where Melis as near as I can tell will be heading downward on day 12 at HC.Forrest just came out this morning. He said he talked to Melis on the radio last night at the base of Pig Hill, on her way up to the Summit. If Pig Hill was at sea level a fit person could run to the summit in about 2 minutes. At over 20,300 feet it takes over 30 minutes. Melis just called in and they DID SUMMIT! They summitted last night around 10:00 PM. Good job everyone, way to hang in there. All that hard work paid off. They are on their way down from High camp now. At the earliest, we could see them tomorrow morning.
Here, a Denali climber trains for carrying heavy loads and dragging a sled by pulling his old car tires around the block. This is a pretty good method really. Some folks think we're joking when we suggest doing this. But as you can see some people actually do it, and it works well, believe it or not.
Pat Ormond, at the bottom of the fixed lines. According to Forrest, today looked pretty good up high and he thought that there was little or no wind up high. Those guys should be moving up to 17 today. The timing might work out well for a camp swap between Melis's group and Pat's.
Video footage of Pat's crew putting in their cache several days ago at Windy Corner. Caches either need to be burried 1 meter beneath the surface of the snow or in the case of caching at Windy Corner where there often isn't enough snow to dig the cache deep enough, we pile rocks on top as well to keep the ravens out.
That's all for now.
rfg