We all woke up wondering if today would be the day, and sure enough the weather decided to cooperate. We got the call from Talkeetna Air Taxi (TAT) and the team finished packing all of the food and remaining group gear. I'd be lying if I said my stomach didn't turn upside down a bit. We ended up leaving for the glacier around noon and before we new it, we had our camp set up by 1330. We dug our cache and buried a few days worth of food for when we returned. Everyone was stoked to have our objective in site and it was interesting to observe the juxtaposition of attitudes from the various teams. Half of the climbers were fresh and anxious after just arriving, and the other half were haggard climbers who had been living on the glacier for three weeks anxiously awaiting their return flight back to civilization. We found later, that we were the last team to fly on to the glacier that afternoon and flights out would be shut down for another day.
Josh fried up some pot stickers for dinner that tasted amazing. The cooking setup was pretty unique in that they used three Whisperlite stoves to heat up one pot of water. They also used a relatively heavy Fry Bake stainless steel pan. Josh reassured us that the Fry Bake was going to be one our of my favorite pieces of gear on this trip. The plan was to move to the base of Ski Hill at night when the snow is harder, and the heat from the sun isn't that bad. The team was back in the tent by 1930 with the plan to get up around 0200.
No comments:
Post a Comment