LOCALadk Magazine

Winter 2020 LOCALadk Magazine 23 LOCALadk to lead mountaineering expeditions and I was going to do this for the rest of my life." They began descending after about 30 minutes, ran into Bleakley's group that was coming up as snow began falling and the weather worsened, and descended to a camp at 17,200 feet. Failing drank a quart of water, crawled into his sleeping bag and fell asleep. A later photograph that day showed Bleakley, with two rope companions on the summit, his face obscured by nearly black glacier glasses and his thick beard caked in ice. There's nothing visible in the background. Bleakley turned 27 two days later on June 4. He was among six climbers crammed in a four-man tent they attached to the ice with screws, trapped for three days by a whiteout with temperatures 20 to 30 degrees below zero and the wind about 40 miles per hour. They were running out of food. He wondered if it was his last birthday. "Still bived at 19,300," he'd written in his journal the day before. "Storm blowing like hell outside. As soon as we can see some wands we'll tr y to break out of here. It is not too safe to camp this high on this mountain. But it looks as if it will be at least one more day before we can move." The climb for both Bleakley and Failing had been an endur- ance test, hauling packs weighing 75 pounds and sometimes more up at times treacherous ground into thinning air, an agonizing effort even for young men in their peak physical condition. By the summit they were nearly spent. The West Buttress Route was pioneered in 1951 by Brad- ford Washburn, an explorer, photographer and mountaineer who had studied Denali and proposed it a few years earlier. It was his third summit trip, taken with a group of Colorado climbers, all dropped by bush pilot Terris Moore more than 7,000 feet up the Kahiltna Glacier, another first, where they established base camp. The advent of aerial support elimi- nated the need for arduous approach hikes. The route, with camps plotted along the way, follows the glacier up to the Kahiltna Pass at 10,200 feet. It continues up the mountainside, around what came to be called the Windy Corner at 13,200 feet. Farther up, it mounts an 800 - foot headwall, sloped at 50 to 60 degrees, to the crest of the West Buttress itself. It then follows the narrow ridge to an open bowl at about 17,200 feet. It crosses Denali Pass at 18,200 feet, above that passing the Archdeacon's Tower and through a small snow bowl, then up another 800 -foot wall to the summit ridge leading to the South Summit. It's about 15 miles of distance and 13,000 feet in eleva- tion, with some pieces of the route often repeated between camps and caches to acclimatize to thinner air and move sup- plies up. There were fixed ropes up the big headwall in 1975. Failing spent about three hours lost after flying into An- chorage, finding no ground transportation. He hitchhiked, crediting luck for the ride he caught to the tiny hamlet of Talkeetna. It was May 13. They got a pep talk from Genet on May 18, as well as bags of lemon drops and emergency rations should they get lost. Failing managed to be among the first in his group to get on the plane to the glacier, where in his journal he noted that he saw his first avalanche. "It never gets dark up here but I was so tired I slept good anyway," he wrote at the close of the second day out. " We moved all our personal gear, tents, stove and four gallons of fuel 5 miles up the glacier today. We gained about 1,000 ft Trekking from Camp 5 to Camp 6

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