LOCALadk Magazine

24 Winter 2020 LOCALadk Magazine LOCALadk of altitude and set up camp #1. The snow conditions are ver y good for traveling now. Cold enough so we don't sink in too deep and most of the crevices are covered over with winter's snow bridging. Hope they'e still good on the way down." He led a rope team and was told he went too fast. He wished he had some cigarettes. One of the Germans got frightened and decided to leave. Another developed an ap- parent hernia. A third, who was 69, was having trouble carr y- ing his heavy pack and would exit the climb later. Dropouts were escorted back down to the landing zone. On May 20 the group carried supplies through heavy snow to a higher cache at 9,000 feet. " Ver y rough climb up a ramp around a huge icefall," Bleakley wrote. "Sun has taken its toll on me. Almost didn't make it to the cache. Ver y dizzy. Alti- tude or the sun? Well, one more carr y and we establish camp #2, just below Kahiltna Pass. Exhausted!" The next day Bleakley felt better, hauling supplies to a higher cache at the pass. Ravens had gotten into the German team's cache and ruined four food bags. The American group was tasked with hauling some supplies for them. " We have been acting as sherpas for the other team and are getting ver y sick of it," Bleakley wrote. Failing gave an entire page in his journal to the same complaint. Over the next three days, they moved their cache higher and climbed to a camp at 10,300 feet in snowstorms, which confined them other wise to their tent, where Failing began sleeping with his water bottle and camera in his sleeping bag to keep them from freezing. They followed wands placed in the snow by previous climbers to avoid getting lost, but lost sight of them in a whiteout and had to spread out their group's three small roped teams, searching to find them again. At a plateau at 11,000 feet, they camped at a previ- ously built igloo where the Germans had spent the previous three days. "For the first time going up to 11,000 feet with a heavy pack I found it difficult to breathe," Failing wrote. "Have to take it slower from now on. It feels more like we're climbing the mountain now and not the glacier." A week into the ascent, on May 27, they needed crampons on their boots to climb a 1,000 -foot iced slope, following wands in blowing snow, then dug a pit so their food cache wouldn't fly off in 40 mph winds. Genet showed up. " What a nut," Failing wrote. "Running around all over camp tr ying to find out what's going on. And kissing and hustling the girls. He came into our tent and talked with us awhile. He seems sincere enough sometimes but organized he's not. Ver y colorful character." The next day the weather cleared and they moved their camp just below the Windy Corner — a steeply sloping trough against a rock wall — in two trips and then hauled a third load above it to 13,500 feet. Bleakley's journal called it one of the hardest days of his life. "It is pure pain, ever y step," he wrote. The next morning they began climbing on crampons to the

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