Alaska Expedition 2011: Kahiltna
Loading ...Dispatch 1: Pirates of Rad HQ, Kahiltna Glacier, 5/13
Our one week update on our expedition 2011 on the Kahiltna Glacier…when we first got here we dug in our camp at the Kahiltna landing strip and immediately set out on a six day trip to the rarely or never visited West Fork of the Lacuna Glacier. This entailed over twenty miles of glacier travel and it took us four days to recon the route out from the base of the peak which we intended to climb. We put ourselves below the unclimbed South face of an unnamed numbered peak on the Lacuna Glacier system and made it up 2,500 feet of a new route. We were turned around due to bad snow conditions and an impending storm. We ended up descending after one and a half days on route…returning to our camp. We used the remaining time for the 20 mile of glacier travel back to base camp. It was…an odyssey into extremely remote Alaska Range terrain into a zone that neither of us had ever seen with the naked eye and possibly hadn’t been visited by a human being. So it was a pretty wild adventure.
Everything is going well, right now we’re focusing on acclimatization. We’re going to spend the next four days climbing the West ridge of Mt. Hunter, with the intent of climbing most of the route tomorrow, and bivying as high as we can to spend as much time as can above 10,000ft to start acclimatizing for bigger objects.
