Denali rose 18,000 feet above the nearby Tundra, notorious for its challenging weather. Denali is 20,310 feet tall and sits at 63 degrees north latitude, the highest peak in the Arctic. The “Great Man” might attract magnets from the storm blowing in from the Gulf of Alaska or the entire Bering Sea, and sometimes seems to create its own weather, while the top of the mountain is shrouded in wide clouds, indicating that strong winds are shrouding the mountain.
Bad weather is coming, sunny, and calm days are usually mixed with strong and snowy days. In a 22-day expedition, most typical season climbing teams will find three to four days of weather windows enough to make good cracks on the top of the mountain. But this year is not…
The experienced Denali and Alaska Range guide describes his weeks on the mountain in May 2023 as “a few days in the revelation of wind and snow, with good weather windows less than 24 hours, barely open to allow us to move.”
This season, we have several teams who find themselves waiting at 14,000-foot camp, adapting, accommodating and preparing to go to high camps, but their rest in the weather never has more than 12 to 24 hours to move up the hill, let alone having the chance to try the top. Typically, the team left the mountain after a week or more of the weather and made the next forecast weather window seven to ten days later.
One of our most experienced Denali guides, lead him 26th Together and backward from 11,000 feet! Due to the weather, they lost several days and were waiting to fly to the base camp. They lost more days, and under difficult conditions, the Cahiltner Glacier rose, and then lost another week of weather at 11,000 feet. Finally, their time runs out and their sights don’t change, so they make a difficult decision to try again in another season. Crazy!
The challenges of wind and snow are more complex and are related to avalanche dangers. Deep snow and wind tilts take time to settle, and the severe cold of this climbing season exacerbates the process. The possibility of terrain above Genet Basin at 14,200 feet usually takes at least a few days to trigger an avalanche becomes reasonable enough for the team to crawl through it.
Our final team of the season in early July waited in a cold storm at 14,200 feet, while wind-driven snow filled the camp with storm boards and deep baffles. Since the weather did not have a significant rest and could not relieve the avalanche danger, they eventually turned around and hiked back to the building. As of mid-July, the snow has not relaxed.
As parts of the country bake with extreme heat and drought, the Alaska Mountains saw a series of low-pressure systems shifting from the Gulf of Alaska, with only short high-pressure ridges passing between large low-pressure systems. This is the most consistent moisture and low pressure system we have ever seen, and by early July, as our season ends, we are making records set in 1963 to provide precipitation accumulation in southwestern Alaska. This kind of weather is not unprecedented. It's just ruthless throughout the climbing season. Ironically, for most of the season, the 2022 season was the exact opposite of a range of high-pressure systems, with Denali Summits having a success rate of more than 70%.
Weather forecasts have improved over the past decade and over the years we have hired professional mountain weather forecasters to help us, which makes our Alaska range forecast better than ever. Our predictions did help us pick up the top windows, but perhaps more importantly, this year, it helped us get our team out of trouble as short, good weather days turned into strong winds and heavy snow.
Mountain Guides is responsible for making decisions that are in the best interests of our climbers, and the well-being of our guests and guides is our top priority. They say every accident is preventable, and while this may be true, the problem is that we cannot predict every accident. However, we do know that the conditions for entering risk control may even make our system manage these risks vulnerable and increase the likelihood of unacceptable results.
This season, we have seen several other teams on Denali because they were trapped in bad weather or in weeks and then suffered multiple cold injuries. Frostbite fingers, toes, ears or nose are not worthy of the top of the mountain.
Below, as we show websitesummarize our methods of climbing the peak.
Our philosophy of guiding Denali climbing can be summarized in three goals:
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- Everyone is in good health.
- Everyone has a great experience.
- Everyone stood on the top of the mountain.
We will never sacrifice our first two goals for the third goal.
2023 has been a very difficult season. Congratulations to several teams at the summit; however, most of our climbers did not, which was a very disappointing one for every climber, the guide and the company as a whole. Ultimately, we are proud of our climbers and guidance on how to deal with challenges. Part of climbing in the Alaska Mountains is accepting the unknown results of trying to do hard things. It's amazing to see the team come together, work hard in hard conditions, and still have great experience with new friends – even if they can't be the lead.
