Sunday 20 May 2012

Here we go now!


1am. Adrian and I boot up, unzip the frozen tent and sneak out into the cold Alaskan night. It’s not dark! Just the mountains in battle ship greys and blues; in Dartmoor speak its still dimpsey. We cook up a cheesy muff and Starbucks Pike Place coffee and then shoulder our Osprey Mutant packs, tie off coils and skin off up the glacier.  An icey wind is rushing down off Denali.

We have to beat the boys to the col on the ridge below the Sugar Tooth – an Alaskan version of Skye’s Clach Glas and Blaven, but pumped up on steroids. Ade’s aim is to film them from above and then moving on upwards in their quest to traverse the ridge of the Moose Tooth Group.

I follow some wands through the crevasses – they lead to a blind alley and a series of collapsing snow bridges. I switch to intuition and head off out left and follow a spine like lateral moraine. Its steep, icey and we move fast over good ground, the sun climbing and signs of life surfacing back at our camp way below us.

At the steep ground we dump our skis and switch to crampons and axes. It is Adrian's first time using these tools and with an 800ft 50 deg snow slope it is a veritable shove in the deep end. We tie the rope between us very short and I poon my way up tractoring away. Ade shouts: They’re here already!   But we get to the col, belay the rope to a granite spike and Ade springs the cameras into action as Jon and Matt sprint up and move on through, scratching their way up a mixed ramp and out of site around the cathedral buttress above us. It is like being overtaken in the French Alps.

Ade gets his shots and we descend. At our skis we watch for the others above us and see them moving fast 400m above. So far so Good.

Back at camp we fester, watch an avalanche charge down Blood From A Stone on Mount Dickie and dream of climbing the unclimbed Laser Line - a sabre cut runnel of ice that drops vertically from the summit to the glacier for a clean mile. In my mind its got be the cleanest, most awesome climbing objective on the planet.

We keep watching The Moose group of mountains, but cloud has been building all day and they soon disappear into cairngorm type clag. Not good. The recently arrived Mountain school students disappear into their tents. A flurry of snow falls and we look down the gorge to see dark clouds building…

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