Team Alpari: 8 Hours On Our Hands And Knees

This is Ivan Dusharin from Team Alpari. We’re currently working on Mount McKinley.

I wanted to describe one of our most difficult days of climbing, where we had to make it from 3,200 meters to 4,200 meters – a whole kilometer vertically. We were expecting snow today, so we were pretty excited when we woke up and didn’t see any. Then we started to wonder how we would manage to carry all of our stuff up.

We knew that this would be one of our most difficult climbs, pitting us against a really steep incline. On this part ofDenali, most climbers ditch their sleds and carry their equipment on their shoulders.

Usually this stretch takes a couple of days, but we decided to try to make it all the way in one go. We loaded up two sleds and headed upwards. It wasn’t easy. We had to crawl on all fours, fighting tooth and nail the whole way up. It took us 8 grueling hours to make it to rangers’ camp at 4,200 meters, but we managed to cut a couple of days out of our expedition. Along the way, we passed a number of teams that had started out before we did. I think the only reason we were able to make the climb was that we were well acclimatized to the altitude after Everest.