Denali  meaning  ” the high one” is the native American name for North Americas highest peak standing at 6149m, for a while it was known as Mount Mckinley but officially it is now Denali. We were a four person self organised expedition, a Dutch couple Mark and Petra, their friend Jo and myself and in May 2006 we flew into Anchorage in Alaska ready for the challenge ahead. We had a few days here organising stuff and topping our supplies up before getting a lift up to the small town of Talkeetna – the gateway to Denali. Denali National Park and Preserve requires climbing expeditions to pre-register 60 days prior to climbing and pay a fee. Another important thing to sort out prior to arrival was food. Our route was the West Buttress, which is by far the most popular route and probably the easiest and we gave ourselves 3 weeks climbing time, so this set the amount of food we needed – 21 day ration packs each consisting of about 4000+ calories as most days we would be working quite hard, all repackaged to reduce bulk and weight . We would use liquid white fuel to melt snow for drinks so had to work out how much of this we would need.

There are no porters on Denali unfortunately so everything we needed once on the glacier had to be transported by us, the usual way of doing that over there is to carry a big rucsac as normal and then to drag a plastic sled behind you, at the same time you are roped to your fellow team members because you are walking on a glacier with hidden crevasses. This needs a little practise and a lot of patience to get right and going downhill is not as easy as you think! We used 5 camps on our way and most of these were preceded by a day hike to make a cache of food and fuel which also helped to get us mountain fit.

Apart from the normal mountaineering gear other useful gear to have are :-

• Snowshoes great for walking on deep soft snow.
• Plastic sleds for dragging heavy loads.
• Snow shovel for clearing tent platforms.
• Ice saw for cutting snow blocks to shield tents from the wind.
• Cane wands for route marking in bad conditions and for marking food and equipment caches.
• Clean mountain cans (CMC)  Denali has a pack in – pack out policy applying to rubbish and supplies, a more recent initiative is the use of CMC to dispose of human waste from camps. there are latrines at 2200m and 4300m where the ranger station is at camp 4. At other places biodegradable plastic liners are used with the cans and these liners can then be thrown into deep crevasses.