Base Camp

It turns out that the visibility in at the mountain was not great but the pilot could manage to land us a few kilometers further down the glacier than is normal. Marcus and I have a quick discussion and decide that this is OK and that we can sled the gear forward to the base of the ridge with out too much difficulty.

The views of the mountains and glaciers that we have been flying through are magnificent. The view of Mt Logan is impressive too. Its huge! And we are flying directly in towards the ridge that we are going to climb – awesome! But no time for that... The little plane sinks down through some quite bumpy air toward the glacier and very soon we are skidding along the undulating snowy surface to a halt. Out we get and quickly unload our pile of gear into a heap beside the plane. Then the pilot applies power and the little plane turns around and flies back into the sky leaving Marcus and I covered in snow and crouching over our gear in a mini-blizzard.
What’s all the rush for? – well, the visibility is minimal and it could easily deteriorate in the next hour or even minutes. The pilot is hurrying off to get the other half of our climbing team to try to keep us together.

Marcus and I set about digging a hole to cache our back-up food and gear – This is now “Base Camp”. And then we dug out the old bivy site we had landed at and set up our tent. The weather held good, and a couple of hours later we here the plane again and the others arrive in the same manner we did. The action repeats and then as the snow settles and the four of us stand up and dust our selves off, we are all looking at each other with huge grins on our faces – The route looks great

Its too late in the day for us to reach the base of the ridge (about 10Km away) but we set out in that direction anyway. The plastic sleds are loaded up and we put on our ropes and skis and hauling harnesses and trudge slowly toward the massive mountainrough the snow for several hours but the mountain doesnt seem to be getting much closer. We look back and there is nothing to show us that we are making any progress at all - its like being on a treadmill!
Eventually the sun is setting behind the mountain ridges (at about 10pm) so we just stop where we are and set up the tents on the glacier and camp.


The next morning, we got up latish in beautiful sunshine and had breakfast.
We are camped on the glacier out in the middle of nowhere with nothing but snow ice and rock making up the views of these huge mountains – not a scrap of green or another living thing to be seen :)
Breakfast completed, we set about packing camp and loading our gear onto the sleds again and we start trudging toward the mountain again.
We set off at about 10am and the snow slowly became softer as the morning passed and the warmth built up. After a few more Km (we were definitely closer to the mountain now) of pretty flat ground, the glacier got steeper and we headed up toward the base of the ridge we were going to climb. Dragging our big sleds up hill through the soft snow was very hard work. As we got closer to the ridge we could make out some dark specks moving around on the glacier. It turned out that these were some other people at the base camp for the same route. As we got closer still, the ground got steeper and that meant that there were crevasses to be negotiated. It was a very big glacier and some of the crevasses were on a matching scale. They were mostly visible though so while we had to zigzag our way through the maze, we had no problems with falling in. The other people at the base of the ridge were not so lucky though! It turned out that as we got closer we could figure out what was going on. One of them had managed to fall a long way into a crevasse and the other three were working a Z-pulley rope setup to extract him. He was unhurt and roped up so there was no real problem but our party were too far away to be able to offer them help. We were moving as fast as we safely could through the same crevasse field!