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On The Map

Wednesday June 21, 2023

Today the team woke up to Groundhog Day!

It has continued to snow but was relatively mild as far as temps and wind go. We masterfully killed a chunk of time in the morning by making a long brunch. After retiring to our tents for the afternoon, we regrouped and planned our potential launch to 17k camp for the next day over some golden, brown, and delicious burritos.

RMI Guide Joey Manship and Team

June 1, 2023, 5:13 pm PDT

After a successful summit day we descended from high camp to 14k Camp for the night. After a hearty burrito breakfast we descended to base camp, a 10-hour trek. We had excellent weather and perfect snow conditions for our lengthy descent. Unfortunately, snow returned in the morning and we were unable to fly off the glacier. K2 Aviation has pilots and planes on standby to come pick us up when the weather breaks. Who knows when that will be, but until then our climbers are dreaming of hot showers, cold beers, real food, and flush toilets. Nothing is easy about climbing Denali, and this final hurdle is testing our climbers'mettle. Hopefully we'll see the skies soon and the dreams will come to fruition. Fingers crossed. 

RMI Guide Mike Walter and team
 

The Torres del Paine trek team arrived over the last two days in Punta Arenas. Flying this far south requires a lot of plane, airport & layover time. We got an early start for our boat trip to Magdalena Island where a colony of magallenic penguins live.One and a half hours out the Straights of Magellan (if you haven't figured out that he's kind of a big deal down here) where the currents of the Atlantic & Pacific oceans collide resides a lot of penquinos. An hour loop got everyone a full dose of penguins, gulls & skuas. The baby penguins that hatched in November are big and still have trace amounts of their fuzzy down. 

We'll transfer to Puerto Natales this afternoon and get our gear check done. A quick meeting with our Chilean partners will get everyone ready to begin our trek of the "O" & "W" circuit of Torres del Paine National Park.

So far the weather has been nice, seas calm and winds low. We are eager to start walking towards Seron camp in the morning. 

RMI Guide Mike King

The Four Day Climb August 1 - 4, led by RMI Guide Casey Grom reached the summit of Mt. Rainier just before 6 am today.  The team reported a beautiful, sunny day with a light breeze.  The team began their descent from the crater rim just after 7 am.  Once back at Camp Muir they will continue down to Paradise and return to Rainier BaseCamp for a little celebration before concluding their adventure.

Congratulations to all the climbers!

Wednesday, June 2, 2021 - 5:24 pm PT

We had a cold clear night and woke to blue skies. The goal today was to cache food and fuel around Windy Corner at 13,500'. The route would take us up Motorcycle Hill and Squirrel Hill. From there it’s across the Polo Field and into the Saddle before Windy Corner. Windy Corner lived up to its name but the winner of the strongest winds today was the Polo Field. The Team did well and enjoyed the amazing views of the surrounding Alaska Range. We are back at 11K Camp eating food and enjoying some warm tents. We hope to move to 14K Camp tomorrow if the weather permits. There is a weather system forecasted that might keep us here for a few days. We’ll let you know when we know.

RMI Guide Mike King

On The Map

100% Summit!!

I was thinking the other day about just how motivated people have to be to come climb big mountains. It just takes so much effort, from paying for it, training for it, and actually doing it. Real go getters, doers. At the same time, I thought it was quite funny that those same type A, don’t sit around type of people. Have to sit in tents, bide their time, and do nothing for days on end in order to climb these mountains. They take time, patience, preparedness, and luck of course.

Today was our lucky day. We finally had the night we’ve been wanting. Still, cool, clear. And in the “morning” (the sun only hides for 2 hours behind Vinson) it was all systems go. We throttled the stoves and ate our breakfasts. We got our harnesses on and donned our gloves. We started to climb, and… continued to climb.

Vinson summit day involves gentle rolling slopes with bouts of steep seemingly unrelenting hills. It climbs Southeast through the Vinson Massif in the Jacobsen Valley situated at the base of Vinson. Behind, breathtaking views North to Tyree and Shinn from angles we hadn’t yet encountered. The Grand Finale? The summit ridge. A long traverse over the top of Vinson with steep drop offs to both sides, sprawling views, and bitter wind. 100% of the team stood on top this afternoon at 3:34PM.

We did all that today and more. We accomplished a goal that didn’t know we could achieve, we summitted the tallest peak in Antarctica on the best day we could have asked for. We’ll sleep well tonight after we scarf our dinners and run to our tents. Tomorrow, we start the descent.

RMI Guide Dominic Cifelli & Team

We got out of the tents at 6:30 this morning to find the clouds had returned. It was still calm though and not terribly cold at our 10,000 ft camp. We ate breakfast and hit the trail shortly after 8 AM. The trail was a good deal more rugged than yesterday’s with about a million rocky steps to negotiate as we steadily gained altitude through the giant heather forest. The morning rush hour was something to see, with porters from a half dozen expeditions charging up the path all at once. “Traffic” normalized after a few hours and the angle eased as we reached a ridge crest.

We found ourselves above the clouds once more as we moved along the ridge toward Kibo -which was not only visible again, but a good deal closer than it had been at our last glimpse. We made a big left turn to the North and began the traverse out toward Shira. The terrain got more interesting as we needed our hands on rock to pass a number of ledges.  The vegetation changed as we closed in on 12,800 ft -our high point for the day- we saw more giant senecios and lobelias as things got higher and drier.

Finally, we turned the corner onto the Shira Plateau and began walking downhill toward camp. We pulled in at about 2 PM… just in time for lunch and an afternoon nap. By dinner at 12,500 ft, things had cooled considerably and many of us had several warm clothing layers on for stargazing before bed.

Best Regards,

RMI Guide Dave Hahn & Team