At 14,000 feet

They should be enjoying another day of fairly nice weather today on Denali. We hope to get a phone call tonight from the team with updates on when they will be moving to high camp. It should be any day now. Stay tuned...

Moving To 14,000ft camp

The weather was beautiful on Denali today, after snow and winds for a couple of days, and the teams on the mountain took advantage of the weather and moved on up. The June 16th expedition led by Dave Staeheli was able to move up to the 14,000 foot camp today, where they will spend at least 4 nights acclimating and preparing for the next big move to high camp at 17,200 ft. Lets hope for a week of beautiful weather.

Everythings Going Great!

The team has made it to the 11,000 foot camp, and is ready to move to 14,000ft tommorow. Everybody is doing great, the weather is marginal, but OK. The forecast is for the weather to improve thru the weekend which will be just in time for them to move up to camp 3. We will hear from them directly when they get to the next camp where they will be able to check in with us by cell phone.

They Flew to Basecamp

After a busy couple of days of travel, and last minute preparations the June 16th expedition is underway. They met in Anchorage on Friday, and this morning drove to Talkeetna where they hoped on planes and flew 50 miles into basecamp on the Kahiltna glacier. They will begin the hard work early tommorow morning. Stay Tuned...

One week away and counting!

Welcome to the Update Blog for Mountain Trip's June 16, 2006 West Buttress Expedition.

The team is undoubtably finalizing their personal kits and getting psyched for their upcoming adventure on the slopes of Mount McKinley.

The team consists of:

Jacob Melrose
Mark Novak
Clark Luhning
Marc Adams
Rich Birrer
David Marlon
Daniel Larsen

Guides will be:

Dave Staeheli
Peter Ingliss
Kevin Wright

We will do our best to update this site when we get information from the team. PLEASE keep in mind that communication from a big, remote, wild mountain like Denali is difficult. Weather, cold, clouds and terrain all conspire to make cell phones work intermittantly, at best. You should adopt our motto that: "NO NEWS IS GOOD NEWS" when it comes to expeditions like this.

Enjoy!