Ryan Wichelns
Another Route for a reason
Ryan Wichelns is an outdoor and environmental journalist, expedition climber and skier with a special interest in obscure, remote, and mildly illogical mountains in the big ranges. When he’s not in Alaska, he spends his time exploring Colorado’s chossy and avalanche-prone San Juan Mountains.
We had dug a small pin in the snow about 15 feet from our tent to huddle around whenever it was time to fire up the OmniLite Ti stove and melt snow. I was sitting on the edge of the hole with the stove purring at my feet, working away at a pot full of snow. Every minute or so, I pulled the top off and added another chunk of frozen Alaskan glacier. The stove’s gentile hiss was all there was to hear. The skies were blue and cloudless, we hadn’t seen a plane in a few days, and my climbing partners were scattered around the wanded chunk of glacier we had deemed camp a couple days earlier, sucked into their own heads in the same way I was.
That morning, we made the decision to turn around from our objective—the South Buttress of Denali. We had spent a couple days exploring a glacier that leads to the route, only to be stopped no matter which route we took through the maze by a single giant impassable crevasse. This morning we checked out the last option we could find, only to be shut down by it as well. And just like that, a year of planning down the tubes. It wasn’t until we shuffled back to camp and started making dinner that it all really hit us.
We knew an early end to this trip was a possibility. After all, we chose a route that hadn’t been climbed in 25 years. There had to be a reason why, but we were just excited to explore. But hadn’t we done that? Sure, we went there excited to climb Denali, but if that had been our primary objective, we would have picked a different line. Instead, I was here, on a random side glacier without another group of climbers anywhere to be found. Not just in the mountains, being alone is a special kind of being outdoors. We had no way of knowing when the last people up this far had been here. Or if anyone had ever camped in our exact spot. Or when the last person to explore that icefall had done it. Or when the last person laid eyes on Denali from this angle. We had no way of knowing a lot of things when we flew in there, and that was kind of the point. Being out in the Alaska Range—and specifically being as far out there as we could realistically be—was what drove us more than anything else and it was what we had spent the last two years of planning seeking
I put another block of snow into the Primetech Pot and looked back up at the icefall. We came here to be explorers, to try something new, and to find out something about the Alaska Range that others didn’t know. And in getting turned around in that icefall, we succeeded.
- Ryan Wichelns
Outdoor and Environmental Journalist, North America
@Ryan_climbs
