The 1981 South Buttress traverse of Denali got me keen on seeing lesser visited areas of the mountain. Even though the Muldrow Glacier on the NE corner of Denali was the only route climbed from 1913, the year of the first ascent, until 1951, the year the West Buttress was climbed, the Muldrow now comes in a distant second in popularity to the West Buttress.
One of the Muldrow’s drawbacks is its longer approach to the glacier before the climb begins. On the West Buttress, climbers land on the SE Fork of the Kahiltna Glacier at 7,200 feet and start from there. For the Muldrow the start is from Wonder Lake at 2,100 feet and nearly 20 miles distant from the Muldrow Glacier. In addition, the McKinley River has to be crossed. Depending on the river flow, that crossing is a major challenge.
Recruited for the trip were, besides Marcia & myself, Craig Rowley, Dave Sparks, Al Ellsworth and John Arnold. To address the longer approach, we allowed for a 4 to 5 week climb and we hired a dog sledder to haul a substantial part of our gear to McGonagall Pass and the glacier. We solved the McKinley River crossing by leaving early, the second week of April, when the river was frozen. Since we were traversing the mountain and descending the West Buttress route, thus dodging a river crossing during the breakup or Spring floods.
The climbing was not extremely technical but the route finding through crevasse fields kept us on our toes. We took way too much food (my fault as I planned out much of the food) which slowed us down. To keep our pack loads down yet get everything from camp to camp, took multiple trips. We ended up dumping substantial amounts of food in crevasses along the way. Even today I can’t look at Danish butter cookies without thinking of the tins that went into crevasses at 16,000 feet. The good side of our slower pace was that none of us had any major altitude problems on the trip.
While we failed to summit the peak on account of bad weather on our summit day from the 17,000 camp on the West Buttress, we did complete the traverse and dragged ourselves and oodles of gear over Denali Pass at 18,200 feet. The climb lasted 34 days, and, with the exception of a National Park Service climbing team returning from Silver Throne (a nearby peak east of Denali), we saw no other climbers until we reached the 17,000 camp on the West Buttress, nearly 4 weeks of solitude.
