May 7 – Altitude: 2300 meters

What do you do when you are carrying too much gear for mountain climbing travel? you ‘cache’ the gear that you will not need for the coming days for example food bags, high altitude warm down gear, crampons, snow pickets, gas for stove etc.

Obviously we had to carry this up the cache site from camp 1 which was a long 7 hour of climbing round trip with around 30kg backpack on the way up. Xavier decides to spread the load and go with sled and pack, Pat and I go for 1 heavy backpack to make things more simple but it’s tough! This is where all our training comes to fruition.

It snows most of the way up which makes things tough and it’s brutally cold at the cache site. We run into 3 ropes of French who are quite slow and we have to pass them on the trail which is a complicated and a long process. I overhear one of the female members of their team, Pascale, argue about the choice of their leader and she seems quite pissed off by the decision of their lead, Bernard, who decided to go from camp 1 to camp 2 in one day therefore carrying 100% of their gear while acclimatising, it’s a tough bet on Denali. Our plan is slow and step by step – and as we know:  ‘slow is smooth, smooth is fast’ – Xavier loves this expression.

After a long day out, the ceiling of out tent becomes a drying experiment.