Chris and Josh looking out over the moraine of the Muldrow Glacier from west of Anderson Pass. Lots of rain and snow on the hike in. It snowed on us almost everyday, but the weather was never bad enough to really stop us from moving.
Steep climbing on very rotten rock. Our base camp was down below the snowline in this picture. The terrain improved dramatically just a few hundred feet above this photo when we were able to move on the ridge proper.
The climbing along the ridge was nice. You can see our tracks down lower on the ridge on the left side of this photo. Down below is the Brooks Glacier.
We dug our camp right into the ridgeline. We had a beautiful spot here. It took us awhile to dig out this spot but the view was incredible when the clouds finally parted.
This section of the ridge was just above our camp. This was one of the steeper and more exposed sections of the route.
The ridge was corniced in several areas. The snow was pretty good for the most part with only one major section of post-holing that Josh broke through like a champ.
Me on the summit. I lead the last section to the top. It was tough to tell exactly where the top was as we came up the ridge and we passed over one major false summit. I was a little surprised when I poked my head above a drift on the ridge to discover the summit. The top was pretty broad and flat with great views of some of the other peaks in the range including the east face of Denali, behind me, and Mt Mather (not shown).
The descent back to the glacier was pretty straight-forward even though the visibility was poor. The few sketchy spots we had been concerned about on the way up were not bad at all on the way down.
Back down on the Muldrow Glacier we found huge rivers flowing on top of the ice. These rivers carve deep canyons that are very difficult to cross. We had to cross three or four major rivers in order to get to Oastler Pass.
Even after we got back to relatively low elevations it continued to snow. This is at about 5500 ft. We were surprised by this sunset after several hours of heavy snowfall.
Two days of hiking, twenty miles, and a crossing of the McKinley River brought us out to Wonder Lake. Mt Brooks is the pointy peak on the left and Denali is on the right. I had a great time on this trip and came back with even more climbing projects to pursue off the Muldrow.
