Editor's note: California-based Ian Shive has had his photographs published in Time, National Geographic and Outside Magazine, to name just a sliver of the publications where his work has appeared. Over the past few years he has gained a reputation as an "environmental and conservation oriented" photographer, author and film producer.
Ian Shive is co-producer of "Wild Exposure," which has aired since August on the Al Gore television channel, Current TV. He is closely associated with advocacy groups like the Nature Conservancy and the National Parks Conservation Association.
On Tuesday, Shive will be in Anchorage to sign copies of his recent photo book, "The National Parks: Our American Landscape." He will also speak at a forum on how climate change may be affecting America's national parks, along with staff from Kenai Fjords National Park.
It won't be Shive's first trip to Alaska. In 2008 he joined "a search-and-rescue dream team" on Mount McKinley and described the experience in an article originally published in National Parks magazine last year. With the permission of the author, we present portions of that article along with some of Shive's photos of the adventure, some published here for the first time.
RESCUE UNDER A MIDNIGHT SUN
Copyright Ian Shive. Excerpted from National Parks magazine. www.npca.org
The 7,200-foot base camp on the Kahiltna Glacier isn't your typical national park campground. For starters, the glacier itself is moving a foot per day, like a slow-motion conveyor belt made of snow and ice.
Because of the fantastic designs of European climbing gear, everyone is dressed in the brightest colors, as if outfitted for a Las Vegas show. It's a sight to see: teams of the toughest weathered men standing in skin-tight nylon with oversized boots. Camp is a village crowded with anywhere from 50 to 150 climbers. And despite the bright colors, not everyone's mood is upbeat.
Buck Tilton, founder of the Wilderness Medicine Institute, which is now part of the National outdoor leadership school park concessionaire guide-team on McKinley, describes it simply as "a complicated place."
As a long-time Park Service volunteer, Tilton knows this mountain well. "People arrive here full of anticipation," he says. "Others are just returning from their climb -- some have summitted and some have not. This camp is full of emotions."
The camp -- and mountain in general -- is a celebrity scene for the outdoor community.
"I love coming here. I've been coming for 30 years and wouldn't miss an opportunity to come," says Ralph Tingey, who has held senior posts in Denali and the Park Service's regional office in Alaska, and now volunteers at base camp in his retirement.
"Base camp is an international mélange of who's who in the climbing community," he says, and it starts to show. Word on the mountain is that Peter Hillary, son of the legendary climber sir Edmund Hillary, just left base camp to begin his journey to the top of North America.
Daryl Miller, the patriarch of McKinley and the lead climbing ranger only weeks from retirement, is also in camp. His demeanor speaks of years of experience that have helped him guide his successor, John Leonard. Deciding who works at a Park Service outpost is not an easy task. The best rangers are climbers long before they don the gray and green uniform, which means they've got to bridge the gap between the renegade culture of mountain climbers and the regimented culture of the Park Service.
After a couple days of getting to know the team better and acclimatizing, I prepare myself for a 4 a.m. departure. Traveling in the coldest part of the day -- while unpleasant -- is the safest approach. Snow bridges that cover the deep crevasses on the glacier will be frozen solid, making them safer to cross than they would be under the mid-day sun.
The glacier we are traveling on is a mile deep -- so deep that when something falls in a crack, we don't hear it hit bottom.
As an extra precaution, we slap on skis instead of attaching crampons to our boots; this helps disperse our weight and make a fall less likely. In addition, we are all roped together in teams of three. I am in the middle -- a human yo-yo with two strings pulling me in opposite directions. For the next five hours we'll cover more than five miles like this, with a gradual gain of 800 feet.
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We make camp by noon, the hottest part of the day. The sun begins to break through the clouds and quickly turns the white glacier into a gigantic solar panel. The heat from the snow is unrelenting and unavoidable. Even standing still, I break a sweat. Above 13,000 feet, the ultraviolet index will be nearly 300 percent higher than at sea level due to the reduced atmosphere. One foreign climber passing through said it best: "I never thought the coldest place in the world could also be the hottest."
The next five days all blend into one another, with moments of blinding snow and varying degrees of coldness that give way to sweltering heat. Our climbs become more difficult as our elevation gains increase to 3,000 feet per day, a pace we will maintain until we hit the 14,200-foot medical base camp. The weight of my pack and sled seem to be conspiring against my success with every step I take.
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I also get to know lead climbing ranger John Leonard better. Even in a blinding snow, his green Park Service hat and jacket form a silhouette that is unmistakably that of a park ranger. As we pass climbers coming down the hill, many pay Leonard compliments for the cleanliness of the mountain. It is, in fact, spotless. Even the errant Power Bar wrapper gets scooped up as Leonard skis uphill. To him, keeping the mountain clean is priority one.
"We manage Mount McKinley first as a national park," says Leonard, "and that means resource protection is the first priority."
Picking up the trash may not seem like a massive challenge compared with the daunting effort to climb up McKinley, but other mountains, such as Everest, are a step away from being classified as the world's highest landfills. The globe's most impressive mountains are littered with empty oxygen containers, waste bags, meal packs, and anything else people can ditch to cut weight on their climb. From base to summit, McKinley is covered only in footprints.
After five days of climbing, we finally make our approach to an area known as "windy corner," the homestretch on our journey to medical base camp. At 13,500 feet, it's hard to grasp just how high we are, but tech sergeant Brandon Stuemke put it in perspective when he told us the planes he parachutes out of are capped at 13,000 feet. We're walking around in the snow much higher than that.
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The medical camp had an easy go at first with a few complaints of gastrointestinal distress and lightheadedness.
After nearly a week and the first few cases of frostbite, the first serious emergency came up. It was 9:30 p.m., when the voice of an English speaking man with a Russian accent came across the Park Service radio frequency.
A team of Russian climbers at the top of the fixed lines at 16,500 feet had come across a sick climber unable to descend to 14k camp on his own.
They offered to help lower him on their own while the Park Service patrol team immediately mobilized into rescue mode.
This was the real thing.
With crampons on their boots and climbing and rescue gear harnessed up, the team began ascending to meet the sick climber. No ascent is fast at this elevation -- even after acclimation, you still gasp for air with every step. As we neared the patient, his skin looked waxy and he wasn't moving.
The team confirms that the climber is still breathing, and indicates that he's not in serious danger, but he requires extensive treatment and evaluation.
The team lowers the man to the heated medical tent and immediately tap an IV to begin rehydration while he's administered bottled oxygen and warmed in a sleeping bag. After a few hours, he comes around and even smiles. He spends the night in the medical tent under the watch of Dr. Glatterer.
But the next morning, the patient is taken off oxygen and his blood-oxygen saturation immediately drops to abnormally low levels -- a dangerous sign of a more serious problem that can't be fully diagnosed at this facility. The patient will be unable to hike off the mountain and will require evacuation by helicopter.
For the next two days, the patient stays on oxygen and waits for the weather to clear so that the high-altitude helicopter -- the Denali lama -- can evacuate him to Talkeetna.
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Fifty minutes later, we're back in Talkeetna. A medical team escorts (the patient) to a regional aircraft for transfer to a hospital, and that is the last I hear of him. I'm left standing in a parking lot in 80-degree weather dressed in a down parka, climbing boots and harness, sweating and more than a little disoriented.
For some reason, the first thought that hits me is what Sergeant Master Paul Nelson said before we left for the mountain: "What doesn't make sense down here, starts to make sense up there."
Of course, he was referring to the way extreme altitudes can affect a climber's reasoning. But as I stood there watching a midnight sunset, I realized he was right in more ways than one.
Find Mike Dunham online at adn.com/contact/mdunham or call 257-4332.
By MIKE DUNHAM
mdunham@adn.com