Back to civilization now after a successful 12 day climb of North America's tallest peak, Denali, home of some of the most extreme weather on the planet, with my 4 great friends Roger, Matt, Scott, and Aaron. For the first half of the climb we were very lucky with the weather and only needed 9 days to get enough good weather days to acclimatize and summit on the evening of the 20th. After we reached the summit we got about 20 minutes of clear sky -28 degree weather with light wind until a cloud moved in on us. Every day since then has been pretty bad climbing conditions but okay for decending, forecast calls for not a single good summit weather day until atleast the 30th so the 20th was our last summit chance for quite a while. Coolest temperature we observed on the trip was -43 and if I had to guess I'd say the highest wind speeds were only in the 80sMPH, typically you'd experience atleast a couple days with 100+MPH winds.
Feeling blessed to have had a successful trip with great weather and no injuries on the team. When I tried to do it back in the late 80s we had HORRIBLE weather for almost the entire 3 week trip and could never summit.