Base Camp Town: Flying Climbers to the Glacier
Near Talkeetna, Alaska
Talkeetna is the doorway to Denali. Each year climbers from around the world arrive in this little town to begin an attempt on the mountain. They register with the National Park Service at the Walter Harper Talkeetna Ranger Station on B Street, sit through a briefing, and check their gear, before they ever leave the ground.
Their first real stop on the mountain is a place nicknamed the Kahiltna International Airport. It is the Denali base camp, sitting at about seven thousand two hundred feet on the southeast fork of the Kahiltna Glacier. There is no runway, only packed snow.
Ski equipped bush planes leave the Talkeetna airstrip and land climbers directly on the ice, an hour or so from town. During the busy May and June season, several hundred climbers may be spread across the mountain at once, and a base camp manager stationed on the glacier coordinates radio traffic between the climbers and the air taxis. The mountaineering rangers who patrol the route are among the most experienced in the world.
Most climbers follow the West Buttress, the route pioneered in the nineteen fifties, and roughly half who start each season reach the top. Talkeetna sees them off, and welcomes back the ones who make it down.
