Day 64, descent
   
   6/30/01
   8000' camp, Kahiltna Glacier
   
   I let the sun come up before getting started this morning, since I'd
   gotten just a touch of frostbite on my toes and didn't want to
   aggravate them further.  They were slightly swollen and with a numb, tingling
   sensation, but there was no tissue damage so I was little concerned
   about them.  Might loose the toenails, I thought.
   
   I went through the standard winter camping routine and packed up to
   head down.  Again, getting around the area of Washburn's Thumb was 
   slightly dicey, being unroped, but I soon came to the top of the headwall
   and headed down the fixed ropes.  I called Mike's wife Debbie on a cell
   phone to see if he had checked in with her.  She hadn't heard a word.  
   Now that was unusual; if he'd flown out on the bush plane I would have 
   thought he would have checked in.  Another possibility is that the rangers
   weren't very thorough when they told me he wasn't in Base Camp, which I
   thought likely due to the way the conversation had gone (it turned out they
   got him mixed up with a different Mike).
   
   When I reached the 14,200 camp, I retrieved my (large) cache and sled,
   and had a geometry exercise in trying to get everything packed in.
   Mike and I had split up carrying some of the group gear, but much of
   that had been needed for the summit climb, so now I had more than I carried
   up.
   
   Below this point are many crevasses.  It's dangerous to travel alone.
   One might make the argument that above this camp, you can rely on
   skill or caution or good balance or whatever to get you through; but below
   here, if a crevasse decides to eat you, no amount of skill will stop
   it.  Judgment can be used as far as "reading" the robustness of an ice
   bridge, but if that bridge fails anyway, a solo climber has a very low
   chance of survival.
   
   With that in mind, I found another rope team of only 3 persons that
   was glad to have me as a fourth.  I hooked in at the end of their rope and
   we hauled our sleds down.  A cloud layer at this elevation had, in the
   past day, dumped about a foot of new snow here, making travel a bit of
   a slog without snowshoes.  We descended to the 11,000 camp, where I
   disconnected and retrieved yet another cache of gear that Mike and I
   had left there, albeit a much smaller one.  More importantly I retrieved
   my snowshoes.
   
   The rope team had gone on ahead, and I went alone across the upper
   Kahiltna, which is not as heavily crevassed as the lower part.  It was
   an eerie sensation, being completely isolated on an Alaskan glacier,
   surrounded by utter silence save for my own breathing while the
   mountains screamed out their grandeur. Standing in this spot, I could travel
   back in time a thousand years and not see any difference.  Or ten thousand.
   
   I caught up with the other team, pitching their tent at the 8000'
   camp, and decided to park it there myself so that I could rope up with them
   in the morning.  Conditions were amenable to bivvy, so instead of
   setting up the tent I slept out in the open, with just a ground sheet and a
   pad beneath my sleeping bag.  This provided an unobstructed view of the
   mountains all night long in the twilight of an arctic summer.  I was
   content.

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