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Pulling Out the Summit Socks Thursday, June 15, 2000
Good evening Mountain Zone, this is Luis Benitez, with Scott Darsney and calling from 17 camp, up here on Denali. Well gang, the weather has finally broken. I'm standing here right now on this rocky outcrop overlooking a sea of clouds that Hunter and Foraker are poking out of. I can look down and see the 14,000-foot camp and the fixed lines heading up towards the ridge — clear as a bell. The summit's still a little windy, but, all of us here at 17, we've got our fingers crossed and we're actually going to try and go for the summit tomorrow morning, weather permitting. Scott's already pulled out his summit socks, so [laughs] that usually an indicator that we're going to go. Greg was feeling kind of lucky, so he put on some clean underwear. Tomorrow we actually have a birthday, it's Siobhan's birthday, so she's kind of dreading what we're going to do to her. We're going to make her some kind of birthday cake or something fun like that and, hopefully, the summit will be the greatest reward. We just hung around today, the weather was pretty bad all day to this point, we played hearts in the big tent all day long, played cards, had hot drink — used a trash bag as a scoreboard with a Sharpie pen, which was kind of fun, kind of like a little chalkboard. Mike is continuing to be our basic garbage disposal and anything we don't eat or drink he takes. He's feeling really strong and really good and Ken Prince wants to send out a lot of love to his daughter Gillian, it's her birthday coming up and he wants to say 'hello' and he wishes you were up here Gillian, with him. John's been doing a lot of recording with his cool little video camera, we're all kind of envious because it's lighter than any of our cameras and it's a pretty neat thing...[Unintelligible]...clouds parted, took some shots. Seventeen camp is pretty crowded; there's a lot of people up here that are hopefully queuing up to make the summit attempt tomorrow if the winds die down. There are a couple people up here that are completing their seven summit attempts, that's the highest summits on each of the seven continents. A Spanish woman, a gentleman from Australia, and another fellow, I believe is from Britain, and they've already headed up on the summit bid. No real apprehension about what we've got in front of us and everybody has been pretty well acclimatized for the past four days. Just because we've been up here for so long, we've had the chance to sit around and get used to the altitude. We're pretty ready for a summit push: Everybody's been eating and hydrating really well and feeling really good. And Scott and I are really looking forward to getting up there and seeing what we can do. Matt Szundy went down to 14 camp; he's on his way out tomorrow. We really appreciated all of his help, he actually needs to come in with the next Alpine Ascents trip with Tom Bridge. So for the pre-summit attempt phone call this is Luis Benitez with Alpine Ascents, wishing everyone a pleasant evening.
— Luis Benitez, Alpine Ascents International, MountainZone.com Correspondent
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Hear Luis' Call from Denali 
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