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Financially Feasible Five
Sunday, July 2, 2000

A Season on Denali Hear Bill's Call from Denali
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Good morning! This is Bill McCormick, Sunday morning at High Camp on Denali. We are Alpine Ascents International trip number six and to repeat yesterday's message, the good news is we all summitted yesterday. Jack, Tony, Southward, Luke, Dave and myself left camp at about ten in the morning. Arrived on the summit a little after five and were back in camp before ten. So, round-trip was a little under twelve hours and the remarkably fine weather really made that possible.

Today we're going to pack it up and start heading down the mountain. The weather is still holding. Tom Bridge and Matt's group is here at High Camp and they're probably going for the summit themselves today.

This is our twenty-first day on the mountain, so it's run a little bit long, but fortunately everybody had a fairly flexible schedule and we could work it.

Just a couple of notes on some other groups yesterday. Mountain Trip with Todd Rutledge, most of them summitted. We said goodbye to three young climbers from Anchorage, the Not-before-noon group, who we had a lot of respect for. They made an ascent in some bad weather, turned around at the right time. They're all young guys and they'll be back again. It's just good to see the next generation up here and applying some good common sense and watching out for each other. They're also the next generation with technology -- they had a solar panel and actually we almost cramponed it one day walking by their camp. But it's good to see those guys. Definitely emptying out up here.

And in reference to a message I left concerning my first trip, the AAI trip number one of the season with Tim Lovelace, his title for the five summits, the highest summits on five continents that he achieved, short, missing Everest and Vinson, was the Financially Feasible Five which is still a great accomplishment.

I think for now that'll be about it from us. The rest of the gang, I'll be waking them up here in a moment. I've got hot water going and we'll probably do a wrap-up from possibly down in Talkeetna. If the weather holds, we could be flying back in to town sometime tomorrow, which would be Monday. Thanks, this is Bill McCormick, clear.

Bill McCormick, Alpine Ascents International, MountainZone.com Correspondent


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