Thayer carried Bradford Washburn’s aerial photos of the proposed route, and based on those pictures he expected mostly soft snow and easy step kicking on the South Buttress. But the climbers instead found continuous hard ice on the 1000-foot-high, forty-five to fifty-five-degree slope above their second camp. Today, this face would be a moderate day’s climb, but the 1954 foursome didn’t know how to ascend steep ice on the frontpoints of their crampons. Instead, the leader leaned over and hewed steps in the ice with his long axe, while the others carefully balanced up these steps beneath him. Each step might require five to ten minutes of chopping, and the effort was exhausting. Ice chipped by the leader bombarded the lower climbers. The team carried 12 ice pitons for belays, but these were unlikely to stop a fall on their quarter-inch manila ropes. One day they only progressed 100 feet.

A few team members had recently seen a film of the 1953 Everest first ascent, in which expedition leader Sir John Hunt intones at one point, “Our problem today is to get four tons of equipment up Lhotse Face.” Now confronted with a similar big ice face on Denali, Thayer turned in mock seriousness to his partners and affected a British accent: “Our problem today is to get these bloody packs up Lotsa Face.”

At midday on May 5, the third day of work on Lotsa Face, a storm forced the climbers to retreat just below the top of the face. Four days later, they dug out their steps and finally reached the crest, catching sight of Denali’s summit for the first time in a week. On his way back down to pick up a load, Wood counted 1038 steps hacked in the hard ice of Lotsa Face.
Above, more steep ice appeared to block their route, but the team discovered a tunnel leading underneath an enormous ice cornice that cantilevered sixty to eighty feet over the Kahiltna Glacier. The astonished climbers walked and crawled under the ice roof, pushing their packs ahead of them as they wriggled through tight blue caves. At the far side of this remarkable passage, they found easier ground.