“There they are! she’s almost to the second ice band…. wow! Is today there fifth or sixth day on the climb?”

If being an alpine paparazzi is your thing, it’s hard to beat hanging out at basecamp on the Southeast fork of the Kahilitna glacier in Alaska. The SE fork is the starting point for virtually all ascents of the Alaska Range’s big three: Denali, Mount Foraker, and Mount Hunter. On a busy evening in mid-May, one finds plane loads of guided West Buttress expeditions with their matching tents, private groups of gumbies trying to figure out how to light their stoves, and brooding alpinists sulking around “waiting for the forecast to improve”. Basecamp is to Alaskan climbing what Ellis Island was to American immigrants: a snowbound customs house where the journey ends and the climbing begins. It all makes for excellent people watching. 

And nobody gets more scrutiny then those attempting the North Buttress of Mount Hunter, a gleaming turret of ice and rock only two miles from basecamp. Through the National Park Service’s high-powered spotting scope, you can sit back and watch a team’s every move. When Ben Gilmore, Max Turgeon and I arrived there two weeks ago, I immediately noticed a group of folks lurking around the scope and knew: somebody was up on the Moonflower Buttress. It wasn’t long before one basecamp gossiper filled me in on all the details: They were Japanese, a man and women, they had been up there for six days and had already sat out a storm low on the route. It looked like the pair was flipping leads and were moving really, really slow.