I awoke to a steely-blue light inside the tent, and the morning seemed reluctant to cast a proper shadow. I reached out the tent door and scraped a handful of loose snow. It sat in my hand like a sooty cake of flour and water-sticky, damp, the color of cement. In the still, cool morning, there was no sound, no color, and no motion but the drizzle of wet, gray flakes in the foreground of a gray sky. I could scrape the top layer of snow aside and find clean, white crystals below, but the gray snow soon covered them. Pulling on a parka and my boots, I crawled out of the tent into a world without contrast, and considered the possibilities.
What could have provoked such a storm? Denali is certainly known for the vicissitude of its weather, but gray snow was unprecedented. Arctic dust storms were proposed and discarded. The Alaska Pipeline was burst and burned in our minds. Meteorites were hypothetically cast upon Anchorage, Bethel, and Nome. The sense of our detachment from the outside world was heightened by our ignorance, and we joked crudely even of a nuclear holocaust somewhere in the world down below.
We continued up the mountain, following our compass and our instincts. The cloud sat low over the glacier, trapping heat and holding the air temperatures around freezing, so that the falling gray snow piled wet and thick across our trail. For all of us, I think, it was depressing: slogging along through the muck, heads low, looking up only to sight the occasional bamboo wands that leaned under the weight of dirty, feathered rime ice.
A friend and I were guides, the other five clients. Held apart by fifty feet of sodden rope, we walked cheerlessly through a landscape that both looked and smelled like a dirty washrag. Without a perceivable shift in either sun or landscape to chart them, the day dragged by. Nobody knew why the sky was gray. We wondered whether it was punishment, the mountain's revenge against the desecrations of a thousand climbers, against ten thousand bags of feces dropped into supposedly "bottomless" crevasses, and against countless piles of blood and urine and vomit and even bodies, frozen irreverently into the relentless grinding of the glacier.
The date was June 27, 2002. It wasn't until the next afternoon that we finally heard: a large volcanic peak in the western Alaska Range had erupted. Mount Spurr dusted the city of Anchorage with a light coat of volcanic ash, but it coated the Alaska Range with a thick layer of tephra that remains visible in the icefalls and seracs of the glaciers to this day.
We all climbed to the summit of Denali a week later. It was so warm and sunny that one of our clients dropped his parka, peeled off his shirt, and asked me to photograph his chest hairs rustling in the breeze.
Many thanks to Mike, for sharing his story and photographs with us!
