Cassin Ridge Alaska Grade 5, 5.8, AI 4

My partner and I benefited tremendously from other people's Cassin trip reports. Partly in an effort to give back, I wrote up a report from our ascent this year. We found the route to be much more challenging than expected. When we got down Lisa, the basecamp manager, told us we were the only Americans to get up a technical route on Denali this year. Several of the more "exciting" parts of the trip were: when we dropped a tent pole into a crevasse, when my partner got hit in the arm with ice and had to climb the first and second rock bands with largely one arm, and when we he woke himself up from farting. (I'm sure his list of "exciting" highlights would be different.) The write up describes our time on the mountain and my difficulty exploring questions like "why climb?"

Here's the trip report.