Controlling the Denali Crowds, Who Fooled Whom with Mary Woodbridge
Controlling the Denali Crowds
The US National Park Service has announced a limit of 1500 climbers per season on Mt. Mckinley starting in 2007. According to the statistics on the NPS site, Denali has seen a maximum of 1340 attempts so this will not be a problem in the short term. The real issue seems to be dealing with all the human waste and the pit toilets at the Basin Camp at 14,000'. According to Park Ranger Daryl Miller "... Normally, you would never see the pit toilet, dug 14 feet deep into the Kahiltna Glacier at the base camp, because it is devoured by the glacier ... That wasn't the case last year. For the first time, the pit toilet was visible in an August flyover of the glacier ... It melted away all the way down to 14 feet where we dug and it was sitting on top of the ice ...Now, we are concerned we may have to haul human waste off at 7,200 feet."
Who Fooled Whom with Mary Woodbridge
Swiss clothing maker Mammut pulled a fast one on the climbing community with their well executed spoof of the 85 year-old UK woman stating her intentions to climb Mt. Everest this season. Mary Woodbridge had a nice web site and posted her intentions on many climbing community sites including SummitPost.org. Her intentions were picked up by some news agencies but my favorite claim of indignation came from a climbing site that stated with impunity that the ploy ".. had finally been figured out by the press." I personally found it hilarious. Her site had pictures of her and her dog, Daisy, training and a guestbook full of encouragement. The last time I checked, she had over 70,000 visits to her site. Well done Mammut - the climbing community needs to stop taking itself so seriously.
