June 18, 2006, 6:49 am; Day 23:

With every other tortured step, my right binding creaks like a faraway ghost cackling at me. I laugh back at it. I should stop. I should grease it. I should eat a snack, have a drink of water, take a break, check on my teammates. After all, we’ve been moving since midnight. I am tired; I am so tired, I feel dead. Am I dead? Now I’m gaining altitude. Labored breaths in tune with the squeaks and the laughter—its source a mystery. Is it me?

We’re either almost at basecamp, at heartbreak hill, or else we’ve looped around a crack and are going in circles, going back up the Kahiltna, spiraling through this labyrinth of crevasses. I don't know.

I am not the one with the compass. I am the one who is so afraid of the ground I tread that I will not stop. Not for a snack, not for some water, not for a rest, not to make sure we’re not going the wrong way.

“Zero!” breaks the silence. Is it me? Laughter melts into crackling sobs and I do not trust the sounds I hear any more than the ground I walk. I do not stop; the voice may not be real.

Two years earlier:

I met my climbing partners, Nancy Calhoun and Sheldon Kerr, our freshman year at CC. Nancy and Sheldon, like me, had been backpacking and sport climbing, but Denali?

“I don’t know the first thing about mountaineering,” said Nancy.

“Neither do I,” I said.

“I know how to belay,” said Sheldon.

And so we trained. Five am incline runs before class and crevasse rescue courses in Alaska. Avalanche training in the Rockies and winter camping expeditions in Wahsatch snowstorms. We tied prussics in gales and practiced muenter belays on the campus quad. We studied the sport of alpinism for two years and in doing so we realized that climbing Denali is a privilege, is expensive, is selfish; that we might die. And why?

So we created a nonprofit to leverage the costs and give purpose to our mission. We aligned our climb with the American Breast Cancer Foundation, and raised over $30,000, most of which went directly toward breast cancer treatment and prevention to women throughout America. The rest went toward -40 degree sleeping bags and the world’s best boot liners.

And then in May of 2006, after two years of training, half a year of fundraising, with no guide but ourselves, Nancy, Sheldon and I headed north to Denali. We were Breasts on the West Buttress. We were 21 years old. We were climbing the Great One.

May 26, 2006; Day 0:

There is a mandatory orientation debrief at the ranger station before you climb Denali. Our ranger, Tucker, has the tell-tale raccoon tan of a stint on the glacier. He was just there. He knows what’s up.

“Tell us about the crevasses on Ski Hill,” I say. “The cache at 10,000? Motorcycle Hill. Squirrel Point? How wide is Windy Corner? And the fixed lines? The Thumb? Arcdeacon’s Tower. Summit Ridge?”

We speak the lingo in order to exude confidence and cover up the fact that we don’t know what’s up, and we are scared shitless. Crevasses, avalanches, serac-fall, hypothermia, frostbite, high altitude cerebral edema, pulmonary edema, acute mountain sickness or even just getting lost, getting a blister that gets infected, being too tired to go on, going crazy; death has so many snowy faces in the Alaska Range.

Today is my last day of green grass, of hamburgers, of shorts and t-shirts. It's my last day existing with the certainty that I will live through it.

May 27, 2006; Day 1:

Talkeetna Airport. It is 70 degrees and we are wearing snowpants. Our 8 am flight is delayed due to high winds at basecamp. So we wait. Other teams join us at the hangar. We wait. My skin sweats under gore-tex. We wait. I break into our duffel marked “Snax: 37 pounds.” I eat some cheez-its. We wait. The airport closes at 8 pm. At 7:30, the airport girl strides to our mess of gear and snacks. “Breasts on the West Buttress?” She smiles as she says it. “You’re up. There’s a weather window. Let’s go.”

We have four minutes to load all 400 pounds of food and gear onto the plane. And then we are on our way to basecamp. After so many years of thinking about it, planning it, and training for it, finally we are climbing Denali.

May 28, 2006; Day 2:

We wait at basecamp until midnight to start climbing. At night the glacier is colder and snow bridges over crevasses are less likely to open up underneath you. We talk about goals. We talk about fears. We talk about the Irishman who just fell into a crevasse a half-mile up-glacier.

He survived, but is too scared to go on, and is waiting at basecamp to fly home.

“That won’t happen to us,” says Sheldon. “We will always have good communication and rope tension. So even if we do fall, it’ll only be a few feet.”

“But he couldn’t even see the crevasse,” I say. “It was all just white and flat. And then he fell. Out of nowhere. The whole glacier is like that.”

“We are better at this than them,” says Sheldon.

“But they’re men,” I say. “And we’re just girls.”

She looks at me like I’m just a girl, narrows her eyes and says, “We’re women.”

May 29, 2006; Day 3:

We walk three times past the Irishman’s hole. If it weren’t for the wands they marked it with, we wouldn’t know a crevasse was there.

We shuttle our body weights in packs and sleds up the long, gradual Kahiltna Glacier.

We keep our rope tight.

In the tent we talk about girl stuff: cramps and tampons. Crampons stay outside. We eat chocolate and peanut butter and giggle about the men on this mountain.

We drink Tang. I love Tang. My lips are orange with Tang. We drink it cold, we drink it hot, we drink it with yesterday’s macaroni bloated and pale and stuck to the pot. In the tent we laugh, we truth and we dare. We, BFF three, stoked and stinky, exist in the tent like this is a sleepover.

But outside, with our crampons on, we are 50 feet apart, serious, scared and silent. The only words we say are “Clear,” which means go, and “Zero,” which means stop.

May 30, 2006; Day 4:

It is hot and sunny during the day. The glacier amplifies the UV rays, so we apply sunscreen. We re-apply sunscreen.

We meet Croations, Lithuanians, Koreans, Minnesotans. We crush on men with foreign names: Fabio, Shnizel, Ronan, Chelan. Countless men with American names crush on us. We are the only all-girl team, the youngest team on the mountain; I am the most popular I have ever been.

May 31, 2006; Day 5:

11,000ft camp. I’ve crossed three open crevasses now, a leap of faith each time, and on the third, a guy on the team behind us fell in up to his waist. We heard him scream. It is so sunny and my boots are so hot that I have a minor case of trench foot.

My lips are a bloated combination of cold soar, fever blister, and sunburn. But today I changed my socks and flipped my underwear inside out.

So I’m feelin’ fresh.

June 1, 2006; Day 6:

Windy Corner is the crux of the lower mountain. Wind is funneled through this tight spot, amplifying its velocity, threatening to blow us climbers off the 5-foot wide trail that drops 5,000 feet to the Kahiltna below.

On the other side of the trail is a huge wall that periodically pops Subaru-sized rocks off and onto the path.

We know of people who have been crushed and killed here, so we walk fast, and thank the mountain for her mercy when we’re past. We make it to 14-camp, jubilant and ready for the party that awaits.

June 2, 2006; Day 7:

There are bathrooms at 14,000 feet on Denali. There is a med tent, a ranger station, a helicopter landing pad, and 200 men just hanging out.

I (heart) 14-camp.

June 3, 2006; Day 8:

We make friends with the rangers, the remaining Irishmen, and everyone else because we’re women, a rare thing up here amidst so many privileged and pompous men. We have coffee dates and sledding dates and snow cave dates and snack breaks.

We plan on acclimating at 14-camp for a couple days before moving up to high camp, which means our job is to consume calories and rest. So we eat bacon. Lots and lots of bacon and cheese. We eat frozen butter dipped in brown sugar (shuga-buttah), we eat jerky and no-bake cheesecake and oreo pie and lil’ smokies we found buried in the snow by our tent. We are losing weight despite the rampant consumption and it feels like Disneyland, 14-camp.

June 4, 2006; Day 9:

Weather moves in. Nancy helps organize a camp-wide game of whiffle ball. Hiraldo the Puerto Rican steps up to the plate. He swings. He connects. He runs to first base, trips on a posthole and tears his hamstring. Now everyone calls him Hammy, and he has to wait for a helicopter to fly him home. He cannot move up or down, his dreams of Denali dashed for a game of whiffle ball, he’s going back to Puerto Rico as soon as there’s weather for a chopper to fly.

The wind has picked up above. Nobody is moving in any direction.

June 5, 2006; Day 10:

100 mph winds at high camp, above. We exist in our megamid. Snacks don’t taste as good as they used to.

June 6, 2006; Day 11:

I chip my tooth sewing. When I inhale, the cold cuts deep. Camp is a snowstorm today. We stay in the tent.

June 7, 2006; Day 12:

40 mph winds here at camp. Anything not staked down is blown away. We lose one spoon in the snow, so now the three of us have to share the two we have left and we’re out of Tang.

June 8, 2006; Day 13:

60 mph winds in camp today. Whiteout. Sheldon and I rope up and mission 100 feet to the ranger tent. We learn about two women in an avalanche on Mount Foraker. They were two of the best female mountaineers in the country. And they just died.

Just right over there.

When we get back to the tent, Nancy is gone. We are not even close to being the best mountaineers in the country, visibility is at 2 feet, windchill at negative 40 degrees, and now Nancy is missing. I tell Sheldon I’m going out to search for her solo because I have to pee and I’m sick of the stink of pee bottles in the tent. I wish I could hold it in and never pee for the rest of the trip; I imagine feeding my body the perfect ratio of water and food so that I would use up everything I put in my mouth and never have to drop trow again. The mechanics of going to the bathroom on Denali are so cumbersome and cold in all the places that weren’t ever meant to be cold and my teammate is missing and I miss being barefoot. I miss movies and boys and beds and grass. I miss pavement and animals and I have to pee so bad but I really, really don’t want to unzip and then I remember that I’m still alive. That there are two women on Mount Foraker today who will never get to drop trow again. Tears freeze on my face. My chipped tooth burns to the root. I unzip my snowpants. I place the funnel in position and I pee, grateful for half a second to still be alive enough to do it.

But the funnel is clogged with old frozen piss. It backs up, I can’t stop, it fills my gore-tex, I can’t stop, it fills my boots, oh my god, and now in the worst weather I have ever been in, with a missing teammate who could be dead, I’ve gone and peed my pants on Denali.

I want to go home.

June 9, 2006; Day 14:

Nancy was hanging out in an igloo with the Lithuanians. We don’t leave our tent today. The weather remains the same.

June 10, 2006; Day 15:

The only good thing about today was that yesterday I stashed a bunch of chocolate and meat in my sleeping bag. So now I don’t even have to sit up to snack.

June 11, 2006; Day 16:

The storm has subsided down here, but is still raging up high. The rangers have replaced the dismal predictions on the weather board with a far more accurate cardboard weather forecaster.

“C’mon, It’s fun,” says head ranger Mike with a googly look. It’s our tenth day weathered in at fourteen thousand feet and every man in camp has the crazy eyes. Sheldon spins “High Heat: 100-120 degrees.” Nancy spins “Torrential Rain and Flooding.” I spin, “Citation from Chuck Norris for being a weinie.” And I laugh it off like it’s just the joke that it is, but is it? Or am I actually too weinie for this mountain?

The guided groups turn around today. Hammy flies out. Weather is better down low so fourteen camp empties out to just the hardcores and I cannot help but feel like an imposter.

June 12, 2006; Day 17:

The latrines are filling up, so we help the rangers dig new ones. Now I am careful to bang out my pee funnel before I use it, however, in doing so the frozen tube breaks off and so now, like the spoons, the three of us are down to two.

Looks like tomorrow we will move up high.

June 13, 2006; Day 18:

The move entails a 500-vertical foot 60 degree ice slope known as the headwall, then several miles across the knife-edge 16-ridge to high camp at 17,200 feet.

With the guided groups gone, we are now the slowest team on the mountain. We are no longer popular as men push past us, too exhausted and summit-hungry themselves to offer any help.

Not that we need it. We make it to 17, arriving past midnight to a camp that is full. We will need snow walls to protect our tent from blowing off and we will need to build those walls ourselves. All of the pre-built walls have been filled by the tents of the men who are faster than us.

After an hour of cutting ice blocks and stacking them, I feel woozy like I’m drunk but bad drunk, like I’m a bear whose drunk on engine coolant drunk and I’m saying shit that doesn’t even make drunk sense and Nancy and Sheldon determine that I have acute mountain sickness.

So they finish the wind wall and assign me to the women’s work. All I have to do is cook ramen in the vestibule for our 3 am dinner. But the stove breaks, and my fingers are too numb and bumbly, my mind too dazed and grumbly to fix it. I am spinning in a sleeping bag nest of failure and fatigue and dehydration and starvation as my teammates finish our wind wall like heroes. We eat snickers for dinner and as the exhaustion melts into the down that surrounds me, the high altitude drunkenness morphs not into sleep but into shame.

Am I even alive? How dare I?

June 14, 2006; Day 19:

Above 17,000 feet, the body burns 5,000 calories a day just lying down. This is all we can manage to do today. I am recovering, but barely.

It is perfect, summitable weather today, but we only leave our tent to pee. And even that is exhausting. The digestive system all but shuts down this high. I force a few crackers, some dry ramen, but it’s all I can do not to vomit. My body is wasting away. My teammates are the same. We don’t talk to anyone. The men don’t treat us like girls anymore.

June 15, 2006; Day 20:

And then it’s summit day. That fact alone gives us strength. This is what it’s all been for.

The first section is Denali Pass: a thousand-foot incline prone to avalanches and punctured with crevasses. If we go too fast and fall, we will die. So we go too slow, and frostbite creeps through my world’s best boot liners.

Above the pass at 18,000 feet, the trail is marked by yellow ice. The wind blows off loose snow up here, but decades of climbers’ pee holes are preserved and guide us toward the summit.

At 19,000 feet, I’m on top of the world. My pants-peeing, high altitude imposter syndrome is gone in the face of such greatness. I am on the Great One and I too, am great. We are there. We are so close to being there that it’s like we’re already there. The summit is just three hours away. Just over 1000 vertical feet. I can do that. I can do anything. I have made it.

My toes are cold but I ignore them. Just as I ignore the lenticular clouds above Mount Foraker: a sure sign of approaching storms.

We take a break at 19,400 feet. We have less than 1000 to go. And then, in the time it takes to swallow half a Snickers Bar, drink a mouthful of water and stop to look around, the wind has picked up to 50 mph and gray clouds race over us.

Two minutes later, we will be in a complete whiteout. The summit push is a knife-edge ridge that drops you to probable death if you fall; it is inadvisable for even the best mountaineers to attempt it in a storm, much less a whiteout.

Sheldon and I belay ourselves in to Nancy. Even at close range, we have to shout to hear each other over the shrieking wind.

“Should we go down?” yells Sheldon.

“I don’t want to, but…” I say.

“I think we have to,” screams Nancy.

We stand there, looking at one another for a few moments, debating nothing because the stakes are failure or death.

The background diffuses from top-of-the world vistas to nothing but grayish white. A team ahead of us has turned around. They’re more experienced, have been here before. “Get down,” they yell as they hurry past.

So we do. It’s the twentieth day of our expedition, we are three hours from the top, and now we’re going home. Failures. This is what it is to be a mountaineer.

In a whiteout there is no depth perception or landmarks or differences between solid ground and sky beyond cliffs. There is only white, the snowy tops of my shuffling boots, and an occasional faint yellow spot to lead the way.

The wind screams in through my multiple hats, deafening me to all else. Snot stiffens above my lip, freezes and breaks off. My toes are cold. We cannot move fast enough for them to warm up. I stomp. I kick. I swing my legs wildly between every step to try to get the blood back. There is warmth only in movement, and safety only in warmth, but it’s not enough.

I hail the mountain. “Don’t let us die,” I say. “Be kind.” I panic. “Please?” I whimper. She roars. And then, because I figure she punishes liars, I am honest. “I hate you! I hate this!” I scream as loud as I can. “I want to go home!” I would cry but my body doesn’t have enough liquid left for tears. I shake my fist into the infinite white like an idiot and keep trudging so I don’t die.

We are just above Denali Pass and the rope pulls taut. We have 1200 feet to descend to high camp and my teammates have stopped behind me. I cannot see or hear them so I wait.

Minutes pass. I tug on the rope. Still taut. Now my heels hurt. My toes at least are numb. The cold creeps up my ankles. I kick my legs, but this is too exhausting now. I tug again. Nothing. Now I’m mad. What are they doing? Why aren’t we moving? I wait.

And then there is slack in the rope. Annoyed, I jerk forward. The rope tightens again. Another eternity passes and I can think about nothing but my cold feet going numb. Finally we move and I clip into our first piece of pro. I belay in Nancy.

When she is five feet away, I finally see her. “There’s something wrong with Sheldon,” she says. She sits and I belay. Sheldon appears stumbling, leaning on her ice axe.

“Vertigo,” says Sheldon. Her tears freeze and she blinks the icicles away.

We clip in, untie, re-tie, unclip and switch positions so that Sheldon is in the middle, Nancy is in front, and I am supposed to catch them if they fall. Then Sheldon tells us that she cannot tell which way is up or down. She’s so dizzy that she was sick. And then I tugged on her and she fell in it. My shame returns. I forget about my toes.

We descend the pass slow enough to create a bottleneck when we reach the bergshrund. There were other, faster teams who made it to the summit today, who hate us now for blocking their way down. An Australian man yells at us to “Go faster!” as though we could if we wanted to. I want to spit on him, but my body doesn’t have enough saliva for that.

We make it back to high camp, where we still cannot digest food, hold down water, or breathe deeply. Yet we are relieved. We are safe in our tent. The worst, we assume, is over.

June 16, 2006; Day 21:

We down-climb to 14-camp in the middle of the night. The air at 14,000 feet is thick and warm. We celebrate by streaking past the latrines. It’s the first time I’ve taken off my shirt in 21 days and I don’t like that feeling of nakedness, but what’s worse is putting that same greasy shirt back on.

June 17, 2006; Day 22:

Tonight we will walk down to 11-camp, pick up our skis, glide on into basecamp and fly home.

Piece of cake.

Except I haven’t eaten more than the few crackers, half a Snickers and top ramen since we were last at 14,000 feet, five days ago. I haven’t drunk more than a liter of water total in the last three days. I have hardly slept, and my body has never experienced such prolonged exhaustion. But whatever, it’s all downhill from here.

June 18, 2006; Day 23:

We descend in the middle of the night because by now, late June, the snowpack on the Kahiltna has melted 10, maybe 40 feet, and is completely unstable. The snow bridges that once held our weight now sag and collapse unpredictably.

We believe that the lack of daylight will freeze things over, make the glacier safer. At least that’s what we’ve been told. Although in June, in the Alaska Range, there is no real lack of daylight. There is only that in-between time, when the temperature drops and perceptions along with it.

11-Camp is only recognizable by the Niagara-sized icefall to the left that crackles in the freeze of dusk. Its seracs hang suspended above a sea of fog that sits on the 10,000ft basin: the eerie orange fog of an Alaskan midnight twilight.

We descend into that fog on skis, visibility 10 feet. I am in front, and must snake around hundreds of holes that didn’t exist before; what was a 5-mile straight shot uphill is now a labyrinth easily twice as long.

My right binding creaks as my skis compress the snow. I try to think light. For every crevasse I can see, I imagine ten, disguised by soggy snowbridges. I must traverse them; I mustn’t stop. If I stop I’ll die, I am certain.

“Creeeeak,” says my binding. The orange fog throws the sound, bounces it off some serac unseen, swallows my sanity and hides my teammates from me. I am alone, but for the company of glacier sounds.

“Creeeeak,” it says again, only this time, from over there. No, that way, over there.

I hear blocks of ice rumble and crash in the distance. The snowpack whoomphs far away, then suddenly, “Stop!” someone screams.

So I stop. But I am on a snow bridge. It settles under my weight, so I jump to the other side, just as my sled breaks through behind me and falls in the crevasse, which is bottomless and black. The rope slides down to my sled as my teammates continue forward.

“Zero!” I scream. I can’t see them, but the rope stops. I lurch my sled out of its hole. “My sled just got crevassed!”

“What?!” yells Nancy.

“My sled! Crevasse!” I yell.

“Crevasse?!” says Nancy. Her voice is muted behind the fog.

“Yes!” I say.

Nancy hollers at Sheldon, “Crevasse! Keep me tight!”

“Did you say something?!” I yell at Nancy.

“What?!”

“Did you say, ‘stop’ when I was on the crevasse?”

“What?”

“Nothing,” I say. “Clear.”

“Clear,” says Nancy.

Sheldon’s “Clear” is faint. Maybe she was the one that said stop, I think. Or maybe she wasn’t.

We continue on, but I am shaking and weak. I should stop, eat a snack, have a drink of water, take a break, check on my teammates, but the relentless stress of self-induced near-death for so many weeks now has me googly-eyed and the fact that I haven’t died yet has me scared beyond sanity. And yet…

“Squeak,” says my right binding. “Creak.”

“Clear,” I hear, which doesn’t make sense. “Clear!”

Then, stumbling a bit I hear, “Zero!” So I stop. Nothing. I wait.

Then, faintly, “Zero.” This time it’s unmistakably Nancy. “Libby!” she screams, “Say Zero when you stop!”

“You said zero!” I scream back.

“What?”

“You said zero!”

“No I didn’t!”

“Yes you did!”

“No!” she yells.

“Whatever,” I say. “Clear. Clear!”

“Clear,” says Nancy.

“Clear,” says the faint voice of Sheldon.

“Clear,” echoes back at me. “Clear! Clear! Clear!”

“Stop it!” I scream, but there’s no one there but the glacier. I start to cry. And then I hear laughter. Cackling, crackling, serac-cracking laughter.

June 18, 2006; 6:50 am:

And I don’t know if the laughter is my binding or the glacier creaking as it flows and heaves or if it’s the ghosts of the men and women whose bodies lie in the cracks beneath me, or if it’s just my own starvation and dehydration and acute mountain sickness. Whatever it is, I laugh back at it. Which reminds me that this is all ridiculous, that this is a privilege, that I’ll look back at this and remember that it was scary, hard and fun. That it was awesome. That the mountains are cold and glorious and stunning and terrifying and there is no place on earth where I feel so alive. That this is why I climb.

I laugh louder, and then with courage, I yell “Zero,” probe a perimeter, belay in Nancy who belays in Sheldon and we rest, we eat a snack, we drink water, we check on each other. We’re okay. We’re going to make it.

“This is heartbreak hill!” says Sheldon. “We’ll want to start angling to our left.”

“We’re almost there,” says Nancy. “Good job, ladies. Good job.”

At 7:38 am I see the latrines on the edge of basecamp, shimmering in the glacial light. We arrive haggard, gaunt and wild-eyed. Alive.

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I'd like to thank my climbing partners, Nancy Calhoun and Sheldon Kerr for putting up with my weininess and my whininess during the climb and my bossiness while training. Nancy provided approximately half the photos in this post. I'd like to thank the American Breast Cancer Foundation for facilitating our fundraising and providing treatment to women suffering from breast cancer. I'd like to thank my parents and Sheldon and Nancy's parents for raising us to believe that we girls could do this kind of crazy thing. I'd like to thank all of the supporters of B.O.T.W.B. for their pledges and donations and trust in us. And I'd like to thank the Kellogg Family and the Ritt Kellogg Memorial Fund Advisory Committee for their confidence in us, for making this all possible, and for making the dreams of so many young mountaineers come true.