Japanese mountaineer Yoshitomi Okura climbs North America's highest mountain each year and installs a new weather station to defend the honor of three friends -- blown off Mount McKinley during a winter climb in 1989.
An autopsy showed the climbers -- among the 96 people who have died on Mount McKinley since the first deaths were recorded in 1932 -- were frozen by the ferociously cold winds.
Their bodies were recovered only because a rope they used to tie themselves together snagged on ice.
PHOTO: AP
``You could see how they were blown down from the high camp. They were just lying there like they were blowing like flags in the wind,'' said Roger Robinson, lead mountaineering ranger at Denali National Park and Preserve, home to the 6,096m Mount McKinley.
Robinson guessed that the climbers waited for the wind to die down before making a final rush to the summit, only to have strong winds return while climbing.
"The wind had to have come back. They were found roped together below camp," he said. "They were probably so hypothermic they couldn't hold on anymore."
Okura chose the spot where his friends fell, and where Naomi Uemura, one of Japan's most famous adventurers, vanished during the first solo winter climb in February 1984, to install a weather station in 1990.
The 55-year-old climber has been back to the weather station every year since with other members of the Japan Alpine Club to reinstall a new weather station -- the old ones having been damaged and sometimes obliterated by wind and ice. The endeavor is called the Mount McKinley Weather Station Project.
"He is trying to prove that there are very strong winds up there and those guys were very experienced climbers, and it was not an accident caused by inexperience," said Tohru Saito, a liaison with the International Arctic Research Center (IARC) at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, who for the fifth time accompanied Okura on his climb.
IARC funds the project.
The weather station sits on a ridge above Denali Pass at 5,610m near the mountain's summit. It is one of the windiest places on Earth, with winds unofficially clocked at 302kph in January 2003. When climbers reached the weather station that year, they found a snapped 36cm-long, 1.3cm-diameter antenna. Now, the antennas are made 5cm shorter with twice the thickness and are encased in a tough Teflon tube.
Where the weather station sits is also one of the colder places on Earth. On Feb. 3, 1991, the weather station recorded an unofficial temperature of minus-58.?C.
The weather station, among the three highest in the world, measures temperature, barometric pressure and wind speed.
The other high-altitude stations are on Mount Mauna Loa in Hawaii and in the Andes in South America.
This year, eight climbers began their ascent on June 8. They reached the weather station on June 23, installed the new equipment and then summitted the same day, before descending and arriving at base camp June 26.
"It was snowing every day. It was completely whiteout a lot of times," Saito said, translating for Okura. "It was so snowy he couldn't find the right way to go sometimes."
Climbers have long known about the horrendous weather on Mount McKinley, but documenting just how bad has been a challenge. The goal now is to build a weather station that will remain functional for more than a year.
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