It's bad enough to want to get really cold in the summer, but to do it in the winter buggars rational thought. These idiots decided to climb Mt. McKinley in the dead of winter. Art Davidson was disappointed as a child when he learned that all the continents had been discovered. It's no wonder then that he just had to climb McKinley in winter. Many thought it was impossible. Temperatures hovered around -60 and winds often reached 160 mph. Indeed, in December there is only about 4 hours of sunlight; in February around 7 hours.
They had trouble getting a team together, and the climb began badly when one of the members fell to his death in a crevasse. And this was in the first couple of days on the glacier. He was not roped to anyone else, a basic failure in elementary safety rules when walking on glacier ice.
Three of them finally made it to the summit, only to be caught in a blinding wind blizzard on the way back down. Huddled in a snow cave, sharing body heat for barely minimum warmth against rock and snow. Ugh. The only thing that saved them was the discovery of food left in a cache from three years before and some gas one of the climbers remembered he had left behind from a previous climb.
Read this during the summer when it's really hot. I couldn't help but think they might have done better had they prepared more thoroughly. Hard to determine the cause of some of the whining: altitude sickness or personality. Still, a ripping good read.
