Mckinley summit

[climbabout]

I had mentioned during some earlier posts of my upcoming trip to Mount Mckinley with RMI guides. Some of you expressed an interest in the outcome. Here's a link to their dispatch page as well as some summit photo's courtesy of Dave Hahn as my camera was a bit balky in the cold that day. We summited around 5pm on July 8th.
http://www.rmiguides.com/dispatches/mckinley/062509.php

I also had the good fortune of meeting another forum member (ice climber) as he was on Mckinley at the same time.
Tim

[mtruman]

What an awesome trip Tim! The trip log on the RMI site is great. Would love to see more photos if you've got them from days when the camera was "less balky". Must have been quite a way to spend the 4th of July watching the moonrise over Hunter. Who needs fireworks...

[climbabout]

I'll be uploading my photos to an online site in the next few days or so - not sure which service to use as I have never done that before. Any suggestions?
Tim

[mtruman]

Lots of good choices. If you already have a Google account (gmail, etc) then Picasa is good (that's what I use). Free 1G of storage which is plenty for lots of pics. Flickr, Fotki, Webshots and SmugMug are probably the most popular paid sites. They all have their benefits and tradeoffs. I believe that they all have a free option (at least Flickr does) but those are very limited. The other popular free sites are photobucket, imageshack and some of the photo printing services like snapfish and shutterfly. Not all of them will let you link to the images for display on another site (which you need if you want to put photos in your posts on the forum). I'll let the others here weigh in but my recommendation would be Picasa. The other nice thing about Picasa is that there is a good (free) photo organization and editing PC program that allows you to easily sync with the Picasa web site. More info here: http://picasa.google.com/features.html

[Brad]

Yes, Picasa is a good solution for a starter site if you do not plan on having a lot of pictures over time. An organization I work with uses SmugMug and that works well as long as you stay within their normal design. Controlling things and providing some structure with albums and folders gets harder.

Most of the sites offer the same basic features. I like Fotki.com because it is rich with features and they are all just clickable options. They have a nice album-folder structure to organize things. And you can copy and move things around easily after uploading. I normally upload in a compressed format so the uploads are a lot faster. There are a couple of sharing options. Including an image in a forum post is easy. they provide the URL to use - click on it and it is copied to your clipboard for you. Plus, they have the normal sharing ability to places like Facebook.

Try one or two with their free options - then pick one. Once you go with one it is hard to change later. I have almost 50,000 images and 63GB of space on my normal site. The Fotki site I set up for MWO has 425,000 images using over 90GB of space.

[climbabout]

Thanks to both of you for your suggestions
Tim

[Bill O]

Congratulations!

Yes, please get those photos up as soon as possible.

July 8th seems late. What kind of weather did you have up there? What was the lower glacier like by the time you headed out? You must have had plenty of light so close to the solstice.

[climbabout]

Bill - Dave Hahn always runs a late season trip as it fits best with his Everest schedule and the fact that he likes the mountain a bit less crowded. In fact when the ranger station took us off the board there were only 3 climbers left on the mountain! The lower glacier was a bit bumpy due to the ash deposited earlier by the Mt Redoubt eruption - making the glacier melt out unevenly. Crevasses were typical for late season - lots of them, but Hahn guided us masterfully through them with NO mishaps. When we left the mountain on July 12th, the airstrip had been moved back about as far as it could be. Heartbreak hill was a long slog. The Cessna 185's that dropped us on the mountain on June 27th had a hard time dealing with the bumpiness even though we smoothed the airstrip as best we could with our snowshoes, so Hudson Air sent in 2 Otters to pick us up from K2 Aviation the following day- wonderful planes. In reality, we could have left the mountain on day 15. We later learned that the last group got picked up at 9500' due to the condition of the airstrip.
The weather could not have been more spectacular - we had 16 consecutive days of sunshine and near cloudless skies. Only 1 afternoon snow shower and 1 evening with less than an inch accumulation while at 14k. We summited on day 12 (100% of our group - it was a strong one) with no storm rest days - only a rest day at 11k and another at 14k before moving camp to 17k. Summit day was near perfect with the exception of maybe a 15-20mph breeze near the top. Some fast moving cumulus high altitude columns of clouds gave us some concern around 19k, but as soon as we determined they were moving away from us, we were on our way again.
The only drawback to such a quick trip is that our loads coming down were much heavier than normal - lots of extra food and fuel. Needless to say we ate as much as we could on the way down!
Light was plentiful even on the last day - darkest around 3am similar to sunset here.
I went on picasa last night and saw that they only let you upload 5 pics at a time. Am I doing something wrong? I have a folder with about 140 photos to post - what are your suggestions? Someone earlier suggested fotki.
Please advise.
Tim

[climbabout]

Ok - I think I figured this out. Try this link for my photo's:
http://picasaweb.google.com/climbabout/Mckinley200902#
Tim

[mtruman]

Ok - I think I figured this out. Try this link for my photo's:
http://picasaweb.google.com/climbabout/Mckinley200902#
Tim

Nice! These are awesome pics! Looks like a absolutely amazing trip. Thanks for working out the details to get Picasa going and sharing it with us.