Denali Weather, Courtesy of Naomi Uemura
During winter, Mount McKinley is one of the coldest places on the planet. The sun, weak as a light bulb, cuts a shallow arc over the southern horizon. Wind chill on the mountain drops below minus 100 degrees. Not many people try to climb North America's highest peak in winter, but not many people are like Naomi Uemura.
Uemura, a Japanese mountaineer, liked to do things alone. In 1966, he climbed the Matterhorn by himself, sparking a love for solo treks that made him a hero in Japan. His solitary trip by dog sled to the North Pole in 1978 earned him a place beside Christopher Columbus and Sir Edmund Hillary on a list of explorers compiled in Funk and Wagnalls Encyclopedia.
In 1984, Uemura walked into the alpenglow of Mt. McKinley in a quest to become the first person to climb the mountain alone in winter. Clipped to a long bamboo pole designed to span the mouths of crevasses, he set out in early February.
On February 13, pilot Don Lowell flew over the mountain and called the climber on the radio. Uemura answered, saying he was close to the summit of the south peak, at a height of about 20,000 feet. The radio transmission was the last anyone heard from Naomi Uemura. Searchers eventually found his camp at 17,000 feet, but they never found his body.
To honor Uemura, members of the Japan Alpine Club carried up the mountain an unusual memorial--a rugged little weather station. They used pitons and cables to secure a metal tripod with a wind gauge and a thermometer at a spot above Denali Pass, about 19,000 feet above sea level. The station records wind speed, temperature, and wind direction in a little box called a data logger. On trips up the mountain, Japanese climbers occasionally retrieve the data logger and replace it with a new one.
Some of those climbers were in Fairbanks a month ago to attend the opening ceremony for the International Arctic Research Center. To mark the occasion, the Japan Alpine Club donated the lonely weather station to the International Arctic Research Center and the Geophysical Institute.
Syun-Ichi Akasofu, director of the International Arctic Research Center, decided the weather station would be more valuable if it could transmit information instantly. Kevin Abnett, supervisor of the electronics shop at the Geophysical Institute, thinks real-time transmission will be possible so long as the weather station has a line-of-sight to Fairbanks. The station will need a small whip antenna and a pack of lithium batteries the size of a dictionary. Park Service officials at Denali Park recently approved the upgrade to the weather station. The tentative plan is for a team of Japanese climbers and a few people from the Geophysical Institute to climb the mountain in June and install the antenna and new battery pack.
If the transmitter works, Abnett said he'll put the Denali weather information on the Internet and supply it to the National Weather Service and Park Service rangers. Maybe next February, while sitting in a warm home, we'll be able to find out the conditions Naomi Uemura faced on the mountain in 1984, all by himself.
