Grand Marais explorer Lonnie Dupre spent little time recovering from his attempt to climb Mount Hunter in Denali National Park. He is once again attempting to climb a mountain no one has summited before in the winter.
Once again Lonnie Dupre will seek to reach the summit of a mountain no one has summited in the winter. This time, however, he is bringing a climbing partner with him, Pascale Marceau, who was on a team with him in Nepal.
If all goes well, Dupre and Marceau will start March 2.
At 12,552 feet, Mount Carpe stands in the shadow of Alaska’s Denali Mountain. Dupre and Marceau can expect minus-50- degree temperatures, high winds and 10 hours of daylight.
The duo will fly into Katishna, the last stop on the Denali Park Road, which is closed for the winter. On skis, they will make their way onto the Muldrow Glacier via Wonder Lake, Turtle Hill, and McGonagall Pass. This route was first used in 1913 to summit Denali.
On the glacier, the duo will ski around the Carpe ridge to Tralekia glacier. Dupre and Marceau will then begin their journey up the mountain via a spur route off of the west fork and climb the southwest face of Carpe.
This path was used before. In the summer (August) of 1995, a team traveled this way, summiting Mount Carpe. But no one has made it to the top of the mountain during the winter.
Pascale Marceau will join Lonnie Dupre on a joint attempt to make a winter summit of Mount Carpe located in Alaska’s Denali National Park.
Dupre was born in 1961 and is a descendant on his mother’s side of Jacques Cartier, the French explorer who founded Quebec. Two years ago Dupre became the first person to solo climb Mount Denali in January.
Marceau was born and raised in Sudbury, Ontario and later moved to Ottowa. She spent time in the Adirondacks, New York, and the Green Mountains of Vermont where she discovered backcountry skiing and mountaineering. Today Marceau is an engineering consultant and lives in the Canadian Rockies where she is focused on climbing and alpinism.
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