On Monday, Jan. 14 Lonnie Dupre ended his attempt to become the first person to make a solo winter summit of the 14,573-foot Mount Hunter, or Begguya as it is also called.
Dupre ran into an abundance of crevasses, ice, high winds, extreme cold and more than 70 feet of snowfall in the Alaskan Range, and with 46 inches of snow predicted in the upcoming forecast, Lonnie found more hardship than ever in this attempt to climb Mount Hunter.
Last Friday, Jan. 11 he was contemplating the risk of avalanches as he reviewed his mountaineering options from his cozy sleeping bag. Talking from his Globalstar satellite phone, Lonnie sounded frustrated. He said the Ramen route he had picked out and planned to climb for the past year was completely impassable because of a great multitude of crevasses. Instead, he changed plans and began climbing the northwest basin variation of the west ridge.
But he found little relief there, as well, and on Monday he posted this on his blog, “With the ice fall leading to the Ramen route on Mount Hunter completely impassable this year, I explored an alternate route which proved to have a high risk of serac falls and avalanches. I called for a pickup at basecamp and am now in Talkeetna. More to follow…pictures, video, and future ice climbing.”
This is Dupre’s third solo attempt and fourth try at summiting Mount Hunter in the winter.
In spring 2016, he and a team of four climbers got past avalanche and overhead serac dangers, then, he said, “With a real possibility of reaching the summit, an oncoming storm erased our hopes. Nonetheless, we were excited to have done well on that difficult part of the mountain.”
Last year he found the route he had hoped to climb impassable, and he was stymied by crevasses, weather and snow. In 2017, Lonnie found “unconsolidated snow gingerly hiding numerous crevasses over our spring route. The next day, I fell into a bergschrund just below a band of rocks. After 20 minutes of terror I extricated myself from the crevasse. Standing on the lip, shook up I peered down the deep black hole, and became sick to my stomach. I was lucky and now with a loss of focus, went home.”
This year Lonnie managed to get by some of the crevasses and he stored nine days of food and a cache of supplies at 9,000 feet. Still, he lamented in his blog, his cache of supplies was stowed in an area prime for an avalanche.
Lonnie isn’t the only mountaineer who has tried to become the first person to solo climb Begguya in the winter.
The Japanese mountaineer Masatoshi Kuriaki, a fellow climber Dupre has rubbed elbows with, made 10 attempts to climb Mount Hunter, reaching the highest altitude at 12,000 feet. On his last attempt, after having gotten separated from his supplies due to high avalanche probabilities, he was rescued by helicopter at 8,400 feet.
A plane picked up Lonnie and took him to Talkeetna, Alaska on Monday, Jan 14. Will he make another attempt at reaching the peak of Begguya, a mountain that has been called North America’s most difficult mountain to scale? It’s too early to tell, but Lonnie is persistent in his quests. It took him four attempts to become the first person to make a January solo climb of Begguya’s neighbor, nearby Mount Denali, reaching the top in January 2015. Stay tuned, no matter what, this won’t be the last mountain Dupre will attempt to conquer.
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