Our Denali team is officially off the mountain this time around; the mountain wasn’t ready to give up this hard-earned summit. Here at CTSS, safety and success are always our top priorities, but always in that order.

Our team was unable to make a summit bid due to the persistent weather and wind that continued to affect all the teams. We send the entire team a massive congratulations for sticking it out on the mountain, ready for the opportunity to arise. As we all know, having to turn around before your summit bid can happen when we climb big mountains. Because this is always a potential, we encourage all of our climbers to take time to discover and articulate their goals and their “why” before each expedition. When climbers take a moment to reflect before their expedition, it makes trying times like these feel less like a failure, as you can lean on the success of all your additional goals and objectives for this expedition.

Here is a short video from Alan Arnette on coping with failure and some tools and ideas climbers can employ. This video is from our Mindset for Mountaineers webinar, which is available to replay on our YouTube Channel or by clicking here.

And a few images of the team on Denali from CTSS guide Dallas Glass.