Denali Day 3: On the Move

The mountain is a decision factory.

Every hour up here requires a choice — and almost none of them are simple. Do you push now or rest and go tomorrow? Do you cache gear high and come back, or carry it all in one brutal push? Do you trust this weather window or wait for a better one? And underneath every tactical question is the deeper one:

What do I owe my future self, and what does my current self actually have to give?

I’ve spent most of my life erring on the side of future self. Delay the comfort. Do the hard thing now. Make the sacrifice today so tomorrow is easier. It’s how I’ve trained, how I’ve built businesses, how I’ve approached most things that mattered.

But Jacob is here.

And having my son on this mountain has quietly shifted something in me. I’m watching him. Watching his body, his energy, his face at the end of a long day. Future self is still important — but current self has a name, and he’s wearing crampons ten feet ahead of me. That changes the calculus in ways I’m still working through. And up here, with nothing but miles of white and hours of silence, the rabbit hole goes deep. Why do I default to pushing? Where did that come from? What does it cost?

The mountain has a way of turning questions into conversations with yourself.

Our original plan was to move to 11,000 feet tonight. That’s not happening. I don’t think we’re strong enough for it yet, and I’d rather admit that plainly than pretend otherwise.

So the adjusted plan: move to 9,200, set camp, then carry a load up to 11,000, come back, then move up to 11,000. It’s slower than I mapped out. And the only reason it feels slow is because I wrote an aggressive plan. The mountain didn’t change. My expectations did.

There is no race to the top.

We have weather to watch, but we have plenty of food and enough flexibility to let this take the time it needs to take. That’s the beauty of a real expedition — you build a plan, then you allow the plan to be a guide rather than a sentence. We learn how we say things and how differently they land. We learn how to hold structure loosely. We remember that the summit is still available — as long as we take care of ourselves on the way up.

The summit isn’t going anywhere. But neither are we, if we burn out chasing a timeline that was always just a guess.

Something to think about today:

Where in your life are you measuring yourself against a plan you made — and calling it failure when the only thing that changed was your own expectation?

The goal is still the goal. The route is allowed to shift.

Daily dispatches from Project Climb Higher. Follow along as we work our way up Denali.

— Jenn & team somewhere between 7,300 and the sky