UAF students complete Denali climb, gather snow samples to test for plastics

Two mountaineers who are also University of Alaska Fairbanks students were successful in their attempt to reach the top of North America’s highest peak this summer.

On June 7, while they were standing 20,310 feet above sea level, they pulled plastic bottles from their down jackets. They stuffed snow inside those bottles, to sample later for the presence of microplastics.

Matthew Crisafi-Lurtsema, 21, and Roger Jaramillo, 23, are two friends who one year ago agreed on a plan to climb Denali, the highest mountain in Alaska and all of the continent. They found a scientific purpose and a source of funding in teaming with Alaska Pacific University’s Dee Barker, who is supervising the analysis of melted snow samples in her Anchorage lab.

[Searching for microplastics on North America’s highest peak]

Alaska Space Grant officials provided the men with a grant. The managers of Fairbanks outdoor store Beaver Sports gave them discounts for gear and supplies, and friends and family also helped them undertake the expensive mission.

In May, the friends drove to Talkeetna in a Honda Civic loaded down with around 500 pounds of gear and food that would allow them to stay for four weeks on the mountain.

Most parties climbing the West Buttress route on Denali plan for a three-week trip. Jaramillo and Crisafi-Lurtsema’s planning for extra time turned out to be essential.

That’s because they were living on snow way up in the sky where temperatures dropped to 40 below zero in June. There is sometimes no hiding from winds on a snow-covered hulk that juts into the jet stream.

They played the long game from the start, spending three nights at Kahiltna Glacier base camp, where a pilot had flown them to about the 7,000-foot level of the mountain to begin their climb up the famous West Buttress route. Most teams of climbers stay only a day or two at base camp before proceeding to the four other traditional campsites in the steep, 17-mile route to the summit.

“We wanted all that time to figure things out,” said Crisafi-Lurtsema, a novice climber of big mountains.

Jaramillo grew up at high altitude in Quito, Ecuador. He spent time in New York City before getting accepted into UAF’s engineering program and traveling to Alaska two years ago.

“I’ve been living at 3,000 meters since I was 4 or 5,” Jaramillo said. “My liver, my heart, and my lungs are bigger than normal size.”

The partners noticed their physiological differences first at the 14,000-foot Medical Camp, where climbing team members pause before attempts on the summit a mile above. There, Crisafi-Lurtsema felt woozy; that altitude matched the highest he had ever been, in Colorado.

As they adjusted to lower oxygen concentrations, the pair continued to collect snow samples at regular intervals. They would scoop snow from the camping areas they shared with other teams and also in “remote” areas, often a climbing rope length off the packed snow trail used by most Denali climbers.

They even chipped ice from a bus-sized chunk that fell to Medical Camp from a headwall that led to the West Buttress ridge. They bottled that sample, and about 30 others from their pathway up the mountain. As they advanced, they would bury the bottles along with extra food and gear in snow holes known as caches marked with bamboo wands.

As they were executing the science that funded their trip, the two partners were also attempting an endeavor that sometimes kills people. One member of a three-man Malaysian climbing team that Crisafi-Lurtsema and Jaramillo met died during his climb. Jaramillo found the Malaysians dropped their national flag on the same route and later returned it to them.

Crisafi-Lurtsema and Jaramillo were at the 17,000-foot High Camp when a member of the Malaysian team on the route above them enlisted National Park Service rangers for help. An NPS helicopter pilot later made two trips up high to evacuate the two living climbers and recover the body of their dead partner.

With those men on his mind, Crisafi-Lurtsema was feeling crummy at the 17,000-foot camp as the altitude again affected him a bit more than his partner. After the pair turned back from an attempt to reach the summit due to high winds, they retreated to their snow-fortified tent at the high camp. Living that high is not good physically or mentally for a person who lives at 500 feet elevation most of the time.

“I was pretty out of it,” Crisafi-Lurtsema said. “Mentally demoralized ... I was under the impression that our expedition was over.”

The pair discussed their options in the tent. Jaramillo was adamant about making another attempt, even if he had to do it solo while Crisafi-Lurtsema waited for him down at the 14,000-foot camp.

As they were mulling their options, Jaramillo’s father was studying online weather models from his home in New York City. The high winds and cold temperatures would abate in a few days, he informed his son via a satellite texter.

“He was confident about a Friday window,” Jaramillo said about his father, a mechanical engineer.

With a possible good day ahead of them, Crisafi-Lurtsema thought hard through his misery within the tent, its fly slapping loudly in the breeze. He was scared of the dangers around him and the memory of the first grinding summit attempt. At the same time, he remembered all the work they had done to get to that place where few people sleep.

“We spent months training for this, writing proposals, buying food, learning crevasse rescue,” Crisafi-Lurtsema said.

He then told his friend he would take another shot at the summit.

“OK, let’s do it!” Jaramillo said.

First, they down-climbed to the 14,000-foot camp for a rest day (which Crisafi-Lurtsema said felt like a vacation for its lower altitude and fellow climbers who were happy to be there).

They returned to high camp a few days later.

During a day that started out in sunshine and light winds, they climbed the few steep, rugged and dangerous miles from high camp to Denali’s summit.

On the roof of North America, they posed for photos, gathered a snow sample and lingered for a half-hour. Knowing a storm might be coming from Jaramillo’s dad’s weather report, they began their descent just as the wind again picked up. At one point Jaramillo couldn’t see Crisafi-Lurtsema at the end of the rope that connected them.

“The winds at Denali Pass knocked me off my feet,” Crisafi-Lurtsema said.

After a 13-hour summit day, they staggered back to their tent at high camp.

Days after that, way back down at base camp where they felt like supermen, the partners celebrated by eating steak sandwiches.

Because of bad weather at that 7,000-foot camp, they had to wait a few extra days to be flown to the greenery and warmth of Talkeetna. This pushed their time on the mountain to five weeks, an extended stay they both believed was key to their success; it allowed them to acclimatize and wait out bad weather.

“We could have been up there the entire season,” Jaramillo said, noting that they received food and fuel from climbers who had summitted and wanted to lighten their loads. “We went up with 4 gallons of gas (for their cookstove) and carried 8 empty gallon cans out of there.”

The partners also brought to the lowlands their snow samples from all along their climbing route. Preliminary looks at the Alaska Pacific University lab have shown possible microplastic samples in most of them.

“Every single sample we have may be showing a glowing microplastic particle,” said Alaska Pacific’s Dee Barker, the climbers’ mentor on the project. “But as a chemist, I’m not ready to say.”

Barker will soon purchase a new piece of equipment for her lab that will allow team members to identify smaller microplastic particles as well as classify them as to what type of plastic they may be.

Jaramillo and Crisafi-Lurtsema scooped unseen particles close to camps that have the shape and size of neoprene shed from climbers’ boot covers. Other samples may be microplastics from distant continents, carried northward by winds that picked them up from frothing ocean surf.

With the new analyzer, the researchers will perhaps soon be able to quantify the tiny plastics they carried home from the high point of North America.

“I’m hoping to have some piece of the puzzle where we can say that this (microplastic) is not coming from a mountaineer’s gear at the remote sites but from some other source far away,” Barker said.