By Amy Schenck
Alaska Star

In some ways climbing Denali was exactly what a team of injured veterans expected - it was an arduous climb riddled with everything from crevasses and couloirs to rocky ridges and sluffing snow.

But there were also a few surprises along the way.

All six Operation Denali team members pose with a guide June 9 at a place named Edge of the World, located near the team's 14,000-foot high campsite. PHOTO COURTESY OF MARC HOFFMEISTER

For two, those on the team who got turned around before reaching the summit suffered from severe altitude sickness and frostbite; the fact that one was a leg amputee and the other was an arm amputee had little to do with it. Their prosthetic limbs held up sturdy and strong against the long treks, heavy loads, fixed line ascents and bitter cold.

And the biggest surprise?

“The summit was disappointing,” said team member Bob Haines. “You kind of get robbed - in a blink of an eye you’re done.”

The team of six, who called themselves Operation Denali, spent 16 days ascending the 20,320-foot high mountain, which is officially name Mount McKinley, and only three days retreating from the peak to base camp at 7,200 feet.

Three of the six climbers made the summit. They were David Shebib, who was severely wounded in a near-fatal roadside bomb attack in Iraq; Marc Hoffmeister, who lives in Eagle River, serves as the chief engineer for the U.S. Army Alaska Command and organized the climb as part of his own recovery from getting hit with a roadside bomb in Iraq; and Haines, a firefighter and a non-wounded Army retiree, who assisted the climb in every way possible, from carrying a huge portion of the group gear to caring for team members when they became sick. Their guide Kirby Senden, who is also from Eagle River, stood on the cold, cloud-clad peak with the men.

A few days after the climb, kicked back in his Eagle River home, hands wrapped around a beer and a scruffy beard hanging from his chin, Hoffmesiter chimed in with Haines.

“The summit was the beginning of the end,” he said.

It was the end of searching out fellow injured veterans who wanted to climb Alaska’s mammoth peak. It was the end of nonstop fundraising to cover the $70,000 expense of climbing. It was the end of day-in-and-day-out training. And it was the end up moving uphill. There was nowhere left to go but down.

But on summit day Hoffmeister didn’t have too long to dwell on all of this; instead he had to focus on breathing in the dangerously thin air and finding his footing on the knife-edge ridge.

In a journal entry dated June 16, summit day, Hoffmeister wrote:

“We have to pass an ascending team of two. As I approach, I step slightly right of trail; in my limited vision I can’t differentiate between snow and cloud. I step into cloud and, whoosh, I’m falling off summit ridge.

“I struggle to self-arrest, but my gloved, wounded hand fails. I quickly swap hands and arrest at the same time my teammates and the anchors catch me. I ice climb back up to the trail, winded, and we carry on.”

Hoffmeister’s other journal entries tell about long slogs as the team shuttled and cached gear from one camp to the next; perilous, and even fatal, incidents they witnessed while on the mountain; sometimes tenuous group dynamics; and the chow the team devoured to stay energized.

“Strawberry and blueberry pancakes for breakfast - awesome for two reasons: tasted great and was heavy as hell,” starts the June 11 entry.

Hoffmeister’s journal entries also took on reflective tones. In his summit-day entry he wrote:

“I’m spent - a year’s journey to this summit, but we did it. Only half the team managed to summit, but the efforts of those who didn’t enabled our success. I’m struck by the parallel of our wounded warriors and fallen heroes. They may not have seen the fight through, but their sacrifice enables our nation to win its battles.”

For the three team members who got pushed back in their bid for the high peak - Matt Nyman, Jon Kuniholm and Gayle Hoffmeister - there’s a feeling of unfinished business, even failure. Denali has almost become their nemesis.

“It’s a bit overwhelming for me that I wasn’t able to make it,” Matt Nyman said, as his eyes reddened and a tear squeezed out above his peeling sunburned nose. “It’s the first thing I’ve failed at.”

This is not to say that Nyman’s feelings toward the mountain are all doom and gloom.

“I still love the fact that I was out there, and I was just trying to savor every minute I had on the mountain,” he said.

Even though Nyman fell a few thousand feet short of the 20,320-foot mark, he learned loads about mountaineering and, more importantly, got to push himself the way he used when he was in Special Operations Command with the Army - before he got thrown through a helicopter’s rotor blade.

Nyman recounted a couple of days on Denali when the group was hiking uphill and, for the first time since his injury, he forgot all about “the fact I don’t have a leg.”

Nyman talks about his “stump” matter-of-factly, often making jokes that leave people both blushing and rolling with laughter.

So, what’s next for the crew?

Haines is thinking about his honey-do list waiting for him at home in Colorado.

Nyman is concentrating on Mount Rainer. Some day, he said, he’ll come back to climb Denali, but in the near future, with a 3 1/2-year-old son, it would be financially and logistically difficult to make another summit attempt.

Kuniholm is back in North Carolina, working with a research team to use what he learned from the climb to develop prosthetics suited to extreme environments.

Shebib reenlisted in the Army on Denali’s summit in ceremony performed by Marc Hoffmesiter. He’s been assigned to the 173rd brigade combat team (airborne) as a combat medic. He leaves for Bamberg, Germany, in September.

And Marc and Gayle Hoffmeister are still sleeping in their high-altitude tent. They’re planning a trip up Kilimanjaro this winter, and Gayle has her sights set on a second bid for Denali’s summit in 2011.

Reach the reporter at amyschenck.@alaskastar.com.

This article published in The Alaska Star on Thursday, June 25, 2009.