Northern Neck Times

The Denali test

A realtor and an insurance broker walk into the wild.

If it sounds like the setup for a joke, for Rick Stockel and John Sherman, it was a plan. Two years of preparation and anticipation had brought the two longtime friends and Richmond classmates, both just past their 61st birthdays, to the shoulder of this hard-packed dirt-and-gravel road more than 4,000 miles from home. At their feet, the ground dropped away into scrub. In the distance, the terrain rose again to steep ridges.

“This is where we have to start walking,” Rick says in the video footage he captured in the moment, the camera panning the spare landscape.

It was a Sunday, late August of 2022, and ahead of them lay what they had come here for: five days and nights trekking in Alaska’s Denali National Park and Preserve, a raw and challenging subarctic wilderness larger than the states of Connecticut, Rhode Island, and Delaware put together. The gravel road where Rick and John stood, along with two fellow adventurers Rick had picked to join them, is the only one that serves Denali’s more than 6 million acres. Fifteen percent of the park is covered by glaciers. It is braided by multiple rivers and thousands of miles of streams. More than 200 species of animals live in the park, including grizzlies, black bears, wolves, coyote, lynx, caribou, and moose. If you’re not conversant with a compass, a topographical (aka “topo”) map, and some solid backcountry skills, you might quickly find yourself lost and in a load of trouble.

But whatever the weather, the wildlife, or the landscape might throw at the four men in the days to come, they would have to depend only on those skills, each other, and what they were wearing or carrying in the backpacks to navigate. For true emergencies, they had a satellite-linked GPS transponder. But for anything short of that, no matter how weary or worn or beleaguered they might find themselves, they’d have to get out of the wilderness the same way they were about to get in: on their own two feet.“I knew it was going to be hard,” says John. “But I didn’t know it would be as hard as it would be.” Comfortable being uncomfortableThe first day of their adventure, the four men rose at 5 a.m. to catch the park shuttle bus that delivered them to their point of departure into the backcountry. Leaving the road behind, they began a steep descent, bushwhacking into the scrubby brush.To minimize human impact on the land and preserve the park’s wild character, Denali is divided into 87 separate “units,” each one thousands of acres. Not quite half of those units are assigned limit on the number of trekkers permitted to camp overnight. Rick and John’s group would spend two nights in Unit 7 (quota: six people) and three in Unit 8 (quota: four people). Chances were good that the four might go the entire trip without seeing or hearing another human besides themselves. Bears, on the other hand, were a distinct possibility.Hundreds of black and brown bears make their home in the park — how many is only a guesstimate. From a safe (read: “very long”) distance, or from the safer confines of a park bus, a bear sighting is one of the thrills of a Denali visit. But even if there has been only a single recorded case of a fatal bear encounter in the park’s more than 100-year history, nevertheless, nobody wants a chance to be the second. On a trip to Alaska in his 20s, Rick had experienced two too-close-for-comfort bear encounters he wouldn’t care to repeat, and as they made their way through the brush now, they saw enough fresh bear scat to know the risk of a surprise encounter was more than theoretical.Fortunately, bears have excellent hearing, so hikers in Denali are advised to make a racket that (hopefully) encourages any bears in the area to clear off. As they hiked, Rick blew a piercing whistle while the others shouted, “Hey bear!” and, “Hi Yogi!” Still, being “constantly on alert for running into a bear,” Rick recalls, was “mentally taxing.”And physically, that first day, and indeed any of the days that would follow, was no stroll in the park either. “It’s constantly up and down these small mountains,” Rick says. “We had to descend maybe 600 or 700 feet, and then we followed a small creek bed, and then we were bushwhacking up the next mountain. And then, all of a sudden, we were on frozen tundra, sinking down into loose sand.”There were also repeated crossings of the swift-flowing glacier-fed rivers and streams, slate-colored with silty runoff, the water so cold it burned. “The river is split into 20 or 30 branches, and you have to cross every single one to get from one side to the other,” says John. “Cold water is not my favorite thing, and so I would go to great lengths to cross rivers and streams at their most narrow point, even walking hundreds of yards up or down river to find the ‘ideal’ place to cross, while others, like Rick, would just bite the bullet and cross whenever he encountered the barrier. I was like a cat, and Rick was like a polar bear.”

At every water crossing, they also had to pause to loosen their backpack straps. You cross by facing the oncoming current and taking careful side steps. Lose your footing, and you could easily be swept away by the fast-moving current. Fall over backward with a 40-pound dead weight strapped to your back — “turtling,” they call it — and you would likely drown, says Rick.

“After hiking for five-plus hours up and down hills and through water, I came to the conclusion that meeting up with a bear was the least of my worries,” says Rick.

Their destination that first day was to find a place to camp within sight of the East Fork Glacier, which they hoped to hike to the following day. With only a topo map to follow, though, the four were regularly forced to backtrack, reroute, and, several times, chance it with questionable ascents and descents of steep, crumbling slopes.

“All the hiking I had ever done was on a trail,” says John. “This was the first time I had ever done true backcountry hiking. We ended up going over some terrain that was pretty dicey.”

And then there was the weather. Most days, the temperatures hovered in the 50s and at night sank into the 40s or lower. The wind was constant, sometimes gusting more than 50 mph. Every day it rained; it was impossible to stay dry.

“You are uncomfortable a lot, and you have to be comfortable being uncomfortable,” says John.

 

Long day’s journey into twilight

Their LinkedIn profiles might not mark Rick Stockel and John Sherman as the likeliest two to trade their beds for Therm-a-Rests, bear spray, and five days and nights of that kind of discomfort. In fact, though, neither of them was a stranger to such challenges; they’d come to Denali in search of them.

“For me the draw was the rawness of the weather and environment with no guardrails to protect ourselves should we fall and slip down a slope, have an animal encounter, fall in a river or stream and get hypothermia, says Rick. “I need these challenges physically and mentally just to feel alive as a human being.”

In his later 20s and early 30s, in the years after he graduated from Richmond, Rick had been a river rafting guide. “I thought I was invincible,” he admits. There were wild whitewater excursions to West Virginia and Maryland, a few scrapes with near-drownings, a taste for pushing hard and doing it all. At some point, he proposed an “epic trip” to a couple of younger Richmond alumni he’d rafted with.

The seven-day paddling excursion on Alaska’s Copper River (“We literally walked in places no human has ever been,” says Rick) was followed by another seven days hiking in Denali. Thirty years later, he was making good on his dream to return.

As for John, when his family moved from the Chicago suburbs to southwest Virginia when he was 12, he found himself drawn to the outdoors and the nearby Blue Ridge. He joined the Boy Scouts, eventually rising to Eagle Scout. He spent “a ton of time” hiking before heading off to Richmond for college. He’s traversed the length of the Appalachian Trail in Virginia. He’s hiked in the Great Smoky Mountains and the Sierra Nevadas, up Mount Whitney, and rim to rim of the Grand Canyon. He’s no stranger to putting one foot in front of the other. “I am very comfortable in the wilderness,” he says, and for years, he and Rick had been tossing around the idea of Alaska; finally, they’d found the time and put it on the calendar.

Original source can be found here