ON MAY 14, two climbers, Will Mayo and Max Turgeon, retreating from a new line to the right of the Spur, met up with Nott and McNeill at the start of the route. The women were carrying huge packs and told Mayo and Turgeon that they hoped to be back at base camp in ten days.

A week later, on May 21, Mark Westman—a member of the last team to summit the Infinite Spur, in 2001—flew over the south face on a routine flight back to Talkeetna and spotted tracks at the base of the arête. He saw no one on the route, but there was little cause for concern. The pair had planned to move slowly and steadily, and by their own most optimistic estimates they would have still had several more days of climbing before they finished the route.

Later that same day, an Arctic cold front from the northwest collided with a gigantic high-pressure

"I was worried," said a local pilot. "That windstorm was just brutal. I couldn't imagine what it must have been like high up on Foraker."

system in the Bering Sea, producing eight days of unimaginably high winds. From May 25 to 28, winds at the 14,200-foot camp on McKinley were clocked at 50 to 70 miles per hour, with gusts as high as 100 miles per hour reported at higher elevations. During this tempest, Foraker and McKinley were lost inside monstrous lenticulars.

Winds dropped enough on the 29th for Will Mayo to get a "pretty good look" at the upper half of the Infinite Spur from the window of a bush plane. He saw no tracks and no humans. Alarmed, Paul Roderick, owner of Talkeetna Air Taxi and the bush pilot who had taken Nott into base camp in late April and McNeill a week later, flew over the route the next day. He found no trace of the two women.

"I was worried," Roderick told me a week later from his hangar. "That windstorm was unbelievable. Just brutal. It was the first time weather had actually grounded me in years. I couldn't imagine what it must have been like high up on Foraker."

In Talkeetna, he called Daryl Miller, Denali's South District Ranger. A Vietnam vet who did two tours of duty as a combat marine, Miller, 62, joined Denali's SAR squad in 1991 and has since participated in hundreds of rescues and dozens of recoveries. In 1996 he was presented with the International Alpine Solidarity Award for saving so many lives.

"I spent the 31st evaluating the information we had," Miller told me solemnly when we met in his Talkeetna office on June 6. "The weather events, the ability and personality of Sue and Karen, the route. And the next day we launched the search and rescue."

It was deemed too dangerous to search the Infinite Spur on foot, so Miller dispatched a Lama helicopter to fly a reconnaissance mission. The pilot spotted tracks at around 14,000 feet, but no other sign of the climbers. The next day, Lama pilot Jim Hood, along with climber Mark Westman and ranger Meg Perdue, flew multiple sorties over the route and discovered Nott's pack, pad, and sleeping bag. Due to the risk of avalanche, they used a hydraulic "grabber" suspended below the Lama to retrieve the gear.

Lashed to the outside of the battered pack was the sleeping pad; it was sun-faded, indicating that it had been in that position for a number of days. The radio inside still worked but had not been used. Judging by the position of the pack's shoulder straps and hipbelt, Miller ruled out the possibility that Nott had been wearing the pack when it was lost. A more likely scenario, he hypothesized at the morning briefing on June 3, was that it had been accidentally dropped or blown off from somewhere above 11,000 feet—and that Nott and McNeill had continued climbing without it.

That day, the Lama flew the lower sections of the route. A fixed-wing aircraft scoured the Sultana and Southeast ridges, the standard descent routes off Foraker's summit, but saw no tracks. Two searchers were stationed with a spotting scope at an 8,000-foot camp a mile east of the Infinite Spur. Nothing.