Escape from Lucania

by David Roberts

  Among the Alps with Bradford is a blithely written, almost cocky récit of two young acolytes having the time of their lives in the mountains. Despite the fact that Brad was only seventeen when he wrote it, the book gives insights into the character of the man who would become the foremost Alaskan mountaineer and explorer of the century.

  On their first major excursion on the Aiguille du Midi, a startlingly sharp pinnacle that looms 7,000 feet above Chamonix, Brad and Sherry worked out a way to reassure their anxious mother that everything was okay. At dusk, from the porch of the hut at the Plan de l’Aiguille, the boys prepared a Roman candle and a “red fire, with which to signal mother in the valley.”

  When the appointed time arrived, Sherry ran out onto the terrace of the rocks below our window and touched off the red fire, while I fired off the Roman candle from the window.

  A moment later we saw a light blinking furiously from the window of the hotel [in Chamonix], far below us. We replied with a few flashes made by passing a hat before our candle.

  In the midst of climbs, there were carefree diversions unthinkable today:

  We had some canned pineapples, and when they were finished I amused myself by throwing the can over the cliff, and listening to it as it dropped and dropped, banging and clattering over the rocks for nearly a minute, before it was lost to sight and sound in the distance.

  On hard pitches in the 1920s, guides routinely hauled their clients up like sacks of potatoes. The brothers Washburn, however, were determined to second the pitches under their own steam, changing from hobnailed boots to sneakers (which “stuck like glue,” Brad claimed) for the tricky bits of rock climbing. In a charming introduction to the book, Sherry bragged about his older brother:

  You can hire a guide who will pull you up any difficult places there happen to be on a mountain, but Brad usually gets up by himself. He agrees with those who believe that mountain climbing is a test of sportsmanship, and feels that if he can’t climb the difficult places without being pulled he really hasn’t climbed the mountain.

  Setting out for an August 1927 assault on Mont Blanc, at 15,771 feet the highest peak in western Europe, immediately after a heavy snowstorm, Brad and Sherry hired a porter as well as the guide Georges Charlet. There is a hint of the pampered rich kid in Brad’s rationale for doing so: “It’s always necessary to have a porter on that climb because it’s so long and fatiguing for anyone under twenty-five years old, that it is good to go without anything on your back at all.”

  In the end, a second fierce storm defeated the party. Sherry turned back early, though Brad pushed to the top of the Col du Dôme, only two hours in good weather from the summit. Guide, porter, and client alike suffered minor frostbite. The closing passage of Among the Alps, voicing Brad’s sanguine acceptance of the setback, uncannily anticipates the decision he and Bob Bates would face on Mount Lucania a decade later:

  There’s nothing like the game in which you match yourself against Nature. Give her your very best and fight to the end, but when you see that she has got the upper hand, turn, and don’t be scared to admit defeat. It’s the fool who sticks to it when it’s impossible…. [A]fter all, there’s nothing like the feeling of knowing that you’ve done your best, even though you’ve lost in the struggle!

  In 1929, between Groton and Harvard, Brad spent one last summer climbing in the Alps. By then, he was an accomplished mountaineer. No longer a mere client, but a near-equal partner to his celebrated guides, Washburn that season went after unclimbed routes. His crowning deed was the first ascent of the north face of the Aiguille Verte with Georges Charlet and Alfred Couttet—the boldest climb yet done in the Chamonix area, still regarded more than seven decades later as a watershed in Alpine climbing. To be sure, Couttet and Charlet led most of the pitches, but at nineteen Brad pulled his own weight.

  Looking back on that accomplishment in the year 2000, Brad recalled the vaulting ambition that drove him to the Verte. “Sherry had gone back home, and I was staying in France for a couple of extra weeks. Couttet was one of the finest climbers in the Alps, and he thought that the two best unclimbed routes around Chamonix were the north face of the Aiguille Verte and the Walker Spur on the north face of the Grandes Jorasses. So Alfred went over to the hut beneath the Walker and spent a couple of days sitting there looking at the face with his field glasses. I paid him ten bucks a day to do it. He came back and said, ‘I don’t like it. There’s too much rock fall.’ Remember, in those days we didn’t have helmets. So we did the north face of the Verte instead.”

  The Walker Spur would defeat a number of daring attempts before falling to a team led by the formidable Italian climber Ricardo Cassin in 1938. By that year, it was common to refer alternately to the Walker or to the treacherous north face of the Eiger in Switzerland (solved the same summer, only after eight of the first ten aspirants were killed trying) as “the last great problem” of the Alps. To think of assaulting the Walker in 1929, as Brad had, was to be far ahead of one’s time.

  Entering Harvard, then, Washburn had good reason to regard himself as the equal of any mountaineer his age in the country. That freshman year, however, Brad saw his geographical priorities radically reoriented. Presiding over the HMC was Henry Hall, with his years of experience in the Canadian Rockies and his participation in the remarkable 1925 first ascent of Mount Logan in the Yukon, the second-highest peak in North America and, in terms of sheer bulk, the largest mountain in the world. At one HMC meeting, Brad listened enthralled as a somewhat senior explorer, W. Osgood Field, spoke of his journeys among the fjords and peaks of Alaska’s Glacier Bay. Then, at an American Alpine Club meeting in New York, Brad met Allen Carpé.

  A research engineer at Bell Telephone Labs and a student of cosmic rays (which are best detected at high altitudes), Carpé was probably the most outstanding expeditionary climber of his day in America. He had been a driving force on the Mount Logan ascent. In 1926, he had made an attempt on 15,292-foot Mount Fairweather, a beautiful, isolated giant of a mountain looming over Glacier Bay in southeast Alaska.

  Compared to the crowded Alps, Alaska promised limitless wilderness and challenges at every hand. “I was just fascinated,” Brad says today of these glimmerings from the North. “This was a new place. Very few people had been there.”

  A less confident mountaineer (or for that matter, one with the temperament of Bob Bates rather than Brad Washburn) might, at nineteen, have sought to become a protégé of Allen Carpé, hoping to be invited along on the next attempt on Fairweather, which Carpé had called in print “now perhaps the outstanding unclimbed mountain in America.” Instead, Brad boldly organized his own Fairweather expedition for the summer of 1930. Having just turned twenty, Brad landed his team by boat at Lituya Bay and set out to knock off Fairweather.

  The attempt ended in abject failure. Brad’s party wore themselves out relaying loads twenty-four miles from Lituya Bay to the foot of the great mountain. At the end of their probe, the men had reached the paltry altitude of 6,700 feet—some 8,600 feet short of the summit.

  Thus rather than becoming Carpé’s protégé, Washburn became his rival. Spurred to action, Carpé returned to Fairweather in 1931, with, as teammates, three of the strongest expeditionary climbers in America. Moving with a logistical efficiency that had eluded Washburn, Carpé’s quartet planted a series of camps up the south face of the mountain. Finally, on June 8, Carpé and Terris Moore stood on the summit of Fairweather.

  Moore barely knew Washburn by 1931, but they would become close friends for life. In later years, Moore told Brad about the decision, while the quartet was marooned in a high camp during a storm, to send the other two climbers down. “Terry said that they were running low on food, and finally Carpé said, ‘We’ve got to divide this party up because we haven’t got enough food for all of us to get to the top.’ So he and Terry stayed in camp, and [the other two] went back down. Terry told me that the last thing Carpé said, as the group broke up, was, ‘If we don’t climb this goddamned mountain
now, that son of a bitch Washburn will come back and do it next year.’

  “’Cantankerous Carp,’ everybody called him. Carpé scared the hell out of Terry. He didn’t like climbing roped; he felt the rope was a damned nuisance. Nobody ever said Carpé was not a hell of a good climber, but high on the shoulder of Fairweather, he slipped and barely avoided falling to his death. Climbing unroped, of course, eventually cost Carpé his life.” The very next year, Carpé and Theodore Koven, skiing unroped on the Muldrow Glacier on Mount McKinley, fell (probably simultaneously) into a huge hidden crevasse. The site of the unwitnessed accident was discovered two days later by another party descending the mountain. Koven lay dead, face-down, on the glacial surface, having apparently summoned the effort to struggle out of the crevasse before he succumbed to his injuries and the cold. Carpé’s body was never found.

  By the time Brad began cavorting in the playground of Europe (to use Sir Leslie Stephen’s felicitous epithet), climbing in the Alps had a glorious history of 140 years, stretching back to the first ascent of Mont Blanc in 1786. The last major summit to be climbed was the Matterhorn, by Whymper, whose ill-starred ascent in 1865 closed what was even then called the golden age of mountaineering.

  In contrast, by the time Brad landed at Lituya Bay in 1930, alpinism in Alaska was barely forty-four years old. The three highest summits in Alaska and the Yukon had been reached, but all of the technically most difficult peaks—the Matter-horns of the North—were still virgin. Whole ranges lay unexplored, even unnamed.

  The initial lodestone for mountaineering in the North American subarctic was Mount Saint Elias, a graceful peak that thrusts to the improbable altitude of 18,008 feet only twenty miles from the Gulf of Alaska. Sighting the mountain on July 20, 1741, while still 120 miles from land, the Russian explorer Vitus Bering made the European discovery of Alaska.

  For nearly two decades after 1880, Saint Elias was thought to be the highest peak on the continent (it is actually fourth, after McKinley, Logan, and the Mexican volcano Orizaba). The first two attempts to climb it, in 1886 and 1888, got nowhere. In 1890 and 1891, a pair of expeditions sponsored by the National Geographic Society and the U.S. Geological Survey, led by a redoubtable geologist named Israel Russell, made a real dent in the mountain’s defenses. On the second venture, Russell and two companions struggled to reach a high col that would prove to be the key to the first ascent.

  That came only in 1897, at the hands of a lavishly equipped team led by Luigi Amedeo di Savoia, the Duke of the Abruzzi. At the time of his birth in Madrid, Luigi, though Italian, was son of the ruling king of Spain. After his father’s death in 1890, the king of Italy bestowed on the seventeen-year-old the title of Duke of the Abruzzi—a post that required precious few official duties. In the shambles that was Italian politics in his day, the duke might well have slipped into a life of luxury and dilettantism. Instead, he became one of the greatest mountaineers and explorers of his era.

  As he sailed for America in May 1897, Luigi Amedeo was only twenty-four, but he had under his belt not only ten years of solid service in his country’s naval schools, but an enviable record of hard climbs in the Alps, including a new route on the Grandes Jorasses. Having pondered the failures of his predecessors on Saint Elias, the duke, in the words of his co-biographers, Mirella Tenderini and Michael Shandrick, “decided to plan his expedition as if he were going to the North Pole instead of climbing a mountain.”

  From Italy, he brought five companions and four professional mountain guides. In Seattle, he hired an American outfitter who recruited ten porters to haul loads from the seacoast to base camp. On disembarking at Yakutat Bay, the party unloaded the mind-boggling quantity of 6,600 pounds of food alone.

  In logistical style, the expedition was a curious blend of the modern and the old-fashioned, The team’s spiffy Mummery tents weighed only three and a half pounds each, but the duke had also brought ten iron bedsteads so that he and his well-born compatriots need not suffer the indignity of sleeping in direct contact with the ground. (In the end, five of the bedsteads were hauled by the porters fifty five miles from the beach to advance base camp. The guides were content to rough it, bedsteadless.)

  With those guides tackling the technical passages, by July 30 all ten Italians had reached the high pass below the summit on the north, which the duke named Russell Col, in honor of the geologist who had paved the way there in 1891. The next day, all ten men made it to the summit, though on top they were so exhausted that the duke himself had to undertake the meteorological observations he had assigned to his colleagues.

  In terms of the legacy this first great Alaskan ascent bequeathed to Washburn and Bates, there would be three intriguing linkages. Twelve years after Saint Elias, the duke led an expedition to K2, the world’s second-highest mountain. On that mountain in 1909, he reached the extraordinary altitude of 24,275 feet—the highest anyone had ever been on earth to that date. In so doing, the duke pioneered the route (called today the Abruzzi Ridge) by which Bob Bates’s 1938 team would reach a new high on the mountain, turning back a mere 2,000 feet below the top. K2 would not be successfully climbed until 1954, by a strong Italian party.

  One of the duke’s teammates on both Saint Elias and K2 was Vittorio Sella, universally acclaimed as the finest mountain photographer in history—before Bradford Washburn, that is, with whom he now must share that accolade. Struggling against impossible conditions to expose large-format photographs with his heavy and temperamental cameras, then to develop the pictures on the spot in a black tent brought along for that purpose, Sella lost many of his best images to such unexpected mishaps as condensation from his own breath gathering on the gelatin paper he used. So determined, however, was Sella to get good summit pictures, that he reclimbed the mountain the following day with a different camera.

  When Washburn turned his passion toward aerial mountain photography in the late 1930s, Sella’s by then famous pictures set an Olympian standard toward which the young American strived. Though he never met Sella, the Italian became a model for Brad. A touchstone was Sella’s dictum—“Big scenery should be photographed with big negatives.” The crystalline clarity of Brad’s own best pictures, shot with frozen fingers out of the open doors of planes bouncing in the turbulence, owes much to Brad’s choice of a series of heavy Fairchild cameras that expose eight-by-ten-inch negatives.

  The third linkage had to do with the view the ten Italians had from the summit of Mount Saint Elias. Thirty-five miles away in the northeast, the whole horizon seemed to be taken up by the sprawling bulk of Mount Logan. But off Logan’s left shoulder, twice as far away, loomed another giant peak. On the spot, the Duke of the Abruzzi named this second mountain Lucania, after the name of the ship on which the expedition had sailed from Liverpool to New York. The Italians were not the first nonnatives to see Lucania: prospectors in the Yukon lowlands had doubtless caught sight of it looming over nearer, lower mountains. But the Italians were the first to put its existence on official record.

  In 1897, the same year that Saint Elias was climbed, a gold miner named William A. Dickey wrote a now-famous letter to the New York Sun. Dickey had spent the previous summer in the Alaskan interior, panning on the Susitna and Chulitna Rivers. Impressed by the huge glaciated mountain hulking to the north on clear days, Dickey performed a crude survey of its summit, and came up with the surprisingly accurate estimate of 20,000 feet for its altitude (the mountain is now known to rise 20,320 feet above sea level).

  Dickey claimed that the “new” mountain might be the highest on the continent. And he suggested a name for it. The first news his party of sourdoughs had received on emerging from the wilderness the previous summer was of the nomination of William McKinley for the presidency. A staunch Republican, Dickey slapped on the mountain that was indeed the highest in North America a name that could not have been more inappropriate—for the twenty-fifth president not only never traveled anywhere near Alaska, he seems to have been singularly uninterested in the territory.


  The “original” name for the mountain, Denali, which has come back into vogue during the last two decades, is only one of a number of appellations by which the indigenous Indians referred to the peak. “Denali” means “the high one” or “the great one.” The careless legend has come down to us that Dickey was the (nonnative) discoverer of Mount McKinley, but this would be preposterous. Not only had many miners and trappers come relatively close to the mountain by 1897, but on a clear day, McKinley is plainly visible from Cook Inlet, 150 miles to the south. From their ships, not only Captain George Vancouver in 1794, but Captain James Cook and any number of Russian mariners before that had almost certainly seen the peak.

  Lying so far inland as it does, McKinley poses greater logistical problems of approach than does Saint Elias. The first two “attempts” on the mountain, in 1898, were really only reconnaissances of its lowland defenses. Depending on what one calls a genuine attempt, McKinley would repel some eleven expeditions between 1898 and its relatively clockwork first ascent in 1913, by a party led by the forty-nine-year-old Hudson Stuck, archdeacon of the Yukon.

  By all odds the most bizarre and remarkable of these attempts was the work of a team of gold miners in 1910, who, completely untrained in mountain climbing, decided to drop their prospecting for a few months and pull off an ascent that “professionals” and “outsiders” seemed incapable of. By 1909, McKinley had become the talk of the camp at the Kantishna diggings, north of the mountain—particularly the acrimonious disputes over Dr. Frederick A. Cook’s claim to have reached the summit with one partner (a virtually mute Montana horsepacker) in 1906. (In later life, having become an assiduous student of North America’s most audacious exploration hoax, Brad would debunk Cook’s claim beyond the shadow of a doubt. Yet in 2003, legions of true believers in the doctor’s absurd boast still abound.)