Escape from Lucania

by David Roberts

  The catalyst for what would come to be known as the Sourdough Expedition was a $5,000 saloon bet that McKinley would see a first ascent by July 4, 1910. Hoping to get rich from the wager rather than from the endless toil for gold, four prospectors worked their way up the northeast side of the mountain through the spring of 1910, unerringly pioneering the route by which Stuck would succeed three years later. By March 18, three of them had established a high camp at 10,900 feet.

  On April 1, they set out with the bold intention of climbing the last 9,400 feet in one day. So fit were they, so undaunted by crevasses or potential avalanche slopes, that they might well have succeeded, but for an odd yet understandable decision.

  McKinley has two summits: the true south summit, at 20,320 feet, and the north summit, at 19,470 feet. Despite the 850-foot difference in their altitudes, it is almost impossible to gauge from the upper Muldrow Glacier which is higher. (Because it is nearer, indeed, the north summit can look higher.) The Sourdoughs chose the north summit, however, mainly because it could be seen from Fairbanks. As if climbing more than 9,000 feet at high altitude in a single day were not challenge enough, the trio took turns lugging a fourteen-foot spruce pole which they planned to plant near the summit, flying a flag from it so that the skeptical might see their marker by telescope from the Kantishna gold diggings about forty miles to the north.

  Two of the three, Billy Taylor and Pete Anderson, reached the north summit at 3:25 P.M., in temperatures of minus 30°F, shortly after erecting their flagpole on a prominent spur just below the top. Alas, the spruce tree was far too small to be spotted from Fairbanks, even with the best telescopes. Taylor and Anderson returned to the diggings to find their claim of victory dismissed as roundly as had been Dr. Cook’s. Vindication came in 1913, however, when a sharp-eyed member of Stuck’s party saw the pole with the naked eye from a plateau 2,000 feet below it and two miles away.

  After the first ascent of the Matterhorn in 1865, climbing in the Alps continued at a fever pitch. Whether or not the so-called golden age had ended, alpinists were driven to push the limits by putting up new routes on peaks that had seen only a handful of ascents.

  The same was not true of Alaska. After the first ascent of McKinley, climbers turned their back on the Far North for a dozen years. The campaign that ended that neglect, ironically, was born in emulation of the British Everest expeditions of 1921, 1922, and 1924.

  By 1925, the first- and third-highest peaks in the North had been claimed; but the second-highest, the gigantic massif of Mount Logan (19,550 feet, only 770 feet lower than McKinley) had not even been reconnoitered. Only the ambitious Boundary Commission party of 1913, which probed the lower reaches of the glaciers flowing west from Logan, had called attention to Logan’s promise as an objective, though the commission’s report labeled the terrain a land of “utter desolation.”

  The summit of Saint Elias forms the pivotal corner of the border between Alaska and Canada. McKinley, of course, lies in the interior of Alaska. But Logan is a wholly Canadian mountain, sprawling in its seldom-seen obscurity at the heart of the Saint Elias Range, its summit a good twenty miles east of the border. Thus its conquest became an obsession of the Alpine Club of Canada.

  Thinking in terms of a North American Everest, expedition leader Albert MacCarthy decided to lay a series of caches along the arduous 140-mile approach route. To do so, he started work in the bitter cold of February. Launching his campaign from McCarthy, the same gold-rush town from which, twelve years later, Russell Dow and Bob Reeve would fly in the ton of supplies for base camp on Mount Lucania, MacCarthy and five teammates used two horse-drawn sleds and three dog teams to get a considerably larger pile of food and gear distributed in depots along the Chitina River gorge. Temperatures ranged as low as minus 45°F. Harnesses on the horses froze so badly, they could sometimes not be removed for two weeks straight.

  After two months of fiendishly hard work, the long string of caches was in place. In May, MacCarthy led the team of eight men toward the mountain. By June 22, six climbers were still in the hunt, having pitched a camp on the summit plateau, above 18,000 feet.

  The most dangerous aspect of a Logan climb is not any stretch of particular technical difficulty, but the sheer size of that summit plateau, unparalleled elsewhere on earth. The problems range from trying to guess which of several peaks is the true summit, to getting lost in a storm, to spending too much time exposed in high winds at altitude. All of these hazards now afflicted MacCarthy’s team, despite their fanatically thorough preparation. The peak they thought the summit lay two miles from the actual highest point; the extra four miles of trudging in the thin air seriously overextended the party. On the descent, the two ropes of three got separated from one another in a whiteout, and the weaker trio got disoriented by a full 180 degrees, so that the men started to follow their own willow wand markers back toward the summit. All six men survived an open bivouac at 19,000 feet, with a temperature of minus 12°F. By the time the party reached the lower slopes, all the men were utterly played out.

  It was only good luck that kept the Logan ascent from costing the lives of several of its members. Yet the triumph was widely hailed as a brilliant success. The British Alpine Journal editorialized, “Greater hardships have probably never been experienced in any mountaineering expedition.” A measure of the team’s achievement lay in the fact that on Logan, unlike Saint Elias and McKinley, the first party to attempt the mountain reached the summit.

  Only four years later, as Bates and Washburn arrived at Harvard, the mentor-in-residence was Henry Hall, a veteran of the Logan climb (though one of the two men who did not make the summit). With membership in the HMC, which Hall had founded, came the implicit doctrine that the Logan style—a massive buildup of relayed loads and caches, months in the approach, heavy camps fortified for long stays—was the way to attack the remote prizes of Alaska and the Yukon. That doctrine, however, Brad and Bob would do their best to demolish.

  Not all at once, however. Washburn’s 1930 failure on Mount Fairweather had rubbed his nose in the sheer enormousness of the logistical challenge on an Alaskan snow-and-ice giant. Rather than return to the North, Brad spent the next summer in Chamonix, not tackling virgin routes but helping a friend, Burton Holmes, make a film of the standard route up Mont Blanc. It would be one of only three summers in a stretch of sixteen consecutive years during which Brad did no significant mountaineering.

  Recalls Bob Bates, “Brad asked me to go on Mont Blanc with him in 1931, but I didn’t have any money.” During their sophomore year, the “hell of a nice guy” in Dunster House and the boys’ adventure writer over in Lowell had spent a lot of time in the White Mountains together. A week or two after he returned from the Alps, Brad talked Bob into trying to break the speed record for the hike from Pinkham Notch to the top of Mount Washington. The record—4,000 feet of ascent in one hour and twenty minutes—was held by the crusty caretaker of the Pinkham Notch hut, Joe Dodge.

  “I was tough as nails from climbing in the Alps all summer,” Brad recalls, “but poor Bob had been lobster fishing in Maine. He sort of died out on Lion’s Head.”

  A passage in Bates’s memoir, The Love of Mountains Is Best, dovetails with Brad’s recollection. “I stayed with Brad to the top of the [Tuckerman] headwall, which we reached in an hour, then sat down and waved him on. I didn’t stay long, however, and was only a few minutes behind when he reached the summit.”

  “Never did break Joe Dodge’s record,” Brad adds. “We did it in an hour thirty.”

  Throughout the school year, Bob and Brad went off nearly every weekend on HMC climbing or skiing trips. Though their style of mountaineering would prove to be prophetic in the great ranges, in one respect the two twenty-year-olds were already reactionaries. Figures associated with the HMC only a few years before—notably Ken Henderson and Robert Underhill—had brought the techniques of the Alps to New England, where they pioneered daring rock routes on such cliffs as Cannon Mountain and Cathedral Ledge. />
  The HMC climbers of Bob and Brad’s era, on the other hand, were uninterested in rock climbing. There were no afternoon outings to Quincy Quarries, no Saturday sessions at Joe English or Crow Hill, where later generations of HMCers would perfect their rock technique. To this day Brad brags of having driven only one piton in his life.

  This might seem puzzling, given Brad’s virtuosic apprenticeship on the Chamonix aiguilles. At an early age, however, Brad recognized that rock work would play very little part in the first ascents of the remote and glaciated mountains of the North that would become his life’s mission. The HMC’s weekend training on ice, on the other hand, was at a high level. In chopping steps up the 70-degree incline of blue ice in Pinnacle Gully on Mount Washington, Brad would perform a climb that was still considered an achievement thirty years later. In 1980, one of the central figures in that HMC gang, H. Adams Carter, who for thirty-five years single-handedly edited The American Alpine Journal, insisted, “Don’t let anybody tell you that Brad wasn’t damned good technically. I would say that technically Brad was the best [in our circle].”

  By the summer of 1932, Brad was headed for Alaska once more. His objective was Mount Crillon, at 12,726 feet, more than 2,500 feet lower than Fairweather (which lies twenty-five miles to its northwest) but in every other respect an equal challenge. This time Bob Bates was a member of the team.

  It would take Brad three successive summers and three expeditions to knock off this pesky mountain. The first year, 1932, his team exhausted its resources simply sorting out the unknown geography that lay between Lituya Bay and the base of the mountain. By the end of the trip, the climbers had reached only the initial cliffs on Crillon, but from that low vantage point, they saw what looked like a good climbing route.

  The next year, with Bob once more on Brad’s team—both men having graduated from Harvard just a few weeks before—the party took advantage of its hard-earned knowledge from 1932. On July 29, in a blowing mist, Bob, Brad, and Walt Everett (the friend who had introduced the two to each other three years before) struggled up a steep ice pitch to stand on what they were sure was Crillon’s summit. The barometer actually read 254 feet higher than the mountain’s known elevation. The men shook hands and congratulated each other.

  In the next moment, one of the cruelest tricks that fate can play on mountaineers unfolded with its heartless logic. As Bob would write in The Love of Mountains Is Best,

  Brad tied the American flag to a trail marker and was taking a picture when Walt asked, “What peak is that?” Clouds kept blocking the view, but we could glimpse a peak ahead. At first we thought it was Fairweather, but in a few minutes we had a better view. It was the summit of Crillon and still a long way off. We were on the high point of the ridge, but not on the summit.

  With no time left to push on, the 1933 expedition thus saw victory slip through its fingers.

  Nothing if not dogged, Brad put together another team in 1934, and at last reached Crillon’s summit with two companions. Bob was not one of them, however, despite being invited on the expedition. Pursuing an M.A. in English at Harvard, with an offer of a instructorship at the University of Pennsylvania for the following autumn, Bates felt duty-bound to spend his summer in the library (where he pored over the works of the eccentric antiquarian and biographer John Aubrey) rather than on an Alaskan glacier. Asked sixty-seven years later whether it had been painful to miss out on Crillon’s ascent after two summers’ trying, Bob was philosophical: “No. I made my choice. I wished Brad luck, and I was glad when they climbed it.”

  Throughout his life, Brad Washburn has been the sort of man who does not readily accept defeat. Brad’s first three Alaskan expeditions, strictly speaking, were failures. With success on Crillon in 1934, however, he began a string of eighteen years in the mountains that utterly reversed that discouraging initial course.

  On Fairweather and Crillon, Brad and his cronies evolved the style that would revolutionize big-range mountaineering in North America. Step by step, they rejected the logistical overkill embodied in the 1925 Mount Logan expedition, in favor of a streamlined approach to penetrating remote regions. Though their gear and food were not markedly superior to their predecessors’, Brad and Bob in the early 1930s learned to move fast and light.

  Curiously, more than six decades later, the two men have a hard time articulating the reforms that went into their fast-and-light style. So thoroughly have their ideas gained the day, it is as though they cannot recall an era in which things were done differently in the mountains.

  Today, Bob and Brad point to their food-bag system: on Crillon, one day’s food for six men was stuffed into each of several identical bags, so that a person knew exactly how many ration units he had loaded into his pack. That principle by itself, however, hardly explains the HMC teams’ new efficiency.

  As early as 1932, Brad had taken advantage of the airplane to approach Alaskan mountains. For three years running, he had landed by floatplane at Lituya Bay, rather than approach by boat. In 1934, he gave the party a huge boost by arranging airdrops of supplies at base camp (the first time this gambit had been employed in the North), and he succeeded in using intercamp VHF radios on the mountain.

  The core of the fast-and-light style, however, must be seen as a matter of nerve and daring. The earlier expeditions, overwhelmed by the scale of the northern wilderness, hedged against risk by making sure there were always ample stores of food, gear, and tents to which to retreat in an emergency. The HMCers under Brad, on the other hand, began to feel that they could do without some of those safety nets. Above all, they came to feel utterly at home on high ridges and crevassed glaciers, as even the Duke of the Abruzzi had not in 1897. (It is significant that in more than twenty years of campaigning in Alaska and the Yukon, not one of Brad’s HMC circle would ever suffer serious frostbite.)

  At the same time in England, two farsighted Everest veterans, Eric Shipton and H. W. (Bill) Tilman, were comparably reforming Himalayan climbing, turning their backs on expeditions equipped with tons of gear and hundreds of porters in order to prosecute bold forays into blank regions on the map with a colleague or two and a couple of porters. These legendary climbers, who would eventually become friends with the HMCers, made their own independent discovery of “fast and light” in the remote ranges.

  After graduating from Harvard in 1933 (Brad cum laude in French history and literature), both men stayed on for graduate study. Bob earned his M.A. in English the summer that he devoted to John Aubrey instead of to the mountains. Brad started graduate work in the Harvard Institute for Geographical Exploration, a quirky but cutting-edge facility that has long since ceased to exist.

  At this point, but for a few twists of fortune, the close friends of four years’ standing might have begun to drift apart. In September 1934, Bob arrived at the University of Pennsylvania, ready to begin the life of an English instructor, only to receive a rude shock. The embarrassed dean told him that far fewer students had enrolled at Penn than anticipated. The job Bob had been promised had evaporated.

  Deeply disheartened, Bob started taking courses toward a Ph.D., and accepted a stopgap job “practice teaching” at the secondary school he had attended before Exeter. A phone call in late November suddenly interrupted the desultory course of his career.

  That same autumn Brad had written an article about Mount Crillon for National Geographic, commencing a lifelong association with the society in Washington, D.C. It had not taken the young adventurer long to sweet-talk the NGS into a wonderful boondoggle.

  In his memoir, Bob recalls the first words Brad spoke into the telephone from Cambridge to Philadelphia. “Bob,” said Brad, “the National Geographic Society wants us to map those mountains we saw [from Crillon] north of Mount Saint Elias. We’ll leave after Christmas and travel on the glaciers with dog teams. They’ll pay all expenses. Can you come?”

  Bob’s reaction was instant:

  Could I come? … If I had had a job teaching, I couldn’t have done it, but I wa
s free—free to help chart the last large blank space on the map of North America! I was ecstatic. All I had to do before departure was to write papers for the courses I was taking. There were no final exams.

  It was characteristic of Brad’s noblesse oblige that he phrased the mandate as “the National Geographic Society wants us” to chart the blank on the map. Ever since staring at the frozen wilderness from the south, Brad had had his heart set on exploring it.

  Just how unknown that blank region was can be gleaned from a perusal of the map Brad’s party carried into the field in early 1935 (see photo insert). The document, zealously guarded by Brad through more than six decades since the expedition, has the look of an ancient chart found in some obscure archive. The burn marks on its edges were inflicted on the Lowell Glacier (named by the party), when a tent collapsed onto the camp stove, incinerating Brad’s sleeping bag, several articles of clothing, and the tent itself, and nearly consuming the team’s only map. Brad sketched on the map in pencil his own approximations in the field of the gigantic glaciers his party discovered and was the first to explore. Mount Lucania appears in the upper left corner, its southern approaches charted by the Boundary Commission in 1913, but all the terrain north and east of it virtually featureless.

  What was officially titled the National Geographic Society Yukon Expedition remains to this day one of the most ambitious exploratory jaunts ever undertaken in the North. The whole scheme was Brad’s, but among the party he recruited were two men whose expertise stretched into areas Brad himself knew little about. Andy Taylor, then in his early sixties, was a longtime prospector who had come to the Klondike in 1898 and stayed on, perfecting the various arts of overland travel in the subarctic. Though not trained as a mountaineer, Taylor had been probably the steadiest member of the 1925 Mount Logan party. Johnny Haydon, born on Kluane Lake to an English father and an Indian mother, was an expert dog musher.