Only Brad might have concocted an expedition that would marry state-of-the-art bush flying with dogsled teams. Rather than enter the wilderness by creeping toward it from the edges, Brad planned to fly in to establish a base camp in the very heart of the region.
That blank space comprised 6,400 square miles of glaciers and mountains. Not only, as far as anyone knew, had no human beings, native or otherwise, ever traversed it; by 1935 no pilot had had the nerve or incentive to fly over it. The excellent flyer Brad recruited, Bob Randall, was constantly apprehensive while airborne over that frozen wasteland. As he told Bob Bates of the region where Brad proposed to set up base camp, “If we have to make a landing out west of the Alsek [River], I might as well just nose her straight down; it would be much more simple.”
In early March, Brad and Bob Randall took a series of reconnaissance flights, during which for the first time Brad practiced his aerial photography. Many of the glaciers and peaks the men found on those flights, they were the first to see. On one thrilling flight, the pilot circled Mount Logan. Brad got his first good look at Lucania and the Chitina valley, photographing madly. With the door off, in the dead of winter, these flights were brutally cold; on one, Randall froze his knee. By the end of March, however, the pilot had flown the whole party into Brad’s chosen spot on the glacier they named the Lowell. Beside the team’s tents, Brad erected a prefab Beaver Board shack—his “survey office.”
For the seven men in the heart of the Saint Elias range, there followed two and a half months of unprecedented adventure. Brad had chosen to pursue the expedition in late winter and early spring for ease of glacier travel, but at times the cold was nearly unendurable. During one ten-day stretch, the temperature ranged between minus 40 and minus 5°F, never climbing to zero.
There were a number of close calls. There was the tent fire, which, if it had not been smothered by Andy Taylor before the flames reached a five-gallon gas can, could have blown up base camp. There was a huge crevasse down which three untethered dogs fell, rescued only after Brad rappelled eighty feet into the fissure and tied the trembling canines to a rope with which his teammates hauled them to the surface. There was an encounter with a massive old grizzly bear, which Bob killed with a perfect shot from the team’s 30.06 rifle. (The men dined for days on bear heart and liver, but the bearskin rug they stretched beneath their sleeping bags to ward off the glacial cold proved so full of fleas that the whole camp became infested.)
There was also a seemingly endless idyll of discovery. As Bob reminisced in his memoir:
Every day we saw magnificent rock and snow peaks, unnamed and new to everyone…. There was continuing excitement in being where nobody had been before, and almost every day we discovered a new mountain or a new side glacier. In clear weather the snowy summits stood out magnificently against the blue sky, and even on cloudy days the blue-green ice gleamed.
To cap off the expedition in mid-May, rather than fly out from base camp, Brad divided the team into two parties that would traverse the whole Saint Elias range by separate routes, emerging for prearranged pickups at a pair of widely spaced floatplane landing sites. Should one team get into trouble, the other would know where to search by air.
Bob ended up paired with Johnny Haydon and one other teammate in a virtuoso trek down the Lowell Glacier and the Alsek River, during which the trio man-hauled loads on snowshoes, then backpacked under staggering loads, and finally built a raft of skis, driftwood, and air mattresses on which they crossed the flooding Alsek. In the end, the prescribed pickup lake was covered with ice: Bates and his partners had to wait ten days for the surface to thaw out.
Theirs had been an epic journey. Despite a number of near disasters, not one of the seven men suffered a significant injury. What was more, the trip firmly planted the seed of what would turn out to be Bob and Brad’s ultimate adventure, for day after day as they trekked the unnamed glaciers, the two men had stared at the pyramid of Mount Lucania, far to the north. As both men knew, the highest unclimbed peak in North America had never been attempted.
Brad had actually first schemed a Lucania assault the previous autumn, only to run into an awkward obstacle. Sometime in the fall of 1934, an acquaintance named Bill Ladd, having heard of Brad’s plans, approached him with a request. Ladd had been with Allen Carpé on Mount Fairweather in 1931, and thus was something of a rival. Older than Brad, he was also an established figure in the American Alpine Club. Now he spoke on behalf of another relatively senior mountaineer, Walter Wood, well entrenched in the upper echelons of both the AAC and the Explorers Club.
Wood was planning his own expedition to Lucania for the summer of 1935, Ladd explained. Would Brad graciously back off and yield to the veteran mountaineer?
Brad’s competitive juices flowed. He had tried in 1930, after all, to snatch the prize of Fairweather from the clutches of Carpé, another senior eminence. But now Brad bowed to the unspoken hierarchy of the AAC. He would put off his own Lucania dreams and give Wood the first crack. Meanwhile, he would occupy himself with the blank on the Yukon map.
This delicate compromise actually issued in good feeling: on his way toward Lucania in June 1935, Wood ran into Bob Bates in Whitehorse, headed home after the traverse of the Saint Elias range, and promptly invited him on his expedition. Exhausted by the months he had just spent on unknown glaciers, hoping to get back to his teaching career, Bob declined.
That summer, Wood pursued an attempt on Lucania in the old style, horse-packing in from Kluane Lake nearly fifty miles to an advanced base camp on an ice stream the party named Wolf Creek Glacier. There was one innovative touch to the assault, as Wood had provisions (including fresh eggs and hot biscuits!) dropped in to base camp by parachute. The trouble with Wood’s approach, however, was that 16,644-foot Mount Steele stood between him and Lucania.
At the end a month and a half of effort, four members of Wood’s team, including the leader, stood on top of Steele, having claimed its first ascent. Beyond them loomed Lucania, darting in and out of clouds and mist, massive and tantalizing, but out of the question. In the November 30, 1936, Life magazine—the fabled weekly’s second issue—Wood published three pages of pictures with a short text. The last photo showed Lucania from the summit of Steele. “Highest unclimbed mountain in North America is Mt. Lucania …,” read the caption. “Expeditionist Wood mapped it from the air. Mt. McKinley in Alaska, highest (20,320 ft.) in North America, and Mt. Logan (19,850 ft.), highest in Canada, have both been scaled. But Mt. Lucania remains virtually impregnable.”
Music to Brad’s and Bob’s ears. Brad had studied the aerial photos he had taken of Lucania on the 1935 reconnaissance flights, as well as others that Russ Dow had shot with Brad’s Fairchild camera in March 1936. (Instructing Dow how to operate the bulky apparatus, Brad had said, “It’s easy. Just shoot at ƒ8 at a 250th.”) Armed with these images, Brad had conceived of a novel approach to the remote and lordly mountain. Rather than pack in from the lowlands—either from Kluane Lake to the east, à la Wood, or from McCarthy to the west, as the 1925 Mount Logan party had—he would hire Bob Reeve to land high on the Walsh Glacier, from which a feasible route seemed to lead up the southern headwall and along the east ridge.
On June 18, 1937, Reeve had done just that, only to find the upper Walsh Glacier reduced to a sea of slush. Five days later, in the riskiest takeoff of his career, Reeve had escaped the prison of his marooning, leaving Bob and Brad to their own devices.
On Lucania, the doctrine of “fast and light” would receive its ultimate test.
THREE SHANGRI-LA
AT 8,750 feet on the Walsh Glacier, Brad and Bob faced a predicament unprecedented in the history of North American exploration. Never before had adventurers penetrated by airplane to such a remote place, only to discover that the airplane was useless to extricate them from it. To be sure, bush pilots in Alaska and Canada had crashed their planes and walked out from the wreckage—but never from a high, crevassed glacier, and never so far across such diff
icult terrain.
On June 22, 1937, the nearest human beings to Bob and Brad were miners in the town of McCarthy, eighty air miles west of their glacial eyrie, but considerably more by the route any trek on foot would take them. McCarthy had sprung into being in 1900 when the Bonanza strike, which plumbed a fabulously rich vein of copper ore high on a foothill above the Chitina River valley, gave birth to the Kennecott Copper Company. At peak production in 1916, the mine produced 119 million pounds of copper, worth twenty-nine million in 1916 dollars. The population of the boom town spiked at five hundred in 1920.
It had been McCarthy to which Bob Reeve and Russ Dow had ferried the gear and food for the base camp cache in May. From McCarthy, with Reeve’s Fairchild 71 still on skis, the pair had then flown the ton of supplies up to the Walsh Glacier. On their flight in on June 18 in the lighter Fairchild 51, Bob and Brad had passed near McCarthy, but some miles south of it, as Reeve took the shortest route from Valdez to the Walsh.
By 1937, the mining town was all but moribund. After the 1938 season, the once-storied Kennecott mine would shut down. Still, a scattering of hard-on-their-luck prospectors and lonely trappers lingered on in and about McCarthy, reluctant to abandon one of the most beautiful natural settings of any village in Alaska. As far as Bob and Brad were concerned, McCarthy spelled civilization.
The best course of action must have seemed obvious. A hundred-odd-mile hike out to McCarthy would be a genuine ordeal, but the two men had ample gear and food in their cache to pull it off. As they had seen on the flight in, the Walsh Glacier below 8,750 feet swept downhill from east to west in a smooth highway of ice, seamed with the occasional field of crevasses, but contorted by nothing like a major icefall. As it approached its moraine-strewn snout, the Walsh grew ugly, a labyrinth of ice cones, hollows, and glacial pools, coated with loose scree and talus. But some thirty miles below base camp, the Walsh joined the massive Logan Glacier. From that point on out, Bob and Brad would be retracing the route by which the 1925 Mount Logan expedition had fought its way to and from Canada’s highest mountain. Any trek Henry Hall had accomplished, Brad and Bob knew they could handle.
Yet today, both men insist that they considered hiking out to McCarthy only during the days that Bob Reeve’s escape by plane remained uncertain. On foot with Reeve, the glacial novice terrified of crevasses, the mountaineers would have high-tailed it to McCarthy. Once Reeve was safely airborne, Brad and Bob turned their backs on the McCarthy escape route.
That decision, which could well have had fatal consequences, bespeaks not only how comfortable Bob and Brad were in the northern wilderness, but just how intense their passion for Lucania was. Oddly, though, neither man will admit today that ambition dictated the choice. A kind of rationalization seems to have set in. The “nauseating desolation of dying masses of ice” that Brad had noted on the flight in, the bleak, vertical valley walls, the “potholes full of horrid muddy water” convinced him that a hike down the Walsh Glacier and Chitina River valley would be a nightmare. As Bob blandly recalls, “Flying in, we said to ourselves, Gee, we don’t want to go out that way. The alternative seemed very straightforward.”
Nor did this blithe perspective on the men’s options emerge only in the rosy glow of retrospect. Writing in his diary on June 22, only half an hour after Reeve’s hair-raising takeoff, Brad gazed not west but east, toward the high ridges enfolding Mounts Lucania and Steele:
It is a curious feeling to be all alone, except for one other fellow, on a thoroughly rotten glacier with eighty miles of mountains and an 11,000-foot divide between you and civilization. As Bob just said, “We’ll know what it’s like to be married after this trip!”
“Civilization,” in this entry, means not McCarthy, but Burwash Landing on Kluane Lake, a place neither man had ever visited, and a destination, as they would eventually hike, 156 miles away, not eighty.
The first task the pair undertook was an inventory of their belongings. In the letter to Brad’s parents that Reeve carried out with him, the twenty-seven-year-old complained, “Bob and I have enough food to keep an army going a dozen years and enough gasoline to keep us warm for months. We have no dish towels and, unfortunately, we have three left boots and one right one. Russ [Dow] has the rest of the boots in Valdez, Gol Ding it!”
The lack of dish towels was hardly a serious matter, but the boot mixup could have been consequential. Today, neither man has any recollection of what Brad’s gripe was about. Fortunately, boots would turn out to be the least of the men’s problems on Lucania.
Brad’s diary records other minor aggravations vis à vis supplies: “We have just found that all but six pounds of the butter is in Valdez—dammit! So much less to lug!”
Within little more than an hour after Reeve’s wobbling takeoff, Brad and Bob set out to reconnoiter the route up the Walsh toward Lucania. Roped together, hiking in snowshoes, they slogged across the still mushy surface of the glacier, which rose at the gentle but steady incline of two hundred feet per mile. There were a few stretches where crevasses posed a threat (indeed, the next evening, Bob fell, unroped, up to his waist in a crevasse only three feet from the men’s tent door). The going was relatively straightforward, however, and after two hours Brad and Bob stood four miles closer to the mountain that towered over them on the north.
To mark the route—as they had learned to do on Mount Grillon, beginning with Brad’s 1932 effort—they thrust “willow wands” into the snow every hundred feet or so. These were actually machined wooden dowels, three-eighths of an inch in diameter and three feet long, with one end painted black. In good weather, a party following the track of its previous passage had no trouble finding its way along a glacier. A few hours of wind could efface that track entirely, however, and in a whiteout the world turned into a featureless blur, through which not even the keenest dead reckoning could safely guide a pair of wanderers. Over the decades in Alaska, more than a few mountaineers’ lives have been saved by a dotted line of willow wands.
Brad and Bob had already identified the key weakness in Lucania’s defenses. The mountain’s gigantic south face, a full 6,000 feet from base to summit, was self-evidently out of the question, a 45-degree precipice loaded with séracs and ice cliffs ready to collapse. Several days later, in fact, from a parallel perch, the two men watched as the whole face was swept by the thundering wreckage of the biggest avalanche either man had ever seen.
The Walsh Glacier, though, headed in the high ridge that connected Lucania to Mount Steele, eight miles to the north-east. It looked as if the going should be relatively easy, a trudge up a broad boulevard of ice, to the foot of the steep headwall that rose 4,000 feet to that catwalk between the two great mountains. The headwall itself was the question mark. Brad thought a shallow protruding rib ought to provide a safe line between the slide-prone slopes on either side.
The men had decided to ferry fifty days’ worth of food to the foot of the headwall, pitching their tent at a spot they would call Basin Camp. Then they would try to haul twenty-five days’ food up to the Lucania-Steele ridge. If the going proved too tricky or too slow, the other twenty-five days’ food at Basin Camp would afford a fallback reserve. If the headwall proved impossible, there would still be the option of returning to Base Camp and heading west out of the mountains toward McCarthy. That course of action would spell defeat, but allow escape.
Bob and Brad dearly hoped that once they left Base Camp, they would never see it again. This meant that, before hauling their loads up the glacier, they would have to sort through the mountainous cache, deciding on the spot which items to abandon. What it grieved Brad most to leave behind was his large-format Fairchild F-8 aerial camera, which exposed five-by-seven-inch negatives, the first of a series of heavy and expensive apparatuses with which Washburn would capture his matchless aerial images of the mountains of Alaska and the Yukon. He was determined to carry and use a lighter camera, his Zeiss Ikon Maximar, for no matter how trying the circumstances, Brad had already developed a burning pas
sion to bring back good pictures from every one of his expeditions. (The excuses of other explorers who captured only poorly exposed, out-of-focus images of their deeds would form a source of lifelong scorn for Washburn.)
It also seemed poignant to abandon all of Russ Dow’s and Norman Bright’s gear and clothing. As Brad wrote in his diary on June 24, “It has been a really tragic afternoon—throwing away all of Russ’ and Norm’s carefully packed clothes. They had done so very much to help make the trip a success.”
Bob and Brad did not literally throw away these objects. At the time, they still hoped that Bob Reeve might make another flight in to the Walsh, perhaps in winter when the glacier surface had frozen hard, to retrieve the supplies. To that end, they repacked their cache and covered it neatly with a big tarp to protect it from the weather.
As it turned out, Reeve had had such a scare on the Walsh that he had vowed to stay clear of that neck of the Saint Elias Range for the rest of his life. Brad recalls the pilot later saying, “I’d never go back to that goddamned place if you gave me a million bucks.” So spooked was he by his close call, Reeve did not even try to fly by Lucania later in the summer to check up on his castaways. As he rationalized (in Brad’s recollection), “Christ, I knew they could take care of themselves. Besides, who the hell would’ve paid the bill?”
Accustomed as we are to today’s high-tech, lightweight expedition gear—to down-filled sleeping bags and Gore-Tex parkas, to nylon ropes and tents, to plastic double boots for alpine climbing, to contoured backpacks—it is worth pausing to make our own inventory of the gear Brad and Bob had at their disposal in 1937. Despite Brad’s outcry in his letter to his parents, each man had a pair of shoepacs, heavy boots with rubber lowers, leather uppers, and felt insoles. Somewhat sloppy as footgear, shoepacs feel more like galoshes than proper mountain boots; but they effectively forestall frostbite, and they are rigid enough to take crampons, the sets of metal spikes strapped underfoot that climbers use on ice and hard snow. On the moderately difficult ground of Lucania, they were ideal.
Escape from Lucania Page 7
