Escape from Lucania

by David Roberts

  On July 2, Brad and Bob once more waited out the heat of the day at Basin Camp. The sky was cloudless. At the very center of the parabolic dish facing the sun that the Walsh Glacier and the southern slopes of Steele and Lucania formed, the men sweated through what Brad mordantly called “the hottest afternoon in northern history.” At one o’clock, the thermometer, lying in the snow but exposed to the sun, registered an unthinkable 114°F. (Despite his penchant for making meteorological observations, Brad had to cover up the thermometer so the mercury would not burst the bulb.) “This is the hottest day,” wrote Brad in a state of semi-incredulity. “Since we returned at noon, neither of us has dared to go out for fear of getting sunstroke. The tent is a furnace a couple of feet off the floor.”

  All day the men feared the sun would melt the perfect crust of the slope they had climbed in the night, reducing it to slush like the stuff Reeve’s plane had sunk into or, worse, turning it into a deadly avalanche runnel. Yet in the afternoon, the sky clouded up. By 11:00 P.M., the temperature had plunged to a welcome 22°F.

  Their marathon workdays had thrown the men off their diurnal schedule—though they knew that from Shangri-La onward they must move not at night (for it would be too cold) but in the daytime. On July 3, they left Basin Camp at 9:30 A.M. Soon the dreaded heat was bathing the headwall, but to Bob and Brad’s delight, the kicked steps from the day before stayed firm. Climbing this “golden staircase,” as Brad called it, he counted steps, reaching 2,300 before the pair arrived at the cache they had left the day before on the shelf of snow at 12,200 feet. On the dangerous sérac traverse, they had fixed a light rope, anchored with snow pickets and an ice axe, to serve as handrail. Dumping their loads, Brad and Bob paused for a drink. As Brad wrote in his diary, “We were so hot that we made a little hole in the snow, covered it with a tarp, and melted a bucketful of water and had lemonade for lunch!”

  Rehydrated, the men climbed back down to make a last ferry up to Ridge Camp, as they had nicknamed their providential perch midway on the headwall. In the snow at what had been Basin Camp they left behind a week’s supply of food, eight gallons of white gas, a sleeping bag, and a three-by-five-foot rectangle of cloth they had cut out of the tent floor to save weight. By 9:05 P.M. the men were ensconced at Ridge Camp. The view out the tent door was spectacular: 2,000 feet of empty space beneath them (any trash tossed out of the tent promptly disappeared), with a sideways prospect of the gigantic 6,000-foot south face of Lucania, swept daily by avalanches.

  The shelf on which the men had pitched their tent was so small, they had to shovel for two hours into the drift on the uphill side to make room for it. To stabilize the tent, they deliberately froze the corners into the snow. The open rectangle in the center of the floor actually worked to the men’s advantage: as Brad wrote in his diary, “We sleep on one side of it; the kitchen is on the other; and in between we get snow for water.”

  For the first time the two men slept in a single bag. In The Love of Mountains Is Best, Bates recalls the semi-comic struggle this entailed:

  That night we both climbed into the same end of one of our rectangular sleeping bags. We managed to squeeze in, but were so crammed we could barely breathe. That system didn’t work. Then Brad seized our pliers and removed the heavy zipper at the bottom. One of us climbed in the top and the other in the bottom; and that way we could fit, with shoulders against feet. As we soon learned, however, one person’s head always seemed to be downhill. We drew lots to see who would have which end, but eventually alternated. From then on, that was how we slept (or tried to sleep). Occasionally I would hear Brad mutter something, but sound didn’t travel well. I would imagine he was commenting on the snow conditions, when finally it would dawn on me that he was saying, “Quit kicking me in the ear!”

  (On June 23, it will be recalled, Brad’s diary had recorded a first experiment in sleeping head-to-toe, two in a single bag. No doubt it was then that Brad made the crucial zipper alteration, not at Ridge Camp.)

  The men were exhausted from their 2,000-foot carries up from Basin Camp in the glacial heat. “Now for supper,” wrote Brad that evening. “We’re both sunburned like lobsters and hungry as bears. This morning I put too much salt in the cereal, and so we had only one nasty cup apiece.”

  The airy perch on which the men had pitched their tent, after fifteen consecutive nights spent in mundane camps on the gentle Walsh Glacier, lent a certain edge to their mood. So did the uncertainty of their fate, which here reached a critical pivot point. Brad’s diary betrays that edginess: “Goodness only knows, we’ve worked to get here; I wonder when the weather will let us reach that pass [between Steele and Lucania], It will be the thrill of my whole life to realize that there is nothing but downhill to Burwash! … We are half way up now, and we’re ready to siege the last half if we have to. Powder snow is likely to be our worst enemy from here on up.”

  It was a canny prognosis. That night, to the men’s dismay, clouds rolled in and it began snowing hard, without a breath of wind. “This would be a wild spot in a real blow,” Brad had written just as the snow began to fall on July 3. By noon on the 4th, an outlandish twenty inches of new snow had been dumped on the men’s precarious camp. The tent itself was nearly buried. Both men knew that such a snowfall could turn any slope into an avalanche trap. Only the shallow bulge of the rib they had chosen for their route up the headwall offered protection from a universe of sliding snow.

  Most climbers would have waited out such a storm, and even given the slopes a day or two of good weather to slough clear and firm up. Committed to their minimalist assault, however, Brad and Bob felt they could not waste a single day. At half past noon, they started up the rib above Ridge Camp. At once they floundered in knee-deep snow; in protected hollows, they plunged in waist deep. The men stayed roped, a hundred feet apart, a necessary precaution, for, as Brad wrote later that day, “We fell in half a dozen snow-covered cracks, but only to our waists.”

  To the men’s joy, however, the slope seemed safe from avalanches. For more than two hours, they staggered clumsily upward, plowing a trench through the powder, taking turns in the lead. Slowly the snowfall ebbed and the clouds began to break. Having started in virtual whiteout, the pair were startled to catch sudden glimpses of their camp far below, “perched [as Brad wrote] on the edge of nothing,” and of the upper reaches of Lucania, “soaring skyward, wreathed in blowing snow and mist.”

  Thirteen hundred feet above Ridge Camp, at an altitude of 13,500 feet, the angle of the rib abruptly relented. The triage by which the two men had discarded much of their gear but kept what they deemed essential now proved sagacious, for on this gentler slope, loaded even deeper with powder snow, Brad and Bob could advance only by donning the bearpaw snowshoes they had lugged all the way to this point (and had had the wit to pack with them that morning).

  They could almost taste Shangri-La. The slope here was too gentle to slide, and only scattered, harmless séracs littered the landscape. Rounding one of the last of these ice blocks, they saw an easy route to within fifteen feet of clear sailing—except that, in Brad’s words, “those fifteen feet were a crack at least sixty feet deep, with an absolutely impassable vertical wall!” In the end, the men had to retreat, then make a mile-long detour to circumvent this crevasse.

  Instead of reaching Shangri-La in a single push from Ridge Camp, the pair realized they would need an intermediate camp at 13,800 feet. “All we did today,” wrote Brad dispiritedly back in the tent late that afternoon, “was to make certain of our route above here, and to break out a preliminary trail, which I fear will be all gone tomorrow, for it is still snowing. I’ve never seen a place where it snowed so continually.” Even dinner, to which the men had looked forward all day, was disappointing: “Dammit, about one-third of our two-pound tin of butter is rancid from roasting in the sun in a duffel bag yesterday; but we have cut off the outside and the center is all right. We are cooking Knorr’s soup and the dried beef together (after boiling the soup and soaking, wring[
ing] the salt from, and frying the beef); the beef is pretty tasteless alone.”

  As they lay in their tent, the men heard the thunder of nearly nonstop avalanches all around them, most of them sweeping the east face of Lucania. “They sound like great freight trains which slowly get louder,” wrote Brad, “and then fade away once more into silence, leaving only the continual patters of the snowflakes on our roof.”

  Characteristically, instead of crawling into their single bag after dinner and trying to sleep, the men went back out into the storm. Desperate lest the new snow fill in the track they had so laboriously plowed that afternoon, they pushed themselves close to the limit to get another load up to the gear dump at 13,800 feet. It took them two hours and forty-five minutes to climb those 1,500 feet, but only twenty-five minutes to descend.

  At last something like normal subarctic temperatures seemed to have descended on the Saint Elias Range. That night the thermometer dropped to 2°F, by far the coldest yet. When a morning sun burned through the clouds on July 5, for the first time Brad and Bob greeted its warmth gratefully. The cold also served to consolidate the still-perilous slopes. That day, the men wrestled their last loads up to what they were calling Ice-Block Camp at 13,800 feet “in one dreadful two-hour-and-fifteen-minute haul.” They pitched their tent in the lee of one of the biggest séracs (whence the name for the camp). That evening, optimism reigned, yet it was still laced with uncertainty. “Only a mile to Shangri-La—” wrote Brad in his diary, “in fact, only a hundred yards—but we have to go a mile to get there! I wonder when that great day will come.”

  Thanks to the men’s persistence, the great day came on the morrow. Neither man slept well during the night, as snow fell once more. In the morning the sky was “very grey and forbidding” (in Brad’s words), and lenticular cloud caps—nearly certain harbingers of a coming storm—covered the summits of Steele and Lucania. Nonetheless, Bob and Brad packed up fifty pounds apiece and started off through the deep snow, circling via their long detour around the impassable crevasse. “At one point Bob fell into his shoulders into a tremendous crack,” reported Brad. (On this expedition, Bates seems to have suffered by far the majority of the crevasse falls. Was this just his bad luck, or did the fact that he weighed ten pounds more than Washburn mean that he broke through snow bridges that Brad could walk across unscathed?)

  Yet the going got easier and easier, as the slope gentled almost to level. By late morning on July 6 the two climbers stood on the crest of the long ridge between Steele and Lucania. “We have made Shangri-La!” Brad later crowed in his diary. It was the nineteenth day after Bob Reeve’s landing in the slush of the Walsh Glacier.

  Bob remembers that triumphant moment: “We didn’t shout for joy. We just said, ‘Well, this is it. We made it. From here on, we know what we want to do.’”

  FOUR OVER THE TOP

  IT took another day, and three more load carries, for Brad and Bob to establish themselves at Shangri-La. The next-to-last haul, in the late morning of July 7, took place in the middle of a “wild snowstorm.” Wrote Brad in his diary, “We could not see a thing either way—just kept to the downhill side of the willow wands and scuffed along in the snow, feeling for yesterday’s steps.…. [W]e couldn’t even tell we were on a grade when we crossed the 45 [-degree] traverse under the séracs. It feels like walking in a cloud and it is very hard to maintain balance.”

  Then, as they rested in the tent at Ice-Block Camp before packing up the last load, a huge sérac collapsed nearby—“we could feel the ice jerk underneath us,” noted Brad. (Over the years, many climbers have been crushed to death by falling séracs. Usually their bodies are unrecoverable.)

  The significance of reaching Shangri-La was monumental. Brad and Bob had placed their camp only three miles southwest of the summit of Mount Steele. Before the expedition, Brad had made a small album of the twelve best aerial photos of the Lucania region that he and Russ Dow had shot in 1935 and 1936, respectively. One of the pictures in that album now made it clear that there would be no difficulty in traversing beneath the summit of Steele on the north. Once they had gained Steele’s northeast ridge, they would intersect the route by which Walter Wood’s party had made the mountain’s first ascent in 1935. And, as Brad and Bob were fond of repeating to each other, with the cockiness of their youthful expertise, “Anything Walter Wood can climb up, we can climb down.”

  The dangerous campaign of the last seven days, however, as the men had fought through storms to carry loads up the 4,000-foot headwall, ought to have given the conclusive lie to Brad and Bob’s rationalization that climbing to the Steele-Lucania col to launch a long eastward trek toward Burwash Landing was the safest and easiest way out of the Saint Elias Range. Yet Brad’s diary never addresses the question, and today both men still insist that it looked as though it would have been harder and nastier to flee west down the Walsh Glacier toward McCarthy.

  The real motivation for reaching Shangri-La, of course, was to have a crack at North America’s highest unclimbed mountain. Despite all the handicaps with which the fickle weather had shackled the men, they were not yet willing to abandon the expedition’s original goal just to ensure an outcome so mundane as survival.

  Late on July 7, as the storm that the lenticular clouds had presaged smothered the exposed Lucania-Steele ridge, Brad and Bob hunkered down in the tent at Shangri-La, while Brad made a long entry in his diary. With his passion for precise detail, he took stock not only of the men’s food and gear, but of their prospects.

  They were short, Brad noted, on sugar, butter, and cereal, but had plenty of beans, soup, bacon, and the detested dried beef. As they had planned, they had managed to haul twenty-five days’ worth of food to the high camp. Yet now they faced a cruel imperative. For all the chucking out of supplies the men had practiced over the previous two weeks, they still had well more than a hundred pounds apiece of gear and food. Once they began their descent of Mount Steele, they were determined to reduce their burdens to a single load apiece, preferably of no more than sixty pounds. It would be far too arduous, as well as too perilous, to double- or triple-pack loads down that unseen ridge. From the shoulder of Steele to Kluane Lake, the men’s guiding doctrine of “fast and light” would rule every hour.

  It may be, moreover, that the two men miscalculated how many days their food was actually good for. A kindred error has dogged the heels of some of the most seasoned explorers: it led directly to the deaths of Robert Falcon Scott and his four companions on their return from the South Pole in 1912. Under normal circumstances, it is hard for an average-sized man to burn more than 4,500 calories a day, even with all-out exertion. Most expedition rations are planned to supply about that many daily calories in food. Yet for men in superb condition, working in the cold as hard as Bob and Brad were, it is possible to burn as many as 6,000 calories a day. A man eats and eats and never sates his hunger. What was more, Bob and Brad were lean, almost skinny, at the outset of the Lucania trip: they had precious little body fat to burn.

  Brad’s long July 7 diary entry breathes a deep sigh of relief. “It’s a glorious feeling actually to be camped here, with no more of the grueling uphill that we have had up till now. The tension is relaxed.” In his ebullience, Brad understates the task ahead: “Only a 2,000-foot spur [the shoulder of Steele] separates us from downhill to Burwash, and there isn’t a crack between us and it. We certainly have fought to get here and I think that what we have done is downright amazing, considering that we have had fresh snow every single day so far, with the exception of one.”

  In the very next breath after declaring the tension relaxed, Brad comes to his senses: “Four men would have made a world of difference. With only two, no one can relax and take a breather; it is just a continual fight. But so far we’ve won.”

  While Brad was writing in his diary, Bob took the trouble to shave (exactly how he did so, with snowmelt for water and no soap or shaving cream, has escaped both men’s memories). Wrote Brad of his partner’s effort to mai
ntain a civilized toilette, “I shaved at the Ice-Block Camp and Camp III; so I’m still one up on him, but we certainly are some specimens, on account of peeling sunburn and windburn.”

  Other climbers, facing a plight similar to Brad and Bob’s, have felt their nerves fray to the breaking point. Cabin fever all too easily sets in, so that a teammate’s mildest habits drive one to the edge of apoplexy. Two men sleeping head-to-toe in a single inadequate bag make a perfect recipe for such interpersonal antagonism.

  Perhaps the single most remarkable aspect of the Lucania expedition is that both men swear they never felt a moment’s antipathy toward each other, let alone indulged in an overt quarrel. “I can’t recall an evil word from the beginning to the end of that trip,” insists Brad today. “We got along very well,” says Bob blandly. “I don’t think we had any disagreements.”

  If this is true—and not some rose-tinted distortion in the glow of memory, or the residue of an ethic of the day that one never airs in public the dirty linen of a private adventure—then the remarkable harmony the two men enjoyed during the most hazardous exploit of their lives owes much to a happy symbiosis between their temperaments.

  Early and late, Brad Washburn was notorious for the obstinacy of his will. On an expedition, one pretty much did things his way or not at all. Brad could lead brilliantly, but not follow, and it is not surprising that he was the leader or co-leader of every expedition he ever went on. On Mount Crillon in 1933, Washburn locked horns with a similarly obstinate teammate two years his junior, Charlie Houston. Houston would go on to make the first ascent of Mount Foraker, Alaska’s third-highest peak, and to co-lead the 1938 and 1953 American K2 expeditions with Bates. But though the two men have remained loyal friends all their lives, Houston and Washburn never climbed together again after 1933.