Escape from Lucania

by David Roberts

  Now another of the men’s load-lightening measures came back to haunt them. On the Wolf Creek Glacier, they had cut up their hundred-foot hemp climbing rope and discarded most of it. The piece they had kept was shorter than the forty-foot length they would need to double over the bollard. So the men resorted to yet another sketchy improvisation, as they untied a piece of flimsy packboard cordage and used it to extend their inadequate hank of hemp. The rappel, though “extremely delicate work,” in Brad’s phrase, proceeded without a hitch.

  After that, the going across the ice became simpler. At 10:30 in the morning Brad and Bob reached the southern edge of the glacier. They could see a walking route off the last of the ice. And for the first time, they could gaze up-valley and gauge where the true head of the Donjek River lay. That distant, blurry snout of the Kluane Glacier was so much farther than the men had hoped, it brought upon their spirits a whole new onslaught of dismay.

  Yet in the next moment, dismay was countered by wild hope. Before them, perhaps a hundred feet below, the Donjek River lay braided across more than a mile-wide gravel bar. Staring at that geological apparition, the men counted more than fifty separate channels. A torrent that Brad and Bob had given up all hope of fording might after all be wadable.

  So focused on the braids of the Donjek were Brad and Bob, that they almost blundered into a perilous encounter. Just as they scrambled off the last of the glacier ice onto the gravel bar, they spooked a grizzly bear that had ambled near without the men having noticed it. After four days of hiking in which the only game they could scare up was a single red squirrel in a tree, a grizzly was the last thing the men expected (or needed). To their relief, the bear, apparently as startled as they were, took off running instead of charging toward them. As Bob would write in The Love of Mountains Is Best, “[H]e was half a mile away before I thought of Russ Dow’s police revolver in my pack.” In any event, a misaligned pistol would have been a poor match for an aggressive grizzly.

  As the men neared the Donjek, the wind blasted their faces with clouds of fine gray dust, blinding them. Then their boots began to sink deep in a sticky brown ooze—quicksand, here in the Yukon where the usual river bank was as hard as a sidewalk. Neither condition boded well for the most dangerous river crossing the men would ever attempt.

  It is a curious fact that while more than two centuries of climbing have wrought advances in gear and technique that have revolutionized the art of ascending mountains, in the year 2002 (as in 1937) we know little more about the craft of fording rivers than men did in the Middle Ages. Equipment has done virtually nothing to tame the terrors of flooding streams, especially in the Far North, where glacial temperatures and the ubiquitous silt clouding the water make the task of wading them all the more hazardous.

  Each explorer, nonetheless, swears by his favorite method of getting from the near bank to the far shore. Some believe that a pair or trio of waders shuffling along with linked arms makes for a stabler juggernaut. Others insist that the job is best accomplished with a long rope, one wader securing the other from shore; while yet others argue that a rope creates dangers of its own. (An accomplished French climber, Jacques Poincenot, drowned in 1952 in Patagonia crossing a river with a harness hitched to a rope fixed from shore to shore, when one anchor pulled loose and his rig slid down the rope, only to hold him trapped underwater while his teammates tried futilely to release him.) An ice axe propped upstream like a third leg seems to give a modicum of balance to the hapless forder, but it can suddenly swing free in the current and jerk the man off his feet. A few tricks are widely, though not universally, agreed upon. It is probably better to wade diagonally facing upstream rather than straight across, and it is preferable to stare at a fixed object on the far bank rather than the mesmerizing current through which one plows his chilly way. Unfastening the waist belt on one’s pack is all but de rigueur, for a wader knocked off his feet can be dragged under and drowned by a pack he cannot slip free of as he tumbles with the current. (In Bob and Brad’s case, this last point was moot: their packboard and rucksack lacked any semblance of a waist belt.)

  As they edged into the Donjek, Brad and Bob had their own theory as to how to maximize their chances. They believed in roping up as far apart as they could get, so they tied all their packboard cordage to their short span of hemp, creating a makeshift seventy-five-foot rope. They added rocks to their fifty-pound loads, in hopes the extra weight would give them added stability. They wore the packboard and rucksack on their backs, but they removed the canvas duffel bags in which their clothing was packed, pulled the drawstrings as tight as possible, and carried these burdens in their arms ahead of them. The idea was that if they lost their footing, the duffel bags might hold air and serve as marginal life preservers.

  At 10:45 A.M., as the slightly heavier climber, Bob stepped first into the nearest channel. He crossed it smoothly, and Brad followed. One channel after another succumbed, but patches of quicksand stalled the men: between fords, their legs were caked with gooey brown mud. In a corner of Brad’s mind was the realization that all it would take was a single unfordable channel to turn the men back. They would have to reverse each numbing wade, then trudge hopelessly south along the west bank toward the Kluane Glacier, as their last reserves of strength slowly failed them.

  After thirty-five minutes of dogged exertion, Brad and Bob had crossed all but two of the fifty-odd channels. As they had seen from the glacier’s edge, however, the last two channels promised to be by far the hardest. All the way across, they had dreaded those two deep, fast currents. By now they were on the verge of clinical shock from cold and fatigue. They had said not a word to each other.

  In the middle of the first channel, Bob went in over his waist, the deepest yet. All that kept him in balance was the quirk of a locally weaker current. He gained the far bank, then belayed Brad across.

  There was only the last channel to go. Brad paid out the rope as Bob waded in. When the full seventy-five feet of line were out, Brad was forced to start wading himself. Near the middle of the channel, Bob went in to his waist, then a little deeper. He staggered, barely in balance, but the current was too swift. Bob fell, dunking his whole body and his pack.

  The belay rope gave Bob a second chance. Somehow he got his feet back under him and inched forward. By now, with the rope tight as a clothesline between the men, Brad was waist-deep himself. Then Bob lost his footing once more and started floating downstream. Brad braced to hold his partner, only to have the rope pull him off his stance. The two men began to careen out of control down the Donjek, connected by an umbilical cord that promised death, not life.

  Yet at that moment, buoyed by the grace of the insouciance with which he met all dangers, Bob surrendered to a technique that was born of pure instinct. The duffel bag he clutched in his hands indeed served to keep his head above water. The current carried him pell-mell for twenty or thirty yards, but then his feet would touch bottom. Rather than try to stand, he hopped, propelling himself forward. Whether in imitation or by kindred instinct, Brad began to float and hop off the bottom himself. Both men today credit the duffel bags with keeping them from going completely under.

  At last Bob eddied out on the east bank of the last channel. Gasping for breath, he crawled up to a tundra-covered bench, seized some bushes, pulled himself onto the bench, and collapsed. Brad was only seconds behind. Neither man had the energy to summon up a cheer. “We crossed the goddamn son of a bitch,” Brad whispered.

  After the men, lying supine in the grass, had caught their breath, they stripped off all their clothes and crawled naked, head to toe, inside their single sleeping bag. Their hands were so numb, they had almost been unable to untie the drawstring of the sack that contained the bag. “I don’t know if I’ve ever been so cold,” remembers Bob. For half an hour, the men shivered uncontrollably.

  It was too windy to build a fire, but that same wind gradually dried the men’s clothes. At last their body heat returned: their teeth stopped chattering and their
shivers stilled. Without the sleeping bag, the two would probably have died of hypothermia on the spot. Now, with the returning warmth, a starburst of euphoria and relief bloomed over their midday bivouac.

  They were still fifty miles from Burwash Landing, but for the first time, Bob and Brad dared believe that they had solved all the challenges that separated them from civilization. Once they had warmed up, they crawled out of their sleeping bag, put on their almost-dry clothes, ate their last two handsful of raisins, and started hiking north along the Donjek.

  After a mile or two, walking along a faint game trail in the tundra, the men scared up another red squirrel. This time Bob nailed it with a single shot. They gathered more of the small brown mushrooms, then stopped to cook a stew of soup and mushrooms, saving the squirrel for the morrow. The meager repast renewed their spirits, so they hoisted their packs once more. Only after retracing eight miles of their long Donjek detour did the men stop to camp. In his diary, Brad recorded: “8:40 P.M. We’re laying off early, about four miles north of the end of the Donjek Glacier.” “Laying off early,” indeed! On July 15, the men had hiked for nearly thirteen hours and survived the closest call of their lives.

  Brad’s diary entry that evening brims with the joy of the reprieved (“There is moss everywhere—a beautiful fire and scarcely a mosquito”) and with his habitual Yankee optimism: “We’ll make Burwash now if we have to get through on our hands and knees. My, but it’s good to have no hopeless obstacles in the way (except our food is damned scarce). I’d love to make a trip through here sometime with plenty of food and nothing to do but look and sleep and eat. It is such beautiful country that it’s a shame to have to miss it all by working under such an awful strain.”

  In the wake of their deliverance from the Donjek, Bob and Brad enjoyed what the latter called “a prodigious sleep” of more than twelve hours. On the morning of the 16th, while Brad cooked a spartan breakfast, Bob went hunting, but found nothing to shoot. For four miles, they followed the Donjek north, the first two miles on a series of game trails in the trees and tundra, the last stretch on the gravel bar beside the river. At 2:45 P.M. they stopped for a hot lunch: a “mulligan” made up of the stringy squirrel, more mushrooms, half a slice of bacon, one ounce of dried beef, two teaspoons of soup, and their last six baked beans. They cooked this stew on a wood fire, saving their last half-pint of white gas for rainy weather.

  So far, Brad and Bob had enjoyed relatively easy traveling in the low country. Yet subarctic taiga—forests of scrubby spruce, birch, and willow carpeted with lush tundra—can be some of the most fiendish terrain on earth to hike across. Because of the permafrost (a layer of ice as little as a few inches below the surface that never melts, even in July or August), the ground often approximates a mossy swamp, through which one wades calf- or even thigh-deep. On drier slopes, sprouting tussocks invite a sprained ankle at every step. Worst of all are the alder thickets, through which one must crawl in a kind of vegetative parody of spelunking, covering as little as a quarter of a mile an hour.

  As Bob and Brad tried to follow the Donjek north, the gravel bar gave out, and faint game trails diverted them up into the taiga, where the going indeed grew nasty. The men were sure that when they reached the point opposite where they had first struck the Donjek three days before, a substantial trail—the horse-packing route blazed by Gene Jacquot’s wranglers over the years—ought to lead them eastward to Burwash Landing. Now, as they veered to the right away from the river, cursing each game trail as it petered out in the alders and willows, the men took comfort in the thought that at worst they were striking off on a triangular shortcut that must intersect the Burwash trail. But as the afternoon wore on, there was no sign of that trail. The sky clouded over, and it began to rain. Worn out from their bushwhacking, Bob and Brad entered a zone where high winds had felled hundreds of trees, creating a deadfall maze—a pickup-sticks-like chaos of decomposing timbers—that made the going all the more onerous.

  Finally, after 6:00 P.M., they hit the Burwash trail, a virtual highway in the taiga. At exactly that moment, a sizable arctic hare sprang into the clearing. Bob dropped his pack and tore out the police revolver, while Brad tried to fence in the animal. By the time Bob was ready to fire, Brad was dancing, crouched with his hands stretched out, like a basketball player guarding a particularly pesky scorer, with the rabbit directly between them. Afraid that a missed shot might take out his companion rather than the rabbit, Bob tried to signal Brad away, but Brad was oblivious. At last Bob fired, killing the creature with his first shot.

  A few miles along the Burwash trail, at 8:45 P.M., Brad and Bob stopped to camp. As Brad wrote, “This diary is about two inches from a big pot of rabbit meat, with ample left for at least one and possibly two more meals; so here goes! We have cut off all four of the rabbit’s feet; I’ll bet there are no more potent good-luck charms in the world!” The men gorged on three cups apiece of rabbit—mushroom—celery soup stew. Just before turning in, Brad jotted, “The pillow is covered with rabbit’s blood, but what do I care!”

  Despite that benediction, the men slept poorly, as it rained all night and, jostling each other every time they shifted position in their single bag, they could not get comfortable lying among the tussocks that carpeted their campground. On the morning of July 17—the thirtieth day of their expedition—they did not get off until after 11:00. Before packing up, Brad wrote in his diary, “Two days more of good food; then we’ll have to begin to retrench aplenty, unless we kill more game. I certainly hope that we can hold this trail.” “Good food” represented Brad’s usual optimistic overstatement: the men were down to little more than soup, tea, and the remainder of the rabbit.

  There was no escaping the fact that a month of undernourished struggle had taken its toll. Both men were weaker than they had been ten days before, when they had knocked off Lucania and Steele. Loads of only fifty pounds seemed like Sisyphean burdens. Their feet were raw and blistered; their very joints ached. Now, as Brad had feared, they soon lost their trail in the muskeg, the mossy bog underfoot. The rain had stopped, but a steady uphill grade toward the pass that separates the Donjek from the Duke River (a tributary of the Kluane River, which itself merges with the Donjek some fifty miles to the north) slowed their footsteps. They stopped for lunch—more rabbit stew—after less than two hours of hiking. “He was a big snowshoe rabbit, and boy, how good he tastes!” wrote Brad during the break.

  After lunch, the men resumed their weary trek. The pass to the Duke River drainage was a mere two miles ahead, so Burwash Landing now lay only some twenty-five miles away. Yet neither Brad nor Bob had any idea what the country was like on the other side of the pass. Might there be other barriers in their path?

  Bob recalls what happened next: “We’d been trading the packboard and rucksack back and forth. I happened to be a little ahead of Brad. I heard a sort of clinking sound. I thought, Gosh, that seems strange—we haven’t heard anything like that before. I looked back at Brad. He’d heard the clinking sound, too. I looked ahead, and the next thing I saw was a man’s hat. It appeared, then disappeared, appeared again, and disappeared again.”

  The apparition suddenly took on a gestalt in Bob’s mind. “By God,” he said out loud, “it’s a pack horse!”

  Brad thought at first that his friend was making a bad joke. Then he saw it, too. Less than two hundred yards away, first one man on horseback rode past, then a second, then a third leading a string of ten riderless horses. As Brad later wrote, “We nearly went crazy with excitement. In fact, I have never been so excited or thrilled or happy all at once in my life.”

  As startled as Bob and Brad were to run into the first other human beings they had seen in a month, the horsemen were even more so. “Who are you?” one of them managed to blurt out. “Where did you come from?”

  Brad waved to the west, saying, “Over those mountains. Where are you going?”

  The riders turned out to be two young Indian men, Johnnie Alien and Sam Johnson, and a Fr
ench wrangler named Paul Bierckel, employees of Gene Jacquot. They were bringing supplies to stock a cabin on this, the eastern side of the Donjek, in preparation for hunters to be guided in August. They also planned to round up some eighteen horses that had been left for weeks to graze on the grassy sandbars of the Donjek.

  The five men chatted for several minutes, a bit uneasily, given the strangeness of the meeting. At first Bob and Brad hoped only that the strangers might be able to give them a little food (sugar and coffee were foremost in Brad’s mind) and fill them in on the condition of the trail back to Burwash. But when they learned that the wranglers would be returning to Burwash themselves in three or four days, Brad asked, almost timidly, “Would you mind if we joined you?”

  Jacquot’s men had warmed to the scrawny vagabonds. Within minutes, Bob and Brad were mounted bareback on a pair of horses, while another pair carried the packs they had grown to hate. The string of horses moved slowly northwest, back toward the Donjek. As blissful as it seemed at first to ride rather than walk, Brad and Bob had so little fat on their rear ends that the gentle bouncing became a torture. After about forty-five minutes on horseback, Brad dismounted and walked the rest of the way.

  It took the pack train only an hour and a half to reach the cabin. Unlike the one the men had discovered on the other side of the Donjek, this shelter was well stocked. That evening, all five men dined on cinnamon rolls, bread with butter and jam, and roast Dall sheep “that would put filet mignon to shame,” as Brad wrote in his diary. (The wranglers had shot the Dall sheep that very day.) Inside the cabin, Brad and Bob laid horse blankets on the floor, spread their tent over them, then used the unzipped sleeping bag as a top blanket. For the first time in two weeks, they had the privilege of stretching out to sleep as they pleased, without worrying that each fidgeting adjustment might disturb the other’s repose.