Escape from Lucania

by David Roberts

  Brad opened his diary entry that evening with a cry of jubilation: “HURRAH! HURRAH! HURRAH!” He could not get used to the sudden luxury and safety the chance meeting had guaranteed. “There is enough food in this camp to keep us for a year,” he wrote, “and all we have to do now is sleep for the next forty-eight hours…. It’s superb to hear other people talk; it’s grand to take it easy and not worry about how we’re going to get over the next pass.”

  As they spilled out their story to the wranglers, Brad and Bob noticed a certain incredulity on their faces. Two of the men, however, had packed gear up Wolf Creek to Walter Wood’s base camp two years before. “[B]oth of them swore they would never set foot in the valley again—a statement with which we both heartily acquiesced!” wrote Brad. The enforced delay while the men rounded up the stray horses seemed a small price to pay for such a deliverance—even to the chronically impatient Brad. “It may be quite easy to round up the horses, or it may take several days,” he wrote. “What care we! Our cares and worries are at an end…. Lucania and Steele are climbed. The Donjek is crossed, and all our troubles are over.”

  As it turned out, Brad had gorged on bread and jam and roast sheep so immoderately that he was sick in the middle of the night. Bob’s slightly more abstemious intake spared him the same fate. In the morning, an unrepentant Brad shoveled in a breakfast of yet more bread and jam and sheep steaks, and he noted in his diary, “Boy, oh boy, how good that sheep is!” Late the evening before, Johnnie Allen and Paul Bierckel had located the grazing horses; now, on July 18, they went out to round them up. Meanwhile, Bob, who was feeling better than Brad, went out with Sam Johnson to see if they could ford the Donjek on horseback and retrieve the cache in which Bob and Brad had left the camera and all the film.

  The horses, along with the Indian wrangler’s canny knowledge of the ford, made all the difference. “It wasn’t bad,” recalls Bob. “The water came up to my knees, but with a good sturdy horse beneath me…. We came out on the other side very close to the cache. Sam was as surprised as anything to see it there.”

  By evening, all the stray horses were staked out near the cabin. Brad was overjoyed at the retrieval of his film and camera. The men spent another night in their palatial shelter. Brad could not bring himself to eat moderately: that night in his diary he sang the praises of “another huge lunch of sheep” and a dinner of “sweet ‘tea crackers’ and a huge can of sliced peaches, a can of corn, one of tomatoes, and one of peas…. I’m so absolutely filled with food of every description that I can scarcely move.” “Loafing” all day in the cabin, Brad had composed a newspaper dispatch about the expedition to radio to the East Coast as soon as the men hit Burwash Landing. He had also used a bucket of hot water, soap, and a “clean towel” to wash “over and over again”—his first bath in a month.

  It took nine and a half hours on July 19 to cover the thirty miles to Kluane Lake. Brad and Bob rode with only a blanket apiece between them and their wooden pack saddles. Brad would later look back on that ride as one of the worst physical agonies of his life. “We were kind of bony,” Bob says. Brad tried for some time to cushion his left thigh by slipping his right hand beneath it, then slipping his left hand under the right thigh, to little avail. At one point, he said to himself, “Christ, I can’t take any more of this.”

  The trek, however, proceeded without incident, though as the horses forded the Duke River, still some six miles from Burwash Landing, Bob and Brad recognized that on foot, they would have had a lot of trouble with this last stream. Since the river was not glacier-fed, however, the water in the Duke was considerably warmer than that of the Donjek.

  The pack train reached the trading post at 5:00 P.M. In thirty-two days, counting every load relay, Bob and Brad had covered 156 miles of glacier, mountain, gravel bar, and tundra. Utterly exhausted, Brad managed only two lines in his diary that evening: “Marvelous supper. Too tired, after thirty miles in a pack saddle, to do anything but go to bed alone!”

  SEVEN FRESH MILK FROM A REAL COW

  AT his trading post on July 19, Gene Jacquot was every bit as surprised as his wranglers had been by the advent of the two emaciated young men who had emerged from the wilderness of the Saint Elias Range. In the best tradition of northern hospitality, nonetheless, he gave Bob and Brad a hero’s welcome. By the next morning, Brad had recovered sufficiently to record that reception in his diary. “My, but Kluane Lake looked gorgeous, nestled down among the hills,” he wrote, “as we caught our first glimpse of it when coming over the pass out of Burwash Canyon. Best of all, though, was the view of the tidy, neat little cluster of cabins, with its radio masts, as we rounded the little hill above town and walked our horses to the corral.”

  Brad also managed to expand on the “marvelous supper” his diary had so laconically documented the night before: “He gave us a supper that would have graced the finest table in Christendom: grayling from the lake, fresh milk from a real cow, mashed potatoes, sheep meat, marmalade, bread, raisin-cinnamon buns, and lemon-meringue pie with delectable crust! Gene used to be a cook or a baker in France before he came here, and he certainly knows his trade.” Sixty-three years later, Bob can still taste that dessert. “Yes, lemon meringue pie,” he muses, “which Gene personally made just for us.”

  As delectable as the pie crust was the novelty of the men’s first night in bed. Brad and Bob turned in at 8:15 P.M. “In a real spring bed,” Brad rhapsodized the next morning, “with a mattress and clean blankets, and a pillow, and pillowcases—all spotlessly clean in a real French style, with a wash basin and clean towels in the neatest, spic-and-span cabin you ever saw in all your life.” It rained through the night. “[M]y, how nice it is to hear the lake lapping on the shore and the rain pattering on the roof!”

  The radio at Burwash Landing had been established by Pan American Airways to broadcast weather reports to advise their pilots in this mostly uncharted sector of the Yukon (the Alcan Highway, linking Dawson Creek, British Columbia, to Fairbanks, Alaska, would not be built until 1942). Now Brad and Bob used the radio to send cables to their families. The newspaper bulletin that Brad had scribbled down in the Donjek cabin would have to wait till the men arrived in a real town.

  The only way in and out of Burwash Landing was by airplane. There was a flight carrying hunters scheduled to arrive from Whitehorse in the Yukon on July 22. Bob and Brad could board the return flight, take the train from Whitehorse to Skagway, then book passage on a pair of boats hopscotching up the Alaskan coast, through Juneau and back to Valdez, where they had left all the belongings they hadn’t flown in to the Walsh Glacier with Bob Reeve. On the face of it, two more days of “loafing” under the genial ménage of Gene Jacquot ought to have loomed as a happy prospect.

  But Brad, characteristically, was too impatient. When he learned that a Pacific Alaska Airways flight carrying cargo and mail from Whitehorse to Fairbanks would make a stop at Burwash that very day (July 20), he got on the radio to PAA headquarters in Whitehorse. Normally, the airlines had a rule against passengers riding on cargo flights, but the administrator Brad talked to recognized a special case when he heard one. Within five minutes, the climbers had their okay to ride the cargo flight.

  By ten that evening, Brad and Bob were lodged in a Fair-banks hotel. “I’m now in a comfortable bed in Fairbanks and Bob is taking a hot bath!” Brad exulted in his diary. A few minutes later, he added, “[H]ere we are, in comfortable warm beds after ice cream, movies, and a pleasant airplane ride!” Bob’s memory of that sudden plunge back into civilization, as he wrote of it in The Love of Mountains Is Best, betrays a wistful tinge: “It was suddenly over, as if we had just awakened from a dream, but no dream could have made us appreciate so much the luxury of a bed, a chair, and a full meal.”

  The next day, July 21, these friends, who had been so vitally bound to each other for what would prove to be the most intense month of their lives, parted ways. Bob flew to Anchorage, took a boat south along the Alaskan coast, and eventually rode a train
across Canada. (Brad would gather up the belongings Bob had left in Valdez.) A week after the expedition, as he strolled the streets of Montreal while waiting for a train to Boston, still wearing his ragged climbing trousers and his shoepacs, Bob was shocked to see his own face grinning back at him from the front page of the local newspaper. Several columns were given over to an account of the Lucania climb. Brad, still in Alaska, had wired his story east, where it was picked up by the Associated Press and many newspapers, and he had prevailed upon the National Geographic Society, which had sponsored his 1936 aerial photography flights, to release pictures of the climbers and the mountain.

  Meanwhile, on July 21 Brad hitchhiked a ride on board a bush pilot’s flight to Valdez. Bob Reeve, who must have been vastly relieved to see his young client safe and sound, feigned nonchalance. In Brad’s paraphrase, his attitude was “Of course I expected you guys to pull it off. You got back a little faster than I thought you would, that’s all.” On the spot, the pilot concocted a clever play on names. As Brad recalls, “From that day on, through the rest of his life, Bob Reeve always called me ‘Burwash.’”

  Brad’s intention was to stay another three weeks in Valdez and fly with Reeve to take aerial photos of the Lucania region. He hoped also to persuade Reeve at least to consider a flight in to the Walsh to retrieve as much of the base camp cache as possible, but the pilot made it emphatically clear that he hoped never again in his life to see the Walsh Glacier or Mount Lucania. In the end, Brad stayed in Valdez until August 12, but continued bad weather, along with Reeve’s insistence on flying his milk-run mining camp supply drops in preference to serving as Brad’s taxi driver, bedeviled his efforts to get new aerial photos of the Saint Elias Range.

  As soon as he arrived in Valdez on July 21, Brad reestablished himself in the run-down cabin he had rented for five dollars a month. The first night, it poured rain. Brad woke in the wee hours in the grips of a nightmare. “I dreamed that I was trying to cross a flooding river,” he recalls. “I went to the window of the cabin and screamed, ‘Help! Help! Help!’ There was some guy outside, and he said, ‘For Christ’s sake, shut up!’”

  The newspaper articles made a minor stir. Yet both Brad and Bob remember that when they resumed their jobs that fall—Brad in the Harvard Institute of Geographical Exploration, Bob in the English department of the University of Pennsylvania—their colleagues offered them little more than routine congratulations and showed not a great deal of curiosity about how they had spent their summer.

  In the 1930s the American public remained almost completely ignorant of mountaineering. A Boston newspaper, for instance, titled its column-and-a-half story “Cambridge Boy Hero of Climb,” but the Associated Press writer had reworked Brad’s story into a résumé of the exploit that, at the same time that it made the achievement sound dull and routine, exhibited a thorough incomprehension of what climbing a big mountain was all about. “Roped together to avoid sliding into crevasses, they forced upward”; “Peak after peak rose ahead of them as they climbed through frost and feathers”; “The surface of the glacier proved so badly cracked that Reeve was able to return only after three takeoff attempts”—such lame approximations betrayed the efforts of the AP hack to grasp the achievement.

  Had Brad and Bob been Frenchmen, Italians, Austrians, or Germans who had pulled off a deed in the Alps comparable to their ascent of Lucania, their climb would have made a big splash among a knowledgeable public. Indeed, the following year, when two young Austrians and two young Germans made the first ascent of the Eiger’s deadly north face, Adolf Hitler fêted them at a public rally, while the audience wildly cheered the men as Aryan heroes. In America at the same time, mountaineering accomplishments were as obscure as scholarly breakthroughs in entomology.

  Brad did his best to dent that ignorance. As soon as he had returned to the East Coast, he took the train to New York and, in typically brash fashion, walked uninvited into the office of Wilson Hicks, a Life magazine associate editor, in the Chrysler Building. There he plopped down a copy of Life’s second issue of November 30, 1936, featuring Walter Wood’s first ascent of Mount Steele. “And so what?” said Hicks.

  Brad laid a typescript and a box of eight-by-ten photos on the desk atop the copy of Life. “Here’s the story,” he said, “of the first ascent of your unclimbable mountain.” (The final caption of Wood’s article, showing a view of Lucania from Steele, had read, it will be recalled, “But Mt. Lucania remains virtually impregnable.”)

  With the editorial efficiency of the day (an art all but lost in the first decade of the twenty-first century), the September 27, 1937, issue of Life—reaching the newsstands scarcely a month after Brad had walked into Hicks’s office—ran a handsome eight-page article on Lucania, lavishly illustrated with the excellent photos Brad had captured with his Zeiss camera. The author was Lincoln Barnett, later to make a name as a popular science writer (The Universe and Dr. Einstein), working on his first story for the magazine. Life paid Brad and Bob a thousand dollars. In one swoop, the men had recovered the cost of the expedition.

  With Brad peering over his shoulder, Barnett did a good job. The article was wholly free of the gaffes that had marred the newspaper accounts. “Mountaineering is a compound of sport, science, audacity,” the piece opened. “In America it has lately appealed to a growing band of young climbers notable for successes among the peaks of this hemisphere. Less reckless than Bavarians [a backhanded slap at the Eiger candidates, several of whom had died on north face attempts], they have relied on scientific planning, camping ability. Of them none is more precise and competent than Bradford Washburn of Cambridge, Mass.”

  Yet strangely, the coverage ended high on the northeast ridge of Mount Steele (no doubt because Brad ran out of film there), relegating the climax of the expedition—the desperate hike out to Kluane Lake and the near-fatal ford of the Donjek—to a perfunctory sentence. The article thus presented Brad and Bob’s extraordinary traverse and escape as merely a plucky first ascent. Even Bob Reeve’s dilemma in the slush, which left the two climbers stranded, was glossed over, its implications unexplained.

  Over subsequent years, the Lucania expedition became a legend among the cognoscenti, the peers of Bates and Washburn who themselves sought out first ascents in the remote ranges. Yet Lucania remained off the beaten mountaineering track, seldom visited during the decades after 1937. (Its second ascent did not occur until 1967, when four climbers from California and Colorado flew in to the Chitina Glacier and climbed the mountain from the north. Unlike Brad and Bob, they were also able to fly out.) Thus any detailed knowledge of the dramatic twists and turns of Bob and Brad’s journey faded from the memories of all but the most perspicacious students of mountaineering in the Far North. By contrast, a classic route on Mount McKinley, such as the first ascent of the south face by an Italian team led by Ricardo Cassin in 1961, saw its reputation grow more burnished with each subsequent season, for by the late 1980s more than a thousand climbers a year were doing battle with North America’s highest peak. Every time a band of young tigers struggled up the Cassin (as the route is nicknamed), they were moved to reflect, “Boy, those Italian guys were ahead of their time.” (Allen Steck and Steve Roper’s definitive collection, Fifty Classic Climbs of North America, includes the Cassin but not Lucania.)

  Over the decades, Brad was recurrently tempted to write a book about Lucania, but, busy as he always found himself with the myriad projects that have crowded his professional life, he never got around to it. Bob was content to devote a long chapter to Lucania in The Love of Mountains Is Best.

  With their friendship cemented for life by their shared ordeal, it would have been logical for Bob and Brad to undertake another expedition together in 1938. This was not to be, however. Only three months after returning from Lucania, Bob got a late-night phone call from Charlie Houston, his Harvard friend and teammate on the 1933 Grillon expedition. The American Alpine Club had been granted permission to attempt K2, at 28,250 feet the world’s second-high
est mountain. The club had asked Houston to choose a team. At twenty-five, Houston was at his mountaineering apogee, having pulled off the first ascent of Mount Foraker in Alaska while Brad and Bob were on Lucania. The year before, he had co-led an Anglo-American expedition that had placed two men on top of 25,645-foot Nanda Devi in India—the highest summit climbed anywhere in the world for the next fourteen years, until the French succeeded on Annapurna in 1950.

  Houston’s first choice for the K2 team was Bob Bates. Today, Bob and Brad cannot recall whether Washburn was invited to K2, but it seems unlikely. Unlike Brad’s Alaskan campaigns, K2 was envisioned by the American Alpine Club not as a Harvard- or Ivy League-centered effort, but as a national one. Bates was the only other Harvard alumnus on the team, and the climber who would turn out to be its strongest member was a Wyoming cowboy named Paul Petzoldt, who had made the first ascent of the north face of the Grand Teton. Petzoldt’s training, both in school and in the mountains, was as different from that of the HMC gang as could be imagined in 1938.

  So Bates spent the summer of 1938 in the heart of the Karakoram Range, then part of the princely state of Jammu and Kashmir, and today within Pakistan. After an arduous and eventful approach march from Srinagar, the team made its way up the Baltoro Glacier to attack K2 by its southeast ridge, a route first attempted by the Duke of the Abruzzi in 1909 (and subsequently named after him). In a brilliant logistical effort, the team strung seven camps up the precipitous ridge (which is maddeningly short on decent natural tent platforms), the highest at well above 25,000 feet.