Escape from Lucania

by David Roberts

  Perhaps knowledge of Brad and Bob’s achievement would have hinged on the discovery by some lowland party—maybe Jacquot’s wranglers—of the cache the pair left in the tree on the west bank of the Donjek. Such a party would have had to recognize the significance of the find, without suspecting that any mountaineers had entered that wilderness since Walter Wood in 1935. Before such a discovery could have been made, on the other hand, bears might have torn the cache to pieces, strewing its contents on the gravel bar, smashing the camera and spoiling Brad’s rolls of exposed film.

  Instead, both Brad and Bob not only survived all their expeditions, but lived long enough to mellow gracefully into their tenth decades. It is hard not to envy the men’s quiet pride in their lifetimes of achievement in and out of the mountains. Both have been blessed with long-lasting marriages that were also true partnerships. And both readily admit that what has anchored their lives is an abundance of enduring, unquestioned friendships, of the sort about which Homer sang. (As Brad is fond of joking, much to his wife’s chagrin, “I’ve always said the only two good bed partners I’ve ever had were Barbara and Bob Bates.”) The two men still visit each other regularly, as they did one frosty day in January 2001, to celebrate Bob’s ninetieth birthday.

  From the armchair in the living room of his retirement-community apartment in Exeter, New Hampshire, Bob radiates an unmistakable serenity. His zest for life undimmed, he still travels with Gail to the corners of the globe. If The Love of Mountains Is Best rings today as a bland, old-fashioned motto, it nonetheless serves as the appropriate epigraph for Bob’s life.

  Less serene, impatient as ever in his ninety-second year, Brad still works every day out of a home office in his own retirement-community apartment in Lexington, Massachusetts. Anticipating the years to come, he bluntly remarks, “I hope and pray I just drop dead of a whopping heart attack.”

  It is not far-fetched to see Brad’s and Bob’s most dangerous expeditions as keys to their longevity and fulfillment. From Lucania, they brought back not only the triumph of a first ascent, but the kind of momentary renewal of the world that the best adventures can work, turning something as mundane as “fresh milk from a real cow” into a sacrament suffused with wonder.

  In the light of the history of mountaineering, it was certainly not technical difficulty that made the first ascent of Lucania such a benchmark. Bob and Brad faced not a single move of rock climbing on their month-long expedition, and their hardest work on snow and ice amounted to chopping steps up steep slopes and crossing thinly bridged crevasses. On K2 in both 1938 and 1953, Bob climbed much more difficult pitches than anything on Lucania, as did Brad on Mount Hayes in 1941 or, for that matter, on the Aiguille Verte in 1929.

  On Lucania, it was the collision of the risky new gambit of using a ski-equipped plane to approach a remote mountain with some of the weirdest weather either Brad or Bob Reeve would ever see in the North that led to the men’s dramatic dilemma—two climbers marooned in an uncharted wilderness, a hundred miles from the nearest other human beings, left to their own devices. What stamps the 1937 adventure with its special genius is the boldness with which Brad and Bob responded to that near-catastrophe. In the shape of their lives, as confident as climbers have ever been in the great ranges, they escaped their captivity by accomplishing what they had come to the Yukon to do: get up the highest unclimbed mountain in North America. What did it matter that the way out lay across a blank in the map, a blank that they nonetheless knew before they started was bisected by a river that would give them all the trouble they could ask for?

  In the end, Bob and Brad pulled it off by inches—but those inches were the measurements by which they had built their doctrine of fast and light. Sixty-four years later, we can look back and say that in the history of mountaineering, there is no other deed quite comparable to Brad and Bob’s in 1937. And in our own modern age, with exploration abetted by helicopter rescues and global positioning systems and satellite phones, with no true blanks left anywhere on the map of the world, another Lucania will never again come to pass.

  EPILOGUE

  IN February 2001, I finished the last of several marathon sessions of tape-recording Bob and Brad’s reminiscences about Lucania and about their lives before and after. I guessed that I knew the story of that extraordinary climb as well as anyone could who hadn’t even been born in 1937. Thanks to Brad’s superb photographs and to modern maps, I felt that I knew my way around Lucania.

  Yet something nagged at me. Although I had pursued thirteen mountaineering expeditions of my own to Alaska and the Yukon in the 1960s and 1970s, I had never climbed in the Saint Elias Range. Driving the Alaska and Glenn Highways, I had admired the northern and western ramparts of that great sprawl of glaciated peaks. But I had never seen Mount Lucania, not even from an airplane.

  When Brad mentioned that he was being flown up to Denali National Park in July for a celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of his first ascent of the West Buttress, an obvious plan was hatched. Once the park rangers were finished fêting Brad, could we not hire a bush pilot and fly over the Saint Elias Range, retracing by air the route of his Lucania expedition sixty-four years after the fact? Brad was all for it.

  I met Brad and Barbara in Anchorage on July 14. Art Davidson, an old climbing buddy of mine and one of the three men who had made the first winter ascent of McKinley in 1967 (and nearly died in the process), hosted a crab fest at the sylvan homestead he had built south of town in Rainbow Valley. A small throng, comprising some of the best Alaskan mountaineers of the second, third, and fourth generations after Brad’s, paid homage to both him and Barbara. Kneeling on the grass in Art’s front yard, they peered over Brad’s shoulder as he unrolled the exquisitely detailed Canadian government quadrangles and, with the back end of a ballpoint pen, retraced the route of his escape from Lucania.

  The next morning, Brad, Barbara, and I drove out of Anchorage in a rental car. The weather had been lousy, Art had told me, for two solid weeks, and now it was overcast and raining. I had lined up a bush pilot, but now, as we crept northeast on the Glenn Highway, I contemplated the glum prospect that we might arrive in McCarthy only to cool our heels, using up our few available days while Lucania sat, invisible and unflyable, smothered by the storms that, after all, were business as usual for a range so glaciated as the Saint Elias.

  As we passed through Palmer, though, the rain stopped and the clouds started to break up. By the time we had climbed up the canyon of the Matanuska Valley, patches of blue sky were showing in the east. Brad peered intently out the righthand window. All at once the bluish snout of the Matanuska Glacier appeared between steep ridges cloaked with spruce and fir. Some twenty miles up that glacier, Bob Reeve had landed Brad’s party in 1938, when they had made the first ascent of Mount Marcus Baker.

  “If Reeve couldn’t fly back in to pick us up,” Brad said now, “we had a plan. We were going to hike down the Matanuska Glacier, build a raft out of driftwood, and float out to Palmer.” In 1938, the Glenn Highway had yet to be built, and this gloomy canyon was uninhabited. Brad stared at the chaos of morainal debris and braided river below us on the right. “We’d have never made it,” he said softly. “They’d have never found us.”

  Just past Eureka, the highway bursts out of its claustrophobic gorge to traverse a gloriously green tundra plateau. The sun had burst upon us as well. We stopped to take some photos. All around us, magenta fireweed blazed in riotous bloom, and mosquitoes swarmed.

  It is possible to drive to McCarthy, but the last sixty miles from Chitina proceed along an unpaved old railroad bed that is so littered with rusty spikes and nails that you can count on a flat tire or two. (The rental car companies forbid this passage, but in anarchic Alaska no one pays attention to such fussy rules.) I had arranged instead for our pilot to pick us up at Glennallen and fly us in to McCarthy.

  The outfit I had hired was Wrangell Mountain Air, run by Natalie and Kelly Bay. At 8:15 P.M., with the slanting late-afternoon sunlight bathing
the tundra, a yellow-and-white Cessna 206 put down on the dirt strip at Glennallen. As we loaded our luggage aboard, Barbara said, “Plenty of room.” “It’s our station wagon,” answered Natalie Bay. An Aussie by birth and accent, she had come to Alaska in 1983, fallen in love with the place and with her soon-to-be husband, and stayed for good.

  Brad got into the co-pilot’s seat, with Barbara and me in the seats behind. All at once we were in the air, gliding over the taiga skirts of the Wrangell Mountains. Brad’s old pilot instincts came to the fore. “There’s no rudder on the co-pilot’s side,” he complained into his headphone. Natalie glanced at him and smiled, “But you’ve got everything else.” Realizing that she had an aviator beside her, she asked Brad in what craft he had learned to fly.

  “I took my first flights,” he answered, enunciating as if to a schoolchild, “in a Kinner Fleet biplane. I’ll bet you’ve never seen one of those.” Natalie allowed that she hadn’t.

  The air was utterly smooth. On our left, one by one, the isolated hulks of Mounts Drum, Sanford, Wrangell, and Blackburn, dormant volcanoes covered with massive glaciers, crept by. Brad peered at Sanford, tracing a line in the air to show us where he and Terris Moore had skied down from the summit in 1938.

  We crossed a low divide and suddenly found ourselves in the Chitina valley. Circling over the Kennicott Glacier, we came in to land on the 3,500-foot dirt strip at McCarthy. We were only forty-five minutes out of Glennallen.

  Although McCarthy had been crucial to the 1937 expedition—for it was from this strip, then covered with snow, that Bob Reeve and Russ Dow had flown in the depot of base camp supplies to the Walsh Glacier in May—Brad had never before visited the town. A Wrangell Mountain Air employee drove us four miles up a hillside to the Kennicott Lodge.

  The wooden hotel, painted dark red with white trim, was designed to match the spectacularly derelict Kennecott Mine complex beside it. (Though named after Robert Kennicott, an early U.S. Geological Survey explorer, the mine had been founded in 1906 by men who managed to misspell his name.) The lodge and the mine gaze out over one of the most sublime settings in Alaska, with the talus-covered jumble of the Kennicott Glacier below in the foreground, and beyond, a lordly vista south across the basin of the Chitina valley, here at its broadest, a good fifteen miles across. We spent two nights in this comfy (if overpriced) hotel, sharing the hearty family-style meals served up for the tourists whom the all-too-brief summer lures to this outback of pioneer Alaska.

  Brad knew that Andy Taylor, the Klondike veteran who had taught him so much about winter camping and dog mushing on the 1935 Yukon expedition, had spent his last years in McCarthy. We made our way down to the old town below, a scattering of dwellings nestled among the birch trees, and, after inquiring of oldtimers, found the trim miner’s cabin, now boarded up, that had been Taylor’s last residence. Brad took a picture of the house.

  At eight in the morning on July 16, we met Kelly Bay at the airstrip as he gassed up a spiffy yellow-and-red Cessna 185. The weather was holding magnificently. “You folks are in luck,” said Kelly. “Best day so far of the whole summer.” We climbed into this smaller plane, the craft of preference for bush flying in the North. Brad once more took the co-pilot’s seat; Barbara sat directly behind him, while I sat on the left behind the pilot.

  A big, rangy, affable fellow with a dark black beard sprinkled with gray, Kelly filled us in on his background as we gained height and swung southeast toward the main Chitina valley. He had come to Alaska in 1975 from his native Seattle, a young man looking aimlessly for adventure. “Did a lot of trapping with dogs in this country,” he said into his headphone, “marten, wolverine, lynx, the occasional wolf. I took up flying when I got tired of looking at the wrong end of a dog. Did some trapping with a snow machine, but there wasn’t any fun in it.”

  In 1980, the Wrangell-Saint Elias National Park and Preserve was established, putting an end to the big-game hunting that had been the chief draw for visitors to McCarthy through the 1960s and 1970s. During those last pre-park years, Kelly admitted with a guffaw, he had done some “unauthorized” flying of Dall sheep hunters (he had had as yet no bush pilot license)—“mostly friends, for pocket cash,” he added. “Then I figured, why not start an air taxi?”

  Brad told Kelly about our discovery of Andy Taylor’s house. Taylor had been dead so long that he seemed to locals a figure out of ancient myth. “Did you know Andy Taylor?” Kelly asked, incredulous.

  The Chitina River was directly under us, maybe 2,000 feet below. I stared at the wide meanders of its chocolate-colored current, the same meanders Brad and Bob had apprehensively surveyed on their way in with Reeve, with the sky getting darker and darker ahead. Here, at least, I thought, the walking would not have been terribly arduous, on the fringe where the forest met the gravel bar.

  “What was Bob Reeve like?” asked Kelly.

  “He was a man of few words,” said Brad. He retold the story of Reeve’s telegram, “ANYWHERE YOU’LL RIDE, I’LL FLY,” then added a footnote: “He rescinded the whole thing afterwards.”

  As we flew, Brad whistled softly and tunelessly into his headphone, a kind of nervous tic he had adopted, I had noticed, during the last decade. Still gaining altitude, we passed over the snout of the Chitina Glacier. I craned my neck to look down at it. Here was “that nauseating desolation of dying masses of ice,” those “potholes full of horrid muddy water fill[ing] every depression in the hellish sea of stagnant ice” that Brad had noted in his diary on June 19, 1937. The glacial snout indeed looked like nasty going, but in the sunshine and calm air, everything in this gleaming wilderness seemed to take on a benign aspect. On either side, unnamed mountains rose to 8,000 feet, each promising a major challenge in its own right.

  Where the Chitina branched from the Logan Glacier, we followed the latter. Here we were over the route of the epochal pack-in on the first ascent of Mount Logan in 1925. Brad was taking color slides with his Nikon, mere snapshots compared to the large-format black-and-whites he had spent six decades fine-tuning; but with a series of impatient hand signals, he directed Kelly Bay to dip his left wing or fly in a half circle so he could get the shot he wanted. When he was ready, he opened the small window, careful to ease it upright so that it didn’t snap in the sudden airflow, in order to shoot through transparent space rather than scratchy Plexiglas. Each time he opened the window, an arctic blast struck Barbara in the face. She balled up a big down jacket and held it in front of her for protection.

  Brad was awash in 1937 memories. “It was around here,” he told us through his headphone, “that Bob Reeve said, ‘Look, if we go any farther, we have to stop and refuel.’” Then, as we glided steadily up the Logan Glacier, Brad suddenly remembered his first view ever of this terrain, on the March 1935 reconnaissance flight with Bob Randall, when the twenty-four-year-old Brad had shot his first pictures of Lucania. “Randall was so far from home,” Brad related now, “that he said, ‘I’m lost. Where the hell are we?’ I said, ‘You just fly the plane, I’ll tell you where we are.’”

  Suddenly, ahead of us and slightly to the left, we saw Lucania. I recognized it like an old friend of a mountain, though until now I had known it only through Brad’s photographs. We came to the junction of the Walsh and Logan Glaciers. As Kelly flew up the Walsh, we crossed the border into Canada. Had Brad and Bob hiked out to McCarthy, the thirty miles between this junction and their base camp would have been the only terra incognita on their escape route. And now, as I gazed down, it was clear that those thirty miles would have been a piece of cake, a stroll on a broad glacier uncomplicated by icefalls or serious crevasse fields.

  We were a good 3,000 feet above the glacier, gaining height so that we could pop over the Steele-Lucania ridge and push on to the east. Off my window, the gargantuan south face of Lucania slowly unveiled itself, in the late morning sun almost too bright to look at. We came to a corner where the Walsh bent toward the north. “Where was your base camp, Brad?” I asked.

  He lean
ed across the pilot and counted with his right index finger: “One, two, three ribs—just off the third rib.” I spotted the rocky spurs pitching off the south face, but we were too high to make out any details near the foot of the third one. On the way back, we would fly low to check out the terrain more carefully. Now, just off the wing lay the headwall Brad and Bob had fought so hard to carry their loads up. In the fresh snow, I saw small slide runnels everywhere on that slope. It was obvious why the two men had worried about getting avalanched there.

  Kelly circled within the basin to gain altitude. “We got fourteen-six here,” said the pilot, glancing at the altimeter.

  “We ought to get over that pass easily,” said Brad. “It’s about fourteen.”

  Kelly preferred a little insurance. We circled up to 15,500 feet, near the limit for a Cessna 185. I felt light-headed in the thin air. “I’ve never had it over sixteen,” Kelly admitted. “But it’s got a brand new engine in it.”

  “Good!” exclaimed Barbara, clutching her down jacket.

  In a sudden swoop, we crossed the Steele-Lucania pass. I stared down at the featureless snow, where sixty-four years before, Brad and Bob had pitched their tent triumphantly at Shangri-La. “We had a hell of a good camp here,” Brad told Kelly. “No cracks anywhere.” Within minutes, we were descending the far side of Steele, with the northeast ridge on our left. It looked alarmingly steep and sharp. Brad gazed down at the Wolf Creek Glacier (now officially named the Steele Glacier). “Boy, that would be good walking down there,” he said.