Escape from Lucania

by David Roberts

  A flight such as the one we were taking, I knew, ran the risk of trivializing the experience it was designed to appreciate. Here we were, after all, floating in comfort inside a heated cabin across terrain that Brad and Bob had had to fight for, foot by foot and day by day. Yet so far, the flight had only deepened my respect for their journey. In particular, the sheer hugeness of Lucania came home to me: only McKinley, among the mountains I had climbed, was in the same league.

  We followed the glacier down, until it bent slightly toward the right. “There’s Peter Rabbit corner!” Brad cried, pointing at a grassy bench on the right bank. He told the pilot the story of finding Walter Wood’s cache, ruined by bears except for the single small jar of Peter Rabbit peanut butter. Kelly shook his head. “You can throttle back here and save gas,” Brad advised. “Just glide down to the Donjek.”

  We had enough fuel for about a four-hour flight. The Donjek would make a safe turnaround point. We would not be able to fly the last thirty miles to Burwash Landing, but after all, Brad and Bob had ridden horses on that last, uneventful leg.

  We lost altitude as the valley gentled. The perfect day was holding. I realized that since we had turned up the Walsh Glacier, I had been in the grips of a strange mood, a mixture of elation and agitation. During the previous months, I had so relived Brad and Bob’s 1937 adventure that it was almost as if now I were retracing an old voyage of my own. And at the moment, with sparkling streams pouring off the green hillsides in full summer, I wanted to be down there, hiking toward my future.

  “There’s the Donjek!” Brad exclaimed. Slowly we approached it, until you could count the silver braids in the current.

  “Donjek’s a pretty big river,” mused Kelly, who had seldom flown so far east of his backyard.

  “It’s a son of a bitch,” said Brad.

  We turned south to fly upstream, heading for the snout of the Donjek Glacier, where Brad and Bob had passed the most miserable and anxious night of their lives.

  Brad saw it before I did. “The glacier’s surging!” he cried. I stared out my window. The Donjek Glacier, pouring out of the foothills to the west, sprawled into the river from an oblique angle. But where, in 1937, the main current of the river had torn viciously through a canyon carved between rock cliffs on the east and the glacial snout on the west, we saw that now the glacier lay completely athwart the river. The main current of the river, pouring from its true source in the Kluane Glacier fifteen miles farther south, had carved a tunnel beneath the snout of the Donjek. “Yes,” said Brad, who knew his geology, “that glacier’s advancing to beat the band.”

  All glaciers flow downhill at a rate of inches or feet per year. But in a still little-understood phenomenon, glaciers may unaccountably surge, galloping forward by hundreds of yards per year for a brief span of time. Though glaciers everywhere in the Yukon and Alaska have for the most part retreated steadily during the last century, as melting outstrips their downhill flow, sometime within the past sixty-four years the Donjek had surged, so that its terminus now completely crossed the river.

  “We could have just walked over on the ice!” Brad groaned. Barbara patted him on the shoulder.

  It was time to turn around. As we headed back toward Mount Steele, I reflected that any lingering doubts I had had about Brad and Bob’s crucial rationalization, that to head east toward Kluane Lake was the best way to go to get out of the Saint Elias Range, had vanished. There was absolutely no chance that the hundred-mile hike west to McCarthy would have proved tougher than Brad and Bob’s eventual 156-mile flight to Burwash. I would guess, to the contrary, that a trek down the Walsh, Logan, and Chitina Glaciers and then down the Chitina valley would have been three or four times safer and easier than what Brad and Bob ended up performing. But in that case, of course, they would have had to leave the first ascent of Lucania to someone else.

  We crossed back over the Steele-Lucania Ridge. Kelly circled over the Walsh Glacier to lose altitude. It had been Brad’s hope (and mine) that we might catch a glimpse of the base camp cache the men had abandoned on June 26, 1937. No other climbers had ever reported its discovery, but even by 2001, very few men or women had penetrated to the upper basin of the Walsh. As Kelly now said, “The truth of it is, there aren’t a heck of a lot of people that have ever looked around up here.”

  Indeed, I felt stunned by the emptiness of the wilderness we had flown over during the last two and a half hours. At that moment, on Denali’s West Buttress, probably two or three hundred climbers were scattered up and down the route, their tents and gear caches littering the slopes. The weather was so good that maybe a dozen or two were at that very instant hugging each other and snapping pictures on the summit. But I was quite sure that in the 120-mile swath of Saint Elias Range we had surveyed, not a single human being was presently abroad. The Lucania region seemed as unexplored as it had been in 1937.

  Only two hundred feet above the glacier, Kelly straightened out and took the line Brad indicated. Brad peered out the right front window, I out the left rear. Kelly slowed the Cessna to about a hundred miles an hour. A skin of snow still coated the glacier, but we saw meltwater pools and rivulets.

  There was no question of landing: Kelly had no planes on skis in midsummer, and he was not authorized to make glacier landings in Canada. With our eyes, we scoured the landscape whizzing by beneath us, but we saw nothing but snow and a long ribbon of morainal gravel on the dirty ice. Brad turned to me and said, “You know what we should do? Come back here with a helicopter, land, and just walk down that moraine.” I had no doubt that, had Kelly been able to land, Brad would have hopped out the door and headed off unroped down-glacier to look for his lost cache.

  Less than half a mile in a direct line below the site of that long-ago camp, the glacier slumped into a chaotic jumble of crevasses and toppled séracs. It seemed to me that here was the likely answer: with the flow of the decades, all Bob and Brad’s precious gear had most likely been dumped into this frozen maelstrom, where it now lay entombed in ice. I didn’t have the heart to say as much to Brad.

  We rose again and headed for McCarthy. No one said anything for ten or fifteen minutes. I felt a bittersweet longing come over my spirits.

  I had expected that the flight would stir in Brad a kindred pang. Late in life, an old story has it, the British writer Jonathan Swift was asked for the umpteenth time whether he had indeed penned the anonymously published A Tale of a Tub, a work so brilliantly heretical it might well have landed its author in prison. For the umpteenth time, Swift denied the attribution. But then he turned and muttered to himself, in a barely audible voice, “Ah, what a genius I had in me then!”

  Surely our flight over Lucania had awakened in Brad some nostalgic sorrow, some fresh cognizance of the glory of youth slipping away irretrievably into the past. But if Brad had such feelings in his breast, he kept them to himself.

  We flew past the snout of a nameless glacier joining the Logan from the south side. Brad pointed: “Each one of those lobes there marks a different glacial surge.” As the plane sped on, he stared back, caught up in his geology. “Isn’t that interesting?” he said. His breath whistled softly in the headphone. “I’ll be darned.”

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  THIS book, of course, would not exist without Bob Bates and Brad Washburn. My longtime admiration for the feat they pulled off in the Yukon Territory in 1937 was deepened, during the last two years, by my gratitude for their willingness to reminisce at length in front of my tape recorder, as well as to allow a person who had not even been born when they attacked Mount Lucania to tell in print what was after all a very personal story. Brad, in particular, saw more than a decade ago that Lucania deserved a book, and was kind enough to think that I might be the person who should write it.

  By sharing their husbands’ adventures decade after decade, and by resolutely backing them through the most unlikely and perilous of projects, Gail Bates and Barbara Washburn have each helped construct that rarest of modern edifices, a happ
y marriage. Bob and Brad have often, in slide shows and lectures as well as in print, expressed their own gratitude to and appreciation of Gail and Barbara. May I here add my own, for both women encouraged me from start to finish.

  When I was in my early twenties, setting out to be a mountaineer myself, Bob and Brad gave me all the support and advice I could have hoped for. As such, the two men were part of a sizable cadre of members of the Harvard Mountaineering Club, dating back to its founding in 1924, who served as role models and mentors to my generation in the early 1960s. To them, and to the cronies with whom I set off on my own expeditions to Alaska and the Yukon, I owe some of the best friendships and unquestionably the greatest adventures of my life.

  Jon Krakauer and Sharon Roberts read my book in manuscript and gave me many valuable tips. Kelly and Natalie Bay, of Wrangell Mountain Air, did some slick flying to allow Brad, Barbara, and me to retrace by airplane the route of the 1937 escape from Lucania on the finest day of the summer of 2001. The Bays are classic Alaskan bush pilots in the tradition of which Bob Reeve was one of the pioneers; he would have been proud of them.

  To my agent, Stuart Krichevsky, I owe not only the professional acumen that allowed my book to become a reality, but an abiding interest in the story that transcended our mere business relationship. The same holds true for Shana Cohen, Stuart’s associate, who untangled many a logistical snag while always expressing her enthusiasm for the Lucania saga. Stuart and Shana even served as my part-time research assistants, hunting down such arcana as the ur-texts of Tillie the Toiler.

  At Simon & Schuster, Johanna Li once more, in her apparently effortless way, kept track of all the loose ends that every book seems to come booby-trapped with. If there is a better associate editor than Johanna in American publishing, I’d be surprised. I have lost track of the numbers of colleagues who, as we faced some apparently unprecedented dilemma in writing, research, or permissions, said to me over the phone, “I’ll call Johanna—she’ll know how to straighten this out.”

  Finally, on this, my sixth book for Simon & Schuster, Bob Bender has once more proved the ideal custodian of my prose. It is a rare occasion when one’s editor becomes a true friend, and rarer still when the most discerning critical judgment on the editor’s part coexists with that friendship. Bob, after all, would not be doing his job if he did not save me from the flights of rhetorical excess and trudges of expository plod that every writer lapses into now and then. All I can hope is that, no matter for how many years I continue to scribble away, I never have another editor than Bob Bender.

  INDEX

  Abruzzi, Luigi Amedeo di Savoia, Duke of the, 3, 54-55, 57, 67, 113, 164

  Accidental Adventurer, The (Washburn), 169

  Adams, Ansel, 170-71

  Aiguille du Midi, 47-48

  Aiguille Verte, 4, 50, 178

  Allen, Johnnie, 151, 153

  Alpine Club of Canada, 61

  Alpine Journal, 62

  Alsek River, 72

  American Alpine Club, 51, 73, 164, 166, 172, 173

  American Alpine Journal, 10, 64, 124, 169

  American Photographer, 107

  Among the Alps with Bradford (Washburn), 38-39, 45, 46, 47, 49

  Annapurna, 164, 174

  arctic hares, 149

  Army Air Corps, 166

  Aubrey, John, 66, 68, 167

  Basin Camp, 81-97

  supplies moved to, 87-93

  Bates, Gail Oberlin, 2, 172-74

  Bates, Robert Hicks:

  background of, 41-44

  in book project collaboration, 10-12

  books published by, 9, 63, 65-66

  cabin discovered by, 129-30

  character of, 9-10, 11, 106-7, 177

  crevasse falls of, 100

  expedition portraits of, 113-14, 118

  on flight to Lucania, 18-22

  HMC membership of, 39-41

  HMC style influenced by, 62-63, 66-68

  influenza epidemic and, 41

  inventory taken by, 79

  K2 expeditions of, 8-9, 56, 106, 164-65, 173, 174-76, 178

  marriage of, 172-73, 177

  modesty of, 9-10

  on Mount Crillon expedition, 65-66

  on NGS Yukon expedition, 69-74

  physical appearance of, 1-2

  physical condition of, 104-5, 150

  singing of, 107-8, 116

  sleeping bag shared by, 2, 96, 105-6

  teaching career of, 68, 167

  trip preparations and, 14

  on U.S. Army Alaskan Test Expedition, 166-67

  Washburn met by, 38-39

  Washburn’s friendship with, 105-6, 163, 166, 177 see also Lucania expedition

  Bay, Kelly, 183-93

  Bay, Natalie, 183-84

  bears, grizzly, 142-43

  Beebe, William, 45

  Bering, Vitus, 54

  Bertha, Mount, 168

  Bierckel, Paul, 151, 153

  Bonanza strike, 76-77

  Boundary Commission, 60, 70

  “Boys’ Books by Boys” series, 38-39, 45

  Bradford on Mount Fairweather (Washburn), 45

  Bradford on Mount Washington (Washburn), 45

  Bright, Norman, 19, 27, 30, 31, 82, 115

  background of, 32

  Lucania ascent missed by, 34

  trip preparations and, 14, 88

  Brinkley, David, 7

  Buhl, Hermann, 174

  Burwash Landing, 79, 103, 155-58, 192

  bush pilots, 28

  Camp II, 88-89

  Cannon Mountain, 64

  Carpé, Allen, 51-53, 73, 176

  Carter, H. Adams, 64, 173

  Cassin, Ricardo, 50, 163

  Cathedral Lodge, 64

  Charlet, Georges, 44, 50

  Chitina Glacier, 187, 192

  Chugach Mountains, 16, 17

  Col du Dôme, 49

  Cook, Frederick A., 58-59, 60

  Cook, James, 58

  Couttet, Alfred, 44, 50

  Cradle of the Storms (Hubbard), 115

  Crillon, Mount, 13, 31, 65-66, 80, 106, 169

  National Geographic article about, 69

  Cunningham, Glenn, 32

  Dall sheep, 125, 152, 186

  David Goes Voyaging (Putnam), 45

  Davidson, Art, 182

  Day, Beth, 30, 36

  Deborah, Mount, 7, 11

  Decaneas, Anthony, 44

  Denali, see McKinley, Mount

  Denali National Park, 182

  Deric in Mesa Verde (Nusbaum), 45

  Deric with the Indians (Nusbaum), 45

  Dickey, Mount, 7-8

  Dickey, William A., 57

  Dodge, Joe, 63

  Donjek Glacier, 132, 136-43, 191

  rappelling on, 141-42

  Donjek River, 190-91

  crossing of, 125-46

  Dow, Russell, 27, 30, 31-32, 75, 82, 115, 124

  Lucania ascent missed by, 34

  Lucania preparations and, 13, 18, 19, 61, 77, 185

  revolver of, 86, 118-19, 123, 134

  Duke River, 150

  Dunster House, 38

  Earhart, Amelia, 38, 171-72

  Eielson, Carl Ben, 28

  Everest, Mount, 43, 46-47, 61, 171, 174

  Everett, Walt, 39, 65

  Explorers Club, 73

  Fairweather, Mount, 51, 63, 65, 73, 165, 169

  Field, W. Osgood, 51

  Fifty Classic Climbs of North America (Steck and Roper), 163

  Fire Trail, 40

  Flying Mountain, 41

  Foraker, Mount, 106, 164

  fording techniques, 143-44

  Forest Service, U.S., 40

  Geological Survey, U.S., 54

  Gilkey, Art, 9, 174-76

  Glacier Pilot (Day), 30

  glaciers, structure of, 23

  Grands Charmoz, 44

  Grépon, 44, 46

  grizzly bears, 142-43

  Groton School, 46, 49

  Hall, Henry, 4, 40, 51, 62,
78

  hares, arctic, 149

  Harvard Institute for Geographical Exploration, 68, 160

  Harvard Mountaineering Club (HMC), 4, 51, 164

  founding of, 4

  membership requirements for, 39-40

  mountaineering style of, 62-63, 64, 66-68

  Mount Washington cabin of, 40

  Haydon, Johnny, 70, 72

  Hayes, Mount, 168, 178

  Hazard (barnstormer), 14

  Henderson, Ken, 64

  Hicks, Wilson, 161

  Hillary, Edmund, 174

  Hitler, Adolf, 161

  HMC, see Harvard Mountaineering Club

  Holmes, Burton, 63

  Houston, Charles, 9, 106, 163-64, 174, 175, 176

  Hubbard, Bernard, 115

  Hubbard, Mount, 94

  Huntington, Mount, 7

  Huntley, Chet, 7

  Huscroft, Jim, 134-35

  Ice-Block Camp, 100, 102

  International Center of Photography (New York), 170

  Irvine, Sandy, 43, 47

  Jacquot, Gene, 129, 148-49, 151-52, 157, 158

  Jensen, Don, 11

  Johnson, Sam, 151, 154

  K2:

  Abruzzi’s ascent of, 55-56

  Bates’s expeditions to, 8-9, 56, 106, 164-65, 173, 174-76, 178

  K2: The Savage Mountain (Bates and Houston), 9, 176

  Katahdin, Mount, 43

  Kateel River, 26

  Kennecott Copper Company, 77

  Kennecott Mine, 185

  Kennicott, Robert, 185

  Kennicott Glacier, 185

  Kluane Glacier, 137, 142

  Kluane Lake, 79, 136

  arrival at, 154-55

  first sight of, 116

  stay at, 156-58

  Kluane River, 150

  Koven, Theodore, 53

  Ladd, Bill, 73

  Life, 10, 74, 124, 161-62

  Logan, Mount, 54, 57, 60, 61, 62, 66, 78, 187, 192

  first ascent of, 4, 51

  flight around, 71

  Logan Glacier, 187, 188

  Love of Mountains Is Best, The (Bates), 9, 63, 65-66, 96, 107, 142-43, 158, 163, 177

  Lowell Glacier, 70, 72

  Lowell House, 38, 39

  Lucania, Mount:

  declared “impregnable,” 3

  escape plans from, 77-78