The Adventurer's Son

by Roman Dial

  In Fairbanks, the idea of a ski race the length of the Hayes Range was met with curiosity, mostly at Sandvik when someone broke out the beer. The idea gained critical traction later that fall. During a guides’ association meeting on the UAF campus, an impish guy in his mid-thirties arranged a stack of flyers. I picked one up and read: “Alaska Mountain and Wilderness Classic: An Overland Footrace from Hope to Homer. Carry all needed equipment and food. No roads, no pack animals, no caches, no outside assistance. Finish with what you start with.”

  “Hi there.” The imp grinned. “I’m George Ripley. You look interested in Hope to Homer.” Ripley had a round, open face with ears that stuck out as if he were really listening to whatever you said.

  “Yeah, I am interested. I want to put on a race, too, but in the Alaska Range—a ski race from highway to highway.”

  George’s grin grew. “Why don’t you come do my race first? And then we can do your race.”

  That August, ten of us, Alaskans all, lined up in Hope near Anchorage. By the end of the first day, Dave Manzer, a twenty-seven-year-old Anchorage resident, had caught me. By the second evening, the Skilak River had stopped us both in our tracks. Gray water churned in a single channel seventy yards across. This would be our first river swim on the race course. Intimidated, we decided to make camp. Pulling out a candle, Manzer dripped wax on tinder and started a campfire.

  “Want some tea?” he asked.

  As an alpinist, I had never had much use for campfires, but welcomed this one’s cheery warmth. Soon, other racers caught up to us, including a white-haired, fifty-five-year-old named Dick Griffith. With a quiet confidence and chiseled features, he resembled Clint Eastwood in tennis shoes and a backpack.

  “What are you doing here?” asked Dick, dropping his big pack. “I thought you young guys would be halfway to Homer by now!”

  “We’re waiting till morning to swim across. It’ll come down after the sun gets off the glaciers,” Manzer said.

  “You gonna swim that?” Dick asked incredulously. “You can’t swim these glacial rivers! They’re too cold and fast. How you gonna swim with all that stuff on your back?”

  We nodded, wondering that, too.

  Dick chuckled, pulling a red Viking hat with blue horns over his head, and said, “You may be fast, but you young guys eat too much and don’t know nothin’.” He shook his head, the blue horns wagging in scorn.

  “You need one of these,” he said, reaching into his backpack to unroll a small, one-man vinyl inflatable raft at our feet. It looked like it weighed only a few pounds.

  “What’s that?” someone asked.

  “That’s my secret weapon.” He chuckled again. “Old age and treachery conquer youth and skill every time.”

  Manzer and I looked at each other. “He’s going to use that thing to float the Fox River, too,” Dave whispered. The Fox River valley was twenty miles of thick alder brush and swamp that would take us more than thirty hours to cover on foot. Dick would paddle it in five.

  In the morning, Dick blew up his little packraft and rowed across. Manzer tied into a rope held by a race official for safety. As he swam into the current, the line tangled dangerously in his legs. Manzer struggled and Dick rowed out to save him from drowning. It was a sobering lesson and I swam untethered. We hurried onward to warm up.

  The next day we caught George, who led us along animal trails through thickets of dense brush. “Game trails are the way to go, aren’t they?” he asked rhetorically, looking over his shoulder at me with his impish grin.

  Manzer’s campfires, Dick’s packraft, and George’s game trails offered me new lessons in wilderness travel. I would pass their techniques on to my son like my uncles had taught me theirs a decade before. The Wilderness Classic—as the race would come to be known over its thirty-eight-year history—would ultimately transform Alaska from inaccessible wilderness to multisport playground for me, Peggy, my son, and my friends, especially the use of Dick’s “secret weapon,” the packraft.

  A FEW MONTHS after the Wilderness Classic, Peggy and I headed south for six months, wanting to see the world as independent travelers who find their own way. Peggy Mayne was no stranger to life on the road. Born in Massachusetts, she went to elementary school in Ohio, then Oregon. When she was twelve, her father drove his wife and six youngest kids to Alaska, where he hoped to get rich in the “bush,” that part of the state beyond the road system.

  The Mayne family lived first in Tok near the Canadian border, then later in Selawik, an Inupiaq village above the Arctic Circle in northwest Alaska. Peggy graduated high school during the year her parents spent in Anchorage between stints teaching in bush villages. Soon afterward, she left for UAF, happy to be away from an alcoholic and domineering father she feared.

  With money we had earned from working at UAF all summer long—me in the carpenter’s shop and Peggy in the paint shop—we drove to Mexico in a beat-up little red Toyota pickup that I’d bought for five hundred dollars. Along the way we gawked at the Canadian Rockies, snowshoed through Yellowstone, rock-climbed in Yosemite, and hiked across the Grand Canyon. In Arizona, we parked the pickup in Tucson, bicycle-touring across Sonora and the length of the Baja Peninsula. We spent three months in Mexico: biking, hiking, climbing, and eating. Afterward, we drove east to visit family, then north to Alaska.

  Peggy often balked when I pushed her toward her limits on those adventures. Her overprotective father, worried about the safety of ten kids on a middle-class income, had never bought Peggy a bike, never taught her to swim, never set up camp away from the road, nor allowed her to take a chance that might result in injury. His strategy had worked. “Out of ten of us, nobody was ever seriously hurt,” Peggy pointed out. Her rearing left her risk-averse, a complement to my risk-taking behavior.

  Our experiences crisscrossing the continent taught us to communicate, share, and compromise, skills necessary to make a family work. We could also see the outlines of children more sharply in our shared lives. When we returned to Fairbanks in May 1983, my former adviser in the math department stopped me on the street to describe a new graduate offering at UAF. “Roman,” he said, “this program is tailor-made for you.”

  Working toward an M.S. in mathematics at UAF would allow me to continue analyzing an ecological model I’d developed as an undergraduate. It would also give me financial support working as a graduate assistant and a skill in teaching math. While unscheduled on my science career timeline, the decision seemed a good one along a path that included Peggy, kids, and our future adventures together.

  I had no idea that a steep mountain in the Hayes Range would hurry me on my way.

  Chapter 4

  The Cornice

  Hayes Range cornices, January 1984.

  Courtesy of the author

  Not long after we got back to Alaska, I walked into the Hayes Range to climb McGinnis Peak. At its base my partner revealed a dream he’d had the night before: I fell while leading, and to save himself, my partner unclipped to let me fall past. While only a dream, this confession against the inviolate bond of the rope unnerved me as we headed up our climb. Dangerous conditions chased us off, but I named the route anyway: “Cutthroat Couloir.”

  Two years later I went back with a mercurial mountaineer named Chuck Comstock. Stocky, blond, and belligerent, Chuck was the toughest guy I would ever know. He climbed with a brutal style that many, including me, misunderstood as incompetence. On rock and ice, he thrashed like he was only marginally in control. He made hard things look desperate, scary, unnerving. He’d fall on rock, on ice, in the mountains, but somehow, he would survive to terrify—or inspire—those around him.

  Like two partners at the start of a buddy movie, we didn’t hit it off right away. On our first major expedition together, Chuck warned me during an argument not to turn my back, or—as he drawled in his Iowa country-boy accent—“I might sink an ice ax in the back of your head, Romin Dahl.” Later, as roommates at Sandvik House, we came to blows over something petty. C
ornered, Comstock landed a punch to my jaw. I replied by pummeling his belly, then throwing him on a table, breaking it and ending the fight.

  Nevertheless, we partnered up for Cutthroat Couloir. We flew there in March when it was well frozen and safe from rockfall. The climb to the top took three difficult days, including my hardest lead ever on ice, a pitch we had named “Difference of Opinion.” Chuck’s lead on “Mixed Feelings” was even harder. After those pitches of steep rock veneered with thin, hollow ice, we finished the couloir and climbed a snowy ridge to the top.

  We tented on the summit our third night. Below us the Hayes Range went dark as the sky turned indigo and Alaska’s winter chill set in. The temperature reached thirty below zero and I shivered, tossing and turning in my expedition down parka and synthetic sleeping bag. Long before dawn, we woke and brewed hot drinks on our stove in the tent to warm up.

  We felt good about McGinnis’s Cutthroat. Maybe too good. We had just put up one of the hardest climbs in the Hayes Range. We knew that McGinnis’s southeast ridge was another. Hubris sent us down that knife-edged ridgeline like happy cowboys on barebacked ponies. Then we arrived at a long stretch of cornices. Two of the most experienced alpinists of our generation had disappeared without a trace on Canada’s highest mountain when one of these snowy hazards collapsed beneath them, sending the pair roped impotently to their deaths.

  On Ten Nine Ten five years before, Carl had instructed me in negotiating corniced ridges: “Roman, if I break a cornice, jump off the other side, okay?” The idea that a rope stretched over the ridge between us would keep us both from falling to the glaciers below seemed iffy at best, but it would be the only way to safeguard our descent of McGinnis’s southeast ridge.

  AT THE END of a stressful two-hour lead, I slithered like an alpine chimney sweep down a big iced-up crack that split a craggy spire. Tied together with twin parallel ropes, we had reached the col between McGinnis and the next mountain. It was a good place to pull Chuck in on belay. Crisp blue shadows rimmed in tangerine stretched across the ridge. The sun would drop soon, sending temperatures to minus thirty again. The wind picked up.

  Waiting for Chuck to join me, I looked ahead. Beyond the col, cornices clung to bare rocks like a white gyrfalcon’s talons to a black fox’s carcass. There was no place to camp here and no time before dark to maneuver through the tortured ridgeline coming up.

  Tense and angry by the time Chuck arrived, I dumped my stress on him.

  “Chuck! There’s no place to camp! Why didn’t you say something earlier, when you were leading?” We argued about whose fault it was that we hadn’t made camp somewhere safe. He ended our spat with a whisper.

  “Okay, fine, Romin Dahl,” he said quietly, his jaw stiff from the cold. “Let’s just split right here. I got a stove and a cookpot, you got a stove and a cookpot. We both got shovels. Just take your rope and give me mine and we’ll go our separate ways.” Chuck untied. He dropped the end at my feet.

  Eyes as big as the yawning space around us, I stared at the naked tail of rope.

  “Chuck . . . look, I was wrong. . . . You were right. It’s my fault. I should have said something back there. Maybe we can camp on this col . . . Chuck, please. Tie back into the rope.”

  He looked away and spat a rat turd of Copenhagen snuff into the clean white snow.

  “Really. Chuck, I mean it. . . . I’m sorry. It’s going to be fucking cold soon. Chuck, man, please. Tie back in.”

  His blue eyes squinted through blond lashes crusted in frost, his look like a runaway dog who’s unsure if he should return to his owner. Reluctantly he retied. The moment passed and Chuck led off. The twin lines paid out as Comstock plowed a trough along the ridge crest, the broadest it had been since the summit. Half a rope length away, he pushed a four-foot aluminum stake—a picket—into the snow as protection, then probed the ridge with his ice ax. I wasn’t sure why. Maybe looking for a camp, maybe testing the footing, when—in one fluid motion—he dropped from sight.

  The rope yanked at my comprehension, reminding of me what Carl had said on Ten Nine Ten: I leaped free of the ridge. I tumbled into space, cartwheeling and bouncing off the snowy slopes below, everything passing in a slow-motion blur. Relaxed, without pain or even fear during a fall that felt very far, I wondered if I might die, like Peter McKeith. Or if not killed, about how I might be hurt, like others who’d fallen and survived, only to suffer with broken arms and legs, days away from help. I found myself praying: Dear God, don’t break any bones. If you must, take my life instead.

  Eventually I came to a bouncing, yo-yo-like stop, hanging from the end of the rope and alive. Dangling in the soft rime and sunshine I took stock—tools, crampons, pack, all intact and me uninjured—my helmet? Where’s my helmet? I looked down. Accelerating toward the glacier at the base of McGinnis was an orange dot. If the rope had broken, that would be me, careening like a rag doll.

  The rope—stretched tight over the ridge—had saved me. What about Chuck? With mechanical ascenders on the rope I pulled my way to the ridge crest. Is the sturdy anchor on the other side Chuck’s dead body? On top, the rope sliced deeply into snow the cornice had left behind. A thirty-foot chunk of the ridgeline—five feet thick and fifteen feet wide—had broken free, the collapsing snow stuffing Chuck into a steep, dark couloir. Hoping to see Chuck alive, I peered down the nasty gash and spied a figure inching upward with tangled coils of rope hanging below.

  “Chuck!” I called down. “You all right?”

  “Yeah!” he yelled back. “I hurt my hand! But I’m okay!”

  “Hold on, Chuck! I’ll come down to you! Put in a screw!”

  I pounded a picket into the hard-packed snow left behind by the cornice, then rappelled down to him. He looked all right: no blood, no deformities.

  “Good God, Chuck. What happened?”

  “Well, Romin Dahl,” he drawled, more shaken than I’d ever seen him, “there was a strange hole in the snow and I bent over to look inside. I thought maybe we could camp in it, dig a cozy little snow cave. And then I was falling and all this snow was pushing down so hard on me I thought the rope would break! And when it stopped—well, there I was.”

  We rappelled a thousand feet into the night, until we found snow deep and soft enough to scrape a shallow bivy cave. It was crowded inside but we felt safe and lucky to be alive. In the morning we rappelled another thousand feet to the glacier, staggered back to camp, stepped into our skis, then cruised off the glacier and down an iced-up creek.

  At the time, I had planned to return and make another climb on the east side of McGinnis. But once back in Fairbanks, the retelling of events on the southeast ridge revealed the truth, stark as the shadow Chuck fell into: the mountains don’t give a goddamn about how good you are.

  I loved alpinism like a junkie loves a fix, but I needed to quit cold turkey. It seemed far better to be an alpine has-been at twenty-five than a dead legend at thirty.

  McGinnis marked the last time I would tie in for an alpinist’s route.

  Chapter 5

  Cody Roman Dial

  Father and son, November 1987.

  Courtesy of the author

  After McGinnis Peak nearly killed me, I asked Peggy to marry me. We wed in June 1985 surrounded by family and friends in a wide-open field behind the Miller Hill cabin. Our honeymoon in Maui followed and then we moved into a one-bedroom house a block from Maureen and Steve. It felt good to be married and done with alpinism, although the Alaskan wilderness still tugged at my bootlaces.

  In May of the following year, after finishing my master’s degree, Peggy and I headed west from the Trans-Alaska Pipeline on cross-country skis to attempt the middle leg of a thousand-mile traverse of the Brooks Range. We pulled sleds filled with a tent, a packraft and paddle, plus food and equipment for four weeks, hoping to enjoy spring give way to summer. From May to August, it never gets dark in the Brooks Range.

  Only five miles from the road, though, the snowpack turned rotten in the afternoon sun, leav
ing conditions too soft to ski, much less walk. We climbed up to the canyon rim and camped, waiting for it to cool and the snow to harden back up. “Let’s just stay here,” Peggy suggested when the first night hovered above freezing.

  On the canyon rim, we set the tent facing east and overlooking Kuyuktuvuk Creek’s valley below. We waited there, stuck in our camp, the tent hot as a greenhouse during sunny day after sunny day. We stripped off our clothes to keep cool and—technically still newlyweds—enjoyed a second honeymoon. Tent-bound, Peggy complained, “I have never eaten so much candy on one trip. We eat chocolate three times a day—just laying around in the tent!”

  “What’s wrong with that?” I asked, thinking it sure beat running out of food with Chuck or bivouacking on a summit with Carl.

  While I was happy to lounge around naked and sweaty all day and spoon under the covers at night, Peggy wanted more exercise. The snow in the valleys remained too sloppy for travel, but the slopes above camp froze into a walkable crust in twilight. Beneath the glow of a midnight sun behind the Brooks Range’s northern ramparts, we spent the week exploring the mountains each night. We would climb a few thousand feet to gain a gentle ridgeline, then slide down on our butts in a real-life Chutes and Ladders. We had one ice ax between us that Peggy used to control her descent on steep snow. I held long sturdy rocks for the same purpose.

  One day, back in the tent after a night in the hills, Peggy woke, looked out, and cast her eyes up at the sky. It was three in the afternoon. “Yuk,” she said, “it’s still gray.” The clouds meant another warm night with snow too soft for travel. “We’re prisoners.”

  “Prisoners of love,” I reminded her, pulling her back in the tent.