Denali's Howl: The Deadliest Climbing Disaster on America's Wildest Peak

by Andy Hall

  “When it came to the summertime and Wilcox went up, it didn’t seem like anything extraordinary, just a long Muldrow slog,” Nosek said. “But your dad had this idea that it would be good if there was a backup plan in place if Wilcox’s party got in trouble. It wasn’t just picking out Wilcox’s party, it was any party, and Wilcox just happened to be one of the first parties after your dad had that idea.”

  The Mountaineering Club of Alaska had planned a Muldrow Glacier ascent of Denali for late June 1967 to be led by Bill Babcock, a twenty-nine-year-old climber who had recently moved to Alaska after spending several years working for the Peace Corps in South America. A veteran of several high-altitude ascents in the Andes, Babcock was a careful climber, fanatical about safety, and a taskmaster when it came to preparing his team.

  The Alaska Rescue Group formed a plan around that fortuitous coincidence of the two climbs. Nosek said Babcock and several members of his team were also ARG rescuers who could be activated if the Wilcox party got into trouble. “We thought that for the Wilcox party we had a good plan in place because ARG members were on their own climb, going up maybe a week behind the Wilcox party. That was a lot of our membership in the ARG on that single climb, so it was considered as the onsite backup for Wilcox.” If the Wilcox Expedition ran into trouble and couldn’t rescue itself like the Winter Ascent party had, a team of rescuers who were already on the mountain and acclimated was the next best thing.

  With the exception of Bill’s nineteen-year-old brother, Jeff Babcock, who was attending college in Maine, the MCA Expedition members all lived in Alaska. Leo Hannan was the coleader; anesthesiologist Grace Jansen-Hoeman provided medical support; and Gayle Nienhueser, Chet Hackney, John Ireton, Barney Seiler, and Don Haglund rounded out the team of nine.

  Their training began in September of 1966 and they climbed together every other weekend throughout the winter and spring of 1967. Bill Babcock put an emphasis on mountaineering techniques and shelter-building on those training climbs. Six outings were conducted on glaciers “where the climbers ascended one-hundred-foot ice walls, ascended forty-foot prussicks, and spent hours cutting steps and placing ice screws.”

  He also kept a close eye on the group dynamics and didn’t hesitate to act when he saw problems. “Each member of the group has come to know the others and there are no serious personality conflicts. Others, who initially joined the group, were eliminated because of personality conflicts that they were responsible for.”

  During their training they endured temperatures as low as minus 25 degrees Fahrenheit and winds in excess of 50 miles per hour. On two trips, one in January and one in February, they went out without their sleeping bags.

  Based on his experiences in the Andes, Bill Babcock knew that tents were vulnerable to wind unless fortified by sturdy snow walls. At high altitude he preferred snow caves, which offered unparalleled protection from mountain storms. So, cave and igloo construction was an integral part of their training.

  “You have to practice and practice to get good at digging caves and building walls and igloos,” Babcock said. “It’s the kind of thing that you have to do a lot of to feel comfortable that you can actually whip one out in an hour or so.”

  Though the MCA Expedition was better trained and more experienced in alpine arctic conditions than the Wilcox Expedition, it was not immune from hardship, conflict, and discord. Babcock planned to traverse the mountain, ascending the Muldrow and descending the West Buttress and flying out from the Kahiltna Glacier. They did not have the luxury of Berle Mercer’s packhorses to get them to the McGonagall Pass, so on June 29 they gathered at Wonder Lake, shouldered their packs, and headed toward the mountain on foot under a ceiling of moisture-laden clouds piled up on the north side of the Alaska Range. High on the Muldrow Glacier, heavy snows pinned down the Wilcox team for a day. Down on the tundra the clouds loosed rain, sleet, and fog. It was the beginning of a wet, miserable, and meandering march for Babcock’s team.

  “Our first seven days were absolutely miserable, rainy, cold, zero visibility,” Babcock said. “It made the going very, very difficult.”

  The McKinley River was high, making the multiple crossings difficult. Chet Hackney fell in twice, first losing his ice ax and later his camera. Don Haglund and Barney Seiler were spooked after running into a bear on the trail and grew more and more morose as the gloomy weather persisted.

  “Don moody and fearful of just about everything bears, river, etc.,” Bill Babcock wrote in his journal. “Also, despite months of having time to prepare he was not yet ready for the climb.”

  Seiler also began having second thoughts. “Barney took off on his own—had to talk to him, as result he got angry, decided to pull out.” Haglund had been moody but hadn’t quit the expedition. A conflict over who would carry loads across one of the swollen creeks was the last straw for Haglund, who gathered his personal gear and left with Seiler.

  I spoke with Don Haglund just a few days before he succumbed to cancer at his home in South Anchorage in August 2012. He told me he was in poor physical condition when he left for the climb, and the incessant rain made him feel all the worse. He was an experienced mountaineer who had climbed extensively in the Alaska and Chugach Ranges and knew the going wasn’t going to get any easier. He said he’d already had it in his head that he wasn’t going to make it to the summit when Seiler told him he was thinking of leaving. Haglund said he thought about his wife and two young daughters at home and made a split-second decision to go with Seiler. He gathered his gear and left without even telling the others.

  I asked if he followed events on the mountain as the Wilcox tragedy unfolded in newspapers across Alaska a few weeks later. “I didn’t pay much attention to it,” he said. “I had moved on, I was just glad I left when I did.”

  Later that day Babcock realized he had mistaken Carlson Creek for Cache Creek. He had led the expedition up the wrong valley and it would take days to backtrack. His journal notes his matter-of-fact realization of the mistake: “The map and book obviously told me so, but [I was] too engrossed to fully realize it.”

  In spite of the weather and the conflicts, the remaining climbers were committed to the expedition and persevered. Bill Babcock and John Ireton found a shortcut between the Carlson and Cache Creek drainages, redistributed the group’s supplies, and headed for McGonagall Pass.

  It was July 9 before the sun returned and the expedition reached the edge of the Muldrow Glacier. “Everything was soaked when we got to McGonagall Pass. Everything,” recalled Gayle Nienhueser. “Every piece of clothing we had was laying out in the sun. It looked like a Chinese laundry.”

  After days of cold, wind, and rain, the sun quickly became too much, as Babcock noted in his journal: “Hot weather made relays from eleven A.M. to three thirty P.M. unbearable.”

  Before leaving McGonagall Pass behind, Babcock made a surprising discovery.

  “There were some halfway decent snow shovels and a couple of saws left by them [the Wilcox Expedition] at McGonagall Pass, which we couldn’t really figure out,” he recalled.

  The MCA Expedition had pared down its own gear after Haglund and Seiler left, but shovels were not among the items discarded. In his July 9 journal entry Babcock noted, “Mistake to leave big shovel, each tent or cave team needs shovels for caves 2 or three man is about maximum.”

  By Tuesday, July 11, all their supplies were at the top of the pass and a rope team had already established a cache at the Lower Icefall. Buoyed by clear weather and improved morale, the pace quickened and they began moving up the glacier.

  But a few days later the expedition lost another man, this time to a close call with an avalanche. “It was Gayle and Leo who made a relay,” Bill Babcock said. “Right after they completed the relay a huge slide came down literally ten or fifteen minutes later. Had they been anywhere on that path they would have been killed. After that Leo came up to me and said he just couldn’t go—
with kids at home, he couldn’t do it.” Though it was a sixteen-mile round-trip, Gayle walked Leo back to McGonagall Pass and made sure he got off the glacier safely before returning.

  Though Babcock’s expedition had barely reached the mountain, it was already down three members. Yet Babcock’s journal entries reflect no angst about the losses. I asked him about it.

  “Early in the game, when I first started climbing, I had people going with me say they wanted to leave and I always tried to talk them out of it,” he said. “It never worked out. I found that trying to push someone to go along who doesn’t want to go along is senseless.”

  Though Don Haglund said he had abandoned the expedition, Babcock recalls it differently.

  “Don and Barney just came to me and said they wanted to go back and I said fine. If you don’t want to be here, you’re not part of the team anymore.” The two men were experienced climbers; they had their reasons for leaving the expedition and that was good enough for him. Babcock said coercing them to continue might have put the entire expedition at risk if the men weren’t committed or prepared, which seemed to be the case. His attitude is in sharp contrast to that of Wilcox, who was intent on keeping his expedition together in spite of the obvious disparities in skill and, at least at times, commitment.

  Between the Muldrow Glacier’s Upper and Lower Icefalls, the MCA group camped at a site previously occupied by the Wilcox Expedition and found “several pair of broke plastic snowshoes, a considerable amount of miscellaneous equipment, and food and fuel.” Discarding the impractical Snowtreads made sense, but Babcock thought leaving the food and fuel behind was foolish.

  So the five men and one woman continued to make their way up the Muldrow Glacier under mostly fair skies, moving quickly along the trail broken by the Wilcox team several days before. The rainy weather and lost trail below McGonagall Pass had slowed their progress early on, and that delay of several days proved to be fateful. While the Wilcox Expedition’s eight-man advance team settled in to the 17,900-foot high camp, Babcock’s MCA team was still negotiating the avalanche zones and crevasse fields of the Muldrow Glacier.

  “I think the smartest thing I ever did was take everybody up the wrong valley,” Babcock said. “It saved our lives. If we hadn’t gotten lost, we would have been up on the Harper when the storm hit.”

  CHAPTER 8

  HOWLING

  A 40-mile-per-hour wind pulled and plucked at the fabric of the tents tucked into Camp VII at 17,900 feet and the noisy snapping made for a restless night. When Howard Snyder awoke on the morning of July 15, the sky was dark and clouds and wind-driven snow obscured the view across the Harper Glacier. A few feet away, in the tent he shared with Denny Luchterhand, Joe Wilcox listened to the wind and wondered if they would be denied the chance to stand on the summit. He knew many climbers had come this far only to be turned back by punishing wind and snow that can come with little warning and settle in with impunity. With the gusts still lapping at his tent, Joe Wilcox dozed off again.

  Though the day seemed less than promising, Snyder began filling his small backpack with the essentials he would carry to the summit. By late morning on July 15, the ranger’s interpretation of the rising barometer was proving accurate. The wind dropped to 5 miles per hour and clouds gave way to a deep-blue sky. In the Colorado tent, Snyder, Lewis, and Schlichter began dressing for the extreme conditions that can occur on the summit ridge. Over their long underwear and ski pants, they pulled on down pants and shirts and wind shell parkas. Feet were tucked into silk socks, then wool socks, then down booties, felt booties, felt overboot insulation, and finally nylon overboots. Thick silk gloves, followed by down mittens, covered their hands.

  When they emerged from their tent around 11:30 A.M., Joe Wilcox was the only other climber who was ready to go. None of the others had budged from their tents. “Here we are, Jerry Lewis, Paul Schlichter, myself, and Joe Wilcox,” Howard Snyder said. “We’re out of our tents, we’re ready to go, nobody’s stirring in the two tents where these guys were. So I went over to Jerry Clark, the deputy leader, and said, ‘Jerry aren’t you guys going up?’ ‘Nah,’ he said, ‘we’re just going to sit and watch the snow blow.’”

  A different decision by Jerry Clark at this point might have changed the Wilcox Expedition’s place in history from tragedy to a climbing footnote. Had those healthy enough to climb gone to the top they might have avoided the storm and left the weaker climbers with no choice but to descend.

  Snyder said he was surprised at the time, but he’s had a lot of years to think about why they decided not to go that day and now believes that Jerry Clark was looking out for the weaker climbers when he chose to wait.

  “Well, they knew, at least Jerry Clark knew, of the correspondence with the park wherein they were forbidden to divide the group into the most experienced and the least experienced, and that’s exactly what they had done,” Snyder said. “So, he probably said to Hank Janes and to Denny Luchterhand and to Mark McLaughlin, he probably said, ‘Look, we have been forbidden to divide our group like this. Denny can’t go to the summit today. So we’re going to stay here, we’re going to wait for those guys to come up from 15,000 feet so we will not have violated the prohibition of the park. So, we will go together tomorrow, just like we have done all these years in the Cascades. We will go together as a group. Let Wilcox and these Colorado guys go on, what the heck do we care? We’ll go tomorrow.’”

  Comradeship, Wilcox believes, motivated their decision to stay behind. “I thought it strange at the time,” he said. “In retrospect, I think that they might have wanted to climb with friends. That was probably the reason. Resting at 18,000 feet wasn’t going to help much.”

  Paul Schlichter believes that strong leadership at that point in the climb might have changed the course of events that followed. “I think that was where Joe or somebody should have said, ‘You know the weather is good, you’re not going to get any rest by staying here at almost 18,000 feet for another day. You’ve got to decide whether you’re going to come with us now, or it’s probably smart to turn around and go back.’”

  Over the decades since the four-man team went on to the summit, much has been read into their decision to go on without their companions. However, the decision had been discussed on the radio with the Eielson rangers and it followed the same routine the expedition had followed since it first set foot on the Muldrow Glacier at McGonagall Pass: an advance team led, followed by the support team a day later.

  Wilcox also has been accused of abandoning his team at this point in the climb, but it is Howard Snyder, his oft-supposed adversary, who has long challenged that contention.

  “In Joe’s defense, if it is a defense, we were part of his group,” Snyder said. “Just like the other guys. Well, not like the other guys, but part of his group . . . I don’t think he is guilty of any wrongdoing in that. But it makes it very convenient for people to dump on him for it, to say he should have done otherwise. Here’s what I tell people: We were his group. We were no longer an independent group. We were part of the Joseph F. Wilcox Mount McKinley Expedition.”

  So, while John Russell, Walt Taylor, Anshel Schiff, and Steve Taylor began their trek up the Harper Glacier toward Camp VII at 17,900 feet, Jerry Clark, Mark McLaughlin, Denny Luchterhand, and Hank Janes waited for them. Joe Wilcox, Howard Snyder, Paul Schlichter, and Jerry Lewis set out for the summit.

  As they prepared to leave, Wilcox discovered that they had only fifty wands to mark the trail. “What a blunder, I thought. How could John have sent us barely half the wands needed to mark the route from high camp to the summit?”

  Rather than waste the good weather waiting for more wands to arrive with the men coming up from Camp VI, they decided to go on and mark the route by breaking the four-foot wands in half. Howard Snyder led the rope out of camp; Paul Schlichter and Jerry Lewis followed, with Joe Wilcox bringing up the rear.

  The summit team placed wands
at 110-foot rope-length intervals, sometimes in as little as 6 inches of snow. The wands marked the trail both for their own return and for those who would follow in a day or two. When visibility is so poor that the trail and the next wand can’t be distinguished, the team waits at the last wand and the leader walks to the end of his rope and then fans back and forth like a human radar beam until he finds the next wand. Once it is found, the rope team moves forward and the process is repeated.

  They took fifty minutes to reach Denali Pass, and although that first half mile was nearly level, the going was difficult due to weak, crusty snow underlain by soft powder. At the pass, they found several caches from prior expeditions. “We did not inspect any of them,” Wilcox reported. “Although we did notice one cache in wooden crates had been broken into—possibly by the winter expedition.”

  At Denali Pass, they attempted to hail Eielson using their handheld radio but had no luck. At 2:00 P.M. near 18,500 feet, they made “loud and clear contact” with Eielson, which continued all the way to the summit.

  “At Denali Pass we encountered wands leading up toward the summit, which apparently belonged to a recent West Buttress group,” said Wilcox. “We chose to follow these wands, saving ours in case we needed them later. On the ridge behind Archdeacon’s Tower we could see that the rest of the route to the summit was well wanded, so we cached the rest of our wands—about fifty.”

  Snyder disagrees. “It was not well wanded,” he said. “I was leading all day long from the high camp to the summit. There were some wands; we saw about a half dozen before the summit. Two were at an ice cliff, near the side of Archdeacon’s Tower Ridge. Otherwise there weren’t very many and some were blown away by the time we returned.”