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

by Andy Hall

  We see a party of 5 coming down the cocks comb really slow. I watch them thru my binocs and make funny comments #3 sits down, #1 talks, what the hell is going on? Until it occurs to me that there is trouble. As one we go up and meet the five man group who are staggering down.

  Hoeman, Bill Babcock, Jeff Babcock, Gayle Nienhueser, John Ireton, and Chet Hackney gathered food and drink and met the exhausted climbers at the top of the fixed line about 900 feet above their camp.

  “They literally drank and drank,” Babcock told me. “They drank everything we had and ate everything we had. We belayed them down the icy pitch and then fed them again. We were elated to see the climbers but then we wondered what the heck happened to the other ones.”

  CHAPTER 10

  AN ICE AX IN THE SNOW

  When Bill Babcock realized that the seven remaining men had been incommunicado high on the Harper Glacier for nearly a week and might be running short on food and fuel, he urged Joe Wilcox to call an all-out rescue. “To me, it was blatantly obvious four days earlier that anyone up there was going to be having serious problems,” Bill Babcock told me.

  Grace Jansen Hoeman’s journal reads, “Bill will go up in forced ascent if the decision is made.”

  The 4:45 P.M. entry on Sunday, July 23, in the Wonder Lake log notes, “Wilcox reached MCA group at 12,100 OK. Asks that rescue not be called until observation made, but should be ready to go immediately. Asked about a larger plane. Merry again recommended to HQ that overflight by large craft be made.”

  The Wonder Lake log was clear: do not launch a rescue until an observation flight is made. But as far as Joe Wilcox was concerned, there was no difference between calling for a rescue and calling for an overflight. “Somehow, there was the idea that Merry hadn’t called an all-out rescue,” said Wilcox. “I kept repeating ‘I need an overflight.’ I didn’t see the distinction. You can’t have an overflight without an emergency situation.” He was asking for help.

  At sea, when lives are at stake, the distress call is mayday, mayday, mayday. On a mountain it is not so simple; at least it wasn’t then.

  Neither the Park Service nor the Alaska Rescue Group had the authority to order the Air Force to launch a plane. That decision lay solely with the commander at the RCC. Given that National Weather Service wind charts showed high-velocity winds had been constant at 18,000 feet since July 18, any flight would have been dangerous, if not impossible, and visibility virtually nil anyway. Only the uninformed would have thought an overflight possible.

  “I got the sense that Wilcox did not want to trigger a rescue unless he was absolutely sure it was necessary,” recalled Frank Nosek. “I don’t know what the thinking would be behind that. I’ve often thought to myself, Well, Wilcox viewed rescues like most of the climbers did in the early ’60s; it’s kind of a sign of weakness. You didn’t want it to happen unless there was absolutely, positively no other way but to call a rescue.”

  Late that day, Gayle Nienhueser, one of the MCA climbers, overheard Joe Wilcox and Schiff arguing over whether to call a rescue. Schiff, Nienhueser recalled, was worried about the cost, a familiar concern. Though keeping costs down had been a factor when planning the expedition, Wilcox says he wasn’t worried about the expense when it came to searching for the lost men. One way or another the matter was resolved between Schiff and Wilcox quickly.

  “There’s a full-scale rescue under way!” Schiff announced to Snyder and Schlichter at 10:30 P.M. “Do you want your parents notified?”

  The Wonder Lake log on July 23 makes no mention of a formal rescue call, only noting continued calls for an overflight: “Merry again recommended to H.Q. that overflight by large craft be made—decision apparently has been to wait until Sheldon can make it.” The Alaska Rescue Group diary doesn’t note a change in status either, but after all, with the mountain socked in, rescuers in Anchorage and Talkeetna could do no more than stand by.

  “I remember we mobilized and were ready, but we didn’t feel like we were in a better position for a rescue than Babcock’s group was,” Nosek said. “Sheldon couldn’t go, and the RCC wouldn’t.”

  How hard would it have been to do a flyover? Chuck Sassara flew in Alaska from 1951 to 2010, piloting more than 171 types of aircraft from a two-seater, 65-horsepower Luscombe to the four-engine, cargo-carrying Lockheed L-1049 Super Constellation. Sassara says effective search aircraft must be able to fly low and slow enough to allow for a visual search while maintaining maneuverability. “You have to be moving faster than your aircraft’s maneuvering speed in the mountains. It’s stall speed plus 50 percent because of downdrafts and other turbulence.” For the small, single-engine Super Cub and slightly larger Cessna 180, that’s 60 and 85 miles per hour respectively. The multiengine C-130 would have to maintain a speed of at least 200 miles per hour.

  Because of their need for speed, large aircraft don’t like small spaces. “You simply can’t get it down in those cracks and crevices that have to be searched like you can a 180 or a Cub,” Sassara said. “You need a lot of room to turn. If you’re in the Mojave Desert: no problem. If you’re in Denali Pass trying to get through a notch, you’re going to be in a world of hurt.”

  The plan that Superintendent Hall and the ARG had made, calling on the MCA Expedition to become a rescue team, was the only option available. They were acclimated, in position, and ready to move as soon as the weather allowed.

  That night Bill Babcock, along with his brother Jeff, Nienhueser, Ireton, and Hackney, made preparations to move up as quickly as they could. Grace Hoeman had been sick and Babcock felt that she would hinder their progress and told her she would have to descend with the Wilcox team. She was not happy about it but agreed.

  Joe Wilcox expressed no interest in climbing back up the mountain with the MCA team. Babcock saw his anguish. “He just wanted to take off, and I wasn’t in a position to stop him. It seemed like he should go out with his group. Joe was obviously very distraught. I mean, I can’t even imagine what was going through his head.”

  Wilcox Expedition group one, accompanied by Dr. Hoeman, continued their descent at noon on Monday, July 24. Heavy snow and whiteout prevailed at the MCA camp on Karstens Ridge through the day. Babcock’s journal notes that at 9:00 P.M., the high winds returned: “Winds began to pick up and by midnight were 50–60 mph and the tents all but blew away. The high winds lasted until early morning.”

  At 4:30 A.M. on July 25, Chet Hackney woke the camp. The skies had cleared and they readied to leave, packing warm clothes, sleeping bags, food, and their shovels and snow saws. The tents that had proven vulnerable to the wind and sapped their energy during the night were left behind. From here on they’d rely on snow caves for shelter.

  Though there is no mention of it in Babcock’s journal, the Wonder Lake log reads, “MCA report good flying weather.”

  That day, Don Sheldon flew for the first time since July 18. Though a standing cloud cap obscured the mountain above 15,000 feet and rose well above the summit, to 25,000 feet, he proved the versatility of his small plane by slipping in and dropping a radio and food 500 feet below Wilcox’s 15,000-foot camp.

  Higher on the mountain, at 17,200 feet on the West Buttress, Louis Reichardt reported, “We awoke at 3:30 A.M., the familiar thin cloud had returned to the mountain, a harbinger of storm. Every one of us had seen that cloud before and knew what it implied.” After playing cat and mouse in the clouds, the sun and the peak disappeared from view, and heavy snow resumed.

  The weeklong storm that hit those men on the mountain was a once-in-a-lifetime event, maybe once in a century. John Papineau, who’s been a meteorologist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) for more than a decade, sits at his desk in the fall of 2011, studying a modern-day version of the 1967 storm on a computer screen. Even today, he says, if a storm of this magnitude hit, there’d be little we could do to save anyone unfortunate enough to be clinging to the side of Dena
li when it rolled in.

  Under the fluorescent lights at his desk in the Anchorage Forecast Office, Papineau sits down in front of two side-by-side computer screens.

  “Would you like to see the storm?” he asks, then without waiting for an answer clicks the mouse and makes a few keystrokes: a map of Alaska appears on the screens, overlain with concentric circles representing the weather systems that were moving across the skies of interior Alaska on July 18, 1967.

  Since the 1930s, NOAA’s National Weather Service has used weather balloons to collect information on atmospheric conditions, including temperature, moisture, pressure, and wind speed and direction. In Alaska, balloons are launched daily from thirteen locations, and data collected during their flights is used to create weather forecasts for the region. Three of those locations—McGrath, Fairbanks, and Anchorage—triangulate almost perfectly around Denali. That data, from July 18 to July 25, 1967, is what Papineau has used to produce the model on his screen.

  “This is where it began, in the Arctic,” he says, pointing to the top of the Alaska map. “In the Beaufort Sea, we had an area of low pressure, and in that airflow the winds are going to be counterclockwise.”

  He grabs a white pad of paper and makes an inverted V in the center saying, “Denali is here.” Then he draws a spiral swirling counterclockwise just north of the mountain. As the spiral grows, the lower part of the rings, representing wind direction, begins overlapping the mountain in a west-to-east direction.

  “That’s the low to the north,” he says.

  Beneath and slightly to the left of Denali he draws another spiral, this one swirling clockwise. As he widens it, the upper lines of the spiral overlap the mountain as well, also indicating west-to-east airflow.

  “That’s the high in the south.”

  Then he taps the overlapping lines.

  “So anytime you get a low and a high and they get close together, you get strong winds,” he says.

  On the computer screen the weather systems were bigger and less distinct, but as Papineau advances the maps showing July 19, 20, 21, and 22, more and more lines appear, compressing tightly together over Denali. Those lines, he explains, represent unusually strong westerly winds.

  The data Papineau is using tells a story of just how horrific those winds were, whipping at 60 to 70 miles per hour, nearly nonstop, from July 19 to July 25. Papineau shakes his head and exhales in a long, slow hiss, his eyes never leaving the screen.

  “Those guys on the mountain just had the unfortunate timing—the wrong place at the wrong time.”

  Just a few weeks later, the late Ted Fathauer ran a similar model at the Weather Bureau office in Fairbanks and also marveled at the stack of lines indicating the winds over Denali during the weeklong July storm.

  “They were where the wind is just like a river,” he said, confirming Papineau’s analysis. “It goes slightly upstream, but when it begins to flow with gravity, then it accelerates. I can see eighty miles an hour in Denali Pass, but the real change began on the nineteenth of July. They must have had gusts of eighty or ninety miles an hour.”

  Fathauer, advancing through the weather maps a day at a time, shakes his head.

  “It’s not the first time we’ve ever seen them act like this, but it’s certainly the worst. Then, on the twentieth, there, it was even faster I’m sure. In the south pass they were getting west winds gusting to a hundred miles an hour. More of the same on the twenty-first; the twenty-second must have been a real scene. The twenty-third was only a little less terrible. I’d say this is the worst storm to hit the mountain, the worst when people were on it.”

  Then he explained a factor known as gap flow, where air movement through tight passes is accelerated like water through a fire hose, and that thereby the wind could have been three times as fierce as 100 miles per hour. It would have surpassed the highest wind gusts ever recorded on land by some 70 miles per hour, but a back- of-the-envelope calculation of gap-flow acceleration suggests maximum wind-gust velocities as high as 300 miles per hour could have raked the ridges and passes of the upper mountain on Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday—July 20, 21, and 22 of 1967.

  Though they were exhausted after a night spent wrestling with their tents in the high winds at the 12,100-foot camp, the MCA Expedition turned rescue party made swift work of the steep and treacherous Karstens Ridge, covering 2,400 feet in nine hours—a feat that had taken the Wilcox crew a full week to accomplish.

  And the work wasn’t over when they reached the top, as Babcock’s journal notes: “Spent several hours digging cave and building igloo. VERY TIRED.”

  To be fair to the Wilcox team, part of the reason they’d taken so long was because they were relaying supplies, necessary when supporting a large team high on the mountain. The MCA team moved fast, intent on reaching the men they believed might be stranded without food and fuel.

  “We were still planning to relay,” Babcock said. “But then the park asked us if we would just go nonstop in hopes of getting up to where someone might be alive.”

  To move fast, they had to go light, discarding all unnecessary equipment, including their tents.

  “I had been very happy with snow caves and igloos, and everyone had experience over the winter building them. Our tents were quite heavy; we had those big pyramidal tents, so I decided we would go just with entrenching tools and we would take more food and fuel and go on up without stopping, without relaying.”

  On the morning of July 26, the short traverse across Parker Pass to the Harper that Snyder and the others had found so treacherous and icy two days earlier was buried under two feet of new snow. “The going was extremely difficult with deep new snow from 14,500 to 15,000,” Babcock recalled. “Gayle Nienhueser did an excellent job of leading all the way and breaking trail.”

  They reached 15,100 feet at 1:30 P.M. and spent the next two hours looking in vain for Don Sheldon’s airdrop after getting bad directions from Eielson.

  Later they found one of the packages containing three radios, including one Sheldon was supposed to keep for his own use, precisely on the trail. It had been so hard to find because it was wrapped in a white pillowcase. Babcock’s anger over the incident is reflected in his log entry: “Never should have done it, wasted hours looking. Sheldon’s reliability highly questionable due to the fact a pillowcase, unwanted drop at 15,100, his uncertainty of exact location of first drop after it could not be found, etc. BILL PISSED OFF!”

  Looking back on it, Bill Babcock said he isn’t surprised that communications were fouled up. They were unable to speak directly to Don Sheldon, or to the park for that matter.

  “We had this crazy way of communicating,” he said. “They could hear us in Fairbanks, and Fairbanks could reach Eielson, and Eielson could contact the headquarters. It was a back-and-forth thing; it took forever to communicate.”

  After the first foul-up, they asked to have Sheldon drop food and fuel at 17,900. If any of the seven men they still hoped to find were alive, they would need to feed them. Babcock’s concern grew as his party, which included his nineteen-year-old brother, put itself at greater and greater risk, climbing higher without getting the supply drops that had been promised. They carried a fraction of the food and fuel he liked to have at high altitude to facilitate the quick ascent. Not enough to endure another extended storm if they were marooned, and certainly not enough to support survivors.

  Even the scheduled radio calls were exhausting. “Today, you can have a conversation in thirty seconds,” Babcock told me. “These conversations would take twenty, thirty, forty-five minutes the way communications were going. Gayle would say something; it would go to Fairbanks, to Eielson, and then to the park headquarters. Then the park would go to Eielson, then to Fairbanks, then to us. It took forever to get anything done, and you’re sitting out there, totally exposed, out of the snow cave. I really think that got to Gayle. He started to get sick; then you
get weak, you get dehydrated on top of it. It’s only a matter of time before you’re getting pulmonary or cerebral edema.”

  On Thursday, July 27, the summit of Denali stood white against the blue sky for the first time in more than a week. The shroud of clouds and blowing snow that had hidden it were gone and Don Sheldon wasted no time. He was at the mountain at 4:30 A.M., passing over the MCA’s 15,100-foot camp at 4:45, and further angering Bill Babcock when no supplies were dropped. Sheldon spent two hours searching the upper mountain to 18,000 feet in his Cessna 180 but saw no sign of the missing climbers. Gary Hansen and Paul Crews of the Alaska Rescue Group followed a few hours later in a chartered Cessna 310, flying through Denali Pass several times but spotting only the Western States Expedition on its way to the summit.

  The MCA climbers started up the Harper Glacier at 10:00 A.M., and after building an igloo at 16,500 feet, they settled in for another night. Stoves wouldn’t start that night, and the Babcocks weren’t able to cook dinner until 10:00 P.M. It was cold and windy on the Harper Glacier, but the igloo offered warm refuge, free of the rustle and snap of a nylon tent bucking in the wind. Babcock’s journal reads, “Bill exhausted, shelter constructed fair, Gayle starting with cold, windy otherwise weather good and fair.”

  Clear skies and light winds reigned again on July 28, and the A-67 Expedition spotted Sheldon’s shiny Cessna 180 at 10:00 A.M. and again at 12:30 P.M. searching the upper mountain.

  The MCA party left for the Wilcox party’s camp at 17,900 at 10:00 a.m. Ireton and Hackney, both unaffected by the altitude, moved too quickly for Nienhueser, so he tied on to the Babcock brothers’ rope, which moved at a more moderate pace. Each man carried a 70-pound pack filled mostly with food and fuel. It was almost 5:00 P.M. when Ireton spotted a Stubai ice ax, the brand Steve Taylor had carried, lying on top of the hard-packed snow a mile below the 17,900-foot camp.