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

by Andy Hall

  “The snow was hard enough; it looked like it had been blown from camp,” Ireton said. “So I picked it up and stuck it in the snow right where I had found it.”

  A quarter of a mile on, he and Hackney found John Russell’s bamboo summit pole thrust in the snow, its top festooned with black strips of nylon from the burned tent. “Around that,” Ireton described, “there was a sleeping bag, and over the sleeping bag was an alpine hut red shell. It was just wrapped around and we came up to it and I thought it was just a cache or something so I picked it up and there was nothing inside of it except a pair of wool socks and some down booties.”

  Next to the pole, Bill Babcock said, a crevasse yawned black against the bright, white snow. “We hollered, we looked into it, and it was one of those bottomless things. I certainly wasn’t going to rappel into it. I have no idea what happened, but I would suspect someone is down at the bottom of that thing.”

  The worst was yet to be discovered. After several more minutes of trudging up through the wind-crusted snow, the Wilcox team’s 17,900-foot-high Camp VII came into view.

  There was no movement, no welcoming calls, and no survivors. Just silence.

  Mark McLaughlin’s homemade tent stood oddly taut in the light breeze. Next to it was, as Bill Babcock described in his journal, “a ghastly sight, a man sitting upright alongside a Logan tent. Face and hands are blue, green, white, frozen yet decomposing.”

  Ireton said the frozen man wore orange and his face was covered with snow.

  “He was blown over, but during the storm he was holding the pole,” he said. “The tent had probably ripped apart and the sleeping bag had blown away and he was there holding the pole and he obviously froze to death.”

  Gayle Nienhueser did not look closely at the body, though he took a photo of the tent-shrouded figure. The memory still haunts him forty-five years later.

  “I was twenty-six,” Nienhueser says. “I’d never seen a body before. The hand that was exposed was black, and it had frozen and thawed a couple of times. I wasn’t feeling good, and the smell . . .” His voice became choked and tears erupted from his eyes as we spoke. He put his face into his hands, bowed his head forward, and didn’t say anything for more than a minute.

  The sight of the corpse was frightening for the climbers, suddenly bringing home the realization that on Denali, death is never far away for the careless and the unlucky. However, the gruesome condition of the climber’s body didn’t mean he had died a painful death. Freezing can be a peaceful and relatively painless way to go.

  If there is any real pain, it comes at the beginning, when the cold begins to penetrate the skin and causes surface capillaries to constrict, shunting blood deeper into the body. Fingers, toes, the tip of the nose, earlobes, and other extremities are sacrificed in order to keep the vital organs warm. As the blood retreats to protect the core, feet and hands begin to ache, and the nose and ears sting. But the pain, rarely overwhelming, soon is eased by numbness settling in where the blood once flowed.

  Hypothermia takes over when the body temperature slips below 95 degrees Fahrenheit. With it comes violent shivering as muscles contract involuntarily, trying to generate body heat. When warmth continues to flee, the shivering slows and then stops, leaving the muscles unnaturally tight and making simple tasks like donning a jacket or striking a match difficult. Loss of muscle coordination soon follows and walking becomes problematic.

  Hands and feet are soon useless, nose and ears turn white, and lips turn blue, making clear speech impossible.

  Feelings of detachment to the rapidly deteriorating situation soon cloud the mind. A lost glove or hat? No worries. A sleeping bag carried away by the wind: vaguely inconvenient.

  When the body’s core temperature drops into the 80s, complete apathy comes, and then stupor as the cold renders brain enzymes less efficient. The consciousness that still clings to the rapidly cooling body grows blissfully unaware of the catastrophic breakdown of physical function. As blood gathers around the organs most vital to life, the kidneys go into overdrive to deal with the excess fluids that have flooded inward. An overpowering need to urinate rises, followed by one last, sweet release and the fleeting feeling of warmth on the skin.

  A degree or two lower and the pulse becomes irregular and erratic as chilled nerves lose their ability to carry the signals that cue the heart to beat. When the core temperature reaches 85 degrees, a sudden and inexplicable feeling of heat cascades across the body, so hot that victims often tear their clothes off seeking relief, unintentionally hastening their own end. One theory behind this paradoxical undressing suggests that the surface capillaries that constricted early on to push body heat into the core suddenly dilate, bringing a burning sensation as blood surges into the nearly frozen flesh. Whether it is the body’s last-ditch effort to warm itself or a sudden failure of the muscles constricting the blood vessels is unknown. Unconsciousness and death usually follow close behind.

  Bill Babcock said the grisly discovery was disturbing for the entire team, him included.

  “It was a nightmarish thing to run into,” he said. “We tried to open the zipper on his parka but it was frozen. There was a terrible stench. I’d never seen anything like that before. We dug our snow caves quite a ways away.”

  Too traumatized by their discovery, the men avoided the body, not thinking to take more photos that might help identify him later. They reported the dead man and the ruined camp to Eielson, and the rangers asked if the expedition would continue searching, promising to drop radios, 180 man-days of food, sleeping bags, and heavy-duty tents.

  Babcock said they’d go for the summit in the morning and search along the way, but as to staying on for an extended search, “We give negative as we must return to jobs if we make the peak.”

  Back in Anchorage, Gary Hansen was hard at work again. With the mountain finally clear for flying, he worked to coordinate the large airdrop that had been promised to Babcock. After confirming that Joe Wilcox had requested it and would cover the cost, Hansen tried to secure the use of an aircraft large enough to drop the load above 18,000 feet on Denali. The Air Force was the obvious choice.

  At 3:25 P.M., he contacted Major Stevens at the RCC and asked if the Air Force could provide the food and supplies and make the drop. Stevens’s response was curt: “Not likely.”

  At 4:30 Stevens called back and asked, “Can this be accomplished commercially?” Hansen responded, “All equipment required not commercially available. Civilian aircraft available but not experienced in making critical air drop such as required here.” Then he added, “Timing most critical.”

  Stevens called back fifteen minutes later. The flight was on.

  The next morning, at 7:06, a C-130 took off from Elmendorf Air Force Base in Anchorage with a crew of six, accompanied by a combat photographer and two Alaska Rescue Group observers: Gary Hansen and Dave Johnston, one of the men who was part of the Winter Ascent of Denali earlier that year.

  The upper mountain was clear and windless, and the bus-size prop plane thundered through Denali Pass ten times, varying its altitude with each passage. Johnston and Hansen rode in the cockpit and peered through the observation windows looking for the missing climbers.

  Johnston was probably the most qualified man on the planet to be on the flight searching for the lost men. Just a few months earlier during the Winter Ascent, he himself had survived a similar weeklong storm in Denali Pass by digging a cave and holing up in it for a week with two companions. If anyone knew where to look, he did.

  But on that day, though the sky was cloudless, the wind calm, and visibility about as good as it gets, they saw no sign of survivors. Johnston said while the military plane was perfect for dropping large amounts of supplies, it proved to be a poor platform for searching the upper mountain. “It’s not the kind of rig you want to be looking for little dots from,” he said. “Too fast an airplane.”

  On one
run they dropped radios near a rope team of three men, probably Nienhueser and the Babcock brothers, who were climbing together that day. A few minutes later the plane made a west-to-east run through the pass and dropped 180 man-days of food in the form of forty-six cases of C rations, along with twelve double sleeping bags. On the return east-to-west run, they dropped five Gerry cans of stove fuel and nine two-man tents.

  Bill Babcock said their accuracy left something to be desired. “Well, the plane flew over and dropped everything off the West Buttress, right over the edge—tons of stuff, and it didn’t do us a bit of good.”

  High overhead, the plane circled the mountain twice and headed back to Anchorage. So much for the flyover.

  The MCA team had risen at 2:30 A.M. after a fitful night, haunted by thoughts of the young man who sat in permanent repose so close by. They were on the way to the summit by 5:30 A.M. Bill Babcock broke trail to Denali Pass, and then Hackney and Ireton, on their own rope, took the lead. Around noon the five men were approaching Archdeacon’s Tower at 19,650 feet. Nienhueser was suffering from a bad headache and Bill Babcock watched him closely, but the weather was holding and they all pushed on. Ireton and Hackney pulled ahead and reached the summit first. They were on the way down the summit ridge at 2:30 P.M. when they passed the other three heading up.

  “By three fifteen we also reach the summit,” Babcock’s journal notes. “Somehow Gayle makes it. Weather definitely closing in so we take a few pictures and depart.”

  As Hackney and Ireton waited below, the sound of an aircraft engine filled the sky. It was Don Sheldon, this time in his Super Cub. The plane circled the slope below Archdeacon’s Tower, dove at it once, and then flew close to the two climbers and dropped a message.

  Scrawled on a piece of brown paper bag was a diagram and a note. Two marks indicated Ireton and Hackney; three others represented the men near the summit. Below a scrawl indicating Archdeacon’s Tower was a note: “I see something red over on the slope.”

  Ireton started toward it, far enough to spot the patch of color on the icy slope, but Hackney blew his whistle to call him back, insisting they wait and discuss it with Babcock, the expedition leader.

  Babcock could see the signs of an approaching storm and was eager to get back to the safety of their snow caves. He thought investigating the bodies would be too risky and time-consuming. “I really tried very hard to talk them out of going over there,” he said. “But John was a very conscientious guy. They wanted to go over and check.”

  Nienhueser and the Babcock brothers continued on toward camp while Ireton and Hackney went to investigate. Hackney broke through a crevasse bridge as his partner belayed him down the 50-degree slope but continued until he could get a good look at the object. It was another frozen man, this one dressed in a red parka, orange wind pants, and green overboots.

  “The body was in a sitting position facing downhill with one leg extended and the other leg in a sitting position underneath his body, in a semi-relaxed position,” Hackney said. “I never seen an ice ax or a pack or a sleeping bag, anything. He was just in a very relaxed sitting position, just as if he had died in a very relaxed state.”

  Directly below they could see a second figure clad in darker clothes with a sleeping bag wrapped around its shoulders.

  Ireton described this encounter. “He again was in a position where one leg was extended and the other one was put up,” he said. “It wasn’t quite as steep, but he was laying back. And around his body he had what looked like to me, an Eddie Bauer Karakorum [sleeping bag] in a green element cloth cover. And he had it wrapped around the upper part of his body. And I think he had blue wind pants, and I think he had light-colored hair.”

  The men were not roped together and neither wore gloves or packs. Both were sitting with one leg tucked underneath and one extended in front, as if bracing themselves. Whether it was against the wind at their backs, or to hold a rope that may have belayed others below them is unknown. There was no rope present when the MCA climbers inspected the bodies and no other gear was found. Below the bodies, the slope descended into a crevasse field, and beyond that lay the Harper Glacier and the Wilcox Expedition’s high camp. In an interview with the Park Service, John Ireton speculated that they were trying to take a shortcut back to camp and concluded, “I don’t recommend anyone use that again.”

  After viewing the bodies briefly, Hackney and Ireton continued on, traversing the slope to meet the trail that the other three had taken back to camp. On the way down they inspected a few of the airdrops but left the contents undisturbed. “We looked into the cans and there were radios, but we didn’t think they were of any use to us,” Ireton said. “Because we had found three of the seven bodies and it was pretty much an indication as to what happened to the rest of them.”

  The MCA party had done its part in the search; though they’d found only three bodies, they knew there would be no rescue for the lost Wilcox climbers.

  Ireton and Hackney reached camp fifteen minutes behind the others, just ahead of the storm that Bill Babcock had seen coming. His journal describes its arrival: “Mysterious clouds spill over McKinley, streamer indicating high wind velocity, black billowing clouds have reached Denali Pass and winds increase and white out conditions prevail.”

  Babcock told me, “If we had dillydallied a half an hour, we wouldn’t have found our camp. John and Chet, they got back and within a half an hour you couldn’t see a hand in front of your face. A lot of it is just plain, dumb luck.”

  By this time, Joe Wilcox had reached Wonder Lake and was safely recuperating with the Merry family. Wayne Merry shared his frustration over the rescue effort and the failure to launch an overflight with Wilcox, and asked him to read and initial a document outlining the rescue as Merry had interpreted it from Wonder Lake.

  “I didn’t have enough knowledge of the inner workings. I had a one-sided view,” Wilcox says. “I saw Wayne Merry’s rescue log; I saw communication problems. I was surprised Wayne wanted me to read it and initial it to say it was accurate, but I did.”

  News of the first body reached Wilcox there and the impact of it felt like a sucker punch. The Merrys offered words of comfort, but they couldn’t ease Wilcox’s shock and sadness.

  Early the next morning my father relayed a message to Wonder Lake asking Joe Wilcox to come to headquarters. Wilcox made the long drive alone in the Hankmobile, followed by a ranger driving a park vehicle. It was a lonely ride. A month before, the van had rung with the voices of excited young men on their way to the adventure of a lifetime. Now one was confirmed dead and six others lost. The silence must have been deafening. At headquarters, Wilcox met with my father and Chief Ranger Hayes, providing information on camp locations, caches, and various other details that might help with the search effort.

  Later, Wilcox joined my father in the superintendent’s office when he called Steve Taylor’s parents. My father told the Taylors the worst news a parent can hear, that their son, the young man who had graduated from college just a month earlier, was dead. Wilcox took the phone and spoke about the climb, trying to answer their questions. Wilcox had mentored Steve Taylor on his first forays into climbing and convinced park rangers to let him climb when they questioned his qualifications. Now he had to try to make sense of the loss to his friend’s parents.

  That evening, Joe Wilcox had dinner at our house. He entered the front room and seemed to tower over my dad. He had a dark beard and spoke with a soft, melodic voice, and though he was only twenty-four, he seemed to me to carry himself like a much older man. Mom forbade discussing the accident, to give Mr. Wilcox just a few minutes of peace. I was intensely curious about what had happened but knew to hold my tongue. Though just a child, I could sense the sadness in the room, the somber feeling that had us eating dinner in silence.

  After dinner, the old crank phone hanging on the kitchen wall rang short-long-short, the ring sequence that had been assigned to us
on the party line that ran through the housing complex.

  Dad lifted the earpiece from its cradle and spoke into the microphone extending from the front of the wooden box. He listened momentarily, then hung up and turned to Joe Wilcox.

  “Let’s go. They’ve found two more bodies.”

  They jogged across the road and up the short hill to the headquarters. There they listened in as the MCA party described the two bodies found near Archdeacon’s Tower, and the worsening weather. It was becoming clear that the lost men were dead, the window of good weather was closing, and the MCA party was ready to leave.

  Reporters already had gotten wind of the developing disaster, and the parents had to be notified. My father and Joe Wilcox stayed late at the headquarters building that night, calling the parents of the lost men. One by one, my father went down the phone list, telling the anguished parents on the other end of the line the words no one wants to hear. After each heart-wrenching conversation, he would hand the phone to Wilcox, who would try his best to console them.

  My father told me that it was the longest night of his life.

  After the calls, Joe Wilcox paced the building feeling hopeless and useless.

  The storm kept the MCA party in their caves for another eighteen hours; when they emerged, it took a half an hour to dig their way out. Around noon on July 30, the wind subsided and they packed and left within forty minutes, leaving the body where it sat, still clutching the tent pole.

  They wasted no time descending and that night settled into their fortified camp at 12,100 feet on Karstens Ridge. With food in their bellies and a secure shelter, spirits were high. Then, during a radio call, my father set Bill Babcock off again.

  “Would you fellows consider going back up?” he asked.

  Gayle Nienhueser, back on radio duty, relayed the question to Bill.

  “I think I yelled at Gayle that whoever was asking that, it was the dumbest thing I’d ever heard of. That we were in really critical shape ourselves and needed to get down. That I wouldn’t even think about doing something like that,” he says. “I weighed one hundred and sixty when I got out; I normally weigh two hundred. Jeff was down to about one twenty-five. We’d been in the mountains for five weeks by then. The storm went on for, I don’t know, seven or eight days; it took a lot out of us. It’s a logical thing to ask, it’s the logical thing to ask, especially if you have never been up there. Under those conditions, it was all we could do to get ourselves down.”