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

by Andy Hall

  Blaine Smith is in his early fifties, lantern-jawed, tall, and fit, with thin brown hair and the energy and mannerisms of a man half his age. His face has acquired some character since we first met more than forty years ago while attending Rabbit Creek Elementary School in Anchorage: his nose is scarred by frostbite picked up on Denali, and one brown eye is surrounded by a titanium socket thanks to a slap delivered by a grizzly bear near his home in the Anchorage suburb of Eagle River. His demeanor, however, remains remarkably unchanged: he is enthusiastic and cheerful, and when he talks about Denali, where he once made his living, Smith laces his descriptions with colorful imagery, humor,* and authority gained from decades of climbing and guiding there.

  On May 29, 1997, Smith roused his clients at the 17,200-foot high camp on the West Buttress. Though the forecast called for good weather, Smith made his own observation before deciding whether to head out on the 3,000-foot climb to the summit.

  The wind blew from the north, and the telltale signs of an approaching low—clouds, either creeping up the lower mountain or amassing around nearby peaks—were nonexistent.

  “The lows usually come from the south,” he said. “A lot of times that high ends up outcompeting the low and you’re golden, not a big deal.”

  The north wind appeared to be doing just that.

  With all signs looking promising, he and assistant guide Willy Peabody set out for Denali Pass around 9:15 A.M. leading five clients. The team carried two ropes, two steel shovels, a scoop shovel, a few snow saws, a stove, a pot, fuel, and extra food and water. Smith also carried an oversized bivouac sack, and each man had a sleeping bag and down pants and a parka. Smith’s pack weighed close to 40 pounds; his clients carried 25-pound packs.

  By the time they reached Denali Pass, the thin overcast sky had burned off, and the sun was out. Still, Smith was cautious.

  “We were kind of creeping into this thing thinking that if we did get bad weather, that we turn around and bolt,” he said.

  They continued on to Archdeacon’s Tower, a rocky 19,550-foot spur rising above Denali Pass, under sunny skies. After a short break, they reached the small plateau below the summit ridge at 19,200 feet known as the Football Field. The entire route was scoured by wind—hard packed and icy, with little loose snow. Where the wind had dislodged wands along the well-traveled route, they replaced them, though the icy crust made planting them difficult. The climbing here isn’t technical, but the thin air, heavy packs, cold, and constant uphill pace is challenging even on a good day.

  At the upper end of the Football Field, one of the climbers ran out of steam.

  Peabody built a windbreak, fired up a stove to heat water and food, and the two men hunkered down at the foot of a last rise to the summit ridge known as Pig Hill to wait for the summit team to return.

  The others continued with two rope teams, Smith in the lead, up the hill and onto the summit ridge.

  “That’s usually how it goes. If it’s easy terrain, you usually are in front. If someone has trouble, you can belay him up,” Smith said. “You’ve got a lot more mobility on the end than if you’re tied in the middle.”

  When they reached the summit around 6:00 P.M. the skies were clear and the sun shined, but the wind had picked up to about 20 miles per hour. A bit brisk, Smith thought, but not enough to be too concerned.

  “That’s not that unusual on top,” he said, “and it was still blowing from the north, which was good for us.”

  As his clients posed for photos and celebrated their success, Smith watched the sky begin to change and felt his heart drop.

  “In the process of five or ten minutes of being on the summit, it went from clear to opaque to overcast. Then the wind built from twenty to twenty-five from the north. Then the wind all of a sudden shifted and came from the south. As soon as it shifted and the sky turned opaque, I was alarmed.”

  The clouds he had been watching for all day materialized as if by magic, and the southwest wind pushed a column of warm, damp air up against the icy mountain, creating a cloud cap with Smith and his team caught inside.

  “It was the worst time for it to happen,” he said. “It could have happened at any other time, but right then we were the farthest we could have possibly have been away from safety.”

  His first thought was to get the climbers off of the summit ridge as quickly as possible without endangering them.

  “I didn’t want us to go in two teams anymore because I didn’t want to lose anybody.”

  He put the entire team on one rope and he clipped in last.

  “So everybody was out ahead of me, and I was driving them like horses,” he said. “I was yelling, ‘It’s time to go, let’s go!’ I was doing everything but putting my boot in their ass. They could tell I was serious.”

  Partway down the ridge, the rope slowed and finally stopped. The men were spread out at 50-foot intervals ahead of him, and from his vantage point at the back of the line, he couldn’t tell what was happening.

  “I’m like, Holy shit, let’s get going! What’s the fucking malfunction?”

  At the other end of the rope, the lead climber had stopped at one of the most exposed parts of the ridge and began yelling for help. With mist hampering Smith’s view, he had little choice but to unclip his harness from the rope, hook his arm around it, and begin running down the ridge.

  “I’ve got my crampons on, my pack, the whole show,” he said.

  As he approached each man, he let go of the rope briefly, then hooked his arm around it again and continued running. It seemed to be a good idea until he tripped and went over the north side of the ridge. Suddenly he was sliding down on his knees hoping the rope would come tight. One of the clients saw him go down and jumped off the other side to counteract his fall.

  The rope came tight and Smith pulled himself up to the trail.

  “Dave was on the other side of the hill in the snow,” Smith said. “It was a gutsy move, but I didn’t have time to thank him. I yelled at him to get up and get going.”

  When Smith reached the lead climber he saw that the man’s goggles had fogged up and he was unable to see. “So I calmed down and said, ‘Let’s take them off, let’s put them someplace else.’”

  Then he realized why the climber was panicking: ice had built up and the goggles had frozen to his face.

  “So I took my fist and hit him in the goggles and the lens popped out,” Smith said. “I grabbed the lens and said, ‘How’s that?’ He said, ‘OK.’ I said, ‘Let’s go!’ I could feel the window closing and I felt like, Oh man, we got to get going, we got to get going.”

  Once off of the precarious summit ridge and down Pig Hill, Smith took the lead position on the rope to set the pace.

  “I just drug them down the hill. I was just ruthless.”

  They collected themselves on the Football Field, but the wind picked up and a full-on whiteout descended. After several desperate minutes spent searching for Peabody and his charge, the party reunited and continued on.

  Near Archdeacon’s Tower, two British climbers overtook them, also heading for the 17,200-foot camp on the West Buttress.

  “We offered for them to join forces, that they could go down with us,” Smith said.

  They refused, saying they could move faster on their own, and disappeared into the fog and wind. As Smith and Peabody led their clients toward Denali Pass the wands grew sparse and they had to slow down. Here the trail leading to the West Buttress can be easily confused with one that leads to a part of the mountain known as the Orient Express, a slope of 40 to 45 degrees that drops 2,000 feet from the top of the West Rib to a crevasse field.

  “It’s super easy to get disoriented when you’re in the blender like that,” Smith said. “So, in the middle of this windstorm I dug in the top of my pack, pulled out my map—managed to hang on to my map—dug out my compass, and reoriented myself.”

 
Soon they were picking up wands again, but as they approached Denali Pass the wind became overpowering. At about 19,200 feet Smith stopped his climbers and continued alone to a ridge that overlooked the pass. When he crested it, the wind knocked him down. “It usually takes a wind of eighty or so to push me over,” he said. “It’s a guess on my part; I only know that I couldn’t stand up.”

  It was then that the two guides decided to hole up and wait out the storm.

  “So I said, ‘OK, gentlemen, it’s time to dig in.’ Then the adventure started, the fun and games were over, and now it was going to get serious.”

  They broke out the steel shovels and discovered that the wind had denuded the slope of snow.

  “It was as hard as this table,” Smith said, rapping his knuckles on the wood under his cup. “There is no place to dig in. We thought we’d find a drift someplace.”

  But no matter where they probed, they found only ice and rock. Meanwhile the storm was battering his clients.

  When one man turned his back to the gusts, the wind filled his mittens and carried them away. Minutes later, both of his hands were frozen. Another’s goggles frosted up, so he removed them and made the mistake of looking into the wind. In a matter of minutes his corneas froze, blinding him.

  “We lost two sleeping bags right out of the gate,” Smith continued. “They were trying to get their sleeping bags out and all of a sudden the thing inflates like a balloon. One guy was just hanging on to it and he was getting drug off, he was going to go away. I had to yell, ‘Let go of the sleeping bag!’ and that’s it. It’s gone.”

  The guides continued to brainstorm ways to create a shelter; even a windbreak would have helped. But the storm made it nearly impossible to even manipulate a shovel.

  “Gravity had totally shifted. The shovel was all over the place. Every time it went crossways to the wind it flipped up in the air and hit somebody in the head.”

  Finally, Smith got three men into the large bivouac sack. When he looked up, one of the others was walking away.

  “I didn’t know what the hell he was doing. I’ve got to get him back because if he gets a few more feet away, I was not going to be able to find him.”

  Desperate to block the wind, he considered emptying the packs and filling them with snow to make a buttress. It would have been a feeble shelter, but better than nothing. Then Peabody found a thick layer of snow that had collected in a small depression. It was hard and deep enough to make blocks, so they pulled out their snow saws and started building an igloo. An hour and a half later, three men were huddled inside the igloo and two were tucked into the bivouac sack.

  The diameter of the igloo was about three feet and the men were packed in, elbow to elbow. Spindrift blew through the door, creating a minor snowstorm inside. One man checked the temperature in the igloo; it was 30 degrees below zero.

  Outside, Peabody and Smith ran out of snow-block material.

  Their clients were safe, but they were not. The wind was moving so fast that it was becoming difficult to breathe.

  “You’d have to get a kind of bubble just to breathe,” Smith said. “If you face into the wind, it would pile-drive you, like drinking from a fire hose. If you face downwind then you’d get all of these vortices; you couldn’t even pull air into your lungs. So you try to position your face so you can just take a breath.”

  The seriousness of the situation was lost on no one. By now, everyone realized the precariousness of their position, and one of the men in the igloo, overcome by claustrophobia, stood up, bursting through the snow blocks like a girl popping out of a cake.

  “So now there’s a hole in the igloo and I’m patching it up again,” Smith says.

  Over the next several hours, the two men struggled to build shelter for themselves, but each time they got close the wind destroyed it or one of them knocked it over.

  “We were getting punchier and punchier and punchier. It finally got to the point where we dug a ranger trench. It was only deep enough for one of us. So Willy got into it and I put a top over it.”

  He didn’t stay inside long, saying being buried in the long, shallow pit was too much like lying in a grave. Finally, after hours out in the wind they gave up on the structure and sat with their arms around each other. Their noses were frozen porcelain white, they were exhausted, and they came to think that they weren’t going to make it.

  “I was trying to think how could we salvage the best thing out of this,” Smith said. “We had one client named Andy who was doing really well. He was our strongest client, and I thought that Willy and he could probably make it down.”

  Though he was fully capable of descending too, Smith would stay behind.

  “I had always wondered, if things got really, really bad, if I would just save myself,” he said. “Could I just say, ‘Well, this didn’t work out,’ and stay alive and everyone else would just croak. So that was a big thing for me. I decided I wouldn’t leave my clients, I decided no matter what it took—even if it cost me my life—I would stay.”

  He sat there, huddled against the chaos around him, and thought about his wife, and the burden she would have to shoulder without him.

  “I remember thinking, Well, who’s going to finish the house? Boy, I’m really going to leave Deb in the lurch here if I don’t pull this one out of my ass—that’s what I was thinking.”

  The guides hugged and said good-bye for what they believed would be the last time, then walked over to roust Andy from the bivvy sack.

  “Well, instead of saying, ‘Andy, get up, you’re going down,’ I said, ‘Andy, how you doing?’ He said, ‘We’re doing pretty good, we’re staying pretty warm, I think we’re going to make it.’”

  Then they went to the igloo and got a similar response from the men shivering inside.

  “We weren’t any better off than we were a few minutes earlier, but still, just hearing them say they’re going to make it turned the table for me.”

  So the two guides went back to the task of trying to build a shelter for themselves. In retrospect, Smith believes it was the constant activity that had kept them alive through the storm. Then, minutes after returning to the task of building a shelter, they felt the wind begin to diminish. By 11:00 A.M., it was over.

  “If it had lasted a few more hours,” he said, “we would have died.”

  Smith, Peabody, and their party had spent twelve hours in the heart of the storm and had barely survived. One man was blind, all suffered frostbite on their faces, and most had frozen feet or hands, or both. Getting back to camp and off of the mountain without further injury was an odyssey in and of itself, but they all survived. A few fingers and toes were lost to the mountain, and the blind man regained his sight when his corneas thawed. They knew how close they had come to not coming down at all.

  At the time of the storm, the National Park Service had a contingent of climbing rangers on the mountain as well as a Lama high-altitude helicopter parked in Talkeetna, ready to fly. Rangers knew where the climbers had been when the storm hit, and they knew that Smith and his party were overdue. Yet no aircraft flew and no rescuers were dispatched.

  Daryl Miller, Denali National Park’s South District ranger, was at the Talkeetna ranger station and in charge of the mountain at the time. Smith and Peabody were popular guides and friends with many of the climbing rangers, including Miller. Deb, Smith’s wife, was with Miller at the ranger station while he fielded calls from rangers on the mountain and monitored the storm. As difficult as it was to do, especially with Deb right there, Miller forbade rescuers from searching until the storm broke. The wind and whiteout made flying out of the question.

  “Too many rescuers are killed in the world today,” he said. “It’s a hero thing. Sometimes people, especially volunteers, practice and practice and they don’t want to see anybody suffer, they want to help. It was great that I had a ranger willing to go. I wasn’t willi
ng to get anyone killed; I didn’t want to make a bad situation a tragedy by killing rescuers. It was hard, but that’s what I had to do to protect my field operations, I had to say, We’re not going, I don’t want anybody else killed or hurt.”

  Smith carried a radio through the entire event, yet he didn’t call for help. In retrospect, he said a call might have alleviated some concern, then again he said it would have been hard to sugarcoat the situation, and it might have made things worse.

  “I never even considered calling on the radio, to be quite honest with you. We might as well have been on the moon,” Smith said. “What was I going to call somebody for? What were they going to do for me? I’m in the middle of this huge whiteout with the wind blowing eighty miles an hour. What was I going to say? ‘Hi, things really suck here. Wish I wasn’t here. OK, thanks, bye.’ I didn’t see any use for it at all.”

  The emergency response system on the mountain is a lifesaver in many climbing accidents, but in a windstorm like the one Smith’s party endured, it couldn’t help.

  “There was no way help could come to me. There was no help that I would want. I would never ask anybody to come out there in the types of conditions we were in. I mean it’s asinine; I was in the spot, I better figure it out, I got to make it on my own. Then, once I can get help, then I’ll talk on the radio, and that’s what I did.

  Once he got his team back to the high camp at 17,200 feet, he broke out the radio. “I called down to fourteen [the camp at 14,000 feet] and said, ‘My clients are beat up, we need some help, they’re blasted, frostbit bad, they need to go to the hospital.’ Then, the Park Service was good; they worked it out. We got the helicopter to come in twice, they took the clients away, and it was great.”

  Smith guided for six more years but only one more season on Denali. Peabody never guided on the mountain again. The two British climbers they encountered near Archdeacon’s Tower followed the wrong trail. Instead of reaching the West Buttress they walked off the West Rib and plunged down the Orient Express. One died and the other lost both hands to frostbite.