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

  I don’t know what they said to each other—I stayed in the car, watching from my perch behind the dashboard as they talked. The young man unshouldered his pack and did most of the talking, gesturing with his hands and occasionally pointing into the foggy distance. Dad and the rangers listened intently, their faces serious, rain dripping from the brims of their Stetsons. After what seemed like hours, the circle of men broke, the climber got into one of the other vehicles, and we began the long drive home, slithering and bouncing along the muddy park road.

  I peppered Dad with questions about the strange man who had emerged from a wilderness that I thought was home only to moose, caribou, sheep, and bear: Who is he? Where did he come from? Why had we come all this way to meet him?

  After a long silence my father said there had been a climbing accident on Denali and some boys had died. His voice was heavy and sounded tired, as if the words were difficult to pronounce. His tone told me the moment was grave, and part of me knew I should share his sadness. But I was just a kid and I was both scared and excited by the thrilling sprint along the river.

  “What happened, Daddy, did they fall off a cliff?” I asked.

  “There was a bad storm, kiddo. We don’t know what happened to them yet, but we’re trying to find out.”

  “Why don’t you just fly up and get them?” I continued.

  “We did, but the boys we found were already dead.”

  “Are you going to bring them down?”

  “No, we’ll probably leave them buried in the snow.”

  “What if the snow melts?”

  “They’re in snow that never melts.”

  CHAPTER 1

  THOSE WHO CAME BEFORE

  The Athabaskan people have lived in the shadow of the great mountain for ten thousand years and know it by many names. To the people of the Lower Tanana, it is Deenaadheet or Deennadhee. The Dena’ina call it Dghelay Ka’a; the Koyukon, Deenaali. Each tribe’s name, though unique, translates to roughly the same meaning: the Big One, the High One, the Great One.

  Neither legends nor oral tradition indicate that Alaska’s Native people desired or attempted to climb it. Though it was revered, no taboo appears to have kept Alaska’s indigenous people from standing on the summit. A healthy aversion to the treacheries of glacier travel and perhaps common sense were enough.

  The subsistence life was hard. The icy slopes and inhospitable mountaintop held no allure to those whose lives were focused on the already-difficult challenge of surviving off the subarctic wilderness; in fact, they avoided the desolate terrain. When Alfred Brooks made the first approach to the mountain in 1902 during a US Geological Survey he knew he was the first white man to see it up close, and speculated that no Alaska Native had been so near to it either.

  I was far beyond, where the moccasined foot of the roving Indian had never trod. The Alaska Native seldom goes beyond the limit of smooth walking and has a superstitious horror of even approaching glacial ice.

  Among the world’s high mountains, summits in excess of 20,000 feet are surprisingly common. In the South American Andes, more than forty exceed 20,000 feet in height; in the Himalayas, hundreds rise higher. But height alone does not define a mountain. While Denali is the tallest mountain in North America at 20,320 feet, it also is arguably the biggest mountain on the planet.

  The Denali massif is bounded on the west by Kahiltna Pass and to the east by the Traleika Col. The Peters Glacier, at the base of the Wickersham Wall, is its northern boundary. The Ruth Gap marks its southern edge. Within those margins is Denali, a 144-square-mile mass of rock, snow, and ice that rises abruptly from a 2,000-foot plateau, soaring 18,000 feet from base to summit, the greatest vertical relief of any mountain on Earth, with the exception of the Hawaiian seamount Mauna Kea, the bulk of which lies beneath the Pacific Ocean. In comparison, Mount Everest, though 29,029 feet above sea level, rests on the 17,000-foot-high Tibetan Plateau and rises just 12,000 feet from base to summit. A similar plateau boosts the Andes; without those geologic booster seats, those peaks all would lie in Denali’s shadow.

  Denali is the apex of the Alaska Range, a cordillera that arcs 600 miles across Alaska, dividing the coastal lowlands around Cook Inlet from the Yukon lowlands of interior Alaska. The great range is about 60 miles wide near Denali and home to twenty peaks taller than 10,000 feet.

  Most of the cordillera is composed of sedimentary shale, limestone, and sandstone that is between 100 and 400 million years old, but a handful of peaks—among them Denali, Foraker, Hunter, and the Moose’s Tooth—arise from a younger 35-million-year-old granite intrusion. Tectonic activity continues to push the entire range upward at a rate of about one millimeter a year even as the erosive action of wind, water, and ice wear it down. The durable gray-and-pink granite ensures that millions of years from now Denali and its granite brothers will endure long after their sedimentary neighbors have been reduced to glacial dust and carried away by wind and water.

  Europeans began exploring Alaska a little more than two hundred years ago and, upon seeing the mountain dominating the interior skyline, were immediately impressed by its evident size. Russian trappers were the earliest to push into the hinterlands and, like the Alaska Natives, were prosaic about the mountain, referring to it as Bolshaya Gora, or Big Mountain. British Navy captain George Vancouver made the earliest written reference to Denali in 1794 after navigating the silty shoals of Knik Arm at the head of Cook Inlet. Standing on the deck of the HMS Discovery, he looked north and noted the horizon “bounded by distant stupendous snow mountains.”

  When prospector Frank Densmore visited Lake Minchumina in 1889, the big mountain rising to the south so enthralled him that he couldn’t stop talking about it—so much so that for years it was known among prospectors as Densmore’s Peak.

  Denali was already well known in Alaska when it entered into the national consciousness on January 24, 1897. An article in The New York Sun written by William Dickey ignored millennia of indigenous tradition and decades of local custom by replacing the name Denali with Mount McKinley, after an Ohio politician who had just been nominated for the presidency of the United States. William McKinley had no connection to Alaska, but was a proponent of the gold standard, a fact not lost on Dickey, a gold prospector. Alaskans and others familiar with the territory challenged Dickey’s label, saying a traditional name was more appropriate. The issue had not yet been settled four years later when an assassin killed President McKinley, and his name became permanently affixed to the mountain. In the same article, Dickey estimated the mountain’s elevation at 20,000 feet. His controversial christening and astonishingly accurate elevation estimate put the mountain on the map, and for the next twenty years virtually all travel to the region was for exploration and mountaineering.

  Judge James Wickersham and four companions made the first serious attempt to climb Denali during the summer of 1903. The party journeyed into the remote region aboard the riverboat Tanana Chief, starting on the Chena River and navigating down the Tanana and up the Kantishna River before disembarking for the final overland approach. On May 19, Wickersham and his party left the little steamboat behind and camped with “Nachereah, the moose hunter” and “Olyman the wise.” Their hunting party was composed of fifty Athabaskan Indians and a hundred malamute dogs.

  With the help of an interpreter, Wickersham described the quest to their nomadic hosts.

  At my request he tells them of our journey to the big mountain and our wish to reach its summit. Ju-dan told us in broken English, “Mountain Sheep fall off that mountain—guess white man no stick ’um.” Incredulity appeared on every unwashed face at the statement of our purpose. “What for you go top—gold?” No, we go merely to see the top, to be the first men to reach the summit. This information imparted by the interpreter caused Olyman to remark in brief Indian phrases, which McLeod translated after the rude laughter had subsided as; “He says you are a fool.”

  Und
aunted by the ridicule of the pragmatic Natives, the party hiked south and entered the folds of the mountain via the Peters and Jeffery Glaciers. They soon came to the mountain’s massive north face, a nearly vertical escarpment that rises all the way to the 19,470-foot north summit. But they could find no way to the top and ended their quest at an elevation of about 8,000 feet on what has since proved to be one of the mountain’s most technically challenging routes. Wickersham’s party wore wool, canvas, and leather, adequate to protect them from the cold weather encountered on the mountain. Their climbing tools, however, were rudimentary by today’s standards. They climbed with alpenstocks—six-foot-long, steel-tipped, wooden staffs first used during the Middle Ages by shepherds in the Swiss Alps. In the latter half of the eighteenth century mountaineers added an ax head with a pointed pick on one side and a flattened adz blade on the other. The pick was used to gain purchase on the steep slopes and the adz blade was used to chip out ice steps. Crampons of the day were more like spiked horseshoes, providing good traction underfoot, but little help on steep or vertical ice. In light of the many obstacles found on the impossibly steep wall, including overhanging rock and ice, chimneys, and fissures, the long-handled ax would have been unwieldy at best. In the hands of Wickersham and his companions, hardened Alaska sourdoughs but novice mountaineers, they weren’t enough to assist them in getting where they wanted to go—the summit.

  Wickersham’s June 20 journal entry captures the moment of surrender.

  I was then convinced that no possibility existed of our overcoming the apparent obstacles to our higher climb—we were climbing on a spur as sharp as a house roof, rapidly rising to where it was nearly perpendicular—solid glare ice, and above it rose thousands of feet of glacial ice undermined and even falling by reason of the hot weather and constant sliding out of the softer snow.

  Though he never made the summit, the north face of the mountain, where he ended his quest, was named for him, today known as the Wickersham Wall, a 3-mile-wide precipice that sweeps skyward for 14,000 feet from the Peters Glacier to the summit of the north peak, making the facade of rock, ice, and snow one of the largest on Earth.

  Snow falls down to 6,000 feet on Denali in every month of the year, giving it one of Earth’s greatest permanently snow-covered vertical reliefs. And that extraordinary snowfall spawns some of the highest and longest glaciers in the Alaska Range. The Harper Glacier originates in the perpetual snow between Denali’s twin summits and feeds the Muldrow, a 41-mile-long ice river that scours a U-shaped valley on the mountain’s northeast side. To the south, the 44-mile-long Kahiltna is the longest glacier in the range. The Ruth Glacier spans 38 miles as it flows through the spectacular Don Sheldon Amphitheater. There the ice is a mile thick and the granite walls rise a mile above that.

  Two months after Wickersham’s attempt, Dr. Frederick Cook’s expedition followed a similar route, pushing deeper into the massif to the Peters Basin and ascending the steep and treacherous Northwest Buttress to an elevation of 11,000 feet. Cook, like Wickersham, was just a mile from the summit as the crow flies, but then, crows can fly. He had underestimated the size of the wall and soon realized the route was too difficult and time-consuming for him and his companions. Still, it was a notable achievement for the four men, three climbing with the aid of alpenstocks and the fourth relying on a tent pole. Undaunted, Cook returned to Denali in 1906 with three other climbers, including Belmore Browne and Herschel Parker. After an initial summit bid failed, Cook set out again while Browne and Parker remained in camp, and returned claiming to have reached the top. Irrefutable evidence soon revealed that this claim was fraudulent, though the Frederick A. Cook Society claims to this day that Cook was the first to summit.

  During the winter of 1910, four Kantishna miners, incensed at Cook’s deception and fueled by a barroom bet, set out for the summit. The Sourdough Expedition spent three months approaching the mountain by dogsled and ascending via the Muldrow Glacier. Three men climbed an astounding 8,000 feet on their summit day, carrying two thermoses of hot chocolate and half a dozen doughnuts in a burlap sack. Two of them, William Taylor and Pete Anderson, reached the top and spent two and a half hours on the north summit taking in the view and planting a fourteen-foot spruce pole in a location they thought could be seen in Fairbanks, 150 miles distant. They had topped the 19,470-foot north peak not realizing, or not caring, that it was 850 feet lower than the south peak. Alaskans were enthused that a group of hardened Alaska miners found success where East Coast cheechakos had failed. Still, the highest summit in North America had yet to be conquered.

  On February 1, 1912, with spring still far off, Browne and Parker set out from the port town of Seward for the great mountain, at first hitching rides on dogsleds to the settlement of Knik near present-day Anchorage. With neither road nor rail links yet established, it was the only mode of overland travel that would get them to the interior in winter. At Knik they met up with Arthur Aten and Merl LaVoy, veterans of an unsuccessful 1910 expedition mounted by Browne. The two men arrived two months earlier to begin caching food and supplies along the trail. They kept to the Iditarod Trail mail route at first but not long after leaving Knik set out across the trackless wilderness ascending the Susitna River. Highways and a railroad now span much of the 500-mile route they and their dogs would follow.

  The four-month odyssey took the adventurers north from tidewater, across the Cook Inlet lowlands, and through the Alaska Range, a tremendous feat in and of itself. Once on the north side of the range, they established base camp in the willows at the head of Cache Creek. While Aten tended the lower camp, Browne, Parker, and LaVoy began their ascent, following the route the Sourdough miners had established in 1910, accessing the upper mountain via the Muldrow Glacier and climbing what would later be named Karstens Ridge. On June 29, after three weeks of arduous climbing, Browne, LaVoy, and Parker left their camp at 16,600 feet on the Harper Glacier, intent on reaching the summit. A blizzard blew up as they methodically cut steps into the icy slope above them. Cresting a rise, the full force of the gale struck Browne and he realized that even though the summit was enticingly close, to continue would be suicide.

  As I brushed the frost from my glasses and squinted upward through the stinging snow I saw a sight that will haunt me to my dying day. The slope above me was no longer steep! That was all I could see. What it meant I will never know for certain—all I can say is that we were close to the top!

  Browne’s party most likely reached Farthing Horn at 20,125 feet, a few hundred yards away, and just 200 feet lower than the summit. There, they tried to wait out the weather but quickly realized their extremities were freezing and began a harrowing return to camp. They spent June 30 resting and set out the following day, only to be thwarted again by dense, wind-driven snow.

  Exhausted and heartbroken, the party descended to base camp two weeks later than planned, where they reunited with a relieved Aten and turned for home. On July 6 a massive earthquake jolted interior Alaska, bringing down avalanches and rock falls on Denali and the surrounding peaks.

  Had they remained to make another summit attempt rather than turning back when they did, Browne and his companions almost certainly would have died there.

  The race for the top ended in 1913 when Archdeacon Hudson Stuck, Harry Karstens, Robert Tatum, and Walter Harper set out from Fairbanks by dogsled, headed for the Kantishna mining district and on to McGonagall Pass, the gateway to the Muldrow Glacier. Though Stuck organized the expedition, Karstens, a veteran of the Klondike Gold Rush, led the climb. The expedition lasted three months and again followed in the footsteps of the Sourdoughs even though the earthquake had shattered Karstens Ridge, leaving it a jumble of massive ice blocks.

  Where deception, confusion, and poor weather had stymied earlier attempts, the Karstens/Stuck Expedition succeeded with hard work and no small amount of good luck. Harper, an Athabaskan Indian, was the first to set foot on the summit.

  On June 7, 1913, K
arstens, who later would become the first superintendent of Mount McKinley National Park, noted the event with pride, compassion, and poor grammar:

  Cold & Clear. “Hurrah” The south summit of Mt. McKinley has been conquered. Everyone out of condition on last night & no one slept we tried from 7 to 10 but not go so we all sat arround primus stove with quilts on our backs waiting for 4 Oclock. My stumach was bad and I had one of the most severe Headaches if it where not final climb I should have stayed in camp but being the final climb & such a promising day I managed to pull through I put Walter in lead an kept him there all day with never a change. I took 2nd place on rope so I could direct Walter and he worked all day without a murmur.

  During the ascent, Walter Harper had spotted the spruce pole planted on the north peak by the Sourdoughs. Once he pointed it out, Tatum and Karstens confirmed it with field glasses, saying “it was plain and prominent and unmistakable.” A monument to the power of hot chocolate, doughnuts, and perhaps barroom bets.

  Even during the long days of the boreal summer, when the sun barely sets and midnight is more like dusk, the summit is known as one of the coldest places on the planet with the average temperature remaining below zero. During the dark days of January the average temperature is closer to minus 30 degrees Fahrenheit.

  The mountain’s subarctic latitude and great elevation combine to produce its especially harsh conditions. Earth’s atmosphere tapers at the North and South Poles and as a result, the troposphere—the life-supporting lowest layer—is shallower at extreme northern and southern latitudes. At the equator it is 10 miles thick, at the North Pole, about 5. A mere 1,800 miles from the North Pole, Denali rises 4 miles high and is closer to the top of the troposphere than many higher peaks at lower latitudes, like Mount Everest.