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

  Proximity to the top of the troposphere means two things. First, there is less oxygen near the summit of Denali than there would be at a mountain of identical elevation at the equator, and 42 percent less than at sea level. At the summit it takes two gasps to bring in the amount of oxygen that one breath delivers on the beach in Hawaii. Second, the thinner troposphere means the jet stream, wind that constantly moves through the upper troposphere near the boundary with the stratosphere, is closer than anywhere on the planet. Atmospheric conditions can drive the jet stream lower, commonly bringing winds of 100 miles per hour or more to bear on Denali’s heights.

  And when those high-speed air currents encounter the peak’s morphology (the shape of the mountaintop), their velocity can increase dramatically. At Denali Pass, between the north and south summits, a stream of air moving perpendicular to the peaks creates a relative vacuum and pulls wind through the pass at speeds much greater than that of the prevailing wind. When the wind blows through Denali Pass, it is compressed and accelerated like water through the nozzle of a fire hose.

  On Denali, where 100-mile-per-hour winds are common, meteorologists agree that downslope winds three times that velocity are possible, peeling away snow, ice, loose rock, and any climber unfortunate enough to be in their path. The phenomenon takes place when fast-moving air piles up against a peak or ridge, boils over the top, and plummets down the lee side. Denali, with its particular geography, is the perfect crucible for such extreme wind events. Mountaineers have never reported such velocities, but then again, surviving such conditions would be unlikely.

  The fastest wind speed ever recorded on land by a measuring device was a gust of 231 miles per hour on Mount Washington in Maine on April 12, 1934. A comparison can be made between both the 1967 storm and the storm that produced that record-setting gust. Both involved strengthening high- and low-pressure systems that created an abnormally powerful pressure gradient between them that was also precisely over a large mountain—Denali in one case and Mount Washington in the other.

  While the rest of the Alaska Range bathes in sunlight, Denali often is shrouded in mist or capped by saucer-shaped lenticular clouds. Because of its height, bulk, and permanently icy mantle, it often creates its own weather. The Alaska Range acts like a mountainous bulwark, separating the moist coastal air coming from Cook Inlet to the south from the drier conditions to the north. The great wall arcs across the lower third of the state of Alaska, from Canada to the Alaska Peninsula, with Denali at its apex acting like a sentry to the comings and goings of snow and wind and rain. When the cool highs and moist lows breach the wall and clash over the range, storms can arise with little warning. Moisture, condensing when pushed into the air surrounding the frigid peak, can transform visibility from crystal-clear to something like being on the inside of a Ping-Pong ball in a matter of minutes. Avalanches are frequent, as year-round snowfalls are released by changing temperatures; crevasses are strewn everywhere, hidden beneath thin layers of snow and ice.

  The idea that such a place can be conquered may seem foolish.

  As the decades passed following the first ascent of Denali, climbing waxed and waned as the Depression, two world wars, and finally peace and postwar prosperity brought mountain climbing into the mainstream. In 1954, my father joined the National Park Service as the first historian at the Sitka National Historic Park. The parameters of the job were unclear, so he defined them himself. The federal government was actively suppressing the religion, language, and customs of the Tlingit people who had lived in the region for thousands of years. When he arrived in Sitka, my father realized that young Tlingit people were not learning about their own culture and an entire generation of tradition bearers were dying—and with them the region’s indigenous culture and language. Carrying a suitcase-size reel-to-reel tape recorder, he visited villages throughout Southeast Alaska, interviewing elders and recording their songs, stories, and traditions.

  My father worked out an agreement that put many Tlingit artifacts on permanent loan from Tlingit clans and families to the Sitka National Historical Park with the understanding that they would remain available to the owners when needed for ceremonial or other purposes. The agreement remains in place today and those totem poles, blankets, robes, hats, house fronts, and other cultural items are still held in trust at the Sitka National Historical Park’s visitor center. To honor his work, Tlingit elder Alex Andrew adopted my father, made him a member of the Kiks.adi clan, and they named him Shakshanee Ish. He later learned that a man named Shakshanee Ish had lived in Sitka and died in the early part of the century. Reincarnation is part of the Tlingit belief system and many of the elders in Sitka had known the first Shakshanee Ish. They told my father, “You’re just like him.”

  Perhaps due to his demonstrated success in working with Tlingit people, the National Park Service drafted my father for a management training program in Washington, DC. With the birth of my sister, Gerianne, in 1960 and me two years later, he began to think about his career. Gone were the days of roaming the islands of the Alexander Archipelago in the Park Service boat to interview ancient men and women who spoke of an earlier time in Tlingit, the only language they’d ever known. In late 1964 our family traveled to Washington, DC, where my father went to work at the Department of the Interior, ultimately working in the office of National Park Service director George Hartzog.

  My parents had met and started our family in Sitka, a small island town. Though my father grew up in Chicago, and my mother in Connecticut, Alaska had changed them. The heat, the traffic, the social pecking order, and the proximity to so many other people in Washington, DC, was oppressive after life among the giant spruce trees and dignified Tlingit elders. Early in their tenure back East they agreed that if they could get back to Alaska, they’d never leave. When the Mount McKinley superintendent’s job was offered, my father called my mother to tell her the news and by the time he got home, she had already listed our house with a Realtor.

  When my family and I arrived at Mount McKinley National Park in April of 1967, barely fifty years had passed since Walter Harper first stood on the summit. In that half century, 420 mountaineers had attempted to scale the mountain, 213 had succeeded, and 4 had died trying. Allen Carpe and Theodore Koven fell into Muldrow Glacier crevasses in 1932. Park ranger Elton Thayer tumbled to his death while descending Karstens Ridge in 1954, and just prior to our arrival, in February of 1967, Jacques Batkin had died in a crevasse on the Kahiltna Glacier.

  Denali was still a remote and exotic climbing destination, known to be a challenging and unpredictable mountain, but not particularly deadly.

  That was about to change.

  CHAPTER 2

  WHAT MAKES AN EXPEDITION?

  Joe Wilcox first experienced Alaska sweating over a chainsaw on slopes crowded with Sitka spruce in the summer of 1966. He was in the islands of the state’s southeast, cutting transects through the temperate rain forest for the United States Forest Service. During those long days amid majestic scenery, his thoughts turned to the highest peak in North America. Though hundreds of miles away, and much too far away to see, Denali called. During the trip home to Utah he hatched a plan a return to Alaska in the summer of 1967. The obstacles piled up before him, but he was intent on climbing the big mountain. Before all the practical matters of equipment, food, timing, and transportation were addressed, he would need to assemble a team.

  Back home in Utah, his newlywed wife, Cheryl, was agreeable. They had recently arrived at Brigham Young University, where they were both pursuing studies. Wilcox was already acquainted with many climbers there and began trying to enlist expedition members. He imagined a six-man team, but the experienced climbers he hoped to draft declined, one after another. Each man had a good excuse, but Wilcox wondered if his personality had something to do with the dearth of willing expedition members. “I was rather non-gregarious . . . sometimes lacking in tactful social amenities.”

  When Jerry C
lark and Mark McLaughlin signed on in November, the Wilcox McKinley Expedition suddenly grew wings. McLaughlin was recommended to Wilcox by a mutual friend and brought excellent climbing credentials, including several ascents of Mount Rainier. He recommended Jerry Clark, who offered even more experience. Clark was a gregarious thirty-one-year-old who had an extensive climbing résumé, including eight trips to the Tetons, two in the Wind River Range, and two trips to Antarctica. Though he was on the southern continent for scientific work, he taught mountaineering and got to the top of one unnamed peak before spending the remainder of his time driving around in a snowcat measuring ice thickness. Clark had been climbing for fourteen years and, a few years prior, had been approved to lead a Denali climb. He was small at five foot seven and 145 pounds, and while not known for tremendous strength he was a smart and careful climber.

  So Clark had deeper mountaineering experience than Wilcox, and where Wilcox appeared blunt and distant, Clark was open and friendly. Between classes, Wilcox dove into planning and organizing the climb—something he could do on his own, which suited his nature better than the social aspects of recruitment. He decided that the team would climb via the Muldrow Glacier on the north side of the mountain. This was an arduous route to the summit, but less expensive for a large, cost-conscious party, and none of these young men had much money to spare.

  Wilcox mailed out fourteen copies of an expedition newsletter on November 16, 1966—the first of several—to potential expedition members in five states. The blue ink of the Ditto copies spelled out the cost as $300 per person (equivalent to about $2,000 nowadays), which would cover “food and group gear” as well as transportation from Seattle to Alaska and back. While the cost was a stretch for most of the young men interested in joining Wilcox’s expedition, it was still a bargain. Forty years later, climbers pay $6,000 to $8,000 per person to join a guided expedition.

  While the official start date was not set, the letter spelled out a “get acquainted workout” to be held on Mount Rainier immediately prior to leaving for Alaska. Rainier would be where the group would get a feel for one another’s abilities and personalities before they roped up at McGonagall Pass and headed up Denali’s Muldrow Glacier. “Every person will be expected to be in attendance,” Wilcox wrote, “unless arrangements are made with the leader”—a phrase he appears to have grown fond of, at least in his missives.

  Though Wilcox was the expedition leader “primarily because I conceived of it and organized it,” most of the men signing on to the expedition were strangers to him, joining by Clark’s invitation. “I was a bit uncomfortable leading an expedition composed largely of Jerry Clark’s friends,” he wrote. “But Jerry’s complete cooperation and support was reassuring.”

  A mail-order expedition like Wilcox’s was not unusual at the time. The climbing community was small and assembling a large expedition sometimes meant bringing strangers together. Wilcox trusted Clark’s judgment, but he knew significant variation in skill levels might prove to be a problem. Meanwhile, there were other, more mundane, problems to consider.

  In early December, Joe Wilcox continued his planning and research. He applied to Mount McKinley National Park for permission to climb and at the same time wrote to Bradford Washburn, who was the director of the Boston Museum of Science.

  Bradford Washburn’s opinion mattered. He was virtually synonymous with Denali for the latter half of the twentieth century, first visiting the mountain in 1936 at the request of Gilbert M. Grosvenor, the longtime editor of National Geographic. On assignment for the world-renowned publication, Washburn hired a pilot who removed the door to accommodate the large camera and then circled the mountain just below the summit. Wearing a cold-weather flying suit, mittens, and an oxygen mask, Washburn spent two days perched on a gas can, photographing the great mountain. He made two more photo expeditions to the mountain in 1937 and 1938. Washburn had scaled mountains all over the world, but it was 1942 before he set foot on Denali for the first time as part of the US Army Test Expedition. He returned in 1947 to lead Operation White Tower, an expedition fueled by an odd mix of hard science and Hollywood. RKO Pictures had acquired the movie rights to a wartime novel called The White Tower, about a mythical peak in the Alps. When a movie executive called to ask if he would lead an expedition to Mount Everest to capture film footage, Washburn convinced him to film on Denali. He also proposed conducting a series of scientific studies in concert with the filming, and soon several Harvard scientists, handpicked by Washburn, had signed on. The major scientific goal was cosmic ray research that could be effectively conducted only at high altitudes, where the atmosphere was thin. The Air Force supported prior research from high-altitude aircraft but experiments were limited by the duration of the flights. A camp at 18,000 feet on Denali would provide a unique vantage point and allow experiments to run longer. Given the scientific element of the operation, the Air Force agreed to provide air support to Operation White Tower. Though a nine-day storm hampered progress and damaged equipment early on, the research was conducted over a ten-day period from a camp at Denali Pass. Between the storm and the start of the research, several expedition members, including Washburn and his wife, Barbara, climbed the south peak. Washburn had melded science and showbiz, and he had managed to get himself and his wife to the summit, making her the first woman to climb Denali.

  Washburn was known to be both imperious and generous, equally comfortable discussing the mountain with John F. Kennedy, who had served on the museum’s board, or a penniless climber looking for a new route to the summit.

  Joe Wilcox wrote to Washburn on December 2, 1966, during the winter before the proposed expedition, describing his plan and seeking the endorsement of Washburn’s museum. Such support would bring financial advantages, but Wilcox wanted to make a scientific contribution to the mountain’s knowledge base as well.

  I have organized and will be leading a ten man expedition on Mt. McKinley this summer (Muldrow Route). The expedition has been divided into two groups: a high climbing group composed of six climbers with the primary purpose of reaching the summit and a four man scientific group with the primary objective of carrying out scientific experiments on the Muldrow Glacier between McGonagall Pass and the base of Karstens Ridge (they will not go above this elevation).

  Wilcox described the team and their educational background in detail but did not fully describe the study, saying only that Dr. Marion Millett of the BYU Geography Department was supervising the planning of the scientific group.

  His plea for help was vague, specifying that he did not want money, just an endorsement that would convince the National Park Service to relax its flight rules, which allowed aircraft on and around the mountain only to support scientific research or search and rescue activity. The no-fly rule meant mountaineers carried all the food and gear they’d need to get to and from the summit on their backs. Ferrying supplies onto the mountain by small plane could save time, and Wilcox knew that.

  Washburn promptly and politely replied, noting that the Muldrow Glacier was more passable than it had been in recent years. He offered to sell Wilcox maps and photos that might help with planning and then addressed the scientific study, saying that geologists with PhDs would be necessary. This was not what Wilcox had hoped for. With no such expertise available, endorsement by the Boston Museum of Science was out of the question.

  Wilcox’s glacier study involved using a theodolite to align a row of bamboo wands at intervals across the surface of the glaciers to be studied. Three weeks after the initial alignment, another theodolite reading of the wand positions would be extrapolated to reveal surface-ice movement. The study may well have been merely a ruse to get around the no-fly rule, as others in the group believed. But it is indisputable that such data is useful—in retrospect all the more so, thanks to global climate change.

  Brad Washburn had discouraged the scientific component of the expedition. But Wilcox wondered if perhaps he could be of some help wit
h publicity for sponsorship purposes. After all, he had been very successful in publicizing his own climbs. Months later, and just weeks before the expedition would get on the road to Denali, Wilcox reached out again to Washburn. On May 12, after disclosing his plans to news organizations, he wrote seeking advice on the veracity of the “firsts” he was considering for his climb:

  Dear Dr. Washburn:

  I will be leading a nine-man expedition on Mount McKinley this June. It appears that we will receive considerable publicity from area newspapers and TV stations to the extent that they may send me to Alaska to cover the expedition. They seem excited by the fact that we may put a camp on the summit, climb both summits simultaneously, or put a camp on each summit. According to the Park Service, some climbers spent the night on the summit in 1960. To the best of your knowledge.

  Has anyone else spent the night on the summit?

  Has any group climbed both peaks simultaneously?

  Has anyone camped on the north summit?

  Has anyone camped on both summits simultaneously?

  Your help will be greatly appreciated. I do not want my group to claim a “first” unless it is indeed, a “first.” Please reply soon, because the news media are anxious to start releases.

  Sincerely,

  Joseph F. Wilcox.

  Washburn didn’t delay in responding, though Wilcox probably wished he had. It was written on Museum of Science letterhead and dated May 17.

  Dear Mr. Wilcox:

  We have received your extraordinary letter regarding the plans for your record-breaking efforts this year on Mt. McKinley. I have answered hundreds of queries about McKinley over a long period of time, but never before have I been faced with the problem of answering one quite like this. In fact, I am amazed that the National Park Service would grant a permit for such a weird undertaking.