Mount Logan is a technically difficult mountain and the largest mountain in Canada
Mount Logan is the tallest mountain in Canada at 19,551 feet and the second tallest mountain in North America. Located in the St. Elias Mountain Range, which also stretches into Alaska, Logan is contained within the Yukon Territory.
It is nearly as tall as Denali, and the peak is more remote and has the weather to match Denali. If anything, Logan carries the potential for more dangerous weather than Denali because it is regularly bombarded by storms forming in the Gulf of Alaska. On May 26, 1991, a temperature of -106.6 F was recorded at high altitude on the peak.
This mountain is not climbed as frequently as Denali because Denali is the biggest peak on the continent and gets more attention from that status. Mt. Logan was named in 1890 by I. C. Russell, a member of the United States Geological Survey studying the St. Elias Mountains. Russell chose Logan as the name after Sir William Edmond Logan, who founded the Geological Survey of Canada in 1842. Logan passed away in 1875.
The first ascent of Logan was recorded on June 23, 1925 by a six-man party made up of mountaineers from Canada, the U.S., and England that included Allen Carpe, who later perished on Denali in 1932. In 1987, Vern Tejas helped jump-start an all-Alaska expedition organized with the goal of making the first winter ascent of this incredibly cold mountain. He joined John Bauman, Willy Hersman, Steve Koslow, George Rooney, and Todd Frankiewicz for the climb that began on March 1 and culminated at the summit on March 16, Tejas’s birthday. To be classified as a winter climb, it had to be completed before March 20, the Equinox.
Several of us were talking about climbing one day and recognized no one had ever made a winter ascent of Mount Logan. Logan was the other great big mountain in the neighborhood. A few of us had climbed together on other major Alaska peaks, and Logan loomed as a challenge.
Four of us came up with the idea, but then we heard a rumor that a couple of other guys were planning to go. We were surprised. I mean, nobody had gone there in the winter, and we found out another climb was being planned. We tracked them down and asked them what was up, as if they had heard about our climb and were trying to beat us. They said, “No, we came up with the idea on our own.”
“You know what? Why don’t we just join forces?” I said. We had a great time climbing Logan. It may not be fun for everybody with that extreme weather, but it was for me.
The reason why Logan’s weather, which in general is similar to Denali’s, can be worse is that it is so close to the coast. We were fortunate. We did not have horrible weather. But it was winter, so we were not going to camp out in tents. Before leaving, we practiced building shelters in the snow. They were modified ranger trenches, built to suit our needs, designed to be dug so the snow never fell in and we could move a lot of gear in and out quickly. Seen from above, the trenches were T-shaped. We dug down four feet and belled it out, putting snow blocks loosely over it. The snow blocks were a lid. We made a little hallway at the bottom of the T. With six guys digging, you had a shelter in an hour or an hour-and-a-half, depending on the quality of the snow. We got down out of the wind pretty quickly as we were shielded by the walls we were building. When you throw the snow over the top, the snow blocks soon set up like an igloo. After a few hours of living inside, the whole roof freezes together so strongly it will easily hold the weight of a man on top.
Snow is good insulation. It easily got up to the freezing point in our snow trenches. We didn’t want it to get any warmer than that because then the entire structure could start melting. The trouble is not that it gets too warm for you, the trouble is that if the walls start melting, they become glazed with ice and there is no breathability. Ventilation becomes super important once inside. We cooked in the hallway near the entrance-exit to avoid poisonous fumes and excess heat. We did not want either too close to our sleeping quarters.
We took a helicopter to the 9,600-foot level on Logan on the western end of the mountain, landing near an area called King Trench. Actually, just getting there was an adventure. We had hired a Canadian pilot by the name of Andy Williams, but on the day we were scheduled to fly, February 26, he said, “Can’t fly today, boys. It’s too cold.” It was minus forty. Then February 27 and 28 go by, and we were into March. Our time frame for completing the climb in winter was ticking away. He kept delaying, and finally we hired a helicopter pilot from a different air service.
We made our base camp shelter at the King Trench. There were tons of snow there, but we had to be careful about the placement of the camp because of avalanche danger.
The climbing on Logan, as compared to Denali, is less technical. There are no fixed ropes put in each season like on Denali on the Headwall. It is steep, but less dangerous. There are fewer crevasses, though I did worry quite a bit about avalanches. To watch for avalanche danger in certain areas, we employed a technique I learned in an avalanche class from Jim Hale.
He asked, “So, you want to go from here to there. But there’s a gully full of snow in-between. What are you going to do?” He made us think about the problem. You think maybe you can tip-toe across this area, but it can still go and then you die. Ski patrol people throw charges of dynamite into suspect areas. But what if we didn’t have dynamite? He said that you could find a good-sized rock or throw your pack. See what happens.
On our way down Logan, we came to a steep slope with a foot-and-a-half of new snow on it. Our body weight could easily trigger an avalanche. We were above it and thinking, “I don’t want to go down that. I’m scared. If it goes, we’ll be buried forever. They’d never find us.” Since we had to get back to base camp and the way looked like treacherous territory, I got the idea to try and set it off. We cut through the surface of the snow and created a big wheel with our shovels and saw and propped it up at the top of the slope. It was quite wide and weighed about 400 pounds. Then we rolled it down the slope in front of us. As the ice wheel gained momentum, it also gained more mass, turning into a gigantic snow roller. It thundered down the slope and didn’t set off an avalanche. If the ice wheel didn’t, me, weighing 165 pounds, and the others shouldn’t either. We took turns walking right down the slope in the rut the ice wheel created. That solved the problem. It took us a little while to think up a solution and it took a little longer to make progress, but for forty minutes of futzing around, we relieved the stress and didn’t die.
Sometime later, in 1989, I was on Everest for Genet Expeditions with some climbers; Todd Burleson, who ran Alpine Ascents International; and a guy with him who wanted to ski down the North East Ridge that linked up with us. During our attempt, we came across the same kind of situation and I thought about the ice wheel.
At the time, we were descending from the North Col for a rest. I started down the fixed line and noticed the right side of the slope was a foot-and-a-half deep with fluffy new snow. The other side was hard-packed with old snow. I paused and asked myself why they were different. “This is ripe for an avalanche! This is probably ready.” I ascended back up and told Todd we had a situation. I told him the wall we were going down had conditions underneath ripe to avalanche. Not only our weight could set it off, but just about anything could set it off. We could wait for it to trigger naturally, we could initiate it ourselves, or we could set it off by other means. The texture of the snow was different than it was on Logan, so we could not make an ice wheel. Instead, we made a giant round snow ball. When we pushed it over the edge, everything broke loose.
It was not just below us, but one hundred feet above us, too. We both dove for the fixed line and held on. When the snow settled, we were each half-buried. The right side of the bench we lay on was buried under four feet of new snow. We dug ourselves out with our left hands, holding on to the fixed line with our rights.
Once free from the snow, I jumped up and yelled, “Yippee!” I was full of adrenaline. I was so stoked that it had worked and we had cheated death. Todd looked at me and said, “You know, my company is looking for a man like you.”
I went on to work for Todd and Alpine Ascents, and a few months later, he called me up and hired me to guide on Aconcagua in Argentina. Save a man’s life, get a job.
The magic snow wheel helped us out on Logan, and we all made the summit. John Bauman wrote up a little story on the climb for the American Alpine Journal, and in it he said my snow shelters were instrumental in our success. Two years later, I refined this survival technique and used a smaller one on my solo winter ascent of Denali.
Budgeting three weeks to make the top of Logan, we had put in several days as a cushion in case of storms, but we lost them at the beginning of the climb due to cold weather. We did it in less than two weeks, which was fast for a winter expedition. When it wasn’t storming, we gained a thousand feet of elevation a day. We were pushing our parameters pretty hard. When we got back to base camp, we radioed our original pilot on a single-side band radio. The weather was clear, and it was no longer minus-forty, so we thought he could come pick us up. We radioed for three more days and still got no ride or response.
Our food was starting to get a little low when somebody said, “Screw it. He didn’t fly us in. We don’t even know if he’s out there. He’s not answering the radio.”
Our message was, “Weather is clear. Need to be taken out. We’re ready to go. Please come get us.” We did that every two hours. Nothing. The radio could be broken. He might not be listening. A few of the guys had to get out and get back to work. Todd, Willy, and George hung in there, but John, Steve, and I decided to ski out. It was a 120-mile trip to the Alaska Highway over three glaciers. Our plan was to ski ten miles a day pulling heavy sleds.
Only an hour-and-a-half after we skied away from base camp, I was in a crevasse yelling, “Get me out of here!” Steve was the better skier and was in front. I was in the middle, and John was behind me. I fell in a crevasse going downhill. We were roped, but even skiing exactly where Steve did, I went poof. It was a trap door. My first thought was “Oh shit,” and that I was a dead man. When the rope caught and halted the fall, I thought, “I’m alive!” But I was in a hole surrounded by snow, and it was cold and black below.
I probably dropped ten or fifteen feet. It was not too far, but far enough. I didn’t want to be there. Fortunately, John kept the rope pretty snug behind me, so he felt the bulk of the weight. Steve was able to retrace his tracks back to the crack I was in. I was yelling, “Get me out of here! Can you guys hear me?” I couldn’t see anything but white above. I couldn’t hear much either.
Steve stuck his head over the hole and hollered, “Vern! Vern! You OK?” With the snow sucking up the sound of our voices, we had yelled at the top of our lungs, though we were right next to each other. Looking back, it was humorous. We did a quick extraction. I was able to take my pack off and pass it up first, then my sled. Then I was finally able to climb out. It was the first big crevasse I had ever fallen into. A few years earlier, I fell into a smaller one on Mount Dickey in Alaska, a quick in and out. But that time I was at the rear on the rope and was able to muscle my way out before anyone even noticed.
In all of my years climbing on glaciated mountains, I have fallen into just two crevasses over my head, and that was the biggest one. It was completely spooky. I am lucky, but I’m also very cautious around cracks. When I am on a glacier, I tend to look around for crevasses all of the time. I never want my epitaph to read, “Fell into a crevasse.” I got out of that hole, and we continued skiing to the road at Kluane Lake. About that time, we heard a plane go overhead. The rest of our guys were going to be back in civilization in an hour-and-a-half. We had five days to go, but we had a great time.
We dug other shelters on the way out and had a tarp that we used as part of the covering. Later, a tail wind came up, and we turned the tarp into a sail in the middle of our trio of skiers. We figured that we might lose a little control, and if one of us fell in a crevasse while blowing along, the others could help. We flew along at almost ten miles per hour for five hours. We were moving right along. Sailing was the highlight of what was a great trip. Somewhere, they’ve got our names written down in the record books as the first winter ascenders of Mount Logan.
Mount Logan is a technically difficult mountain and the largest mountain in Canada
It was pretty special to be associated with the first winter ascent of Mount Logan—or really any ascent of Mount Logan given that is a true brute of a mountain—however that was not the first winter ascent for me.
Logan got more attention because of its size and stature within Canada, but in 1982, I was on the first winter ascent of Mount Hunter in Alaska. Like Denali, Mount Hunter is also located in the Alaska Range. It stands 14,573 feet and is what you would call a mountaineer’s mountain. This is not a mountain that is close to being the tallest in the state, but it is far more technically difficult than Denali. The average Alaskan has probably heard of Hunter, but knows little or nothing about it. Only serious climbers entertain the idea of climbing it by any route at any time of year.
I joined up with Gary Bocarde and Paul Denkewalter of Anchorage for Hunter. Logan, by the route we took, was not technical. We could have taken a harder route, but we knew better. Our planned line on Hunter was much more hardcore. It was called the Lowe-Kennedy Route, after George Lowe and Michael Kennedy who first climbed it. Hunter itself was first climbed in 1954 by Heinrich Harrer, Fred Beckey, and Henry Meybohm.
Climbing Hunter in winter might be the most heroic thing I ever do. Hunter is a very cold mountain. The route we chose faces north and is usually in shadow. It is technically challenging and can be avalanche prone on the approach. One of the stories of my life was going through an avalanche gully at 7,000 feet with a huge, hanging glacier above our heads at 12,000 feet. It was like a two- or three-story building, 200 feet across. Our route was right there under it. We were halfway through when a house-sized hunk of snow came roaring down the chute. I was in the middle position, Gary wanted to run this way and Paul wanted to run that way, each to his own perceived safe spot. We were roped together; I was in limbo in the middle of a deadly tug-of-war game. I had the thought that Hunter was so tough that we couldn’t even get to the route without getting killed.
When I saw what was going on, I unclipped from the rope, thinking, “Well, you guys can fight it out.” I only had seconds to do something, and I was really motivated. I just dove behind an old ice block. Gary won, I think, and Paul went running across his way, but by that time, stuff was just flying by me. I am guessing it fell from 12,000 feet to 7,000 feet, so covering a vertical mile with it coming at 100 miles per hour probably only took seconds.
The avalanche created such a loud roar that it seemed as if some giant had picked up a building and thrown it at us. The visual when an avalanche is rushing down a slope at you is pretty exciting. It’s a white wall coming at you, but this was like a tsunami of debris in a deadly cloud. There were thick chunks of ice that could kill you. I was scared I was going to be ground to death or buried. It all took maybe fifteen or twenty seconds to reach us. Real projectiles zoomed past my head, stuff that was heavy and would leave a mark.
The mountain was saying, “Here boys, time to quit playing around.” But when the avalanche cleared, we were all still there. It took several minutes of coughing to remove pulverized ice dust from our throats. As climbers, though, we played down that stuff. I said, “Oh, that was close.”
Gary said, “Yeah.”
Paul said, “Let’s keep moving.”
I don’t remember us pausing for long. We went right to our route on the Northwest Buttress. OK, it’s a hard-guy route. We didn’t want to worry about little things on the approach, not that you can truly forget a close call like that. The route started up in earnest, a ridgy thing, and there were several crevasses and seracs to negotiate. We had to keep the rope tight to get to the bottom of the triangular face. We dug in, built a snow cave, and went to sleep. That was our last camp; the rest of our five nights were spent in open bivouacs. The face nearby was ice.
A little more than halfway up on the sixty-five-degree ice face, there was a big sloping rock, about the size of an easy chair. It is still there; I saw it not long ago, frozen in. The other guys bivouacked on one side of it and I bivied on another spot that was a steeper slope. It was a hanging bivouac. We were roped and hanging off of ice screws in harnesses with our sleeping bags draped around us.
I kept slipping off the steep rock all night long. When I woke up in the morning, I saw the rope had been rubbing against the sharp rock because of the constant slippage. It was super strong nylon and it was frayed part-way through to its core. It had not been a very restful night; my body was slipping off and bouncing. The rope was frayed to the point if I just jerked on the line, it would fail. If anything had happened, I would have gone a long way, and it wouldn’t have been fun. That would be your high-speed descent. In the morning, I just cut off a short piece of rope. Whew, Hunter could kill you in your sleep.
We had actually begun that trip in February with grand ambitions. We planned to climb Hunter, then move on to Mount Foraker. Foraker is 17,402 feet high and the second tallest mountain the Alaska Range. After that, we planned to move on to Denali. It was a planned triple-header. We were going to do all three on the same trip in winter. We had all kinds of food at base camp, and we found some vegetables left behind by other climbers. They were sponsored by the Carrs grocery store chain in Alaska that was eventually bought out by Safeway. The climbers had to cut the trip short and left behind cases of vegetables. They were frozen. They would have still been good, except ravens got into most of them and feasted. All that was left was Brussels sprouts. The birds left them because they were too big to swallow. So we had a month’s worth of Brussels sprouts. I ate a lot of them. To this day, I still never want to see another Brussels sprout.
We had about eight hours of daylight to work with. It took us so long to make progress with all of us carrying gear. We thought we would get up the face in one day and it took two. As we climbed higher on the triangular face, we encountered fluting, bands of rotten snow and water ice that had to be painstakingly traversed. Once we got to the ridge, there were snow cornices sticking out in both directions. The snow was like whipped cream on a ripsaw blade. It was difficult to forge a good line across the ridge, and ultimately we rappelled off and pendulumed along under the chaotic cornices. We thought it would take us hours, but it took us days. Ah, the joy of winter mountaineering.
Our plan called for taking eight days to reach the top and, while we had plenty of food, especially those Brussels sprouts, upward movement was slow. There was no good place to camp on the airy, double-corniced ridge. It made for very disjunctive climbing. So we decided to camp right at the beginning of the traverse before tackling the horrendous arête. We chopped out a long platform with ice axes and ice hammers. For ice, my North Wall hammer was sweet, yet the hammer proved not so handy in soft, sugar snow. I resorted to inserting my hammer lengthwise into the crappy snow, then turning it sideways and pulling on it. I prayed it would hold. In my other hand, I wielded a normal ice axe, until the ice turned to non-cohesive snow, then I switched to a climbing picket, stabbing it into the sugar snow and hoping it would hold my weight because it had a larger surface area. It was all very tenuous. We were not sure if the sugar snow was deep. We feared our tools might run straight through the precarious placements.
The hanging glacier that nearly buried us earlier was right at the edge of this ridge, and it calved and avalanched two or three times a night. Every time it happened, we thought we were going to die. We were only a couple of hundred feet away from the active face. It was as if a train had run off a cliff. We were soundly passed out in our sleeping bags when a gunshot boom sounded. A hundred tons of ice calved off, shaking the ground and the very air we were breathing. We could feel the vibrations in our bones. We practically crapped in our pants every time it happened. Although we were in a safety zone and knew it wouldn’t get us, psychologically we were not calm. It was a complete physical and mental rumble, rumble, rumble.
We spent three-quarters of a day working our way across the ridge before Gary came up with the idea to lower a rope and pendulum below the hazards like Tarzan in the jungle. We hooked up a rope, swung across, and climbed up past the end of the ridge. The rope trick worked and we were able to establish our camp on the upper mountain. We climbed to the summit from there the following morning. It was only 2,500 more vertical feet, pretty straight-forward going. We arrived on the peak in a storm, as a bonus.
Gary promptly said, “That’s it! Let’s go!”
Only I said, “I can see something higher behind you.” Sure enough, the real summit was fifty feet higher. We could almost not see it in the mist. The reason I could see it was because I had Gary as a reference point. We were all wearing goggles and practically fogged out. The first guy is almost always blind in conditions like that. It’s easier for the second guy to see. We almost went through all of that and turned back without reaching the true summit.
We did not stay on top long. Our view from the summit was pretty much a white sheet over our heads. We were in a hurry to get out of there. I was leading off the summit and came across a pretty big crevasse. It might have been eight feet wide, but I was coming from a higher slope. I had pulled up what I thought was enough rope. I tried to jump across, but when I hit the other side, I bounced and rolled and in the process I pulled Paul off his feet and he pulled Gary off his feet. I realized I yanked them off their feet when I heard, “Aaagghh!” I dug in, making a self-arrest with my ice axe and crampons. In retrospect, I should have made more slack in the rope. I also think I caught them off guard. It was poor communication from me, although it’s not always easy to communicate in a blowing storm.
Those guys were pulled so abruptly off their feet that they went flying over the crevasse and past me to the other side. They were below me and I felt a huge tug on the rope. I waited for a second tug, but there wasn’t a second pull. I thought they must have stopped. Gary did stop, but Paul came off the rope. He was no longer hooked in. He came free, still sliding way below, but fortunately it was in soft snow. We don’t know how he came unclipped. Paul popped to his feet and shouted, “It was locked. It was locked.” He said his carabiner somehow came loose. To this day, I climb with two carabiners clipped on a rope. Paul was lucky. He fell another 200 or 300 feet without injury. We were able to descend and pick him up.
At no other time on my climbs have I ever again seen a rope come out of a locked carabiner. It either was not locked as he thought, or a screw gate came loose and opened, which is possible. That is why I use two. It is not likely to happen twice on one rope. That experience will shake you up. We climbed down and camped at the end of the ridge. The next day was spent rappelling down and swinging across, climbing back up and scooting across to the other side of the ridge.
Before we made it back across, we had one more teensy little problem. In the process of traversing back across the whipped cream ridge, we used a horizontal rappel. That helped ensure safety as we shuttled loads under the cornices. Then all we had to do was pull on the double rope for it to slide through the anchor and back to us. That was the theory. Only, after hauling in about half the line, the rope got stuck. We figured it was frozen. The rope could create friction and melt ice as it was pulled, but it was easy enough for the ice to re-freeze at twenty degrees below. Paul and I pulled and pulled, but it did not budge. We arranged a three-to-one pulley system like that used in crevasse rescue. This probably created 600 pounds worth of pulling power, and the rope still did not move. Only one piece of it was stuck, and we didn’t know what it was stuck on.
Someone had to climb back along the heinous ridge to free the rope. I was the low man on the totem pole on this climb, so I said I would do it. I did say, “Tell Nancy I love her.” She was my girlfriend of the time. That’s how unsure we were about this. If the rope came free, I was going to swing big-time and I was going to get hurt or worse. There were rocks below us on a seventy degree face. I put another ice screw in. Gary was on the triangular face below our position trying to find other screws we had left on the ascent, but it had snowed while we were up high. It was taking a long time to find them, but we needed them to rappel off the mountain.
The ropes were designed to slip through, but the rope was tied in a beautiful knot. We didn’t have a clue how it happened, but I saw it was complicated as I untied it. We called it the “Thank God Knot,” because if it had not formed, we would have been on rappel and could not have advanced. We would have had to hang there all night. We returned to our old ice-shelf camp and listened to the avalanches thunder again. We were able to find the ice screws in the daylight. In the dark, searching would have been a disaster.
At the time, I was cussing the knot, but it probably saved our lives. The climb felt like a hard effort, with a good result. It was a great accomplishment to climb that mountain in the winter time. But that was going to be the last time I tackled such a hard route in winter. We did not go on to climb Foraker and Denali that trip. We were spent.
A lot of my friends have died in the mountains doing crazy stuff like that, and I’m still here, which is pretty phenomenal. I’ve lost several buddies in airplane and motor vehicle accidents, too. I suppose if you are unwise or unlucky, you check out early. If you are lucky and last long enough, you may ultimately lose all of your friends. For life to be good, I must keep making younger friends.
I once asked older friend Brad Washburn how he got so famous. He said, “That’s pretty easy. Do something difficult when you’re young and then relax a bit and don’t get yourself killed. Live to a ripe old age and people will respect you. The whole trick is not to die after you have been to the edge. Then you get to hear about your successes for years.”
Brad was almost ninety-six when he died in 2007. He lived a good life.