IN TALKEETNA, I VOLUNTEERED TO CALL ED’S parents. It seemed only fair that I take on this dolorous task: it was I, after all, who had come up with the idea of inviting Ed on the expedition.
From Don Sheldon’s living room, I placed the call to Pennsylvania. “Mr. Bernd,” I said, reciting the formula I had practiced for half an hour, “I’m afraid I have terrible news.” I took a deep breath. “Ed was killed on Mount Huntington.”
There was a staticky silence on the line. Then, in a voice already thick with shock: “Is this some kind of joke?”
I tried to explain what had happened on the night of July 30. The connection was bad. Mr. Bernd had to keep asking me to repeat myself. I told him the bare facts of the accident. I added that there was no hope of finding or retrieving Ed’s body. I promised to telephone again in a few days, from Colorado.
As soon as I had hung up, I fled the house, walked out across Sheldon’s airstrip, then circled to the back of his hangar. It was a warm, beautiful day, with fireweed rioting in the lot. At last, the dam of feelings inside me broke. I slumped to the ground, put my head in my hands, and began to weep. It had been four years since I had cried—since that other perfect summer day, when we had found Gabe’s body at the base of the First Flatiron. Hearing me, Don and Matt came around back of the hangar. Don put his hand on my shoulder, saying, “Thanks for making the call.”
Later, each of us phoned his own parents to break the news. So lacerating had the call to Mr. Bernd been, however, that I have no memory today of how my parents absorbed the grim tidings.
The next day, Don, Matt, and I drove to Anchorage. We sold the Microbus to a used car dealer; then Don and I booked flights to California and Colorado, respectively. Matt had accepted a job as a handyman for the bush pilot who ran Susitna Lodge, the solitary outpost on the Denali Highway where Don and I had left our pickup in 1964 when we had hiked in to Mount Deborah. Matt spent a stressful and lonely August at the lodge, which was run in a fashion best described as barely contained chaos. The pilot and his wife were in the throes of marital doldrums, and she, a short-tempered harridan, was given to blaming everyone in sight—Matt, as often as not—for each disaster that was built into the routines of their gas station–cum–guiding service.
Only an hour after Matt had phoned his parents from Talkeetna, they received another call, from Matt’s mother’s sister, telling them that Matt’s cousin had just been struck by lightning and killed as he worked building a house in Vermont. It took some weeks for his parents to get the news to Matt, but by the end of August, as he repaired flat tires at Susitna Lodge and backpacked moose meat to remote landing strips, all the while ducking the tirades of the pilot’s wife, Matt brooded upon the twin losses of the summer. A sense of doom seemed to hang over that last month in Alaska, and Matt began to have forebodings about his return to school, where, now president himself of the Mountaineering Club, he would be in charge of the weakest aggregation of undergraduate climbers at Harvard in almost a decade.
We were all three in debt after Huntington. Because Ed had not yet paid his share of the expenses, the expedition had ended up costing Matt, Don, and me an ungodly $800 apiece. (McKinley and Deborah had cost no more than $500 per man, round-trip from Cambridge, including food, gear, transportation, and the bush pilot.) In August, I took a job at Holubar Mountaineering, a climbing shop in Boulder run by an eccentric couple of Austro-German heritage. For minimum wage—$1.25 an hour—I used a reversible vacuum cleaner to blow goose down into the baffles of Holubar sleeping bags, or sold copies of Summit magazine (now defunct) to those rare customers who not only climbed but were eager to read about our sport. And I spent many an idle moment suspiciously handling carabiners of the make Ed had used for his rappel, trying to find ones with loose or sticky gates.
Only a week after returning to Boulder, however, I signed up, with dread and reluctance, for a mission that seemed on the face of it a good idea, but which in the end may have done more harm than good. At my father’s suggestion, I called Ed’s parents and offered to come to Philadelphia to explain what had happened on Mount Huntington.
I was met at the airport by a librarian who was a close friend of the family. Her first words were, “Is there any chance he’s still alive?” The question stunned me. The jumble of the lower Tokositna, as I had seen it from the front seat of Sheldon’s slow-looping plane, with the 4,500-foot vector of Ed’s fall line, flashed before my eyes. Here was an inkling of just how unfathomable to the Bernds were the scale and severity of the Alaska wilderness.
With the temperature in the low 90s, Philadelphia was humid, gritty, and hazy. The librarian drove me to the house in Upper Darby where Ed, Matt, and I had eaten sandwiches at 3:00 A.M. Foolishly, I had not offered to stay in a motel, so the Bernds gave me their living room couch to sleep on.
I had volunteered for a three-day visit. To face what I knew would be an ordeal of guilt and recrimination, I had steeled myself to a single purpose. It would be worth the whole trip if I could simply explain to his parents what climbing had meant to Ed, how well he had done on Huntington, what a great deed we had accomplished together. I was itching to explain.
But for two days, the Bernds steered rigidly clear of all talk about Alaska. We barely talked, for that matter, about Ed—even about their Ed, the high school hero, the pride of the family. Yet the accoutrements of mourning pervaded the small, drab house. The Bernds had left Ed’s bedroom just as it was the June night we had escaped back onto the road west; I recognized the duffels Ed had dropped off, still sitting, unopened, on the floor. The harbinger was obvious: his parents would no doubt preserve that chamber untouched for years to come, a shrine to their lost son. From time to time, I heard Mrs. Bernd weeping from the distance of her own bedroom, while her husband tried to shush her, for fear of disturbing their guest.
So, in the un-air-conditioned swelter of Philadelphia in August, we sat and made awkward small talk for two days straight. I tried to wait out this storm of avoidance, but the nastiest tent-bound gales I had endured in Alaska seemed preferable to this trial by tedium. Twice, the librarian took me out for lunch, providing blessed interludes in the living room impasse. Back on the couch, I picked up a book now and then, a specimen of Ed’s summer reading, then laid it guiltily back down. One morning, at breakfast in the kitchen, as I stared out the window at the small side yard fronting a brick wall, Mrs. Bernd suddenly burst out, “Oh, you look just like Ed! He used to sit right there and look out the window, just like you’re doing.” I smiled wanly, imagining Ed’s own longing for flight.
Finally, on Sunday afternoon, with only two hours left before I had to head to the airport, the Bernds asked me to tell them about Mount Huntington. All my pent-up frustration came out in a recitation of the credo by which I had come to live. Despite his inexperience, I told the Bernds, Ed had performed brilliantly in Alaska. His lead on the fifth pitch was the hardest ice climbing we had done on the whole expedition. The accident was a complete fluke. It was not some mistake of Ed’s—it was a mechanical failure, whose true nature I could not divine and probably never would.
We had done the hardest route yet climbed in Alaska, I ranted on. Within the world of mountaineering, it would win notice the world over. What we had done together on the west face was a great accomplishment. Huntington was, in this sense, a noble memorial to Ed’s courage and talent.
Mr. and Mrs. Bernd stared at me in incomprehension. There had to be, they felt, some overarching meaning to Ed’s death. It was part of God’s plan, but how could God have wanted Ed dead? At one point Mrs. Bernd wondered out loud whether Ed had been spared a worse end, perhaps on some battlefield in Vietnam.
They asked me why we had been unable to retrieve Ed’s body. I tried to explain the landscape of the west face, the immensity of the Tokositna Glacier. I may have drawn a diagram. For the Bernds, the absence of Ed’s body was the cruelest twist of all. As I described the basin to which Ed had fallen, Mrs. Bernd suddenly wailed, “My poor baby! He must be so cold!”
Despite my undergraduate major in math, the University of Denver had accepted me as a full-fledged graduate student in English. In September, I rented a cheap basement apartment on Humboldt Street, a short bike ride from campus. That gloomy garret came to seem something of a dungeon. Almost no sunlight trickled through the small, head-high windows above my bookcase, a sore deprivation in what was then, before smog became a Denver fact of life, one of the sunniest cities in the country. The landlady, who lived upstairs, was a widow addicted to soap operas. All afternoon, every afternoon, I tried to shut out the bass quaver of organ music filtered through the ceiling, punctuated at regular intervals by the woman’s ghoulish cackle. Then, once Days of Our Lives was over, she started boiling her nightly stew, and the reek of overcooked carrots and cabbages seeped down into my precincts.
The prospect of living close to my family again was not high among my priorities in applying to DU. The proximity of the mountains among which I had become a climber was much higher. But the bottom line was that DU was then the only university in the country that offered a Ph.D. in creative writing. By now I knew that I wanted to be a writer. Though at the time I did not recognize the connection, it was proof of how thoroughly steeped I was in my father’s notions of the value of academe that it never occurred to me simply to hang out my shingle and start writing—as Hemingway, Faulkner, and Fitzgerald had. Instead, I assumed the best way to learn how to write was to go to graduate school.
In English C during my senior year at Harvard, thanks to the teacher, a novelist manqué and acute critic of the Romantic poets named Jim Rieger, I served a solid apprenticeship in the craft of fiction. During the next five years at DU, I took seven or eight courses in writing without learning much at all. Yet at the same time, I discovered the glories of the richest modern literature in the world. Before 1965, I had never read Spenser or Pope, never opened Paradise Lost, never committed to heart Herrick and Donne and Keats and Browning and Housman. At DU, I flung myself into literature, gradually learning what I did learn about how to write by reading great writers—a course, I would have thought, some teacher might have recommended to me in the eighth or ninth grade and saved me from what I now think of as the fourteen-year detour that lay across my path.
Word of our Huntington climb had indeed traveled across the mountaineering world. Don and I were invited to speak at the annual dinner of the American Alpine Club in Seattle, where we shared the prized Saturday evening stage with California veterans Allen Steck and Dick Long, who had led a six-man team that made the gutsy first ascent of the long and tortuous Hummingbird Ridge on Mount Logan in the Yukon. And the article I wrote about Huntington for the American Alpine Journal led off the 1966 issue.
The honor we most craved, however, was snatched out of our grasp by a twist of fate. News of our ascent had filtered all the way to France. An incredulous Lionel Terray wrote to Brad Washburn, wondering whether the west face climb was a hoax. For Terray, it was inconceivable that four unknown college kids could have succeeded on a route that was harder than the ridge that had taken the stuffing out of his superb eight-man team in 1964. Washburn wrote him back, vouching for our deed, but before Terray, our hero, could read the letter, he was killed on the easy climb in the Vercors.
I had weathered the deaths of Merrihue and Doody with hard man rationalizations and an unwavering focus on Huntington. But Ed’s death had shaken me as badly as Gabe’s had four years before. Despite my obtuse determination to impress upon the Bernds the magnitude of Ed’s accomplishment in Alaska, I came back from Upper Darby knowing that I had spent three days in the presence of a grief whose depth was matched, in my limited experience, only by Sandy Merrihue’s as she had hiked into the ravine on Mount Washington the previous March. And Sandy’s pain had come home to me only in a flickering glimpse.
I harbored no guilt over Doody’s and Merrihue’s demise. But during quiet moments in my basement apartment in Denver, guilt over Ed throbbed like an old war wound. I had dwelt at length on Ed’s comment as we cheered our victory in the Nose Camp—“I don’t know if I’d do the whole thing again.” It was obvious to me now that, in the normal course of affairs, Ed would probably have climbed at a moderate level for a few years, then quit to take up some other hobby. The blind commitment with which Don and I had learned to fend off the vexing ambiguities of life was not a pledge to which Ed would have lastingly subscribed.
That fall in Denver, there was no gang of climbers to keep me in the fold, no weekend trips to the Gunks or Cannon to restore my equanimity. The school had an outing club, but its members were more interested in ski trips to Winter Park and A-Basin than in climbing routes at Eldorado Canyon. I went out once or twice with acquaintances from Boulder, but I felt shaky and out of practice, overprotecting 5.7 leads I would have danced up the previous spring.
In Cambridge, Matt was going through a kindred tribulation. On even the mellowest weekends at the Gunks, he was seized with the premonition that some terrible accident was about to happen. None of the other HMCers was solid leading anything harder than 5.6, so at Cathedral Ledge, as he watched his colleagues head off in pairs for routes at the very limit of their abilities, Matt suppressed the urge to steer them away from impending catastrophe.
On top of his fears, Matt was climbing poorly himself. In one letter to me, he wrote self-deprecatingly, “At Cathedral, I was in the worst shape of my life. In my Limmers [mountain boots] I diddled and backed off and overprotected and floundered all up the regular route. I even took a short fall onto the big dirty ledge below the cave.”
Only a few years later, Matt would come into his element. For several consecutive seasons, he ranked as one of the best rock climbers in the East. At Seneca Rock in West Virginia, Matt put up several routes that were harder than anything else at the cliff. More than three decades later, those lines are revered as classic test pieces. Matt’s prowess on rock during those years far exceeded any skill that I ever attained. But in the fall of 1965, nervous and uncertain, he plunged to the nadir of the four-year career he had so far devoted to climbing.
Hoping that a stern bout of winter mountaineering would round us back into form, Don and I hiked over Christmas into the Palisades, the most challenging high peaks in the Sierra Nevada. It took us two days to reach timberline, where we set up camp on a frozen lake beneath the north face of North Palisade, which was coated smooth with rime ice. Then a storm blew in that lasted for four days. As we had on the col below the east ridge of Deborah a year and a half before, we fought simply to keep the drifts from burying the tent. On the seventh day, disgusted, we hiked out.
After Gabe’s death, I had pretty much decided to give up climbing. Now, in the fall of 1965 and the spring of 1966, I was not about to quit—I had too much invested in the passion that had, for three years now, been by far the most important thing in my life. But by February 1966, I had pretty much decided not to go on an expedition the next summer. Don and I had talked much about a virtually unknown range called the Cathedral or Kichatna Spires. Although none of its summits reached even 9,000 feet, we could see from the topo maps that the peaks rose, sheer and startling, as high as 3,000 and even 4,000 feet straight out of the diminutive glaciers that hemmed them in. None of the twenty-odd major peaks in the Spires appeared to have a single easy route on it.
Seventy miles southwest of McKinley, the Kichatnas were unknown to Brad Washburn. As far as Don and I could find out, only a single photo of the Spires had ever been published. When I asked Brad why he had never turned his aerial camera on these evidently majestic peaks, he answered pithily, alluding to the terrible weather, “They call that the asshole of the Alaska Range.”
In a spell of blithe optimism, Don and I had tentatively planned to head for the Kichatnas in August 1965, after we had finished climbing Mount Huntington. Instead, that summer, a group of eastern climbers who were more at home in the Gunks than in the great ranges flew in, landed on an unnamed glacier, and spent nearly a month in a state of slack-jawed intimidation among the Kichatna Spires. They managed to climb only three minor peaks.
Now, in the fall and winter of 1965, Don and I traded listless communiqués about the Spires. In the wake of Huntington, our fanaticism had dissolved. We gave up the idea of going to the Kichatnas before we had really formulated it. As of February, I had no idea what I would do with myself during the coming summer.
As compensation for the muddle of my feelings about climbing, I plunged wholeheartedly into graduate school. I took courses in Chaucer, Shakespearean textual criticism, eighteenth-century satire, Melville, and the literature of the American South. Only in brief spurts had I ever been a good student at Harvard, but now I slaved over my textbooks long into the night and every weekend. The perfection of “La Belle Dame sans Merci” and “Lycidas” left me as breathless as the proofs of Euler and Pascal had when I was sixteen. Even the crude insipidities of Restoration comedy seemed well worth a term paper.
In my creative writing courses, I was manufacturing not only short stories, but sonnets, villanelles, and sestinas. For subject matter, I sometimes turned to my beloved wilderness, trying to express in nebulous effusions the absolute truths of beauty and terror I had beheld in Alaska. Yet for school, I felt that I had to couch my passion in statements that aspired to some kind of universal “importance.” One of my prouder efforts, for instance, was a rondeau that eventually got published—to my joy and astonishment—in the South Dakota Review.
In my spare time, I wrote three different articles about Huntington, one for the American Alpine Journal, one for the French magazine La Montagne, and one for our biennial Harvard Mountaineering Club journal. Producing these pieces only scratched an itch that was eating away at me from inside. From September through February, I felt haunted by our Huntington experience. Neither in my soliloquy in the Bernds’ living room, nor in letters to Matt and Don, nor in the too short compass of the journal articles could I quell an inarticulate but ravenous urge to convey the wonder and agony of our six weeks above the Tokositna Glacier. Sometime in the winter, I realized that I needed to write a book about Huntington.
I was taking my classes so seriously, however, that I was loath to steal time from studying to work on this compulsive but (I thought) professionally useless project. Then a simple solution presented itself.
DU let us out for a week of spring break in March. With reluctance, I turned down an invitation from some Colorado climbers to go to the Wind River Range in Wyoming during that week. Instead, I bicycled up to Boulder, installed myself in the bedroom in my parents’ house in which I had grown up, and wrote for eight to ten hours each day. (The basement apartment in Denver, I must have felt, was too redolent of cabbage and soap opera to be conducive to serious work.)
Before I began, I made an outline. Two weekends and a school week long, the vacation stretched over nine days, so my book would have nine chapters. Writing in longhand on ledger pads, I turned out a chapter a day. Except for the number theory proofs I had labored over at age fifteen and sixteen, this was the most intense intellectual effort I had ever made. The book came out of me in one torrential flood.
I emerged from my sanctum late on the second Sunday afternoon to announce that I had finished. Bemused by my effort (for he had planned for years to write a book of his own, but had never gotten around to it), my father said, “So what are you going to do next?”
“Type it up and send it off,” I answered flippantly.
“You can’t do that,” he snapped. For Dad, writing had always been drudgery in the extreme. Only after four or five drafts over many days of hard work could he get a paper in shape to submit to the American Scientist or the Astrophysical Journal. No publisher, Dad scolded me now, would take seriously what would surely amount to a rough first draft.
I ignored my father’s advice. With my right forefinger, on my Hermes portable, I typed up The Mountain of My Fear (the title from a W. H. Auden poem), making only a few changes here and there. Two publishers recommended by my Harvard mentor, Jim Rieger, rejected the book before I alighted on a small but venerable New York house called Vanguard Press. According to the Writer’s Market, Vanguard was constantly looking for new authors. Later I would learn that the press had a reputation for discovering major talents, including James T. Farrell and Joyce Carol Oates, only to lose them, once they started to become famous, to bigger houses with deeper pockets.
Since the spring of 1966, I have written eighteen books, including two novels and a memoir that (mercifully) went unpublished, as well as hundreds of magazine articles. Never again, however, have I labored in the grips of a purgative catharsis of the sort that held me in thrall during those nine days in my bedroom on Bluebell Avenue.
It was not until early in 1967 that I received a letter from Vanguard accepting my book. I read the short note over and over again, incredulous at my good fortune. On top of the fact that my narrative would actually be published, bound in hard covers and sold in bookstores, Vanguard offered me the princely advance of $500. In my grad student naïveté, I had no idea just how long the odds were, even in the 1960s, of a manuscript being rescued from the slush pile of a New York publisher. On the other hand, unlike most first-time novelists, I had been handed, thanks to Huntington, a plot as dramatic as any memoirist could ask for.
Until that letter of acceptance arrived, I had not even told my DU professors that I had written a book. It was not false pride that kept me from doing so: I assumed that the story of a mountaineering expedition had nothing to do with “creative writing.” When he learned about my imminent publication, the founder and director of the DU writing program, an alcoholic novelist named John Williams, who would later win the National Book Award for Augustus, was more miffed than pleased. “Why didn’t you tell me you were writing this book?” he berated me. “I could have helped you with it.”
The Mountain of My Fear finally came out in the spring of 1968. Since my manuscript was less than 35,000 words long, Vanguard had to print the text in large type, with generous margins, and pad the book with maps, photos, and appendices to produce a slender volume of 157 pages. Among the promotional coups the press scored was to land me an appearance on the TV show To Tell the Truth, where three out of the four canny panelists guessed that I was “the real David Roberts” because my two handsome impostors looked so much more like mountain climbers than I did.
Thirty-six years later, the book is still in print, and I am gratified to know that The Mountain of My Fear is regarded as a mountaineering classic. But I can never reread its more overwrought passages without wincing at my twenty-two-year-old pretensions. In the grips of Faulkner, I spun out long, adjectivally dense, barely punctuated sentences that tried to mirror the intensity of our climb, and I wandered off for pages at a time on woolly metaphysical digressions that had little to do with piton-or ropecraft. If the cathartic frenzy of those nine days on Bluebell Avenue allowed me to get down on the page the bare bones of the dramatic story of our forty days on Huntington—a canonic tale, as the blurb writer’s cliché might have it, of triumph and tragedy—it also produced an abundance of rhetorical excess.
The best thing for me about getting a book I had written at twenty-two published, however, was that it kept me from giving up the ambition to become a writer through more than a decade of discouragement and failure that succeeded the appearance of The Mountain of My Fear.
That first year at DU there were other pleasures besides the discovery of Swift and Samuel Johnson. With a former high school friend who was now attending the University of Colorado Medical School in Denver, I struck up a touch football partnership. Just as Paul and I had up in Boulder in twelfth grade, now Bill and I cruised the DU playing fields, looking for victims upon whom to inflict our Zigzag Left and Blind Lateral and H Right.
And somehow the change of milieu, from up-tight Cambridge to the laid-back West, allowed me to tame the anxiety of the dating game and summon up the nerve to ask women out. That year I had three brief affairs (one a mere one-night stand), but while sex still seemed as magical as it had during the first months with Lisa, the intimacy that women seemed to demand scared me. From the edge of the dark hole of emotions, I shrank back toward safer ground. With a climbing partner, there was a real granite cliff, a couloir of ice and snow, upon which to unleash the passion that bound us soul-to-soul. In the hazy wilderness of romance, where was the mountain? Could one belay a lover with a rope made only of flickering desire?
In May, I formed a crush on a slender, petite, dark-haired senior in my writing class. Sharon Morris turned out wry, wispy short stories, the antithesis of my heavy meditations on the meaning of existence. She had grown up in Denver, the oldest of four children of a telegrapher for the D&RG Railroad. Like Ed Bernd, I soon learned, Sharon had been the first person in her extended family to go to college.
We started hanging out together after class rather than actually dating. Sharon was in the midst of a painful disentanglement from a boyfriend of three years, a charming, good-looking sociopath who had fooled her throughout that span with the charade that he was an army veteran turned grad student. The truth was that he had never finished high school; homeless, he lived in a basement storage locker on campus. A DU policeman had recently caught him returning to his lair, blowing his cover.
As Sharon pulled away from the relationship, the man turned into a stalker, hiding for hours at a time outside the drawn shades of her first-floor off-campus apartment. During some of those first afternoons together, I sat on the grass in front of the library listening in fascination as Sharon and her best friend, the editor of the undergraduate literary magazine, talked in their half-secret code about him, and about how to escape his creepy pursuit.
Then one evening, after margaritas at Tico’s, the cheap but good Mexican restaurant that Sharon had introduced me to, we ended up in bed. The stalker soon found out about our affair. At one point, he threatened to kill both of us.
A few weeks earlier, I had solved the dilemma of the upcoming summer. A friend of a friend told me that a job in Anchorage had suddenly come open. The University of Alaska operated extension schools on the military outposts of Fort Richardson and Elmendorf Air Force Base. Thanks to the sudden departure of an English teacher, there was a vacancy at Elmendorf. So desperate was the base to fill this gap, that they quickly hired me—a first-year grad student without even an MA on my vita—to teach GIs expository writing and introduction to literature. For back-to-back two-hour courses four evenings a week, from June through August, I would earn the astounding sum of $2,700. Even with the inflated cost of living under which Alaskans suffered, this seemed a small fortune.
Impulsively, I invited Sharon to come up to Anchorage and spend the summer with me. Just as impulsively, she accepted. But for a pair of car trips in early childhood, she had never traveled outside the state of Colorado, so Alaska promised an adventure. And the forty-ninth state also seemed to offer an escape from the stalker—though there were times that summer when we believed he had made his way north and was lurking in ambush, behind some fence or abandoned building, ready to mete out his vengeance.
During that tumultuous spring of 1966, a chance encounter further complicated my life. A Denver climber whom I knew only by reputation, Gregg Blomberg, invited me, along with several other mountaineers, over to his apartment. Meeting the stringy, wild-eyed gear manufacturer (his main claim to fame was an all-metal ice axe he had invented), I was sworn to secrecy the moment I entered his front door. When the four or five of us had gathered in his living room, Blomberg unveiled his clandestine project—an attempt, the next March, to make the first winter ascent of Mount McKinley.
I did not hesitate before declining. In July of 1963, McKinley had seemed quite cold enough, with temperatures on our summit day reaching minus 25 degrees Fahrenheit. Ambivalent as I felt about expeditions of any kind after Huntington, the last trip I would have signed up for was a plod up the West Buttress in conditions that seemed to guarantee frostbite. Don and I had reveled in the fanaticism that drove us to Deborah and Huntington, but Blomberg’s fanaticism seemed of a different sort—the paranoia of the mad scientist, sure that rivals were about to steal his great idea. As if these were not reasons enough, I also turned down the invitation because I believed that a winter attempt on McKinley stood about one chance in twenty of succeeding.
In the living room that evening, there was another climber whom I knew only by reputation. Though born in Colorado, Art Davidson lived in Anchorage. Roughly the same age as I, he had already notched some impressive deeds in Alaska. Only a few weeks before, with a single companion, Art had made the second ascent of Mount Marcus Baker, the highest peak in the Chugach Range, first climbed by Brad Washburn way back in 1938.
Without a qualm, Art accepted Blomberg’s winter McKinley invitation. But that epic campaign lay ten months in the future: there were things to be accomplished in the meantime. The night after our living room séance, Art invited me out for beers. We met at the Stadium Inn, a venerable watering hole near the DU campus.
Art was wearing what I would come to know as his uniform—shapeless khaki trousers, a plaid lumberjack shirt with holes in the elbows. With his flaming red beard and bushy white eyebrows, he looked like the descendant of Icelandic warriors who had intermarried with Irish slaves. Now Art started talking about Alaska and couldn’t stop. His monologue, an extended paean to the tundra wastes, the dancing northern lights, the gleaming limitless ranges of his adopted state, was like a Dylan Thomas riff spun out of the fizz of his fourth Miller draft. I listened, stupefied and fascinated, as the poetry awakened my own dormant love of Alaska.
Suddenly Art said, “Hey, you want to go to the Spires?”
Of course I did, I thought, my own drunkenness mingling with alarm. But I answered, “I can’t. I’ve taken this job.” I explained to Art about my Elmendorf gig.
“That’s okay,” he rejoined. “We’ll go in September.”
In that impulsive moment, my life took another 180-degree turn. Instead of skipping climbing for the summer of 1966, and so, I would guess now, beginning to drift away for good from the consuming passion of my last few years, I would go on my fourth expedition, to the magnificent and still little-explored Kichatna Spires. Thanks to Art, I would keep my string of expeditions in the Far North alive, in a sequence that would eventually number thirteen straight years.
As soon as school got out at the end of May, I flew up to Anchorage. Sharon followed a week later. I rented a dingy one-room shack of an apartment in Spenard, the tacky suburb that had started to sprawl across the bluffs southwest of Anchorage’s old railroad depot downtown. The bed took up most of our living room–cum–kitchen; a cubicle partitioned next to the sink—little better than a glorified indoor outhouse—served as our very un-private bathroom.
It is a wonder that my relationship with Sharon survived that summer. Despite the steadiness of her three-year alliance with the stalker, Sharon had never lived with him. I, of course, had had almost no experience with women since the end of things with Lisa in early 1961. If intimacy was full of lurking terrors for me, I could hardly have signed up for a more rigorous course of aversion therapy.
Within the first week, Sharon got a job as a sales clerk at J. C. Penney. Her hours were from 8:00 to 5:00, while my Elmendorf classes lasted from 6:30 to 10:30 P.M. Monday through Thursday. Insomnia wreaked havoc with my diurnal round: coming home from four straight hours of teaching, I was usually too wired to sleep. I would read in bed in the dim light of midsummer nights in June and July, with Sharon asleep next to me. Often I nodded off just as Sharon was waking up to head downtown to J. C. Penney. It was no doubt a blessing that our schedules were so out of sync.
Yet still, we made love every day or night, and sex seemed at first to offer a reasonable facsimile of intimacy. Sharon was taking birth control pills, so the gnawing tension that had hung over Lisa’s and my furtive nights in the cemetery was wholly absent in Spenard.
I had entered my first classroom on the air force base with some trepidation. What business had a twenty-three-year-old teaching grammar and literature to men twice his age? Indeed, a number of my students could not hide their shock at the first appearance of their absurdly young teacher, and several harbored an unspoken grudge through the long summer. Having worked full day jobs before heading over to night school, some of my students were so weary they could not help falling asleep in the second hour of diagramming sentences. Yet I was impressed with how seriously these men took their classes—especially when I compared them, two years later, to some of the bored, rich DU kids to whom I taught freshman English.
In my lit course, one of the books on the reading list was Catch-22. I was daunted at the prospect of pontificating about Yossarian’s take on the armed services to men who had served in Korea, and sure that most of these air force lifers would deeply resent the book. Instead, to the last man, they loved Heller’s mad travesty of military life so heartily that more than one of them wept with laughter as he discussed the novel.
When he was not off in the mountains, Art became Sharon’s and my constant companion. A true climbing bum, he squandered no money on rent, but lived in the back of his pickup truck—named Bucephalus, after Alexander the Great’s horse—in the bed of which he had carpentered a doghouse-like sleeping hut. We made a deal: in exchange for the occasional shower or dinner cooked by Sharon in our Spenard shack, Art lent me Bucephalus to commute to Elmendorf.
Spenard abounded in neighborhood bars, several of which became our regular hangouts, and on weekends we sometimes went, all three, to topless joints (the first I had ever visited) where the strippers bantered good-naturedly with patrons who hooted their approval of each inch of newly exposed flesh. And on exceptionally clear nights, we took the elevator to the top floor of the Westward Hotel, then the city’s tallest building. Splurging on overpriced drinks, we watched the sun set in the northwest, then stared for long minutes at the jagged crest of far-off mountains silhouetted in the alpenglow. It was the Kichatna Spires. “We’ll be there in a little over a month!” Art would chortle, raising his glass. He and I never got over the astounding fact that this compact range of virtually unknown mountains could be seen, 130 miles away, from Anchorage—though only from the top of the Westward. A mere three peaks in the Spires were officially named, the legacy of a government explorer who had glimpsed them from a hill to the south on his way through Rainy Pass in 1899.
So the summer waxed and waned. With Art I made the third or fourth ascent of a middling-hard peak in the Chugach, the range that backs Anchorage on the east—three days of drizzle and whiteout among some of the ugliest mountains in Alaska. With Sharon, I did an easy hike up Flattop, the most accessible Chugach peak. It was the first summit she had ever reached.
A self-taught musician, Art had formed the habit of crawling through the window of a locked building on the campus of Alaska Methodist University, where late at night he would thump out blues and jazz on an out-of-tune piano stranded in some student lounge. The cops must have put out an all-points bulletin, for one night, after Art had picked me up at Elmendorf and we were searching for a midnight diner, a trooper pulled Bucephalus over. The nervous young policeman emerged from his squad car with his hand on his gun. Legs spread, palms planted on the hood of Art’s truck, we were frisked before the trooper took Art away in handcuffs. I bailed him out the next morning.
When Sharon flew back to Denver at the end of August, we seemed to have little idea what the shared summer had meant. We had not talked very much about our future. To fit the Spires expedition into the academic year, I had originally planned to take the fall term off from DU, but a meeting with my draft board made it clear that such truancy would buy me an instant ticket to the armed forces. In the end, I simply skipped the first three weeks of my second year of grad school, a self-indulgence two or three of my professors were slow to forgive. (During five years at DU, I never thought to question the social wisdom of that elitist boondoggle of the day, the student deferment—even after two of my friends who had chosen the other path ended up dead in Vietnam.)
At the airport, as I hugged Sharon goodbye, I whispered, “I’ll miss you.” With tears in her eyes, at first she couldn’t answer. We kissed once more. As she turned to go, she said, “Be careful in the Spires.”
That farewell sent needles of disturbance racing through my veins. Not since Lisa had headed off to England in the fall of 1959 had I known the bittersweet anguish of parting, so perfectly captured in Emily Dickinson’s famous lines—“all we know of Heaven,/ And all we need of Hell.” But this time, there was a wholly novel element, which darkened my feelings with the acid taste of dread. At the airport, as Sharon walked down the concourse toward her gate, I glimpsed a truth that would trouble the next decade of my life. The clean love of mountaineering, the passionate pursuit of new routes and unclimbed summits, the most important thing in my life, was fundamentally incompatible with that other kind of love, the bond between a man and a woman who, no matter how they have hedged their promises, hope to share a life together.
On September 2, we flew into the Spires. Art and I had assembled a team of five, including Rick Millikan, the HMCer who had taught me so much when I was a freshman and sophomore, and with whom I had climbed the Wickersham Wall in 1963.
On McKinley, Deborah, and Huntington, we had tackled unclimbed routes on peaks whose summits had been previously reached—the latter two, to be sure, only once apiece. And on those three trips, we had devoted the whole expedition to a single objective. With the Spires, I made a shift in mountaineering aesthetic, one that would last through the next decade. From 1966 on, with a single exception, all my expeditions would be quests for unclimbed mountains, for first ascents of difficult peaks that, often as not, had not even been named by the few explorers who might have passed nearby.
In the Spires, we hoped to revel in an embarrassment of riches, for every peak we turned our attention to had never before been tried. But from the start, we had agreed to focus our best efforts on the range’s highest peak, an intimidating tower of granite known only as Peak 8985, in honor of its altitude above sea level. Just months before, in the American Alpine Journal, the team of eastern climbers who had been virtually shut out in the Spires in 1965 had saluted Peak 8985: “We all considered this mountain—from a mountaineering as well as esthetic viewpoint—to be one of the outstanding peaks of North America.” I had figured out from the topo maps that a glacier on its northeast flank ought to give the best possible access to this monolith.
We flew in not with Don Sheldon, but with Eric Barnes, a friend of Art’s, a veterinarian and former climber who ran a bush flying company as a sideline. Eric made a smooth landing on the virgin glacier, taxied to near its head, and deposited me with a small pile of gear. Three more flights got the rest of the party and the remainder of our supplies in. We had food for forty days. In early October, at the end of the expedition, rather than have Eric pick us up, we would hike out to Rainy Pass, thirty miles to the south, via a circuitous reconnaissance of several of the range’s other glaciers.
In the warmth and drizzle of July on Huntington, Don Jensen had more than once vowed, “I’m beginning to think the best time for a climb like this would be September.” Now, in the Spires, we learned firsthand the rewards and penalties of an autumnal campaign in the Alaska Range, a gambit that virtually no teams had ever previously attempted.
We named our home the Shadows Glacier, in homage to the perpetual gloom that reigned over our northern-exposure base camp. After the first two weeks, in fact, the sun swung so low in the southern sky that, eclipsed by the soaring walls at the head of the glacier, it never rose on camp. Twice during the expedition, we had to hike more than a mile north and erect a clothesline between planted ice axes, to dry out our sodden sleeping bags in the two or three hours of sunshine that obliquely swept this lower surface of the Shadows Glacier. After the equinox, on September 21, we got a solid twelve hours of darkness each night, a dispiriting condition of life I had never before experienced in Alaska. At base camp, we built a fifty-foot-long multiroom igloo in which to cook and occasionally sleep. After a few weeks, it turned into a virtual cave, so much snow had fallen and drifted up against its walls.
For the first nine days, we had decent weather. We bagged two easy, lower summits, and discovered a remarkable hidden couloir—we called it the Secret Passage—that climbed an alarmingly steep but technically easy 1,600 feet to a dizzy notch on Peak 8985’s north ridge. From the col at the top of the Passage, the summit of Kichatna Spire, as we had renamed the range’s highest peak, lay only 2,300 feet above. Yet out of that col, the climbing immediately turned severe. Because our route lay on the dead-north ridge of the mountain, it got no sun in September. Every patch of granite that we came to grips with was plastered with frost feathers, sometimes with sheets of rime ice.
Then a storm blew in that did not relent for twelve straight days. On the only climbing effort we made during that spell, as Rick and I clumped upward only fifty feet below the summit of a minor peak to the north, a windslab broke loose beneath our feet. “Keep out of it!” I yelled, as the avalanche carried us, tumbling helplessly, toward the basin below. We flailed like infants learning to swim. Rick lost his ice axe; mine, knocked out of my hand, stayed attached to me by the wrist loop, and banged me about the head and shoulders as I fell. But we managed to stay atop the cascading debris, eddying out at last 350 feet below the fracture line, bruised but glad to be alive.
Slowly thereafter, during breaks in the consistently bad weather, we added a pitch or two per day to our route on Kichatna Spire. I led some of the hardest pitches, whose starkness was intensified by the wintry cold. We left quarter-inch fixed ropes strung along our route, then, on subsequent forays, used mechanical devices called Jumars, which had just come on the American market, to reascend each pitch. (Today, Jumaring on quarter-inch fixed ropes would be considered the height of lunacy, for the gales that prevail in ranges like the Spires cause the nylon lines to rub and abrade against the rock. Good climbers have died Jumaring frayed fixed lines when thicker ropes than ours broke under their weight.)
Kichatna Spire was a glorious challenge, as hard a climb as we could have asked for. But my mood that September was far from what it had been on Huntington. Now, when the other guys were off climbing, I worried about their safety as I seldom had about partners in the past. And after Rick’s and my escape from the avalanche, I never climbed the Secret Passage without premonitions of the whole couloir’s cutting loose and carrying us to a snowy grave.
As early as September 10, I wrote in my diary, “I have enjoyed the first nine days of this trip…but I wonder if something is missing. I worry a lot, but I always have. I am not sure always if the risk is worth it, as I was sure the last two years. Perhaps I have only in the last year found other things that mean (or that could eventually mean) as much, possibly more, than climbing does to me.” In that stodgy entry, even in the privacy of my diary, I had to euphemize the impact of the summer spent with Sharon. And at the time, I thought that writing The Mountain of My Fear had served as a catharsis of the nightmarish denouement of our Huntington expedition, but now I can see that, fourteen months afterward, the shadow of Ed’s death still hung heavy upon my spirit.
As had been the problem on Huntington, to stand any chance of getting to the summit of Kichatna Spire, we had to establish at least one and possibly two camps along the route. On September 9, we got a two-man tent precariously pitched on the only possible site in the first 2,000 feet, directly beneath a prong of rock that jutted anomalously out of the Secret Passage, just 200 feet below the knife-edged col. A week later, before anyone had been able to occupy the tent, we had to retrieve it, because we had left our only butane stove there and we feared that the tempests might have torn the shelter to shreds.
As it would turn out, it snowed on twenty-five of the last twenty-six days of the expedition. More than once I recalled Brad Washburn’s epithet, “the asshole of the Alaska Range.” In the Spires, we came close to being shut out as thoroughly as the overawed 1965 party had been on the next glacier to the west. Especially in September conditions, the savagery of the range’s wildly sculpted peaks awed us as well. As I would rave in the next year’s American Alpine Journal, “Nowhere else had any of us seen such remarkable sights as huge ceilings interrupting knife-edged ridges, mushroom-shaped towers of rock, or rime ice coating overhanging walls.” Yet in the end, we succeeded on Kichatna Spire, thanks to a bit of logistical luck and some brilliant climbing.
In the Spires, though I was the co-leader, I was not the driving force. Art Davidson was. Art, in fact, was in the middle of a span of seventeen months during which he participated in six successful trips to the great ranges of Alaska and the Yukon—still the most intense spate of expeditionary mountaineering I have ever heard of. Only five months after the Spires, Art and his two partners would survive a six-day-long tentless bivouac at 18,200 feet on McKinley, an ordeal that began only hours after they had succeeded in making the first winter ascent of the highest mountain in North America. By all odds, the trio should have perished; their teammates in camps below, unable to mount a rescue attempt in the hurricane winds, in fact gave them up for dead. Instead, the three men rescued themselves, eventually suffering only the amputation of several toes apiece.
Art would go on to write a book about that expedition, Minus 148° (the title alludes to the windchill at the peak of the storm), which is justly hailed as a mountaineering classic. The next August, he would join me for yet another trip to an unexplored range in Alaska. And then, still only twenty-three years old, having burnt his candle at both ends, he would effectively quit climbing for good.
Our luck in September 1966 consisted in the fact that we got two climbers poised for a try at the summit on the eve of the only sunny, perfect day among the last twenty-six. On the 21st, Art and Rick headed up the Secret Passage, planning to repitch the tent under the prong, spend the night there, then push the next day toward a possible bivouac site at the top of our fixed ropes. I walked with them to the foot of the great couloir, wished them well, and gave them each a clap on the back.
My feelings were riddled with ambivalence. Had I been in the frame of mind I was on Huntington, I would certainly have maneuvered my way into the summit party. But now, I was more than half-glad not to be pushing up the Secret Passage with Rick and Art into the desert of cold and danger that hung above. Back in base camp, I wrote in my diary, “So it looks as if three of us won’t make the summit; but we have shared with them the necessary effort, and though we too could have done it, let the thrill be theirs and the victory all of ours.”
Mine was a time-honored formula of mountaineering magnanimity. Sometimes, especially in the Himalaya, a team of ten or twelve or fifteen strong climbers ends up launching only two toward the summit. The very success of such enterprises depends on the willingness of the team members to sacrifice their own ambitions to the support of others. Yet I suspect that the formula never rings true in the depths of a climber’s heart. To this day, I feel a keen regret that I could not push through the risky ordeal up high and claim the summit of Kichatna Spire with Rick and Art.
They pitched the tent that evening below the rock prong, then reached our previous high point in only three and a half hours on September 22. The ledge looked adequate for a bivouac, so they dropped their packs there and put in three more pitches, making a nasty traverse left on bad snow clinging to steep rock.
September 23 dawned clear and windless—the one great day in our last twenty-six. Art and Rick were off at first light. Way below, at base camp, the other three of us tried to follow their progress with a monocular. We would see them silhouetted against the skyline for half an hour; then they would blend into the rock and snow and we would lose track of them for another hour.
What we would only later learn is that Rick and Art had dropped part of the stove the night before as they sat huddled on the ledge, trying to cook dinner on their laps. This meant that they were unable to melt snow, let alone prepare oatmeal or glop. In the end, they went forty hours straight without water, sixty-four without a hot meal.
The day was too perfect to dawdle, however. They climbed without a pause, tackling wildly exposed pitches on a skin of snow barely adhering to steep slabs. It was hard to hammer in pitons anywhere, so they could not afford to fall. At last they gained the summit ridge and marched toward the highest point.
Rick said later that the climbing was so unnerving that if it had been up to him, he would probably have retreated. Art had no such qualms. At the zenith of his short-lived mountaineering genius, he drove his partner onward, barking out peals of joy at the beauty of the frozen world stretching in all directions. The summit itself—a forty-foot block that overhung all but one of its sides—nearly stopped them, but Art swarmed to the top, then belayed Rick up.
It was 4:30 P.M., only two hours before dark. They accomplished the treacherous descent to the bivouac ledge partly by headlamp. The next day, as another storm crept in, the three of us who had waited below climbed up the Passage to help Art and Rick down. We met them near the top of the couloir, exhausted and desperately dehydrated, but as happy as drunken lords.
We had enough time left to attempt another major climb, Peak 8520 just north of Kichatna Spire, but four days of wretched weather kept us from even setting foot on its lower slopes. At last, during the first week of October, we hiked forty-five miles on our roundabout loop out to a hunting lodge at Rainy Pass. Along the way, we traversed the lengths of three glaciers no one had ever before set foot on, passing beneath the sheer, iced-up walls of a dozen peaks whose first ascents would preoccupy some of the world’s best mountaineers during the next twenty years. It was too cold to think of climbing anything, but the October Traverse lingers on in my memory as an utterly charmed week of exploration through one of the most convoluted wildernesses in North America. Once off the last glacier, we staggered, soaked to the bone, through alder and willow thickets, then forded two rivers that had nearly drowned previous explorers. Late on the afternoon of October 6, with all five of us on the verge of hypothermia, we stepped onto the porch of the lodge, to be greeted by a band of very startled big-game hunters from Germany who had spent the last week cursing the weather and the scarcity of Dall sheep and grizzly bear to shoot at. Ten minutes later, in dry, borrowed clothes, we stood barefoot on a bearskin rug before a roaring indoor fire, drinking the owner’s excellent Scotch.
The next morning, in my last diary entry, I summed up my mixed feelings: “A good expedition, a successful one, and, for the most part, pleasant. Not an ordeal…. We never became a tight-knit group, but we remained friends.” Thirty-eight years later, in the rosy glow of nostalgia, I remember the Kichatna Spires as a far better trip than that. There, we had been genuine pioneers, and in thirty-five days, the only close call any of us had suffered was Rick’s and my avalanche. Perhaps it was possible to do great climbs without taunting the Furies as we had on Deborah and Huntington.
Starting in the late 1980s, the vogue of the Seven Summits took hold among a certain coterie of climbers—the effort by a single alpinist to reach the highest point on all seven continents. And it did not take long for purists to voice a chorus of disdain, for while Everest and McKinley and the Vinson Massif in Antarctica are genuine mountaineering challenges, Kilimanjaro in Africa is a mere walk-up, and Aconcagua in South America not much more than one.
As part of this backlash, in 2003 Climbing magazine (one of the two hard-core American journals of our pastime) published a special issue called “The Real Seven Summits.” The magazine’s panel of experts spent months determining not the highest peak in each continent, but the hardest—that is, the hardest to ascend by its easiest route. For more than three decades, I had been unable to dislodge that pang of regret that I hadn’t been along with Art and Rick on their brave trek to the summit. But now, reading that Climbing had deemed Kichatna Spire the most difficult peak in North America, I felt a burst of pride that I fully expect will last through the remainder of my days. It was music to my ears to read the encomium offered us by one of the experts, a superb mountaineer who made the peak’s second ascent (by a different route) thirteen years after our climb. “The 1966 route on Kichatna is a full-on Grade VI,” the man was quoted as saying, “a long and treacherous ridge on top of a big wall that took a strong team almost a month to climb. Kichatna Spire is definitely North America’s hardest.”
The best thing about returning to Denver that October was not the chance to plunge back into Spenser and Milton. It was seeing Sharon again. That year, we rented separate apartments, but we spent virtually every night together. Soon we were acknowledged around the English Department to be a steady couple. And to our relief, the stalker seemed to have left.
Sharon had enlisted for a first year of graduate school, so we shared a class or two, but she was uncertain about her future. Innately restless, having never been abroad, she toyed with the idea of joining the Peace Corps.
Thanks to the Spires, I had settled into a yearly pattern that, however neurotic at the core, would serve for me as a stabilizing gyroscope through most of the next decade. Serious about school, with no HMC gang to tempt me into weekends at the Gunks or Cathedral, I did relatively little climbing during the fall and spring terms. But I lived for the next summer’s expedition. I found that, with a quick June trip to lesser mountains such as the Wind Rivers or the Bugaboos, I could quickly get back into shape for another campaign among the great ranges. I was a mountaineer first and foremost, not a rock climber. Some of my friends—as Matt Hale would do at Seneca Rock a few years later—bent their best efforts toward putting up the hardest new one-and two-pitch climbs at local crags. I had neither the interest nor the aptitude for such gymnastics. What spoke to my soul was the lure of a northern wilderness, of virgin mountains in unexplored ranges.
The school year, to be sure, took its toll. Every clear day in Denver, as I stared west at the Front Range, its crest dusted with new snow from Pikes Peak in the south to Longs Peak in the north, I felt a wild longing to be clambering past timberline, my steps bringing some distant summit near. Although Vanguard Press accepted my first book that winter, I did not yet really think of myself as a writer. Grad school, as I wrote without intentional irony in a contributor’s note for the South Dakota Review, was what I did in the off-season. A few years later, Sharon would point out that I seemed to carry a constant, hectic impatience with me wherever I went, from September through May. Only in summer, in the mountains, did I truly relax.
I would have liked, in some fashion, to share my passion with Sharon. In those days, very few women climbed anywhere in the country. During four HMC years only one Cliffie (as we called Radcliffe women, who, though they shared all our classes, were not yet officially deemed Harvard students) went on our climbing trips, and because of Henry Hall’s conservatism, she was not allowed to join the club.
In May or June of 1967, I took Sharon on a hike in the Indian Peaks of the Front Range. As our objective, I had chosen Arikaree Peak, an easy 13,000-er, a true talus heap. Sharon did fine until we took a rest break at 12,500 feet. For the first time, she looked around her, instead of concentrating on the uneven ground in front of her boots. A sudden wave of agoraphobia seized her, a panic that she could barely subdue. With much coaxing on my part, we made the summit, but for Sharon those last 500 feet were an ordeal, as she scuttled along, almost on hands and knees.
In subsequent years, she tamed her agoraphobia, but though she eventually did some easy technical routes on “real” mountains (not talus heaps), Sharon never reached the state of alpine equanimity in which good climbers bask. And I never quite got over my disappointment at that fact.
In the winter of 1966–67, it did not take me long to hatch a scheme for the next summer. From high on Kichatna Spire, I had glimpsed a proud peak far to the southwest, standing shoulders above all its neighbors. A little map research revealed it to be North Buttress, at 9,828 feet nearly a thousand feet higher than Kichatna Spire. Named by some soulless U.S. Geological Survey hand, who had seen it from afar in 1958, the peak soared an astounding 7,500 feet above the glacier that flowed beneath it on the west.
The maps further revealed that the mountains stretching south and west from North Buttress looked a lot like the Spires. If they were ever so slightly less compact or steep (and we know today that no other range in the continent is as consistently steep as the Kichatnas), this range was more extensive. And to my wonder and delight, none of the other peaks was named, except a prominent companion summit, labeled by the same surveyor (with bureaucratic logic) South Buttress. No peak within forty miles of North Buttress in any direction had ever been climbed, or, as far as I could tell, even attempted. The range itself, spiraling out from the hub of North and South Buttress, was unnamed!
Here, I thought greedily, lay one of the last challenges of its kind in North America—difficult first ascents of unnamed peaks in an unnamed range, weeks of prowling across terrain that no humans had ever explored. By January, I had decided. The only trick was to scare up a team.
I wrote Art Davidson, chortling over my find. It looked like the best approach would be to land a plane near the head of the biggest glacier, a ten-mile-long ice stream above whose terminus North Buttress towered. “The finest-looking peak,” I wrote Art, staring in a trance at the contour lines on the map, “spreads these perfect ridges over the head of the glacier, just like the wings of an angel.”
“Does the Angel have a reasonable route?” Art wrote back, thereby naming our first peak before we even saw it. The Angel, though 600 feet lower than North Buttress, proved far more handsome, and turned out to be made of clean granite, while North Buttress, uniquely in the range, was composed almost entirely of loose black schist of the sort Don and I had struggled with on Deborah. From our first day on the glacier in 1967, we made the Angel our prime objective.
In the frenzied midst of preparing for winter McKinley, Art nonetheless signed on the dotted line for the upcoming summer. In subsequent weeks, I talked Rick Millikan and Matt Hale into joining us, promising them good weather on the (as it turned out, specious) pretext that mountains on the northwest edge of the Alaska Range were sheltered from the storms that brewed over the Gulf of Alaska and grew nastier as they drifted north. Eventually two other HMCers came aboard—Rick’s older and less ambitious brother, George, and Ned Fetcher, who had been a junior when Matt, as president, had supervised the relatively weak gang that made up the club in 1965–66. During the last year and a half, Ned had radically improved.
Our six-man team—my largest since McKinley in 1963—would also amount to one of the strongest I ever organized in Alaska. Collectively, we had something like fifteen previous expeditions under our belts. And in the end, we would need every ounce of our strength and experience just to survive in the unnamed range.
Despite my happiness with Sharon, the fanaticism that had carried me to Deborah and Huntington was surging back into my veins. I could not wait for classes to end so that I could head off to Alaska. The pall of Ed’s death, which had still hung over me, however unconsciously, in the Spires, had faded. For about a year after my visit to Upper Darby, I had kept up a desultory correspondence with Mr. Bernd. Most of his short notes had to do with insurance companies that were balking, because Ed’s body had never been found, at paying off the meager policies his parents had taken out on their son. How could I prove to their satisfaction, Mr. Bernd wrote me plaintively and miserably, that Ed had really died on Mount Huntington?
During the first days in the Spires, afloat in my ambivalence, I had finally framed in words what I would come to think of as the critical question about mountaineering—and framed that question in doubt, rather than affirmation: “I am not sure always if the risk is worth it.” By the spring of 1967, I was once again as sure as I had been before Huntington. No matter what might go wrong, climbing was so glorious an enterprise that it was worth the risk.
As token of my fanaticism, I wanted to spend more time in this unknown range than we had spent on Deborah or Huntington. In the end, three of us would live on the ten-mile-long glacier for fifty-two days, the longest span of all my expeditions. The plan was for Matt, Ned, and me to fly in three weeks before the other trio, mainly to make a reconnaissance of the peaks we might later hope to climb.
At 3:30 in the morning of July 11, I took off from Anchorage in a Super Cub, with a load of gear piled all around me. The pilot was Jim Cassady, a young, relatively green aviator Eric Barnes had taken on as his partner. As we flew west past Chakachamna Lake and the big dormant volcano of Mount Spurr, then glided over a labyrinth of peaks neither he nor I had ever seen before, I realized that the pilot was not only nervous, he was almost lost. I had studied the maps carefully, so now I navigated.
Don Sheldon and Eric Barnes, the two pilots I had flown with before, had exuded calm self-confidence. Cassady’s apprehension, which emerged in a babbling commentary on the fierceness of the ranges we soared past, was disconcerting. I realized that he might even refuse to land on the ten-mile glacier, the logistical crux of all our plans.
But at last we were coasting at 10,000 feet, just south of North Buttress. “There it is!” I crowed, as the glacier came in sight. For the first time, I saw the Angel, spreading its granite wings just as it had on the map. “As close to the head as you can manage,” I exhorted Cassady. He made two slow loops, losing altitude, as he peered anxiously out the side window. There was plenty of snow, no evident crevasses. The landing, I thought, should be a piece of cake.
Cassady straightened out the Super Cub and came in for touchdown. He made a bumpy landing, then gunned the plane toward the head of the glacier. I hopped out and started pulling gear from the fuselage. “Wow!” exclaimed Cassady. “What a place!”
He was not back with Ned for another nine hours. Exhausted after packing supplies all night, I spread out my Ensolite pad on the snow and fell asleep in the sun. When I woke up suddenly, an hour or two later, it was with as profound a sense of disorientation as I had ever known. The silence was oppressive. The surging granite walls on all sides seemed threatening, not beautiful. Where was Cassady? What if he couldn’t find the glacier on his second flight? Ned, who had played almost no part in the planning, wouldn’t be able to help.
I realized that I was stuck in the most remote place I had ever been. The nearest outpost of civilization was seventy miles away to the north—Farewell, a mere shack or two and a landing strip. The hike out, if we had to make it, would verge on the impossible, with two big rivers in the way that might be too deep and swift to ford. Assailed by a strange despair, I stared at the alien rock and snow around me. Because of possible hidden crevasses, I could not afford even to get up and walk around. I was stranded on my Ensolite pad, with only a meager pile of gear as company.
By late afternoon, however, Cassady had made two more landings to bring in Ned and Matt, and the gloomy funk of my solitary vigil abruptly evaporated. We got our tents pitched, the gear stacked in a tidy cache, and set out to explore.
It had been a winter of heavy snowfall, and now, in the heat of July, avalanches were coming down everywhere, just as they had during our first days on the Tokositna Glacier under Huntington. It was not even safe to climb the easy snow slope to the col south of the Angel, from which the beautiful knife-edged ridge that we had chosen for our route rose 2,500 feet to the pointed summit.
As compensation for this temporary setback, on the third day I talked Matt and Ned into starting up a steep rock wall on another nearby peak. We did not expect to climb the whole of this 2,000-foot precipice, which would have been a major undertaking, but just to go a few pitches up and check out the quality of the rock. And here, we found at once, the granite was looser and crumblier than we had hoped—much looser than anything in the Kichatna Spires. This discovery boded ill for our ambitions. (It would be weeks before we laid hands on the anomalously perfect rock of the Angel.)
Matt was in the process of leading the second pitch when we heard a distant rumbling noise. I craned my neck to look up, and saw a terrifying sight. The sky directly above us was dark with debris, tons of granite blocks falling from more than 1,000 feet above. (The warm sun had probably set loose an avalanche on the summit snowfield, which, as it hit the top of the cliff, pried loose the poorly bonded stones.)
“Rock!” I screamed, involuntarily folding my right arm over my head. Matt, fifty feet to our left, was sheltered by a small overhanging, but Ned and I, standing side-by-side on the belay ledge, had nowhere to hide. We shrank as tight as we could to the wall and waited for the impact.
Rocks falling through the air make an angry whirring noise—a sound that every climber dreads in his guts. Now boulders smashed on our ledge only a few feet away, bursting like bombs, exuding an acrid gunpowder smell. I plastered myself as flat as I could against the cliff. Both Ned and I were struck by small, harmless pieces of rock. By sheer luck, all the big stones missed us.
Once the fusillade ended, Ned and I scrambled unbelayed over to Matt’s perch, where he was frantically pounding in pitons for a rappel. One by one, we zipped down the rope, even as more debris came flying out of the sky, like the aftershocks of an earthquake. Once back on the glacier, we literally ran down the approach slope until we were out of range of the bombardment. Panting, I cursed, “Man, that was stupid!” All three of us stared up at the evil wall.
The next day, still in sunny weather, we started the Butterfly Traverse. I had planned this grand reconnaissance of the unknown range months before, perusing the maps in Denver. We would descend the ten-mile glacier at whose head we had established base camp, round the corner beneath North Buttress, head up the braided channels of the Big River, angle off south to cross two passes between three small glaciers, round another lowland corner at the head of the Swift Fork valley, then close the forty-mile loop by climbing back to the head of our base camp glacier. The only question mark, it seemed, was that 1,000-foot ascent to the col at the head of the main glacier, only a mile from camp. On July 12, however, Matt and I had roped up and climbed seven pitches down that precipice, finding it easier than we expected. Even with heavy packs, we expected to be able to get up it at the end of the traverse.
Among the paraphernalia in our fifty-five-pound loads, we carried a six-foot-long butterfly net. From the American Alpine Club, I had wangled a research grant (all of $150, I believe), by promising to collect bugs blown in storms up onto the glaciers—in particular, butterflies, the passion of the Fairbanks entomologist whose program we were carrying out. As we headed down the glacier on July 14, we expected a strenuous lark. In our darkest premonitions, we would never have foreseen the struggle for survival that would ensue.
For three days, things went according to plan. The stupendous tower of North Buttress loomed over us on the right, inspiring no urges to climb it—“a huge and ugly agglomeration of schist, waterfalls, and moss,” I described it in my diary. On the banks of the Big River, surging channels forced us up into seemingly limitless thickets of alder—the worst bushwhacking in Alaska, as Don and I had learned coming out from Deborah. With our packs snagging on every limb, crawling and squirming through root tangles, we covered only one mile in three and a half hours of dogged toil. In the lowlands, there were fresh grizzly tracks everywhere. On two nights, we camped next to big boulders up which we thought, in a pinch, we could scramble even barefoot, if a bear decided to investigate our belongings.
On the fourth day, it started to rain and blow—nasty, chilling rain at about 35 degrees Fahrenheit. For three straight days, it did not let up for a single hour. The gear available in 1967, crafted for cold, high mountains, was almost useless in these conditions. Gore-Tex had yet to be invented, as did fiberfill sleeping bags. Our outer jackets were far from waterproof, our tent flies mere sheets of plastic. Our down jackets were soon soaked through, and eventually our down sleeping bags as well.
By now we had collected about eight insects, including two butterflies. Eventually, rain washed the labels off the pill bottles we stored our catches in. The American Alpine Club’s research grant, I am ashamed to say, did nothing to advance alpine entomology.
To save weight, I had gone super-light, leaving my sleeping bag at base camp, counting on my down jacket and a thin half-bag covering my waist and legs for nocturnal comfort. The fourth night, I could not sleep at all. At 2:00 A.M., I was shivering inside my cocoon of soggy down. I sat up and lit the stove to try to get warm, but it made only a small difference. I yelled my complaints to Matt and Ned, in the other tent. They were beginning to feel hypothermic as well. We decided the only remedy was to pack up and push on, counting on exertion to warm our bodies.
The insidious wind and rain continued through the next two days. In a lowland camp, the willows were so soaked we couldn’t get a campfire started. We were now just a mile or two short of the 1,000-foot cliff that separated us from base camp. If we couldn’t ascend that cliff, we would have to backtrack almost forty miles, reversing the loop of the Butterfly Traverse, but I doubted we would make it before succumbing to hypothermia.
At 1:00 P.M. on July 19, we started up the cliff. Since Matt was in better technical shape than Ned or I, we gave him a lighter pack and asked him to lead all the pitches. Coming second, I belayed Matt with one hand and one rope, Ned with the other at the same time. With our gear soaked through, Ned and I were probably carrying seventy pounds apiece, a hideous burden on easy technical ground in dry conditions, a nightmare now. As we gained altitude, the rain turned to sleety snow, and small avalanches spilled around us. To make matters worse, a blind fog had swallowed the mountain, making route-finding tricky. As I later wrote in my diary, “I could literally wring pints of water out of my down jacket, and feel my toes floating in water…. Once our chests and backs got wet, we shivered violently, and I began to feel the beginning of a desperation.”
Ned seemed out of it, dopey and sluggish, signs of advancing hypothermia. Sometimes I simply hauled him bodily with the rope, rather than belaying. If one of us slipped, I thought, and did nothing more than sprain an ankle, the others would have to leave him behind.
Matt climbed with utter brilliance, leading ten pitches one after the other. We barely spoke, limiting our communication to belay signals shouted over the wind. At last, we topped out on the col. My fingers were so clumsy that I found it almost impossible to coil the ropes. We set out for base camp at a pace that was almost a jog, yet not even that dash could warm our bodies. We found our once tidy gear cache slumped in the snow, a pitiful collection of soggy cardboard boxes, food spilling out of them. With the last of our energy, we got the tents pitched, ourselves inside, what few dry clothes we had left in camp on to replace our soaking outfits, and the stoves going. Gradually the shivering subsided.
To this day, the Butterfly Traverse remains by far the closest brush I have had with death by hypothermia. It was, I think in retrospect, about as close as you can come and still pull out of it with your own unaided efforts, as opposed to those of a rescue team.
At base camp, the storm raged on unabated. With a dry sleeping bag to replace my soaked half-bag, I slept in relative comfort, but for several days Matt and Ned, sharing a single tent, barely held their own. Ned spent much of the time sitting up, claiming that that position allowed less contact with his wet clothes; he also fired up the stove to warm the tent and cook midnight soups. Matt devised a soggy straitjacket in which to sleep. Having donned his only pair of dry socks, he inserted each foot in a plastic bag, then pulled his slimy rucksack over his legs. A scrap of Ensolite pad served as midriff insulation. Last, he stuffed his body into his all but useless sleeping bag, then covered himself with his dish rag of a down jacket. The arrangement was so cramped that he couldn’t even turn over, but he claimed it was the only way he could come close to getting warm. Matt started to have a recurring dream, in which he abandoned base camp and headed down our glacier, just as we had on the first day of the Butterfly Traverse. On the gravel bar below the terminus, he strode toward a solid log cabin. He could smell smoke from the fire roaring in the stove inside. But just as he touched the door handle, the cabin vanished and he woke up.
On August 2, Cassady flew the rest of our team in. By that date, after twenty-three days in the range, Matt, Ned, and I had managed to climb only two distinctly minor peaks, arriving on the summit of the second in whiteout and heavy drizzle. The advent of Rick and George Millikan and Art Davidson felt like the canonic scene in a 1950s western, when the beleaguered platoon, about to be wiped out by Comanches or Apaches, hears the cavalry bugle and sees a fresh regiment come galloping over a nearby ridge.
From our new partners we learned sobering news. During the same days that we had stumbled through the Butterfly Traverse, a large party had been trapped in a storm high on Mount McKinley, 140 miles to the northeast. In the end, seven climbers had frozen to death—still the worst disaster in the mountain’s history.
Only four months earlier, Art and two companions had survived a six-day storm in an open bivouac at 18,000 feet on McKinley. On that expedition he had lost thirty-five pounds; afterward, he was confined to a wheelchair for eight weeks and to crutches for another six. In Minus 148°, Art would later describe what could only ironically be called his recuperation:
To observe how the body would heal the frostbite naturally, the doctors left the blackened skin and flesh in place to see what would happen. After 14 weeks the decaying parts of my feet were beginning to smell pretty bad. So late one night, I took out a razor blade, sterilized it over a match and cut off the dead and rotting pieces. After this bit of midnight surgery, the doctors relented and finished up the operation.
In August 1967, the last thing Art needed, both physically and psychologically, was to be back on an Alaskan glacier. Such was his commitment to Rick and me, born in the Kichatna Spires, and to his love of climbing, that he insisted on joining us in this unexplored range, although he planned only a two-week stay, with Cassady picking him up a week or so before he flew the rest of us out.
At first, Art’s primary doctor had forbidden him to go back into the mountains so soon after his tribulation, but he was no match for Art’s will. Finally the physician consented, as long as Art guaranteed that he would keep his feet dry. To that end, he had brought along a special pair of coated overboots. They proved as worthless as the rest of our footgear. Within days, Art’s feet were soaked day and night, just as ours were—especially after he insisted on joining us in many a round of a vicious base camp game of my invention, called Hole Ball—a cross between lacrosse and touch football, with a real leather football as missile (heavy as a rock once it got soaked like our boots) and two pits dug in the slushy glacier as goals. By the end of the trip, all of us but me were suffering from a painful alpine version of trench foot, which eventually took months to heal.
The weather was no better in August than it had been in July. For ten days, from August 11 to 20, we were imprisoned near base camp by a virtually nonstop storm. Some of the most violent winds any of us had ever endured flattened our tents and blew cooking pots and even hard hats as far as a mile down-glacier. I had never before experienced (and never would again) conditions in which our very survival was threatened at base camp, as opposed to high on some route.
Poor Art! As the winds shrieked through the high notches, plastering the granite walls with rime ice, he would stagger around camp in his saturated overboots, staring at the sky and muttering, “God, Dave, this is a foreboding place!” During his stay in the range, Art never reached a single summit. And that expedition, his sixth in the last seventeen months, would be the last he ever went on.
In camp, along with potboiler novels and William Shirer’s history of the Third Reich (a mammoth paperback we tore into pieces so that four of us could read it at once), I was browsing through the Bible—not in search of divine enlightenment but as part of my grad school education in literature. The book that vividly matched the gloom and fury of our surroundings was of course Revelation, and I could not help reading out loud St. John the Divine’s evocations of the angel of the bottomless pit or the sea of glass mingled with fire, nor sharing with my teammates his promises of “a woman clothed with the sun” and “silence in heaven about the space of half an hour.”
As the first explorers of this remote range, we knew that we had earned the right to name it. It was George Millikan, in response to my biblical recitations, who suggested calling the place the Revelation Mountains. (So the range is now officially named.) We were already referring to our prime objective as the Angel; now, giddy with logo-logical hubris, we bestowed on the more fearsome peaks bordering our glacier such names as the Four Horsemen, Apocalypse, and Golgotha. (The names have stuck, at least among climbers. Far worse cognomens have been affixed to far more prominent mountains in the Great North, including McKinley, named for a president who never went near Alaska nor showed any interest in the territory, and Foraker, named for an Ohio senator whose career ended in disgrace after he took bribes from Standard Oil.)
During the odd decent day before and after the ten-day storm, we launched our effort on the south ridge of the Angel. Elsewhere in the range we had found indifferent rock, as crumbly as brown sugar at its worst, but the Angel was made of the kind of clean, sharp-cut granite climbers dream of. The south ridge, though immensely complicated, festooned with slabs, notches, and knife-edged arêtes, proved a garden of alpine delights. “You can’t believe it,” Rick said, as he got back to camp after our first serious probe of the route. “Everything just works out.”
By 1967, the bolder climbers in Alaska and the Andes (though not yet in the Himalaya) were starting to apply the tactics of alpine-style climbing to expeditionary mountains. On the Angel, for the first time, we ourselves embraced this vogue. On Huntington two years before, we had fixed lines tediously over virtually every pitch, ferried heavy loads, and established tent camps to support our final assault. Now, on the Angel, we fixed only a few ropes on pitches otherwise perilous to reverse (a slanting slab covered with a skin of ice over a 2,000-foot drop, a thirty-foot rappel on the way up required to circumvent a wild pinnacle), planned to bivouac rather than sleep in tents, and ferried no depots of supplies. Ideally, the peak could be conquered alpine-style in one two-or three-day push in good weather. At the same time, given the medieval state of our clothing and sleeping bags, getting caught in a storm high on the mountain could mean a true life-or-death struggle.
Between August 3 and August 25, climbing in pairs and trios, we made five separate alpine-style forays on the south ridge of the Angel. Every one was defeated by bad weather. The bravest push was performed by Rick and George, those stalwart grandsons of Mallory, who, climbing fast, not even bothering to rope up on the easier but frightfully exposed pitches, reached a level platform at 7,900 feet, only 1,300 feet below the summit, where they pitched our bivouac tent—a nylon sack supported with a single low arc of tentpole. The rain came in in the night and turned to snow before dawn. After a sleepless night, the brothers Millikan fought a grim battle just to get down to base camp. The rock, soaked by the storm, turned so treacherous that in places Rick and George had to rappel nearly horizontal pitches.
It was during the ten-day storm after August 10 that our morale—not to mention our standard of living—reached its nadir. Weeks of wind and lashing rain had eaten away the glacier. We found to our alarm that the bare ice of permanent glacier—many feet below our tents when we had first pitched them on July 11—was now only a few inches underneath. Among other things, this development meant that the runway for Cassady’s landings had radically shortened. We built an igloo, but the wind tore holes in it faster than we could patch them. Finally, in an arduous half-day effort, we moved base camp 100 feet higher on the glacier, tucked under the frowning brow of Golgotha, the most forbidding of all the Revelation peaks.
By August 16, everything we owned was soaked through. The fierce winds blew horizontal rain underneath our tent flies, drilling a fine spray through the ripstop nylon. We joked about our predicament, but simply getting through each tent-and igloo-bound day was a marathon. Though he never complained, Art was sick at heart about the state of his feet. An entry from my diary on the 16th captures the misery:
Matt and George…really had a night of it. Their tent collapsed, they got wet, they spilled a pot of soup into their [sleeping] bags. Matt ran out with only his boots on his bare feet and ran over toward the rocks to look for something to hold the tent down, but his feet got too cold and he stopped short of the ice. Finally, the Primus [stove] seemed to stop working. George spent another miserable night, and emerged in the morning in worse spirits than he’d been in the whole trip. He was beginning to talk about survival and saying to hell with the trip.
Before the expedition, perusing the maps, I had counted thirty-four 8,000-foot peaks and twelve 9,000-foot peaks in what we would name the Revelation Range (including the easterly cirques we had blindly reconnoitered during the Butterfly Traverse). They culminated in 9,828-foot North Buttress, which, despite its modest elevation in absolute terms, was, I reckoned, higher than any peak so far west in the Western Hemisphere.
By August 20, when the long storm at last let up, we had climbed not a single 8,000-er or 9,000-er—even though Matt, Ned, and I had now spent forty-three days in the range. We had seven summits under our belt, none of them a major climb, the highest a mere 7,800 feet. Topping out on the Angel would make the expedition an unqualified success, but after five setbacks, we had begun to despair of our chances on that magnificent peak.
Cassady was due in to pick up Art on August 15. It was no surprise that he had not tried to fly through the worst of the long storm, but as day after day passed without our hearing the blissful buzz of the Super Cub, we grew puzzled, and Art—by now fed up with the Revelations, and frantic to get out—started cursing our tardy pilot. If the plane never came, we started musing, only half in jest, we would have to launch that perhaps impossible seventy-mile hike out to Farewell.
Our ultimate fly-out date had been fixed as August 30. With only nine days left in the expedition, I was eager to bag at least one major summit. On the 21st, in improving weather, Matt and I packed up four days’ gear and food and hiked down-glacier toward the next tributary ice stream to the north, above which junction soared a handsome but apparently moderate 9,000-er, made mostly of snow and ice rather than rock. After camping at its foot, the two of us efficiently solved the peak’s defenses in a glorious but exhausting nine-hour push. Climbing 4,700 feet from base to summit, we needed to rope up for only a few ice pitches, a few rope-lengths on mixed rock and ice, and a punch through the summit cornice. The only disappointment was that we climbed all day in whiteout, and got a view of nothing from the summit. We named the peak Patmos, after the island to which St. John was exiled and where he received his Revelation.
At 9:30 A.M. on the 22nd, as we toiled up the lower slopes on Patmos, we had heard at last the welcome drone of Cassady’s plane—heard him land, then take off an hour and a half later. Because of the whiteout, we never saw the Super Cub, but it was reassuring to know that our pilot had come through, and that Art was finally delivered from alpine purgatory back to his erratic recuperation. It was only when Matt and I trudged back to base camp on August 24 that we got the shocking news.
On August 15, the day scheduled for Art’s pickup, Cassady, knowing he could never get in to the Revelations, had taken a hunter up on a short flight over the western Chugach Range. Even there the weather was marginal. Flying low, as his client tried to spot Dall sheep, Cassady was caught in a sudden downdraft. The plane crashed, killing both pilot and hunter.
In those days, bush fliers kept their business mostly in their heads. Eric Barnes, Cassady’s senior partner, who had flown us in to the Kichatnas the year before, knew only that we were somewhere in the far southwestern Alaska Range. He had no idea even of when we were supposed to fly out.
On a wall map of Alaska in the office, Barnes found a single tiny X penned by Cassady. Climbing into a borrowed plane he had never flown before, Barnes set out on August 22, the first flyable day, to look for us. Navigating cannily on his solo flight, he found our glacier. The four guys at base camp started scampering up and down the runway we had stomped out, but Barnes thought the landing strip offered such a short stretch of snow-covered glacier between bare ice and the Golgotha headwall that he would never have dared touch down without those human markers to give the place scale (and, though he was too modest to say so, without knowing full well the desperate alternative to flying out such a failure would force upon the six of us). On takeoff with Art, Barnes barely got airborne before hitting bare ice, which would have torn his ski-wheels apart and possibly caused a crash.
Back on July 11, coming in on the first flight, I had been mildly irked by Cassady’s nervous anxiety as he prepared for the toughest landing of his short career. Now I felt a guilty sorrow, knowing that, still in his twenties, the game aviator had etched his name in the long and dolorous roster of martyrs to the parlous economics of bush flying in Alaska. Today, thirty-seven years later, I doubt that there are many men within the close-knit fraternity of northern pilots who remember Jim Cassady, or even recognize the name.
During those last days in the Revelations, I pondered the lessons of what would turn out to be the longest expedition I would ever go on. There was no getting around the nonstop drudgery of our ordeal by rain, sleet, snow, and wind. Of the six of us, in fact, only I would ever again go on an expedition to the greater ranges. Yet even as we had shivered inside our disintegrating igloo, we had mocked our plight by regaling each other with baroque fancies and hoary anecdotes. I have never laughed so much on an expedition, and seldom in my life have I laughed as hard—rolling on the igloo floor, crying for relief, pounding my fists on the ice, along with my cronies—while George, an absentminded ornithologist in the making, told with a straight face the saga of forgetfully locking his professor at Duke inside a walk-in bird cage.
The six of us formed the most congenial gang with whom I would ever go into the mountains. During fifty-two days (thirty for Rick and George, twenty-one for Art), we never had a real argument, and scarcely even a sharp word for the sluggard who failed to do his share of the dirty dishes. Of all the pleasures of mountaineering, friendship of this sort is one of the keenest.
At the same time, the illusion I had begun to cherish after the Kichatnas, that one could climb hard with minimal risk in the great ranges, was thoroughly debunked in the Revelations. Besides the two truly close calls Matt, Ned, and I had undergone—the bombardment by tons of falling rock on the third day of the expedition, the reckless flirtation with hypothermia at the end of the Butterfly Traverse—we had suffered other calls not quite so close. Near the top of a 2,500-foot ice-and-snow couloir that we hoped would lead to the summit of a mountain we called Dike Peak, Matt and I were jolted to our senses when the whole huge gully uttered several sharp reports and shifted under our feet—a glacial gesture just preliminary to collapsing. We dashed back down the couloir as fast as we could. On another day, five of us went on an exploratory hike, leaving Ned contentedly reading a book in his tent at base camp. In the afternoon, he heard a sudden explosion. Severely myopic, Ned scrabbled unsuccessfully for his glasses, poked his head out of the tent, and saw a white blur heading straight for him from above to the south. A huge sérac had broken off the shoulder of Golgotha, launching a major avalanche. We thought the new location to which we had shifted base camp was safe from all such cascades, but now that proposition seemed in doubt. Ned got one boot on and was starting to run for it when the slide, full of house-sized ice blocks, plowed to a stop only eighty yards short of camp. The usual avalanche-driven wind cloud bowed the tents and pelted Ned with its mini-hurricane of spindrift before the world returned to normal.
Throughout the history of alpinism, hard men have earnestly concocted rationalizations by which they believe they can outsmart the mountains. The inescapable fact is, however, that in the remote ranges there is no avoiding what climbers dryly call objective danger—avalanches, rock fall, storms, hidden crevasses, and the like, the booby traps laid by the mountain gods that we mortal boobies are helpless to control.
We had given up on the Angel. But now, for the first time since the initial days of the expedition, the weather turned good and held. On August 27, Rick, George, and Ned set off down-glacier to try to bag South Buttress, another 9,000-er (in fact the fourth-highest peak in the range), on which Matt and I had scouted a reasonable route a week before. The next day they succeeded in reaching the summit after an effort comparable to Matt’s and mine on Patmos.
For Matt and me, there remained only a salvage operation: a last jaunt up the south ridge of the Angel to retrieve the gear we had left on the route, principally the bivvy tent at 7,900 feet and as many pitons as we could extract on the way down. Having slept poorly, I had to be cajoled out of bed on the morning of the 28th by Matt, who had woken to the finest day of our whole expedition. We were off at 7:30 in the morning.
On this dry, windless, halcyon day, having climbed most of the pitches before in far worse conditions, we flew up the route. By mid-morning we were cavorting in shirtsleeves, traveling continuously or unroped on most of the pitches. It took us only four hours to reach the bivvy tent at Rick’s and George’s high point—a stretch of intricate climbing that had demanded a full day from our colleagues on August 8. We decided to push on a little farther, seduced by the lure of untrodden ground. We climbed seven or eight more rope lengths on moderate terrain. By mid-afternoon we had reached the foot of a steep snow ramp that bisected a pair of cliffs. Once up that, we thought, and only a sharp, possibly corniced ridge would stand between us and the summit, a mere 700 feet above.
We stopped to confer. The damning fact was that we had only five pitons, one ice axe, and no crampons between us. Without ice gear, the summit ridge could prove dangerous. By now, in late August, it was pitch dark by 7:00 P.M., and we had brought no headlamps. And yet the weather was perfect….
At last we agreed to turn around and descend. We were back at base camp shortly before dark, after an eleven-hour day. We had cleaned the route admirably, leaving only a few scraps of fixed rope and a few rappel pitons in place.
The Angel was finally climbed only in 1985. The pair of strong young Americans who succeeded eighteen years after our attempt apparently tackled a different route. They were repulsed three times before they claimed the summit. Along the way, as they reported in the American Alpine Journal, they encountered “a difficult and poorly protected slab (5.9+),” “nerve-wracking crampon-clad free climbing,” and a gendarme they named Terror Tower—“a two-pitch horror of vertical loose blocks.”
Quite a few times since 1967, Matt and I have reminisced about that moment when we turned back on the Angel. In some cozy pub, after three or four beers, in the safe harbor of retrospect, our conversation goes something like this:
“You know, we probably should have gone for it,” I venture.
“Of course we should have gone for it. What’s the worst that could have happened? A forced bivouac?”
“Remember those storms, what they took out of us…”
The worst that could have happened, to be realistic, is that we could have gotten stuck in another storm, above the bivvy tent—and indeed, on the morning of August 29, the usual rain and wind came back in to smother the Revelations. We could have died of hypothermia in the bivouac, or, in a ragged effort to descend without ice gear, one of us could have slipped and pulled the other off. If we had plunged off the west face, away from base camp, our bodies might lie there still, as unfindable as Ed Bernd’s on the Tokositna Glacier.
But from the vantage point of middle-aged nostalgia for meteoric youth, it is hard to congratulate yourself for prudence rather than for boldness. I still think Matt and I made the right decision on August 28,1967. Yet of all the regrets I have about my years in the mountains, in terms of sheer, simple “what-might-have-been”—even more than the pang of not accompanying Rick and Art to the top of Kichatna Spire—letting the Angel slip through our fingers when we were within 700 feet of the summit on a perfect day still stings the sharpest.
Sharon was waiting for me in Anchorage, having flown up to Alaska on impulse with Rick and George at the beginning of August. It was wonderful to see her again. By now, I knew that I was in love with her: I had even dared admit as much to my diary, albeit in hedged circumlocutions. But for some reason, during my first hour in that sprawling town, Sharon had to run an errand at J.C. Penney, the store where she had worked the previous summer. I went with her. Muzak, shopping announcements, matrons wheeling carts, fluorescent lights, children screaming, piles of unnecessary goodies on sale—suddenly I felt overwhelmed. Dizzy and nauseated, I had to find a chair to sit down in to avoid fainting. After fifty-two days in the Revelations, I was not ready for civilization.
Art had wangled Sharon a semi-invitation to spend the month of August on the homestead of a legendary immigrant family near Homer. The setting was heartbreakingly idyllic, sleek, rolling greenswards looking south over Kachemak Bay. But the ménage was so weird as to be oppressive. The family, who had come over from Switzerland in the early 1950s, the vanguard of a utopian colony the rest of whose members chickened out, had clung to their new Alaskan turf with bitter tenacity. Subsistence was hard in this subarctic wilderness, and it had taken its toll on the whole family. Over the years, they had developed an unspoken code of rules and territories that no outsider could hope to fathom. Sharon had discovered this in her first hours on the homestead. Pausing on the long driveway on the way in, she and the eldest daughter had spent several hours picking ripe, juicy raspberries, filling a generous bowl—which the daughter, in response to a harsh word, had suddenly flung in the face of her mother upon arrival in the homestead kitchen. It turned out that that particular raspberry patch belonged to the matriarch, whose daughters were forbidden to pick from it.
Sharon spent one of the loneliest and most awkward months of her life there, sleeping in the barn, living on Coca-Cola and bread that she ran into town to buy, exchanging stillborn conversations with the homesteaders who came and went without apparent pattern. During that month she read Victorian novels, went for walks on the seashore, and waited for me, trying not to worry, just as she had waited through the previous September while I was in the Kichatna Spires.
In early September, we drove at a leisurely pace down the Alaska Highway in the quaint two-stroke Saab (you poured a pint of oil into the gas tank every time you filled it up) that my father had bequeathed to me my first year at the University of Denver. My head was full of literature, but I was not at all sure I wanted to be back in grad school. Each day as we drove south and the nights grew darker and longer, I felt Alaska slipping away behind me. There was nothing to look forward to but another off-season, another nine months of waiting before the next expedition, so far away in the summer of 1968.
That year I began teaching freshman English, while Sharon worked toward the MA she would earn the following year. But she was restless. Sometime during the first weeks of school, a dilemma emerged. It was not that Sharon presented me with an ultimatum. She simply wanted to know what my long-term intentions were. Had we become a couple? If not, or if not lastingly, she wanted to get on with her life. The Peace Corps still had its appeal.
In one sense, the idea of marriage terrified me. I was only twenty-four, Sharon a year younger. But in another sense, it seemed a logical next step. During the latter weeks of September, I spent many an intense hour trying to concentrate on the path bifurcating ahead of me in the woods. It was so much harder than trying to figure out which mountains to climb the next summer.
In the end, a simple realization pushed me over the edge. I was in love, and I somehow knew that Sharon was a good person. That ought to be enough for a lifetime. And if not—well, it was still worth the risk. We set our wedding date for October 29.