1994 Issue - The Harvard Mountaineering Club

Transcription

arvard
Mountaineering
Number 24
June 1994
Andrew J. Noymer, Editor
David Blumenthal, Design Editor
The Harvard Mountaineering Club
Copyright (C) 1994 The Harvard Mountaineering Club.
All 1:ights reserved. No portion of this Journal may be
reproduced in any way without written permission of The
Harvard Mountaineering Club.
"Rites or Passage" by David Roberts appeared previously in
Reproduced with kind permission of the author.
Sllllllllif.
All photographs arc credited as captioned, and are
reproduced with kind permission of the photographers.
For more information on Harvard Mountaineering or The
Harvard Mountaineering Club, contact us at:
J-1 arvanl Mountaineering Club
4 University Hall
Harvard University
Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138
Printed on recycled, acid-free, paper.
The Officers of the Harvard Mountaineering Club
dedicate this Journal to
the founding fathers of the HMC,
members of the HMC who have lost
their lives in the mountains,
and climbers and pilots everywhere who
risk their lives to rescue others.
HMC Officers, 1989-1995
Academic Year 1989-90
Eran Hood, President
Carl Gable & Shona Armstrong, Treasurers
Alexandra Moore, Secretary
Steve Brown, Equipment Director
William Graham & John Imbrie, Faculty Advisors
Eran Hood & Reuben Margolin, Presidents
Shona Armstrong, Treasurer
Andrew Noymer, Secretary & Librarian
William Graham, Faculty Advisor
Reuben Margolin & Chris Rodning, Presidents
Steve Brown & Josh Swidler, Treasurers
Kirby Files, Secretary
Andrew Noymer, Librarian
Chris Rodning, President
Josh Swidler, Treasurer
Michael Liftik, Secretary
Josh Swidler, President
Michael Liftik, Secretary & Treasurer
Chris Rodning, Librarian
Fall Term 1994-95, Officers Elect
Andrew Noymer, President
Michael Liftik, Secretary & Treasurer
Mark Roth, Librarian
William Graham & Steve Brown, Faculty Advisors
arvard
Mountaineering
Number 24
June 1994
Contents
Acknowledgements .... ... ... ... .. ... .... ... ... .. .. ... ... ..... ... ...... .... 1
Foreword........................................................................ 2
Bad Karma on Mt. Stuart ............................ Peter Adler 4
Mt. Hunter, 1991.. ........................................... Will Silva 9
To 8100m on the Abruzzi Ridge of K2 .. Peter G.Green 15
Cramped on Kenya .................................... .Steve Brown 23
The Needle's Edge .......................... Edward K. Baldwin
........................................................ and Carl V. Phillips 28
Jackson Summer #19 ............................ Rebecca Taylor 35
Where Illusions Dwell ............................ Chris Rodning 43
The Icarus Effect: Aconcagua ........... Victor L. Vescovo 50
One Glissade Too Many ................................ Wil Brown 62
The Kianga River ................................. Andrew Embick 68
The Gallery..................................................................... 74
HMC History.................................................................. 79
47 Years Ago.................................................................. 80
HMC on Mt. St. Elias ............ .......... William L. Putnam 95
HMC in British Columbia ........... ~ .... William L. Putnam 100
The Harvard Cabins, 1932 and 1962 ......... Ted Carman 112
Rites Of Passage .................................... .David Roberts 127
Cabin Report .............................................. Ted Dettmar 138
In Memoriam .................................................................. 142
Membership of the HMC ............................................... 146
About the Contributors ................................................... 154
Acknowledgments
This Journal is the result of the effort of many. It is
impossible to convey on pape~ the debit of gr~titude I owe to
everyone who helped make thts Journal a reality.
Andrew Embick, M.D. made a very generous
financial contribution to defray some of the production costs
or the longest Club Journal to date.
David Blumenthal, the design editor, was the
keystone of the production. Aside from being a desktop
publishing wizard, he never flinched as I made last-minute
changes ad infinitum.
The contributors were wonderful in providing their
articles in machine-readable format, which sped up the initial
work on compiling the book.
Dennis DiCicco of Sky & Telescope provided
invaluable advice in the early stages of the project. Richard
Downing of Town Printing offered great help at all stages,
and was particularly patient as the work became delayed, and
delayed, and delayed again.
Chris Rodning did yeoman work as a typist.
Robert Walker's council as the Editor's editor was
n1uch appreciated. Our faculty advisor, Prof. William
(Ira ham, gave key suppmi in this area as well.
... The officers and membership of the HMC lent
unl allmg support to the Journal. Michael Liftik deserves
partic~ll<~r mention for always coming through in the pinch .
.losh Swtcller, as President and friend was behind the project
one hundred percent.
Thanks to my family and all my friends who
holstered me at the low points when this Journal seemed like
an ttntamable monster.
Tha.nks to my climbing partners who missed
weekends 111 Huntington Ravine for this Journal. And
th.anks. lo all the membership who waited for the finished
P1O(~Ucl lo come out while I spent weekends in Huntington
Ravmc .... I hope you find it worth the wait.
Fmally I would like to thank Jaye Winkler, without
\V I1osc suppo ·t th' J
.
·
·
1
ts ournal would have been tmposstble.
-The Editor
1
Foreword
What is the role of the Harvard Mountaineering Club
in the 1990s? This is a question I have reflected on much
during the past four years. When I think about the present
and future HMC, I also look back on its glorious past.
Almost from the moment I joined the Club, its history started
seeping into my bones, as if by osmosis.
The Club's wonderful library caught my eye at my
very first HMC meeting. I came to the HMC as nearly a
total neophyte to mountaineering; thus I was blown away by
the richness of climbing history on the library shelves. What
struck me the most was the Club's own past: right next to
Terray, Herzog, Rebuffat, and Chouinard were the
handsomely bound issues of the Harvard Mountaineering
Journal, full of stories by Brad Washburn, Ad Carter, Bob
Bates, Henry Snow Hall, Ken Henderson, Terris Moore,
the list goes on ....
Expeditions to the great ranges of Asia. Pioneering
climbs in Canada by William L. Putnam and others. Big
routes in Alaska. The climbs in the sixties by David Roberts
and company, and the daring ice routes put up at Lake
Willoughby during the seventies, almost exclusively by the
Club. As an HMC plebe, I was proud to be part of such a
distinguished organization.
But if past is prologue, then where today are the
spectacular climber-scholars of years past? Several of us
have pondered, with increasing concern, the lack of cuttingedge climbing going on at the Club these days.
Take, for example, ice climbing. The routes we
aspire to are the very routes the HMC was putting up 20
years ago. Has the Club lost its greatness, or have we
simply moved into a new era? Perhaps a new generation of
talent will soon arrive in Cambridge, and in short order put
up dozens of bold new routes. It is impossible to say. But
this begs the challenging question: must new routes of the
very highest standard be the sine qua non of our existence?
What does the future hold for the HMC? Will
expeditionary mountaineering and alpinism become a
footnote, a part of the Club's ancient history, replaced by
Harvard Mountaineering 24
rock climbing of ever increasing technical difficulty and
decreasing route length?
Are we now a Club of climbers but not
mountaineers, content to do shorter, harder routes but only
read about the long daring routes of the Club's past?
I hope not. As an optimist, I believe the Club will
have its share of new routes in the future. But our emphasis
has undeniably changed; there are now many fewer alpinists
than rock climbers in the Club; meeting attendance dwindles
during the winter and picks up again each spring. If this is
for better or worse, I cannot say.
The Club's history gives us much to wrestle with
when we try to compare ourselves to the HMC of previous
years. We may not be repeating the Herculean feats of the
Club's past, but we can at least have reverence for the
climbers who had no Gore-Tex, no kernmantle ropes, no
modern ice tools, no plastic boots, no sticky rubber, no
SLCDs. Yet they climbed routes most of us cannot.
For the HMC in the 1990's, it is this reverence
which is a more important asset than sheer technical skill.
Antoine de Saint-Exupery captured a similar sentiment well
in Wind, Sand and Stars:
To come to man's estate it is not necessary to get
oneself killed round Madrid, or to fly mail
planes, or to strnggle wearily in the snows out of
respect for the dignity of life. The man who can
see the miraculous in a poem, who can take pure
joy from music, who can break his bread with
comrades, opens his window to the same
refreshing wind off the sea. He too learns a
language of men.
I hope that the HMC will continue to be a place, as it
has been during my tenure, where students can come to learn
Saint-Exupery's "language of men." It is this, and not the
promise of new routes, which for me has been the wealth of
the HMC. It is a wealth which I will take with me as I leave
Harvard and enter the tumultuous World.
-The Editor
3
Bad Karma on Mt. Stuart
Peter Adler
My run of bad luck began when my Asolo Yukons
blew out in the Olympics. The sole parted from the upper
while an old friend and I were taking a wrong turn on Mt.
Anderson, and an easy scramble turned into a rock -dodging
jaunt up a dead-end chute. Later that night, as we prepared
burritos on the moraine, I realized I had left the avocado in
Leavenworth. I thought it was an honest mistake, but now I
know that insipid food is a harbinger of bad karma.
I put these omens out of my mind on the ferry back
across Puget Sound the next morning. I smiled in the Seattle
rush-hour, and cheerfully accepted the cobbler's eightydollar bill and seven-day wait. I even laughed while paying
$150 for a pair of lightweight boots at REI. After driving
back over the hill to Lake Wenatchee, and staying up past
midnight packing for a five-day patrol in the Glacier Peak
Wilderness, the idiot grin was fixed on my face. Ranger
Rob, my bunkhouse mate and partner in climb, had spent the
weekend resting and hanging out in Icicle Canyon. He
assured me that he was as excited about climbing the North
Ridge of Stuart as I was: "Bud, it's gonna be classic."
Five days later, after finding an illegal permanent
camp and piles of trash up White River, Rob pleaded
exhaustion. But instead of recognizing yet another sign, I
spent all night convincing him that we had to do Stuart this
weekend. We had a passable weather forecast, plus we had
scheduled Glacier Peak for the next weekend, and Forbidden
after that. Besides, Rob's hardships paled in comparison to
my five-days spent in mortal combat with bugs; I had
somehow encountered the peak week for both horse flies
and mosquitoes. Midnight found us packing once again,
followed by an alpine auto start the next morning.
We hiked to our base camp under cloudy skies, and
without ever seeing the top of the mountain, argued about
where our descent route lay. While we ate dinner-more
burritos-I pointed out that the clouds were dissolving to the
east, over the Columbia, and that surely tomorrow the sky
would clear by midday, or we would punch thr?ugh and
climb in sunshine above the clouds, the epitome of
mountaineering in the Cascades. I am an extremely cautious
climber, particularly paranoid about weather. But I had been
in Washington long enough not to let a few clouds scare me.
A little drizzle builds character. Once, as I described the
rain and white-out conditions that had just forced me off
Rainier, a veteran Cascade wilderness ranger and climber
interrupted, "So ... what's the problem?"
We committed ourselves to at least crossing the
glacier before giving in to the clouds, but, if we found ice
the trip would be over. Since I had to wear my spanking
new lightweight boots, neither of us had brought crampons.
As we sorted our gear, Rob complained of being cold, so I
lectured him on always being prepared for snow in the
mountains. "What do you mean?" sneered Rob, "It doesn't
snow in the Cascades in July!"
It was still cloudy overhead when we got up at four,
but the moon was out to the east. We popped over the pass
and began the long boulder hop to the glacier, shedding
layers as we went. By now we were in the clouds and the
visibility was clown to thirty meters or so. We made our
first route-finding mistake and climbed through the wrong
notch, which put us above the glacier on a steep, sandy
pitch. Sliding down between refrigerator-sized boulders
was only slightly less enjoyable than trying to kick steps in
the steep, hard snow with my lightweight boots. Oh, what I
would have given for my Yukons and crampons! Cutting
steps was painfully slow, and by the time we reached the
North Ridge itself we were behind schedule.
The first pitches were wonderful. We simul-climbed
to the ridge crest and then climbed with fixed belays. The
white granite offered great friction and protection, and the
views from the knife-edge ridge, if we hadn't been
immersed in gray. clo_uds, would have been spectacular.
Soon the easy chmbmg became confusing. The ridge
flattened and forced us to traverse across blocks with delicate
balance moves and long reaches. In the fog, we couldn't see
a reasonable route up the steep section ahead, so we
convinced ourselves that we had reached the "Great
Gendarme." We knew that it was about five pitches too
early, and we knew that there should have been a pin and a
5
rat's nest of webbing at the bypass rappel. Maybe this is
where we should have turned around. But it was still early,
and we were still optimistic and confident. We went ahead
and descended off a forlorn piece of webbing left around a
horn. Unable to locate the icy couloir we were supposed to
cross, we simul-climbed below and right of the ridgeline.
We were still hoping to find ourselves on the blocky fourth
class terrain just below the summit, and then run down the
south side to finish our tortellini by dark.
The climbing steepened, I led over a block, and I
found myself peering down through the clouds at a glacier
three hundred meters below. Behind me was another
expanse of sky, more swirling mist. Horrified, I stood on
the classic North Ridge of Mt. Stuart, feeling very high
above the glacier and very far below the summit. The same
white granite and sharp crest stretched up into the clouds,
perfect climbing but for the increasing wind, drizzle and
approaching darkness. I brought Rob up, and as we put all
our clothes on, we agreed that going over the top would be
faster and safer than trying to descend. But, as we realized
in a long conversation weeks later, I felt mentally prepared
for an inevitable bivy and wanted to climb carefully, while
Rob was determined to get off the mountain.
He sprinted 50 meters along the ridge, and the next
lead put us at the base of the real Great Gendarme, complete·
with the inevitable rat's nest rappel set up. We rapped again,
found the icy couloir, and kept climbing. And climbing.
Guidebooks always seem to describe the first ten pitches of a
climb in great detail, and then say "Class Four to the
summit." They never mention that the fourth class comes
whenyou are most psychologically and physically drained,
and will take longer than any other part of the climb.
Perhaps because I had already accepted the bivouac,
I insisted on using the rope, to Rob's dismay. Simulclimbing would have been faster than climbing free, but the
loose blocks unnerved me, and, in retrospect, I don't think
we would have made it off the mountain that night anyway.
When we finally topped out, the drizzle had turned to rain,
and it was growing dark quickly. We scrambled down then
east on wet lichen, looking for the descent route, but found
nothing in the fog and the dark. The spur we had followed
6
cliffed out just past a big flat boulder. We excavated a few
rocks and squeezed in.
Here is where this unexceptional account becomes a
grisly nightmare, where the climb attained epic status, for
who could have known that pack rats can survive, even
flourish, on top of a 2700 meter Cascade peak? Rob and I
settled into the lichen dust under our boulder and set about
finishing lunch. Muffled sounds from within the rocks
raised the hair on the back of my neck. I turned my head
and the beam of my headlamp caught the first pair of
glowing eyes. Soon, like a pack of wolves, they had
surrounded us. With the courage of lemmings they sprang
from the cracks, intent on our wheat crackers and sewn
slings. We defended ourselves with ice axes and primal
screams, but the horror of those beady eyes and whiskered
tails so close to our own bare flesh was too much to bare.
Defeated, we threw the pack rats an empty tuna can and a
bag of crumbs, our minimum impact ethic and wilderness
ranger spirit crushed.
The fear remained. As Rob and I huddled against the
cold, I imagined the pack rats gnawing through my flimsy
boots and into my numb toes. We passed the night in each
other's arms, sandwiched between rucksacks and ropes.
Every hour or so, we would climb out to jog in place on our
ledge, then crawl back into the hole. I think Rob managed to
sleep a little, but I was either too cold or too uncomfortable.
By dawn the rain had turned to sleet. Rob tried not
to steal jealous glances at my layers of pile. We packed with
cold, useless fingers, and, giving up on the easy descent,
headed down what we figured had to be Ulrich's Couloir. I
learned that a sitting glissade works well on wet, third class
granite slabs, though the utility of the ice axe is limited.
Already soaked by the rain, we opted for the path of least
resistance and merged with the stream rushing down the
mountainside. By the time we reached treeline, knees aching
and pants sagging, we were dreaming out loud about warm
sleeping bags, a sumptuous dinner, and level terrain.
Karma changes slowly, and bad karma may be
especially tenacious. Our tent lay upside down in a pool of
muddy water, the sleeping bags soaked. We crawled inside
and wallowed in misery. If Rob hadn't found the leftover
Marie Lu's, perhaps we would still be there today. But
7
empowered by the magic wafers, we packed and shouldered
our soggy packs and took one squishy step after another
until we reached the car.
No tale of woe could end with the anti-climax of a
sodden drive home. Some may believe that the soul of a
mountaineer rests in the heart, or that determination and
resolve spring from the subconscious mind. But the
wilderness rangers of the Northwest know that true will is
found in a full belly. Without a proper intake of smoked
salmon and ice cream, salsa and beer, our legs grow weak
and our commitment wavers. So we bounced down sixteen
kilometers of washboard and headed for the renowned pizza
of Rosalyn, forty kilometers out of our way. We drove in
sleepy fifteen minute shifts, and after the requisite clearcuts
and mine tailings, we arrived in the scenic resource
extraction town only to find it over-run with tourists
watching the filming of "Northern Exposure." The pizza
joint was closed.
8
Mt. Hunter, 1991
Will Silva
"It'd be the pits to get this high, and then get
skunked," I said. Jim muttered something unprintable and
kept traversing toward the bergschrund, below Mt. Hunter's
south summit. Through swirling cloud and spindrift I saw
Chris plant his tools in the 'schrund's upper lip and haul
over it. Ten days after flying in, we were going to summit.
Act I, Scene 1
I wondered, as Cliff Hudson navigated through
thickening clouds, how many times he had flown this route.
Avalanche Spire loomed and passed by our left side, then
we were in the clear over the upper Kahiltna Glacier. Soon
we stood, Jim Beall, Chris Bretherton, and I, in cool
morning sun looking with delight and trepidation at the
north side of Mt. Hunter. We skied about three kilometers
up the southeast fork that afternoon for a look at the LoweKennedy route. Look but do not touch! We weren't ready
for that one. No matter, we'd done our homework and
drawn up a list of contingency plans large and small.
Act I, Scene 2
We hiked up the start of Hunter's West Ridge a
couple days later, camping 850m above the Kahiltna. How
fine to be high in the Alaska range again! I slept out in a
bivy sack, watching the sun change colors and the crescent
moon sink over the silhouette of Mt. Foraker. The upper
West Ridge stretched out above me. It looked long but
,
straightforward, and I felt optimistic.
We hiked a short way up to the first pinnacle on the
ridge, and peeked over. Wuf! Six hundred meters of
awful-looking gully to the glacier. Across the notch, a
three hundred meter ice slope. How foreshortened? Would
we have to belay, or could we climb continuously? But
first, the hundred meters or so of descent... we made a 12m
Mt. Hunter, 1991
overhanging rappel, traversed down ledges, made one or
two more short raps and traverses ... and we'd brought only
the two 9 mm climbing ropes. A couple old 8 mm ropes
were fixed on the overhang. I doubt they were original
equipment from Beckey, Harrer and Meybohm's 1954
ascent, but they looked it. First Jim, then I, then Chris
rapped down on one of our ropes. How were we going to
get back up? The overhang looked most uninviting, and the
notion of jtimaring one of the ratty fixed ropes felt even
more so. The clouds thickened. We thought hard about
pulling down our rap line. Commitment. Leave it, and do
the climb on one rope? We were of one mind; with only a
little thrashing, we jtimared our rope, and returned to camp
in a blizzard with our tails between our legs.
Everything looks more desperate than I
remember. Blue water ice is everywhere;
ridges are heavily corniced and end in ice
cliffs, ridges dotted with rock towers, a
fanciful landscape that dares and precludes
passage.
Act II
May 20th, five days later now. We had relocated to
Thunder Valley, an eas·t-west glacial trench south of Mt.
Hunter. We had skied back to the southeast fork base camp
for more food and fuel, then spent a few days in fog in our
camp at the base of the West Ridge, reading and making a
serious dent in the fifth of Canadian whiskey we had
brought. The weather cleared around the time we began to
fester. After diddling around in an icefall, we found an
easy way along the east bank of the Kahiltna, and up onto
the glacier below the southwest ridge.
What an incredible cirque.
Savage,
dramatic ... steep granite walls, hanging blue
glaciers, sheets of blue water ice. We skied
up from camp 45 minutes to look at the
couloir. Pitched tents late, stove plugged
up, ate dinner around midnight.
10
Mt. Hunter, 1991
By the time we had packed up, noon had come and
gone. We began moving up to the couloir that would lead
us to the crest of the lower southwest ridge. Third on the
rope, I looked at the avalanche cone below the couloir with
growing apprehension. The intense mid-day sun now fell
on the upper part of the 760m trough. We called a halt,
setting up the tent to shade us. The slides soon began,
along with small serac falls from the snout of a nearby
hanging glacier. We had made the right choice.
Chris began kicking steps up the couloir after the
sun left it at 7 p.m. We unroped after crossing the rimaye.
What delight to get high enough to see over the ridges
along the Kahiltna, to see the range stretching out to
evening tundra! After a few dicey exit moves, we camped
on the col above the couloir in the 11 p.m. Arctic twilight.
Two pitches of low angle ice led up onto the broad,
glaciated ridge. We climbed continuously, wary of the
crevasses which had cost the first ascent party much time.
After a false start along a shelf on the north side, Jim got us
back onto an icy crest. We moved up in brilliant sun. Rock
towers and fluted ice slopes bounded the chasms to either
side of our ridge. Could it get any better? After only a few
hours we camped below the rock and ice buttress forming
the route's crux. A long afternoon allowed us to look over
the route, read, and enjoy the outrageous scenery.
Jim led up the ice slope below the buttress at 7
o'clock the next morning. Traversing left, we climbed
together for two ice pitches that reminded me of
surreptitiously walking on our garage roof when I was a
kid. I led an iced chimney, then continued up narrow ice
runnels through the rock bands above. Jim took over,
leading up a steep ice slope, then negotiating 15m of a
frighteningly loose snow knife edge to a rock belay. I
continued up the corner, then acheval up an ice ridge, and
finally up a brittle ice face and around the main ridge crest
to a great stance on a rock with two screws for a belay. We
regrouped there, then Jim front-pointed out a full pitch. He
and I climbed out another rope length while Chris
(opposite) Mt. Hunter, H. Bradford Washburn photo
12
belayed, then Jim set a belay and brought the other two of
us up. The day was lovely, but we were tiring now. Jim
led off again, I followed, and he brought us up as before.
The top of the ice face was tantalizingly close. I led a last
pitch, and at 6 p.m. slogged onto the col where our ridge
met the summit glacier. Thankfully we dug out a platform
for the tent, and enjoyed dinner in golden evening light.
High clouds moved in overnight. We left camp
before the sun rose from behind the peak, surrounded by a
great circle.
The ridge crest was a frozen whipped cream
horror in places, so we traversed onto the
big glacier lying between this and the next
spur north. Enter Chris the step-kicker.
Hoods drawn against a cold northwest wind, we
hiked up the glacier. Chris traversed a 60 degree water ice
slope above the bergschrund and disappeared into the
spindrift. The slope eased to the false summit. We were
close, but saw Hunter's north summit cloaked in cloud. A
huge lenticular had formed over Denali earlier, and clouds
now covered the top 1200m. We descended to the col
between the false and south summits in wind and swirling
cloud. Were we in for an epic? Then I saw Chris through a
gap in the clouds, frontpointing over the bergschrund and
up the summit ridge. Soon we stood in bright sun and wind
on the broad south summit.
What joy! The north peak was awash in cloud, but
now Denali was clear. We looked out over Mt. Huntington
and the sea of peaks around the Ruth and Tokositna valleys
to the east. Foraker rose, a gigantic challenge to the west.
We hugged and grinned. It had been 10 years since Jim,
Dave Coombs, and I'd climbed the Cassin Ridge. Denali's
south face stood, huge and Arctic to the north. How nice to
have gotten away with that one ... and to be 1800m lower
now! We took our pictures and hastily descended,
downclimbing and jumping small crevasses and running
down the snowy glacier to our camp.
Fortunately, nothing much came of the clouds and
wind. We were off in the morning chill, descending the ice
face in full length rappels off ice bollards. Once we got to
13
Mt. Hunter, 1991
the rock bands, a few slings around blocks provided a quick
alternative as we peeled layers of clothing and began to
relax in the afternoon sun. By 3 o'clock we were brewing
up and eating at our old campsite below the buttress.
This col would have been a lovely place to spend
another night, but we remembered well Shari Kearney's
article about the first ascent. They'd descended in a storm,
reaching camp shaken but unhurt after an avalanche swept
them down the last 150m of the couloir. We continued
down the ridge, rapping off a picket and one last ballard to
the col above the big couloir. Chris placed a fluke that
provided a solid anchor and a last moment of total
commitment as one by one we rappelled into the top of the
chute. We descended facing in at first, then plunge
stepping, then wallowing down steep half-frozen slush.
The last of the sun turned rock towers to gold as we
emerged from the gully. We skied into camp on the glacier
at 11 p.m., just a hundred hours after starting up. What a
hundred hours it had been!
*
*
*
We spoke of trying another short climb, or
reconnoitering for other trips, but the weather went sour
again a day after we got down. After two days we skied the
over 19 kilometers back to Kahiltna International under
cloudy skies. Jay Hudson flew in to get us about 8 p.m.
that night. Our flight out was exciting. I was happy to be
in a turboch~rged Cessna with a great pilot. Jay refueled
and took off again as soon as we had unloaded the plane,
bringing out another two parties that evening.
Our climb on Mt. Hunter stands out as one of the
most satisfying mountaineering trips I've done. Rather than
having a single objective in mind, we had arrived with a
variety of projects to choose from. Objectively, the
southwest ridge route is reasonably safe, but it is varied and
challenging enough to provide a good adventure. Though
Thunder Valley is within sight of the crowds on the
approach to Denali's west buttress, ours was the only party
in this dramatic and beautiful area. We were blessed with
good weather when we needed it. We came and left as
friends. What more could a climber ask?
14
To 8100m on the
Abruzzi Ridge of K2
Peter G. Green
By chance, a friend of mine invited my brother
Robert and me to join a low budget international expedition
to K2 in the summer of 1992. It was a loose network of 18
members on a Russian permit but was mostly Americans
(to foot the bill). The style of climb included fixing ropes
and establishing camps, as well as having bottled oxygen
available. We accepted, but kept our expectations low.
The price of about $5000 was a bargain thanks to
inexpensive gear being bought in rubles. Never having
been over 7000m, we were ready to consider simply seeing
the mountain a success. Reaching the summit would have
been beyond our wildest dreams. After all, in four of the
previous eight years, no one had reached the summit by any
route. Most of the members of the expedition had much
more experience, and also a professional goal involved.
Two in the group had climbed Everest by two routes plus
Kangchenjunga, two more had also climbed Everest,
another had climbed Lhotse, five more had prior experience
high on 8000m peaks, two others had climbed over 7000m
in the Pamirs, and yet another had previously been invited
to Everest. This very high level of experience is typical of
groups attempting K2. The two who had less experience
than us were Kelly, who departed (homesick and
overwhelmed, but content) just a week after we arrived in
base camp, and Yuri (the doctor) who ended up not
climbing much at all. (He did, however, sample his
western European donated pharmacopeia sufficiently for us
to joke that he was getting higher in base camp than we
were on the mountain.) So, Rob and I were at the very
bottom of the scale of those attempting the climb.
We arrived in Islamabad airport on June 8 following
40 hours of travel and 12 hours of jet lag from home in
southern California. Five of our six pieces of luggage were
lost, having been unloaded with the majority of our fellow
passengers in Dhm·an, Saudi Arabia. We were arriving on
To 8100m on the Abruzzi Ridge of K2
the approach of the three day Moslem holiday Eid, during
which no work is done and many pilgrimages to Mecca are
made.
It was clear upon arrival in Islamabad that, as we
had feared, virtually none of the necessary planning had
been done. Moreover, the Russian and Ukrainian members
were a week overdue making their way overland through
Kazakhstan and China.
After they arrived a few days later, we collected our
lost luggage, began tackling the excruciating bureaucratic
obstacles, and eventually took the wild bus ride up the
Indus gorge. In Skardu, our mountain of gear was
repackaged into 140 loads of 25kg each, with 40 more
containing lentils (dal), flour (atta), butterfat (ghee) and rice
(baht) for feeding the porters. We also had several
thousand cheap local cigarettes to meet the required ration
of five per day per porter. We took the jeep road out of
Skardu only to be stopped short by a damaged bridge and a
washout. That meant two extra days marching (and paying
for porters!) to Askole where the trek normally begins.
On the sixth morning on the trail, we walked onto
the Baltoro glacier, past mountain scenery unrivaled on
Earth. Paiju Peak climbed majestically above our last
camp; Uli Biaho stood impressive and alone; the Trango
Towers made Yosemite Valley look meek. The one
thousand meter sheer cylinder of Nameless Tower defies
words. Gathering afternoon clouds later nearly hid views
of Mus tagh Tower, but we glimpsed Broad Peak far ahead.
At Concordia we got our first view of the mountain.
The southern aspect of K2 is daunting. That the 1986
Polish expedition managed to climb a direct line up it does
not make it less so. I was relieved that at least it didn't look
any worse than the photos, that our route was not up the
face, and that we were bringing a lot of rope for fixing.
(We brought 3000m of line, and used it all.)
On June 30th, our eighth day on foot, we reached
base camp at 5000m. The porters pressed on for the full
afternoon in order to reach base camp and retreat back
down to warmer sleeping at Concordia before dark. One of
the fastest porters arrived with me and immediately dashed
off back down the valley. I was puzzled; he had not yet
16
Sunset glow on K2, Peter Green photo
Chogolisa from base camp, Peter Green photo
17
been paid. Later I saw him arrive again with another load.
He spoke a little English and explained that he went back to
carry the load of his father up the last stretch. Finally,
straggling behind the group came the last porter with Dan's
daypack on his shoulders and Dan with a 25kg sack.
Our dictatorial leader Vladimir argued with the
sirdar over payment, offering the bare minimum for what
had been exemplary work on the part of all 180 porters.
Either to bolster his arguments or out of some other pure
foolishness, he and Lena accused the entire angry crowd of
stealing a tent she could not locate! The rest of us promptly
retreated to a safe distance. It is fortunate that these proud
and contentious Baltis do not injure strangers, even when
accused of the very serious offense of theft. Walking sticks
were shaken, a few rocks thrown, and many harsh words
yelled as the throng surged back and forth. Finally they
calmed, and Vladimir resumed his rupee counting. In the
morning, the 'missing' tent was found. Remarkably, not a
single scrap of gear turned up missing. Though they lack
some of the long-admired grace of Sherpas, these people
have a very strong tradition of honesty and hospitality.
Our arrival matched the departure of a Franco-Swiss
expedition that had been tackling the route in early season
in pseudo- (or psycho-) alpine style. While not putting in
fixed lines themselves, they had jtimared on the old,
tattered ropes from previous years, luckily surviving
several breakages!
They were about the twelfth
consecutive expedition to have failed on the route. (No one
had summited via the Abruzzi Ridge since 1986.)
Base Camp temperatures were a little below
freezing each night but pleasant in the sunny daytime. In
the five weeks we spent there, only one day was very
windy. Several times we got a little snowfall, once mixed
with rain. We had very good cooks who made the best of
bland Russian provisions. They kept us much healthier
than neighboring expeditions. Despite considerable effort
to keep up my weight, I lost the five pounds I had gained
during pre-expedition training and feasting. Neal, a
competitive marathoner and 5.12leader, was shocked to go
from a lean and muscular 150 lb. down to 130.
18
Chogolisa, Concordia, and Masherbrum from below
House's Chimney, Peter Green photo
View of Gasherbrum group, Broad Peak, and Chogolisa
from Camp 3, Peter Green photo
19
From base camp on a medial moraine of the
Godwin-Austin glacier, our route followed the moraine and
crossed two stretches of avalanche debris from the south
face. We kept to the far margin of these even though the
summer avalanches never came out very far. A short,
creaking icefall guards the approach to the Abruzzi Ridge.
At first, we used crampons and roped up to pass these
seracs. Later, most of us left our technical gear at the ridge
and just used a ski pole; rescue ropes were cached at each
end of the icefall. Once an ice block toppled Scott off
balance, leading to a dislocated shoulder.
At the base of the ridge (5300m), scree slopes led to
35 degree snow, usually wet, heavy, and even sticky, with
ice underneath. We started fixing ropes at about 5700m
where the route began alternating between rock and snow.
Staying out on the open snow-slopes risked avalanches and
accelerated rockfall from above. Fixed ropes and helmet
use were uninterrupted from there to Camp 3 at 7200m.
Camp 1 at 6000m was tucked behind a rock
pinnacle. (This was the starting point for my steep ski run
down to the glacier.) Camp 2 at 6700m was on a 40 degree
slope hidden under a buttress for protection. Gear
accidentally dropped from there did not stop for 1300m.
Just below it is the famous cliff band passage, House's
Chimney. It is incredible that it was climbed in the 1930's.
I recall seeing it rated 5.7 somewhere. The rock is incredibly crumbly (as on the entire route), and the awkward face
moves, and chimneying and stemming are strenuous even
with a solid fixed rope and ascender in one hand.
The Abruzzi route has a stretch of gentle ground on
top of the shoulder. The rest averages 50 degrees or more,
which is pretty steep for a few thousand meters of snow
mixed with loose rock at quite high altitude. Without fixed
ropes, the many trips up and down would be far more time
consuming and dangerous. Fortunately, we never had
terribly icy conditions except for on the gentle slopes at the
bottom where the summer warmth eventually ate away at
the snowpack. More often we had deep snow from recent
storms; whoever was strongest got to break trail.
It is necessary to make maximum use of every day
since perfect days are rare. One must be on the mountain,
as high as one can get, when the weather clears. Other-
20
wise, one won't have enough time to take advantage of the
break. Of course, storms leave deep snow which impedes
travel and can avalanche. Waiting out four stormy nights at
Camp 2 before our summit bid, Rob and I lucked out with a
storm that didn't dump too much, and ended with light
winds and mild temperatures to produce a firm pack.
Above Camp 2 we stayed closer to the true ridge
than some of the early expeditions. A 15m wire ladder led
up one rock cliff much harder than House's. One could go
around but only to face more avalanche danger. One late
morning after a storm had cleared, I watched the heat of
the sun send slides down on both sides of the route. To
reach the start of the shoulder, one follows the Black
Pyramid. At times one is just a meter or so from a big
vertical drop. At ?lOOm, steep snow ramps led between
overhanging ice cliffs to a patch of level snow. At first we
had set up Camp 3 at an inferior location and had tents
buried and destroyed during a week of bad weather.
From there, broad slopes with a few crevasses led
up to a very steep section. Poor snow conditions would
make this section very tough. Then, one gets some gentle
ground, and approaching 8000m it is mighty welcome.
Rob and I strolled up at a steady four breaths per step.
Vladimir had put Camp 4 at the highest possible location, a
rib of snow on the ridge proper at 8100m, and just away
from being under the tall hanging glacier on the summit
pyramid. While there is still a lot of difficult ground to
cover on K2, our height was exceeded by the summits of
only nine peaks.
Six of our group made the summit, on three
different days spanning from August first to the 16th. On
August first and second, after our stormy vigil at Camp 2,
Rob and I moved our tent to Camp 3 (this was Camp 8 in
1953!), and then to Camp 4 and felt great. We met
Vladimir and Gennady (the first Russian and first
Ukrainian) returning from summiting the day before; they
had waited out the storm at Camp 4! Our oxygen tanks
were left below, having been too heavy to bring along. We
had intentionally (and necessarily) traveled light with the
agreement to head down at the first sign of bad weather.
Throughout the season fine weather arrives with a light,
north "China Breeze" and doesn't last long. Storms come
21
from the south, bearing moisture from the Indian Ocean.
That day, nasty monsoon clouds had been lurking in the
distance and in the .middle of the night strong winds gusted
up from the south. We didn't need to think anything
through. Our decision under these circumstances had been
made months earlier at our 1200m homes in the southern
California mountains.
In the morning when the others went up, we bailed
out for home. We have no regrets whatsoever. By
afternoon it was overcast. The next morning it started
snowing on the mountain and was a raging blizzard by midday. The three who were at Camp 4 with us, and who had
tried for the summit despite the incoming storm, pad a hell
of a time getting down. Alexei, who did summit, suffered
some frostbite to his hands. Chantal Mauduit, a Frenchwoman with the earlier Franco-Swiss expedition, also made
it, but suffered minor frostbite and some vision problems.
She is the only woman alive to have climbed K2. (Two of
the three who had reached the summit in 1986 died on
descent, the fourth has since been lost on another 8000m
peak.)
Rob and I left everything useful in the tent at Camp
4: pad, stove, pot, fuel and food, but took all our garbage
down. At Camps 3 and 2 we picked up garbage again, and
continued to Camp 1. After stumbling down the rockier
route below, then glissading and sliding scree to the glacier,
we navigated the icefall for the seventh and final time. By
descending over three thousand meters in 10 hours, we
escaped the storm and could call our folks ($20 for one
minute on the Swede's satellite dish) to tell them we were
safe and coming home.
Several days after we were all the way home, three
of our team finally became the first Americans to complete
the entire Abruzzi Ridge (and the sixth, seventh, and eighth
to have reached the summit). Still a few weeks later, the
last two jobless/professional climbers in the group gave up
a final, late attempt above 8000m.
I close with some wisdom that Don Whillans has
passed along to Greg Child, as quoted in Thin Air, "The
mountains will always be there. The trick is for you to be
there as well."
22
Cramped on Kenya
Steve Brown
Again this vacation, I found myself crowded against
Sam. Each time was a little tighter than the last. First, we
were crowded into a small hotel room at the base of Mt.
Kilimanjaro, where the management tried to extort additional
fees from us for our climb. Then, we spent a week in a
Landrover on a whirlwind tour of East African game parks,
under the officious protection of an obsequious driver who
thought that there was a lion behind every bush in the
Serengeti.
This latest crowding, however, was by far the worst.
Sam Hoisington '87 and I were sharing a single mummy
sleeping bag on Nelion, the 5188m lower summit of Mt.
Kenya. With both of us inside, the bag would not even zip
past our shoulders. I have always been an extremist on
issues of weight, but this time I had gone too far. We would
never get any sleep, and the next day we were to climb to the
higher summit, Batian.
The climb had started typically enough: A scenic
approach through rolling grassland gave way to barren,
rocky slopes. The rocky slopes became a lateral moraine,
and a few hours later we were comfortably sipping hot cocoa
in a cabin about 500m below Point Lenana, the highest peak
of the Mount Kenya Massif that can be reached nontechnically. The approach was uneventful. We sorted gear
for the next day, and went to bed.
We were up before dawn, hiking across the glacier to
the base of the South Face of Mt. Kenya. It is a long, easy
rock climb (5.4 to 5.6) to the lower summit of Mt. Kenya.
We had planned to spend the night there, where we had been
told there was a small aluminum shelter. The next day, we
would downclimb to the icy saddle between the two peaks of
Kenya, climb up to the taller summit, and then retrace our
steps to descend. Two nice, easy days.
Of course, nothing ever works out the way one
plans. As we began to climb the South Face, Sam and I had
quickly discovered that rock climbing, even easy climbing,
Cramped on Kenya
Sam Hoisington on Mount Kenya, Steve Brown photo
24
above 4500m with a heavy pack is very exhausting. Our
packs contained full bivouac gear, an ice tool and some gear
for the ice we would encounter while crossing to the taller
summit of Kenya, a rock rack, plus food to satisfy Sam's 6
foot 3 inch appetite.
Since we were climbing too slowly to accomplish
our goals, we decided to leave most of our food and gear
behind on the sixth pitch. One constantly reads about such
measures in climbing journals, and it seemed like a good
thing to do here, too. We were a little extreme, though, as
we would find out later at cost to ourselves. I presumed that
both of us could fit into Sam's extra-long, extra-wide
mummy bag, thereby saving five pounds. (Unfortunately,
Sam is already extra-long and extra-wide.) The climbing
itself was easy, so most of the rack stayed too. Since the
climb would only take another day, we left at least half of the
food. Finally, I opted to save the weight of my plastic boot
shells by wearing Sam's enormous rock boots over my boot
liners, and strapping crampons onto this outrageous
combination for the next day's ice.
I am sure that some readers are already laughing, and
now I do too. At the time, though, it (almost) worked. We
finished the day's climbing with only a minor portion done
by moonlight, and although the 1.8m x 1.8m x lm
aluminum summit shelter was full, it was a beautiful night.
We crawled into our sleeping bag, and proceeded to fail
miserably in our attempts to zip it. Hence, once again I was
crowded against Sam, worse than ever before.
In real terms it was not very cold, perhaps 25° F, but
with an open sleeping bag it was quite chilly. The night was
beautiful, though. All day long, bmsh fires had raged in the
plains below, imparting a surreal haze upon the air. Now, at
night, one could see the embers and flames as a ring of
orange all across the horizon like flows of lava from a
volcano. Sunrise, perfect in streaks of pink and orange
against the haze, was only ordinary compared to the colors
of the night.
We ate a meager breakfast and began to search for a
way to descend to the saddle between the two summits of
Mt. Kenya. Ideally, we wanted two clear full-length
rappels, with an obvious, easy route for later re-ascent.
Nothing presented itself, but we rappelled anyhow, ending
25
Cramped on Kenya
up on the wrong side of a cornice cutting across the saddle.
(We did not want to pendulum for fear of sawing the rope
across an edge.) Much struggling resulted in a bellyflop
onto the correct side, where we could see the pleasant gully
we should have descended.
At this point, we were uncomfortably aware of the
ugly mixed terrain which lay ahead. Due to the its equatorial
latitude, one side of Mt. Kenya at any given time is
pleasantly warm rock, while the other side is encrusted in ice
and snow. We could see earlier that morning that our
probable route looked icy, but now we were certain of it.
Yesterday's decision to ice climb in large rock shoes and
boot liners seemed quite hasty at this point.
We had been assured that the climbing would be
trivial, but when had anything in Africa been as expected?
Hence, it came to pass that in January 1991, at over 5000m
on Mount Kenya, Sam Hoisington led his first pitch of ice,
which was mixed in places. I followed with tension, and
two pitches later we reached the summit of Batian, about
11m taller than Nelion.
By this time, the summits were in scattered clouds;
we left after a few photos and retraced our steps. We could
rappel all of the difficult ground, so the retreat went quickly.
Nonetheless, our difficulties had left us with insufficient
time (and possibly inadequate weather) to retreat, so we
stayed again on Nelion. The aluminum shelter was free, so
we enjoyed a less drafty but no less restful night together
again in our bag. This time, we could hear and feel eachother's stomachs growling, too. We still argue about whose
idea it was to leave the food behind.
We descended on the next day. Although we had
been worried about catching the rope sometime during the
rappels, this did not happen until the last pitch, when we
were back on the glacier.
Fortunately, our porters had dinner waiting for us.
Two of them had even walked across the glacier to help us
carry our packs back. At the time, we thought it incredibly
good-hearted of them. Now, though, we think that they
were feeling guilty about what they had done with our
camera. While we were climbing, we left them with a
camera and eight hundred millimeter telephoto lens so that
they could get pictures of us from across the glacier. When
26
we developed the film, all that we saw were close-up shots
of human anatomy. They used the entire roll to take pictures
of themselves, magnified in ungainly fashion by the
telephoto lens.
Three years later, I look back and laugh. It was an
incredibly fun trip, maybe in spite of our mishaps or maybe
because of them. However, I have not come within an inch
of Sam since, nor do I intend to do so.
Steve Brown on Mount Kenya,
Sam Hoisington photo
27
The Needle's Edge: An Ascent
of the Petit Grepon, Rocky
Mountain National Park
Edward K. Baldwin and Carl V. Phillips
Good judgment comes from experience,
and experience is the result of bad judgment.
-Old Climbers' Saying
The summit of the Petit Grepon is a small, airy
platform perched atop a soaring blade of rock. Standing on
it, above a vertical world, one is surrounded only by space
and air. To a climber, it seems an almost incredible miracle
that such a place exists to be climbed. To a non-climber, it
might well seem incredible that anyone would want to climb
it. Photographs of the Petit Grepon were enticing, and we
had heard rave reviews from Boulder locals and guidebooks.
We decided to make it the culmination of our week of
climbing in and around Rocky Mountain National Park, in
June 1993.
The Petit Grepon is a 240 meter spire jutting between
two peaks in the Rocky Mountain backcountry. It is around
1OOm wide at the base, tapering to a long, thin fin about two
thirds of the way up. The fin, nowhere more than 1Om
thick, gradually thins as it rises, culminating in the summit at
3688m. The summit platform is bare rock, 1.8m wide and
. 6m long. It overhangs part of the ascent route, giving a
vertical drop of around one hundred meters, and has at least
thirty meters of steep open air in all directions. The crux of
the route is one pitch of well protected 5.8. There are six or
seven other pitches ranging from 5.3 to reasonably protected
5.7.
The two of us, along with Ed's cousin Mark, a
beginner, had done another backcountry climb, the
Spearhead, on the previous day. Traveling in a threesome,
we were slow getting off that climb, and got a late start on
the ten kilometer hike to the base of the Grepon. Darkness
fell well before we reached the climb, and triggered some
contentious debate on when and where to stop. Eventually,
Mark's exhaustion and Carl's successful quest for a
secluded camp site settled the issue. We bivouacked several
kilometers from the base of the Grepon. In the circumstances, we couldn't quite manage an alpine start, and only
got up when an elk doe and two fawns walked by our camp.
Nevertheless, since the climb was well within our ability, we
figured we could easily get up and off by dark if we traveled
light and moved fast. Mark wasn't up for 5.8, and planned
to hike up the descent route and take photos.
We took off up the hill, wearing light clothes and our
prescription sunglasses and carrying a little water and all the
food left in camp (there wasn't much, since we were heading
back to the car that night). Light clothes were easily enough
for comfort in the crisp, clear morning. Ed had a shell,
windpants, and a polypro shirt, while Carl had polypro
pants and shirt, and a shell. The temperature was about 45°
F and warming, with light wind and intermittent clouds. The
day promised to be as warm and beautiful as the previous
week had been. With the light load, we finished the
approach in time to start the climb at about nine o'clock.
The climbing was as good as promised. We moved
quickly on the initial easy pitches. Ed, as the main advocate
of the climb, led every pitch, particularly since Carl felt a bit
"off" that day. The only difficulty was a stretch of runout
5.7 offwidth, which constantly threatened to squirt Ed out
over the face. After three pitches and some panic on the
offwidth, we reached a large grassy ledge, inhabited by a
fat, happy marmot. He must have levitated to get there. The
weather was changing for the worse: intermittent clouds
blocked the sun almost half the time, the wind was rising,
and the temperature was dropping. We were moving fast
and feeling good, so we kept going.
At the next belay, below the crux 5.8 pitch, we ran
into the tail of a slow moving threeso~e and lost 15 minutes
waiting for them to leave so we could get room for good
anchor placements. The crux was thin, steep, well protected
and generally a beautiful pitch. Unfortunately, when we
topped out on the wide ledge, the threesome had just barely
started the next pitch. We knew that the next belay stances
were small, and decided to wait for them to get clear. The
weather was still worsening.
29
The Needle's Edge
They finally got clear after a cold and anxious
eternity (really 40 minutes). Our wait ended around two
o'clock in the afternoon, by which time the weather was
downright bad: cold and windy, with no sun and a frigid
drizzle. To fend off the weather and stay warm during the
delay, we had eaten all our food, and were wearing every
piece of clothing we had.
We finally climbed the pitch. The belay ledge would
have been comfortable in pleasant conditions. In the
wretched conditions, we were in no mood to appreciate its
fine points. Due to a complicated anchor and excessive
haste, we created the mother of all rope tangles, and lost
fifteen minutes sorting it out. Carl became unsatisfied with
the security of the ledge a bit later, when a gust blew him out
of his flatfooted, balanced belay stance. As before, our
·biggest complaint was weather. There was still no sun, the
rain had turned to hail and then snow, and the winds were
around 30 kilometers per hour, gusting to 50 or more.
Under those conditions we finally did the last pitch.
We topped out in light snow with winds gusting
around sixty kilometers per hour. After a traverse to the
rappel anchor and a quick photo session, we waited another
fifteen minutes for the threesome to get off the rappel. It
was about 4:30, there was no shelter from the wind, and
Carl, with the wind blowing straight through his polypro
pants, was very cold.
We followed the guidebook directions for the
descent, by rappelling 50m into the gully, climbing up it
over the back of the ridge, and walking several kilometers
back around the ridge to camp. (The other party had taken a
different route.) After three short rappels and several close
calls when the rope tried to blow away, we reached the
gully. At this point, some disadvantages of traveling light
without moving fast had become apparent. We were out of
food, nearly out of water, and our clothes were not keeping
us warm.
Carl was cold, on his way towards hypothermia,
while Ed was just chilled. Our different responses to the
weather still incite debate. Ed prefers windproof pants as the
explanation, while Carl favors fortitude and surface-tovolume ratio. Fortunately, though, it had stopped snowing.
30
The Petit Grepon, photo courtesy Carl V. Phillips
31
The Needle's Edge
Ed, more familiar with the guidebook's route description,
chose the easiest looking route up the gully (on the right
side). Naturally it was the wrong route, and forced us to
cover extra ground and surmount two unexpected and
unwelcome 5.6 moves to reach the top of the gully. The top
of the gully was a perfect vantage point, showing the knife
edge profile of the back of the Grepon leading up to the
isolated summit.
After a short walk from the viewpoint, we reached
the top of the ridge, and could start our descent. The
weather had cleared and warmed up somewhat, so we were
starting to feel relieved until Carl, in the lead, came over the
saddle and yelled,
"Ed! We can't go down here. There's a big, steep snowfield."
Ed was skeptical of the obstacle's real difficulty, given
Carl's lack of snow experience. However, he eventually
agreed, since it was untracked and seemed risky without ice
tools. The next saddle had no snowfield, no trail, and no
other practicable descent routes. At the third saddle we
found the route, down a small, well tracked, less steep
snowfield. The soft summer snow made for easy step
kicking, but we stayed roped for the descent.
We crossed a vicious talus field and climbed down
the next snowfield, which was larger and steeper. Carl,
belayed from above, slipped a few times. Ed, without that
luxury, worked out the interesting technique of plunging his
arms into the snow up to his elbows to create handholds.
By the time we were off the snowfield the sun was behind
the ridge. This brought two other deficiencies of traveling
light and slow to our notice. Our clear prescription glasses
were in camp (not clever), with our headlamps (even less
clever).
We followed a faint trail across a huge talus field and
down to a broad rock shelf, assuming there was an easy
descent from the shelf. Naturally, we were wrong again: it
ended in a twenty-five meter drop to a snowfield. Not until
we set up the rappel and backed out to the edge did we see
the wide, deep, steep-walled, and impassable moat between
the rock shelf and the snow. By the time we found and set
32
up a workable rappel onto a steep talus field off to the side, it
was almost completely dark. We made the rappel by feel,
and retrieved the rope after a great struggle against some
invisible hang-up. From there, we groped our way down
more talus and across more snowfields, hoping that we had
done our last rappel.
After an hour or so of this we were both worried.
We had reached the limit of what we had seen before
darkness fell. Carl, who is blind without his glasses and has
poor night vision besides, was afraid of walking off an
unseen cliff edge in the dark. Ed, beginning to stagger from
exhaustion, focused on the more tangible possibility of
spraining an ankle in the talus. Progress was slow, and we
weren't sure how far we had to go. At about 10, we decided
to bivouac and wait for light. The weather, still high on our
list of concerns, was relatively pleasant for a night at circa
3200m. The temperature was in the 30os with a steady 8
kilometer per hour wind.
For the bi vy, we settled down in a sheltered
depression between two boulders. The bivy would have
been peaceful and relaxing, except for hunger, thirst,
anxiety, cold, wind, and the faint, tempting, hallucinatory
lights and sounds from further down the valley. After an
hour or so, we were both chilled, (we weren't as sheltered
as we thought), and decided to warm up by finding a better
spot. Carl found a cave between and under the talus
boulders, and we both crawled in, arranged ourselves, and
dropped into a doze. (If you ever have to do this, remove all
metal, pull your hood over your helmet, sit on your rock
shoes and chalk bag, and use the rope to insulate you from
contact with the rock.)
The mild wind still leaked through the many cracks
between cave boulders, and left us chilled again after an hour
or so. We decided to move some rocks to block the wind,
hoping that the motion would also warm us up. This
quickly developed into a ritual. When we cooled off, Ed
flicked his lighter to check the woefully small amount of time
that had passed, and we both shuffled rocks to warm up.
Fifteen minutes of blind rock construction got the blood
flowing, so we could settle back into uneasy quiescence until
we cooled off again.
33
The Needle's Edge
After five cycles of this, Carl, still hovering at the
edge of hypothermia, found that he could not stop shivering
except when he was actually moving rocks. He spent the
last hour in our cramped quarters repeatedly moving a rock
wall, rock by rock, a foot in and a foot back out He later
labeled the exercise "blind, one-handed masonry." Ed, in a
cold reverie, did not notice. At about 5:15, we detected a
faint hint of light, scrambled out of the cave, recovered and
repacked the gear, and headed down in daylight. The light
was the only weather that mattered, although we were happy
enough to accept the warmth, clear skies, light winds, and
chromatic sunrise that started the day. The woods and the
trail were only 800 meters away now that we knew which
way to walk, and we returned to camp quickly. In the dark,
we could easily have missed the trail and been forced into
blind bushwhacking.
Back at camp, we recovered our camping gear and
took off for the parking lot, hoping to forestall a rescue.
About halfway back, we heard Mark, calling us. When we
rounded the bend, he welcomed us with water and cookies
(Pecan Sandies, of course, as Ed's climbing partners have
already guessed). Later we wondered how he recognized us
before he saw us. He pointed out that very few people carry
jangling climbing gear down the hill at 6:00a.m. We were
back at the parking lot before the Park Service got worried.
The Grepon's final bill for the climb was relatively small: a
few days of exhaustion, somewhat damaged ropes (imagine
blind, one-handed masonry while sitting on your rope), a
number one Camalot lost (overcammed in the snowstorm),
Carl's "super rugged" camera (for which he got a refund), a
vicious cold, and a valuable experience.
For us, the overall lesson learned applies to the "light
and fast" philosophy. It only works if you actually do move
fast. Moving light and slow, for any reason, is a recipe for
problems.
34
Jackson Summer #19: From Kentucky
Fried Penguin to the Tetons
Rebecca Taylor
For nearly twenty years I have lived my summers
and winter vacations in Wilson, Wyoming, ten minutes
outside of Jackson Hole. I have grown up with the Tetons
in my backyard, and have been hiking, biking and skiing
their trails for as long as I can remember. My time in
Wyoming has been such an integral part of my life that I
could not conceive of ever missing a summer there, not
even to travel to other beautiful places. I guess there is
something to be said for home.
Despite my childhood in Jackson, though, I am
embarrassed to admit that climbing did not seize me until
last summer. Perhaps this is because I fear heights, and my
friends in Wyoming are typical skiing and mountain biking
"punks." After one too many nasty spills on my mountain
bike, however, I was ready for something new. One of my
good friends was back home in Utah for a while last year,
and introduced me to climbing.
The Beginning:
Kentucky Fried Penguin to the City of Rocks
12 June 1993. Brad took me to the first practice
wall in Logan Canyon, Utah. I rappelled for the first time,
and then did my first route, a 5.5. I flailed on that wall
several times, took a Slurpee break, and we moved on to
Kentucky Fried Penguin, a personal favorite of Brad's that
has since become my favorite sport route thus far. A 5.9+,
and I made it to the top. Standing on top of the Penguin,
looking down to the ground fifteen meters below, I thought
I was on top of the World.
And thus my climbing career began. I learned
quickly in Logan Canyon, and on my nineteenth birthday
two weeks later, I climbed my hardest route, a 5.10c. Just
Jackson Summer # 19
to make sure it wasn't a fluke, I climbed it twice in a row.
Yes, I could do it.
High on that success, we tackled the City of Rocks
in Idaho. We drove in at night, guided by a huge, golden
moon sitting on the horizon. I couldn't see the rocks until I
emerged from the tent in the morning. It is a city of rocks,
for they are the land's only inhabitants. They are beautiful
white granite creatures that rise anywhere from three to
seventy meters above the barren flat land. We climbed
with some of our friends, a young couple engaged to be
married a week later. What a way to deal with wedding
jitters!
The climb of note from our City adventure was
Terminator Wall. There, I climbed a fantastic 5.10 with a
wild start for short people. The first hold is a jug 1.8
meters off the deck. r must admit that I cheated to make
the first move: I clipped a quickdraw into the first bolt,
grabbed it with my left hand so that I could smear up to the
jug with my right. I think that was my first dyno.
For the next few weekends after that, I continued to
learn on bolted routes in Logan Canyon, and on Hoback
Shield and Rodeo Wall south of Jackson.
Multi-Pitch Adventures:
Schoolroom and Guides' Wall
In July, I was ready for my first real climb: A fivepitch 5.5-5.7 climb in the Little Cottonwood Canyon
outside of Salt Lake City. Beautiful, sparkling granite
called Schoolroom Wall with a thousand variations. This
climb is where I realized what a wonderful world I had
discovered. Standing on top, I reveled in the panorama of
the canyon and river below me, and the gorgeous .
mountains surrounding Salt Lake.
A couple of weeks later, I tackled my greatest
climbing accomplishment for the summer: the SW Arete of
Storm Point, a.k.a. the Guides' Wall, in Grand Teton
National Park. This is a beautiful, six-pitch, 5.7 to 5.10
climb (though we got off-route and it turned into a seven
pitch climb) in the heart of Cascade Canyon. I knew it
would be a great day when we boarded the first ferry across
36
The Tetons, Andrew Noymer photo
37
Jackson Summer #19
Jenny Lake at 6:30a.m., and I was the only female among a
group of about twenty climbers. To climb Guides' Wall
became a mission which I was determined not to fail.
We were the first to reach the base of the climb
about an hour later, and my determination grew stronger
after I heard some guy in the party after us say, "Who's
with the girl?" I stepped out from behind the corner where
I was putting on my shoes and retorted, "That'd be me."
The first two pitches were not difficult, but the third
was the most frustrating moment of my climbing career
thus far. We stepped around the ledge above the second
pitch to find a variation route that Brad wanted to climb, a
steep 5.8 finger crack. I had not climbed an official crack
before, and we were on the first pitch with exposure. I will
admit, although I was following, I was terrified on this
pitch. I flailed and flailed, until I saw an old Tri-cam
jammed in the crack. I reached up with my forefinger to
pull-up, and before Brad could feel the slack in the rope,
the cam popped and I fell down about a meter, landing with
a #4 Camalot between my hip and the rock. I was no
longer scared, but rather ticked off and climbed right up out
of sheer annoyance at the route.
Pitches five and six make this climb, for they are
beautiful twin 5.9 cracks and a shallow 5.8+ dihedral/thin
crack, respectively. The exposure and view at this point are
spectacular. The sixth belay ledge is about 500m above the
approach trail, is no more than a foot wide, and was rather
frightening: I had my knees crammed up to my neck,
clipped into a couple of hexes, praying that Brad would not
slip or fall on this last lead. I realized then how important
faith and trust in my partner is. Once I stopped
hyperventilating on my precarious belay ledge for the last
pitch, I was taken aback by the scenery, straight up the
glaciers of the Grand, Teewinot, and Owen, and down over
500m to the valley floor of Cascade Canyon.
Four 50m rappels later, I was back at the base of the
climb, beaming from ear to ear, starving for a Mountain
High Pizza Pie pizza and a soak in the Spring Creek
Resort's hot tub.
38
Alpine Adventure #1: The Grand Teton, 4,196m
I had bad "Grand karma" all summer long. During
the previous year, I had convinced myself that I had to sit
on top of the Grand, and that is why I was so determined to
learn to climb. I had learned the skills necessary to climb
safely with an experienced partner by this point, so during
August, Brad and I waited for the best weekend to make
our assault. Unfortunately, this past summer was the worst
in Grand history. We never really had summer in Jackson,
for the mountain was extraordinarily icy and snowy from
June to August, and there were a record-number of
accidents and deaths.
The weather was thus the first stroke of bad karma,
and the second came at the beginning of the month when I
read about a risky rescue made about a hundred meters
below the summit. A man and a woman from Boulder,
Colorado had set out to climb the upper and lower Exum
Ridge (our planned route), and the woman, apparently too
inexperienced for the climb, had tremendous problems
getting up to Wall Street between the upper and lower
ridge, which set their climbing time back quite a bit.
Severe weather hit, and they were forced to bivy. With
radios they had brought, they called up for help. They
survived, but were a laughing stock in the climbing
community. The man was quoted in the paper as having
said "Basically, it was radios or death." I didn't want to
become a similar joke.
The second stroke of bad karma came on Friday the
thirteenth. We set out to climb Baxter's Pinnacle, an easygoing four pitch climb near Storm Point in Cascade
Canyon. We never made the climb. We bushwhacked for
what felt like hours, and completely lost each other.
Utterly frustrated and exhausted, I stopped on a rock to
drink some water, and regroup my thoughts. I heard a
helicopter above, and saw the rescue team going up the
Grand. I found out the next day that they were bringing
down the body of a seventeen year old Idaho boy who had
slipped on the Owen-Spalding Route and made a long
involuntary glissade.
11
II
39
Jackson Summer # 19
Our time finally came on the 29th. We were
guaranteed good weather at least for Saturday; Sunday was
not so hopeful. After some debate, I let Brad make the
decision to abandon the lower ridge, and instead go for just
the upper Exum in a one-day, parking-lot to parking-lot
"Super Alpine Assault." He had done it before, and knew
that I could do it.
Nervous, anxious, and jittery, I did not sleep more
than an hour the night before. We packed up our gear and
left for the Lupine Meadows trail head at one-thirty a.m.
The moon was full, and with the music of R.E.M.' s "I am
Superman," we were off. We made fantastic time up the
Garnet Canyon Trail to the boulder field of the Meadows,
which we crossed in the dark. We ditched some gear at the
Meadows, and continued on up. Right below the Jackson
Hole Mountain Guide's hut, the altitude hit us, and we
stopped for an M&M sugar rush. It was very cold, and I
put on my "K2" jacket, as I like to call it. We hiked
furiously those first five hours of the morning to make it to
the Lower Saddle. The fixed rope right below it was
frozen, and the rock was slimy and iced over.
Our beautiful sunrise and blue sky abandoned us at
the Lower Saddle. Instead, we were met with 90-140
kilometer per hour winds, which the Exum guides told us
they had been clocking all morning. We weren't going to
make it. Sadly, I realized this, and made the decision to
turn back. We took some fun pictures and tromped around
the frozen tundra. The heavy gray blanket above us
wouldn't even part for a moment for me to catch a glimpse
of my coveted mountain.
We rappelled down the icy rock, "skied" down the
snow field below the Middle Teton, and played with our ice
axes. At 3 p,m., we were back in the parking lot after a
leisurely, and somber stroll down. We were very
disappointed, and Brad later said that he was particularly
disappointed for me because he knew how badly I wanted
to summit on the Grand, and this had been our last chance
of the summer.
40
Alpine Adventure #2 and Official Summit #1:
Teewinot, 3,757rn
The next weekend was my last in Jackson. Fall had
already turned the aspens yellow, and the park was chilling
over. We had time for one more climb. It was my choice.
The Grand was out because of unstable weather, as was the
Middle. We thought of giving Baxter's another try, but I
wasn't very excited about that. Then I remembered
Teewinot. It's the fifth highest peak, a bit of a grunt in oneday, but "one of the most beautiful and compelling peaks of
the Teton Range" according to the Rossiter guidebook.
Teewinot is in the center of the Teton Range, between
Mount Moran to the north, and Mount Owen to the south; if
I couldn't sit on top of the Grand that summer, then the
next best summit to touch is in the heart of the range.
The trail up the east face is extraordinarily steep,
but quite direct, up the mountain. Excited and determined
to make a real summit, I flew up the mountain, only
stopping for water occasionally. We chose a route up a
snow field so that I could wield my ice axe. About a
hundred meters below the summit, our guidebook became
utterly useless. We couldn't figure out exactly where the
summit was, for there is a false summit. Brad headed up to
reconnoiter, and told me to wait. Five minutes later, I
heard him frantically yelling for me to follow up. I
scrambled up, and was nearly to the summit! I was going
to make it!
We rock-hopped over to the summit. I looked out at
it, and thought that I couldn't make it. It is the tiniest little
point! I had seen pictures of it, and knew that only one
person could be on it at a time, but I didn't know how tiny
it was, until I saw Cascade Canyon hundreds of meters
below me. I got cold feet, and pondered it for awhile. Brad
waited, for he wanted me to summit first. Finally, I told
myself to get a grip, and I crawled out on the ledge, and sat
on top. I straddled it like a horse, and didn't want to get
off. The view was both dizzying and dazzling. I was in the
heart of the Tetons. I could see Lake Solitude down
Cascade Canyon to my left, and the Grand and Mt. Owen
directly behind me. I took out from my pocket a little piece
41
Jackson Summer #19
of folded white paper on which a week earlier I had written
"Grand Teton, 13,770', 29 Aug. '93", and pointed behind
me while Brad took a picture.
That was 5 September 1993, and my Teton summer
was complete. I had one other climb to complete before I
could be wholly satisfied: my first lead.
My First Leads:
Six Appeal and Kentucky Fried Chicken
With less than a week left before school, I set out
for Utah one last time for some sport routes. I was insistent
upon trying a lead. Brad thought of a great first lead in Big
Cottonwood Canyon outside of Salt Lake City.
Six Appeal. A modest, 6-bolt, 5.6. It was the best.
Three veteran climbers on a wicked 5.11 crack system next
to us stopped to watch me on my first lead. I felt like I was
really climbing. (OK, I know you Eastern climbers
reading this are saying that if I wasn't leading on natural
pro then I wasn't really leading. Well, we all have to start
somewhere ... ) I flashed up that route, and came down with
the biggest grin on my face.
My reward: a Slurpee and a quickdraw. My last
day climbing, I led Kentucky Fried Penguin's neighbor,
Kentucky Fried Chicken, 5.8+ (I'm darn proud of that+).
If only I could have had a Grand summit and led the
Penguin, this past summer would have been perfect. But,
I'm not complaining: I need something to strive for next
summer. I wonder what awaits me in Jackson summer #20.
42
Where Illusions Dwell
Chris Rodning
Way back in the days when the grass was
still green
and the pond was still wet
and the clouds were still clean,
and the song of the Swomee-Swans
rang out in space ...
one morning, I came to this glorious place.
And I first saw the trees!
The truffula trees!
The bright-colored tufts of the Truffula
Trees!
Mile after mile in the fresh morning breeze. ·
As a youngster I was a big fan of stories by Dr.
Seuss, and before long my parents had memorized tales like
The Lorax and The Grinch Who Stole Christmas and If I
Ran the Zoo and Horton Hatches an Egg, and Yertle the
Turtle as anyone would do if reading them everyday for a
child. Among my favorites was the story about the Lorax
and his domain of truffula trees, which stand vividly in the
illustrations of an open and expansive forest among the
pages of the book. At the end of January of my junior year
at Harvard I stepped into those drawings while visiting
Joshua Tree National Monument in southern California with
a few other HMC climbers for an intersession trip to the
dominion of the Lorax.
His domain lies along the seam running between the
Mojave Desert and the Colorado Desert. A change in
elevation marks this border, and the shading of altitude
creates distinct pockets of desert landscape. Up in the high
country on the edge of the Mojave Desert stretch miles upon
miles of joshua trees and yucca plants amid the frequent
granite towers that rise above the desert floor. Many of
these rock formations are no more than huge piles of
Ed Baldwin climbing in Joshua Tree,
photo courtesy Ed Baldwin
44
boulders. The rock comes from an enormous batholith that
has pushed its way through the surface. Its rough texture
results from the manner in which the rock has been cooled
and weathered. The steep or overhanging rock is often
rather smooth and polished. Dikes frequently cut across
rock formations. The nooks and crannies scattered across
the landscape provide a home for coyotes, bobcats, snakes,
lizards, and other characters.
Climbing opportunities there at Joshua Tree are
superb. An equipped and experienced climber has
thousands of established routes and undoubtedly many more
routes from which to choose. It is somewhat of a challenge
identifying which rock formation is the desired goal, since
countless formations are in view evetywhere. Climbing at
Joshua Tree often includes a bit of desert hiking to get to the
bottom of a climb. Camping is good, and the weather even
in the depth of winter allows for good climbing days aside
from the rare day of snow or rain like the one that bid me
farewell.
'SO ...
Catch!' calls the Once-fer.
He lets something fall.
'It's a Truffula seed.
It's the last one of all!
You're in charge of the last of the Truffula Seeds.
And Truffula Trees are what eve1yone needs.
Plant a new Truffula. Treat it with care.
Give it clean water. And feed it fresh air.
Grow a forest. Protect it franz axes that hack.
Then the Lorax and all of his friends
may come back.
In January 1993, when the fall semester exam period
had come and gone, four of us headed West from Harvard.
We wer~ ~osh Swidler '94, a junior studying social studies;
Carl Phtlhps, a doctoral candidate at the John F. Kennedy
School of Government; Ed Baldwin, a chemist with his
Ph.D. from Harvard, and myself. Carl, Josh, and I traveled
togethe~· fro?l Logan Airport, and we met Ed at the other end
of the line m Los Angeles. During flights there and back,
we benefited from some first class upgrade coupons Carl
45
had accumulated while shuttling between Berkeley and
Washington some years before as a political consultant.
Once in Los Angeles we made the trek to an
apattment beside the UCLA campus. David Myles, an HMC
member, was our host for our entrance and exit to and from
the desert. Dave was kind enough to let us in for the night,
at which point we all had a couple of bottles of Ed's homebrew, which we had brought as a gift. The next morning we
packed ourselves into our vehicles and headed east for
Joshua Tree, along with Dave and three of his friends from
UCLA. The eight of us stuck together for the weekend,
after which time the UCLA crowd went back to work.
When we returned to Dave's place at the end of the week we
brought pieces of ripped athletic tape and shredded fingers
and dirty clothes with us, at which point we helped Dave
finish off those home-brews. Dave even let me play his
guitar, and he taught me how to play the banjo.
A week-long stay in the desert brought its share of
epics, with folks finding themselves caught on cliff tops
after the last golden hues of sunset had faded into nighttime
and the cold of winter fell upon the land. One evening when
the coyotes finally came out to make their rounds one pair
was still atop the west side of Old Woman. One afternoon a
pair spent the better part of a day hacking through a rough
traverse that crumbled in their hands on the southwest face
of Little Hunk. Another afternoon two of us bailed each
other out of an anchor placement problem near the top of an
unprotected, menacing overhang at Roadside Rocks. The
first sunset perhaps set the tone of the trip when twilight
found a couple of us tinkering around with belay stations on
the cold side of Short Wall at Indian Cove, while the rest
huddled close to the rock itself to catch the ambient heat
dissipating into the cool air. The idea behind it all was to get
in as much as possible and to test some limits, which in
some cases were not particularly high.
I learned to lead in Joshua Tree. With the good
graces of my three teachers and the good rack of my friend
Josh, I led up The Flare at Willard Pillar near Billboard
Buttress. The 5.4 route includes scaling the side of the
chimney up to some easy face climbing. I could hardly
forget the feeling of being there, out in the open and later at
46
Josh Swidler in Joshua Tree, Ed Baldwin photo
47
Where illusions Dwell
the top. Meanwhile, Ed led Main Face, a 5.9 route next
door. After rapping down, we gathered for a couple Pecan
Sandies, a Baldwin classic. (In the absence of Fig
Newtons, a pecan cookie made a good toast.) During the
course of the week I would keep leading, gradually
becoming more comfortable on the easy routes and
benefiting from the critiques of seconds. Before leaving I
led another 5.4 route up a chimney which I learned to
protect, a 5.4 route around an awkward corner called Squat
Rockets, a 5.6 crack on a cold mysterious afternoon on the
east face of Thin Wall in the Real Hidden Valley, an easy
scramble up some rough stuff in the Wonderland of Rocks,
and a 5. 7 bolted face climb called Stichter Quits. I seconded
a number of good routes behind the others, and I found that
a couple guys able to climb at least 5.8 could find plenty to
do while wandering through the dominion of the Lorax.
Among all the climbs and all the exploring, a couple
of memorable scenes remain vivid visions of something real.
On a cool morning we picked the cold east face of
Hemingway Buttress for a climb in the shade. Josh led up
Poodlesby, and not far over Ed led a 5.7 crack called White
Lightning, a sweet pitch of climbing. It was good to follow.
The quintessential climb of our trip came on a cool
afternoon towards the end of the week. From the bottom of
a small canyon in the Real Hidden Valley Ed and Carl gazed
up at a route called Illusion Dweller, also known as CandyColored Tangerine Flake Streamlined Baby, a long pitch of
5.1 Ob crack climbing that gets many good reviews and
several stars in the guidebook. From there Crazy Ed sewed
up his vertical path as he danced up the rock with
characteristic Baldwin grace. His moves were flawless, and
aesthetically pleasing to boot. It pushed some limits, and at
the top I wondered if he had found anything he was looking
for. In my own vision of climbing he had.
*
*
*
It was a fine week. In Joshua Tree in January,
nights are cool and clear, and soon after breakfast time the
sun has warmed the situation. The place is a haven 'for
climbers from all over, and some folks even came on their
48
own in search of a partner. Some folks brought firewood,
and some brought their kids.
We spent nights camped at the Indian Cove and
Hidden Valley campgrounds. We often cooked for
ourselves at the campsite, but on occasion treated ourselves
to a meal at a place in the town of Twenty-nine Palms, where
a fellow who looks like Jimmy Buffett serves great pizza and
cool dark ale in frosted mugs. Josh and I shared a tent, Carl
slept in a bivy sack, and Ed found himself a rock shelter. Ed
joined us on the last morning when the snows came. When
we awoke to the only precipitation we had all week, we
found Carl in his high-tech burrito wrapping in the sand,
quite happy and dry and in a place where the yucca plants
could not poke him. Most nights the stars shone, and most
nights rest came easy. It was a time to cherish the silence
and grace of the outdoors inaccessible in Cambridge.
*
*
*
Once upon a time the Real Hidden Valley was a
hideout for cattle rustlers outrunning the law. While
wandering through the Joshua trees a traveler can
occasionally come across segments of barbed wire and old
fence posts. Cattle rustlers picked the Real Hidden Valley
because there was only one entrance, a hidden passage
through a circle of rock formations that otherwise concealed
a pocket of boulders, Joshua trees, and yucca plants. It is a
peaceful place there where illusions dwell, there where the
Lorax finds himself at home.
But those trees! Those trees!
Those Tru.ffula Trees!
All my life I'd been searching
for trees such as these.
The touch of their tufts
was much softer than silk.
And they had the sweet smell
offresh butterfly mill(.
49
The Icarus Effect: Aconcagua
Victor L. Vescovo
Summit day.
There's no feeling quite like waking up on a summit
day; the accumulated effect of all the travel, all of the
effort, all of the pain to put oneself in a position to reach
the top of a major peak. It's having the knowledge, the
certainty, that before the day is over you will exhaust
yourself, push yourself to the limit, and hopefully achieve
what you've set out to do for so long.
On summit days, everything else in the "real" world
fades away to insignificance. Worries about money, work,
plans for next year, all is unimportant except pushing,
pushing, pushing until the top is reached. A summit day is
like a lens which takes all of your energy and forces it to
focus on accomplishing that single goal, an intense and
liberating feeling.
I awoke when Skip Horner, our guide, roused us at
around five in the morning. I was ecstatic that he had made
the call to go for the summit. No more waiting. No more
anticipation. We were finally going to get a shot at doing it
and getting this over with.
It took a while to get dressed in the darkness of the
early morning. Fortunately, the wind had died down and it
was eerily quiet. It took even more time to get together all
the other things I needed such as an extra parka, spare
gloves, ice axe, food, et cetera into my pack.
Skip called us when the water was boiling, and we
all piled into his tent. Robert handed out some strange fruit
cake things while Skip poured out the hot chocolate.
Everyone was abnormally quiet. I forced the fruit cake
thing down and then munched on some cookies, but no one
stayed in the tent long. We all wanted to move out ASAP.
I smeared sunblock all over my face and what little
exposed flesh I had. Then I spent a good ten minutes
tightening my boots just so and lashing on my crampons.
My crampons had given me some problems on Mt. Elbrus
and I didn't want a repeat performance today. I was
squared away, eventually, and about an hour after wake-up
we were off on the trail.
I fell in right behind Skip next to the snow, with
Robert behind me and Steve at the rear. I liked being next
to Skip since it forced me to keep pace, and I think Steve
liked being in the rear so he could stop and take photos
without slowing anybody up.
The first part of the journey was over familiar
ground. I had already been over it twice before on our
previous day's reconnoiter. Still, it was nice to get going
since it was so cold, and the wind had picked up slightly.
We marched on for about an hour, with the huge
white mass of the Polish Glacier off to our left. I felt
remarkably strong, and had no difficulty whatsoever
keeping up with Skip. Just before we finished the snow
traverse, Skip and I waited for Robert and Steve. Skip
asked how I felt, and I told him I felt as strong as a bull
elephant, and I wasn't lying. I felt very strong.
When Robert reached us, I couldn't help but feel
sympathy for him. I know exactly how he felt since I'd
been in his condition and mental state several days earlier
going up to Camp I.
"I just need to go a little slower," he said while
catching his breath.
Skip shot back in a rather harsh tone that this was
summit day, that we couldn't afford to go any slower or
none of us would make it to the top. "You need to
concentrate on your breathing and push yourself like you've
never pushed yourself before. Okay?"
Robert assented, and fortunately, I don't think he
took it too hard. He probably knew, as I did when Skip
talked to me in earlier days, that he was just trying to get
him motivated. It was his job.
Skip's words seemed to have the desired effect since
Robert kept pace a lot better when we resumed. I could tell
from the sound of his breath intake that he was pushing
hard. We all were, really. At this altitude, by now 5900m,
you had to make sure you emptied your lungs completely
and took really deep breaths. One thing that was essential
as well was to have sort of a "selection" of climbing
rhythms to choose from. One for flat and rocky terrain, one
51
for steep and icy, etc. At this point I was using my twobreaths-per-step rhythm.
We followed Skip's wands and after another two
hours of steady plodding, we reached a flatter area of windblasted volcanic rock. We could see other climbers ahead
of us, staggering up a rocky slope to our left. This, Skip
told us, was where the normal route intersected our V acas
variation route. He emphasized to everyone to memorize
the lay of the land here in case we had to come back
without him. If we missed going through the notch where
we currently stood, we could well end up going down the
wrong side of the mountain during the night.
Crampons still on, we hunkered down and began to
slog up the scree slope. There was a more noticeable path
now, where many boots had trod before. Skip asked me at
one point if I thought we should use the switch backs or
just bull straight up.
Feeling strong, I grinned at him. Straight up, I
said. He smiled back.
It took a while, and was really exhausting, but after
another two hours or so we reached the top of the ridge. I
had some crampon trouble, with one coming off at one
point, but I got everything under control. When we reached
the top of the ridge, we discovered we were at El
Independencia. There was a tiny wooden emergency
shelter there that could barely have held a big teenager, let
alone a fully equipped climber. But I guess you don't get a
lot of volunteers to lug lumber up to 6400m.
There were a couple of Mexican climbers camping
next to it. I was surprised, given how exposed it was and
the extreme altitude, but I guess they wanted to bivy as
close to the summit as possible. We stopped to ~est for a
minute. I broke out my water and shared a rock-solid
Snickers bar with Skip. Robert had kept up okay, but he
was really exhausted and spoke far slower than was normal.
Maybe the altitude was getting to him. I still felt pretty
damn good and was getting really confident that I'd be able
to make it all the way if I had gotten this far. Steve was his
usual steady, quiet self.
There was a group of four French climbers leaning
back against the little A-frame, so I stopped to chat with
them. They had not yet been to the top, and said they were
11
II
52
just taking a long rest before continuing on. They were a
pretty jovial bunch and seemed glad to talk to another
Francophone. I was just happy that my brain still worked
well enough to carry on a conversation in French at this
altitude.
After a good fifteen-minute rest, we donned our
packs again and set out to scale a pretty ugly snow slope
that was close to fifty degrees in places. After reaching the
top of this snow ridge, we had a fairly level hike along a
narrow path. To our left was the face of the summit rock,
and to our right a pretty steep drop of about 1OOOm down
the west face. The trail turned dry and rocky again, which
actually made our footing a little harder since it shifted
under us. We continued on this trail, skirting the summit
rock, to get to El Canaleta, the last major face we had to
climbbefore we hit the summit.
I kept asking Skip if we were at it yet, but he kept
shaking his head. He told me I'd know it when I saw it.
The dangerous gravel and boulders all along its length were
unmistakable, he said. I could tell just from the tone of his
voice that he had a particular hatred of it.
The path began to get much steeper, with a great
deal of mixed gravel, dirt and large rocks. It was quite
tiring and dull to climb, but the scenery was dramatic. By
this time it was about one o'clock in the afternoon and the
first whispers of clouds were beginning to form around the
summit rock.
Robert was slowing a bit, so Skip faded back to stay
with him. Skip asked me to just go slow, and not get too
far ahead of the others; this made me feel great since it
confirmed that I was climbing well.
We paused at one place to finally take off our
crampons. As we did so, I could see a small group of
climbers far below us on the path from El Independencia.
There were about four of them, all facing the west. Then,
all of a sudden, one of them began running down the steep
slope immediately in front of them, running full tilt. I
couldn't believe it! The slope went almost vertical in
another fifteen meters or so. The guy must be committing
suicide or something, I thought.
And then a parachute opened.
53
After the chute deployed, the guy began to sail high
over the chasm off the western face. We all started
scrambling to get our cameras in order to photo this
amazing sight.
After that bit of excitement, I began the agonizing
slog up the summit path. It was really slow going, and was
frustrating to move like an exhausted drunk. I tended to
focus on little things like little pebbles or rocks just in front
of me, or the fall of my footsteps, mesmerized by the
crunch, crunch of my boots on the rock.
Then it came into view: El Canaleta.
El Canaleta is the last big face you have to climb to
get to the summit. It's framed on either side by jagged
walls of rock, and is full of large boulders resting on a bed
of dirt and gravel. Here and there were patches of snow
and ice, all of this at angles forty degrees and steeper.
There were between ten or fifteen other climbers scattered
around, all of them slowly crawling up.
I examined the approach for a while as I caught my
breath, and noticed a big patch of snow and ice off on the
right side of the face. It extended about a third the way up
El Canaleta, and looked far safer than the rock and gravel.
I started to head over that way at my snail's pace. Very
slowly I progressed up the slope, almost hugging the right
wall. Steve was about ten meters behind me; Skip and
Robert were about another ten meters further back.
After a good forty-five minutes on this bit, the
snow/ice patch gave out and I found myself on what
appeared to be a very faint path running along the right side
of El Canaleta. Since this meant fewer, and more stable,
rocks, I started up it after a big nod from Skip. On our way
further up we passed by other climbers who had stopped to
rest. I heard French and German and Spanish. But
everyone's face expressed the same sentiment: exhaustion.
The path gave up about two-thirds the way up to the
summit, so there was no choice but to go out onto the open
face amid the boulders. It was steep, and it was very hard
to get solid footing on the constantly-shifting terrain. Steve
was still a little behind me, and once in a while shouted out
advice on which way to go. I was tempted to let him do the
leading, but by this point we were only about sixty vertical
54
meters from the summit and I figured since I'd made it this
far, I might as well go all the way.
The two of us started angling over to the right, to
reach what looked like the top of a little ridge that marked
the end of El Canaleta. From there, we guessed, it would
be more level, and a short jaunt to the summit plateau.
My legs were screaming at me to rest for a good,
long while, and my lungs were straining in the thin air. At
this point I was taking five, or sometimes more, deep
breaths just to go up a single step.
Step
Breath
Breath
Breath
Breath
Breath
Step
Breath
Breath
Breath
Breath
Breath.
And so on up the slope. What was really frustrating
was taking a step, and finding the gravel underneath giving
way and sliding down a step or two. I was living the old
cliche, two steps forward, one step back. Progress was
slow, and it was frustrating as hell.
I figure we were only about ten or fifteen vertical
meters from the top of the ridge, and just below the summit.
I could see where the summit lay. Small puffs of cloud
churned over the rocky slope at regular intervals. I couldn't
really see the summit itself, but rather could tell that there
must be some kind of flat area where the summit marker
must be.
I was so close now, and convinced I would make it.
I was simply too close to fail now. At this point, fatigue
began to vanish as I came closer and closer to the goal.
I started moving up the slope to the right, moving
among the large boulders and gravel toward the ridge.
55
The Icams Effect: Aconcagua
Steve was about six meters behind me and following to the
right. I kept climbing up, using my ski poles as much as I
could to keep my balance. Just a little further, now.
All of a sudden, something was going wrong,
terribly wrong. I was no longer upright, I had lost balance
somehow.
Oh God, I thought, I was falling. NO! my mind
screamed.
The sound of rocks sliding, crashing down ...
No control...
Head ...
face ...
back ...
chest...
legs ...
BIG Pain.
Blackout.
The next thing I remember I was laying on my back,
almost reclining on my backpack. I was looking up at a
slightly overcast sky.
And something was very, very wrong.
Pain.
I knew I had fallen, but from the looks of it, not too
far. But I knew my body wasn't right somehow. Something was wrong. It just hurt too much. I told my legs to
move, but they didn't.
I sat for perhaps ten seconds when I saw Steve
approach me from off to my right and above me. That
meant I must have fallen all the way past him. Steve was
approaching me quickly, but carefully.
"Don't move," he said emphatically.
He kept moving towards me, and repeated the
advice not to move. That frightened me a bit: that was
56
Snow slope between Camp I and Camp II,
Victor L. Vescovo photo
57
advice you gave to people suspected of having neck or
spinal injuries. My chest hurt and I was having trouble
breathing.
I realized that I couldn't speak properly and was in a
very bad way. There was no way I was going to get to the
summit now. For me, the ascent was over.
The anger over this realization overrode the pain I
was feeling and made me very upset. I began hitting my
right leg halfheartedly as I could feel the first stirring of
tears build up in my eyes. I tried to cuss and pout, but I
couldn't even manage that properly. To Steve I'm sure it
looked like I was hitting myself and mumbling
incoherently. It probably didn't improve how he saw the
situation.
Skip and Robert reached me in a couple of minutes.
At this point, I really don't remember the rest of the day,
but I later learned that the rest of the day's events were as
follows:
Skip came up to me and asked how I was. I
mumbled something that sounded like "O.K.," which was a
blatant lie. Skip held up two fingers and asked me how
many there were.
"Thoo," I managed to gurgle out.
He paused for a second and then held up four
fingers. "How many fingers am I holding up?" he asked.
I concentrated really hard and looked at them. My
head really hurt, and I wasn't sure how many there were in
front of me. ':Shree," I said.
Skip began to get worried since this indicated some
kind of head injury and probably a bad concussion. Not
good, since we were at least 900 vertical meters from any
kind of medical assistance, and that was at a hut where
there was only a medic, at a placed called Berlin on the
west face, in nearly the opposite direction from where our
high camp was located.
Skip asked if I could walk, and I made gestures and
mumbles that I didn't think so. I tried to get up and stand,
but found out I couldn't. My right leg was pretty okay by
this point, but my left was barely usable. It wasn't that they
it was smashed, it just wasn't responding.
The group of four French climbers that I had talked
to at El Independencia were on El Canaleta and Skip
58
enlisted their aid in getting me evacuated. Skip quickly
discovered that while I couldn't walk on my own, I didn't
have to be completely carried (thank God). If there was
someone on either side of me under my armpits, I could
work my legs enough to move at a staggered pace. Robert
took my backpack and redistributed the load with Skip and
Steve.
The decent was exhausting work for everyone
involved, so they all rotated the task of helping me down. I
usually had two guys on either side of me. Given the
difficulty of descending a steep slope of loose talus while
trying to hold up a walking wounded with no sense of
balance, it's not surprising I fell a few times.
I don't remember the descent from El Canaleta at
all. The next thing I do really remember was getting to the
small landing on the trail to the summit where the guy had
jumped off with a parachute. The eight of us (my group
and the Frenchmen) stopped to rest. I noticed it had grown
a lot darker and realized it was because massive amounts of
low clouds had suddenly spiraled in and the wind had
picked up.
I kept trying to talk, but everything was coming out
garbled. One phrase I could pronounce correctly was "very
bad." Since I felt this described my condition pretty well,
and I was very worried about getting down and recovering,
I kept saying it to Skip. I think he got pissed after hearing
it a few too many times.
"No, it's not bad," he would reply, "everything will
be fine."
I would look at him with glazed eyes and say,
"Bad .... very bad."
The Frenchmen hefted me up again and led/carried
me down the big snow slope to El Independencia. I don't
remember stopping there for very long. Most of what I do
remember centers on a terribly long and slow descent from
El Independencia and down the west face.
It was much darker and colder now, and the wind
had picked up noticeably. Combined with the clouds, it
looked like a storm or at least a light snowfall was brewing.
We tried to pick up the pace, but I could only go so quickly,
and everyone was getting worn out.
59
Time ceased to have any meaning to me as we
continued down. I stumbled a lot, but we made slow progress. I remember jagged walls of rock and open fields of
white. And then, at some point, I noticed it had started to
snow.
I was terribly cold, but there was nothing I could do
about it except to keep moving as best I could. My speech
wasn't improving either, despite repeated attempts in to get
something more out than "bad."
Finally, we came down a rather steep rock slope
into a campsite virtually encircled by jagged pinnacles.
There were also two wood huts of reasonable size in the
middle. I was led next to one of them and propped up near
a rock.
Soon, I was led into a small wood hut with an
aluminum sheet that functioned as a door. It was only
about two meters long and just over one meter high inside,
but at least it was shelter. There were two Argentineans in
the structure, who were fixing their supper and listening to
what sounded like a radio. Skip conversed with them in
Spanish as I collapsed onto the floor and tried to stretch
out.
It was very cold in the hut, mainly because there
was no insulation and wind tended to leak in. Combined
with the fact that neither Skip nor I had sleeping bags
meant it would be a very cold night. In fact, even though I
was using Robert's parka as a blanket and had on all of my
extra gloves, it was the coldest I can ever remember being.
I couldn't feel my feet. Skip was wearing some of my
mitten liners on his feet to keep them warm.
Skip tried to talk with me again, but gibberish kept
coming out. Even when I tried to take it really slow, I still
couldn't form the words in my mouth to say what I wanted.
Skip held up four fingers again, to which I said there were
three. He also told me that at one point he had held up his
thumb and asked me what is was. I had responded by
simply looking at him with in a stupid, hurt, frustrated look
and saying nothing.
The Argentineans left the hut an hour or so later, but
it was nearly impossible to sleep. Between sleeping on a
cold, hard floor and the pain in my back and ribs, I could
find no position that didn't jolt me awake with pain after a
60
short time. But eventually, exhaustion took over and I fell
into a kind of half-sleep delirium.
*
*
*
I descended from Berlin via the normal route the
next day, with assistance from Skip. Then it was off to
medical care and eventually home to begin recuperation ...
Four months later as I write this, I still bear the
scars of the climb. My chipped front tooth had been
restored, but the texture of the reconstruction feels
different. Now, whenever my tongue runs over the back of
that tooth, I can't help but be reminded of Aconcagua.
My back, too, still hasn't healed fully and I imagine
that the rock that slammed into me must have pinched a
nerve or bruised my spinal column. It's not painful
ordinarily, only when I really flex my muscles or stretch.
It's like having sore shoulder blades that don't get better.
While that's not exactly fun, it could have been a hell of a
lot worse, and I'm hopeful that it will heal eventually.
Despite these reminders of failure, I still think about
going back to Aconcagua. There's now no doubt at all in
my mind that one day I will get another chance to get up El
Canaleta.
Yeah, I'll be back.
Victor Vescovo returned to Aconcagua in Janumy 1994, and summited
the highest peak in the Western Hemisphere. (ed.)
61
One Glissade Too Many
Wil Brown
The first time I glissaded was down Avalanche
Gulch on Mount Shasta a number of years ago. I'll never
forget it, because it taught me the meaning of a word that has
always puzzled me. Strawberry. Not the kind that you eat,
but the kind you get on your body.
The ride down the gulch was bumpy, and my
posterior was hurting a little by the time I got to the bottom.
It kept bothering me, so when we got back to our motel a
couple of days later, I dropped my pants and shorts, bent
over, and looked into a mirror. Strawberries. One in the
center of each buttock. Each about the size of a small plum,
but exactly the color and texture of a ripe strawberry and
oozing red juice that looked just like the real thing.
That was a good glissade. It was lots of fun, and the
strawberries scabbed over in a few days and disappeared in a
few weeks.
The glissade that I fervently wish had never taken
place happened on 27 March 1991 at about three o'clock in
the afternoon on Diagonal Gully in Mount Washington's
Huntington Ravine.
My goal for the 1990-91 winter was to solo all the
gullies in Huntington. By about two o'clock P.M. on March
27th I had completed the last leg of my goal, Damnation
Gully. It was an interesting climb. The ice was a little too
soft, but still very solid in most places. There was one
section of steep ice about two and a half meters tall that was
coming loose, so I scrambled up the rock and ice to the right
of it. That turned out to be a little hairy, but still manageable
and safe.
After I reached the top, I had lunch in the lee of the
big cairn in the Alpine Garden. There wasn't much wind. It
was only a trifle below freezing. The visibility was
marginal. Grey clouds were beginning to roll in from the
west. There wasn't another human being anywhere in sight.
The silence and solitude w.ere pleasant, but I felt that I
should start back to beat any possible storm. To confirm
that I was the only person on the mountain I yelled a drawnout, "Halloo. No answer other than the echo.
Within a few minutes I was at the top of Diagonal.
The snow was packed but soft enough to provide solid
footing by stomping into it with my heels while facing the
horizon. Things were going nicely, but my crampons were
balling up, so I began swinging my axe left and right in front
of me so as to hit the inner edge of each crampon with every
other blow. This was fun, and knocked the snow off the
crampons very efficiently. I was enjoying the rhythm and
speed of the stride. Then, I slipped, fell backwards, and
started glissading down. I thought, "Hey, this is great. I'll
stay with it for awhile."
This was a big mistake. Within seconds I was
accelerating like a missile. I rolled over and plunged the tip
of my axe into the snow as hard as I could. I was terrorstruck to hear and feel the tip bounce off the ice under the
snow cover on which I was riding. Less than a moment
later I was flying in mid-air saying to myself, "This is it,
Wil. You're finished. No, it can't be over yet. You've got
too much to do." The thought flashed across my mind that
just a week or so before, someone had fallen in the Ravine
and died from his injuries.
Crash. A hollow-sounding thud. My head hit something hard. I saw a few stars and sparks. I'm sure glad I
had my helmet on. Then, I landed solidly on both feet in a
perfectly erect, upright stance. The forward momentum
rocketed me into a midair somersault. I landed again on both
feet, fell forward, bounced, skidded back and forth, hit a
few things, and then did one final flip in the air and landed
flat on my back in deep snow.
I was as comfortable as could be. Wide awake. No
pain. I said to myself, "Wil, is it possible that you didn't
hurt yourself?"
I sat up and looked at my right foot. I knew instantly
that I had broken that leg. My boot was lying flat and
parallel to the ground in a position in which it could not
possibly be unless my ankle or tibia were fractured. So
much for that. The left boot looked fine. The toe was
pointed straight into the air, as it should have been. I said t~
myself with satisfaction, "Wil, you're going to hobble out o
II
63
Huntington Ravine, Andrew Noymer photo
here after all." I started to lift my leg into the air. The boot
stayed on the ground, while my leg went up. "Whoops! I
guess I broke that one too."
I sat there for a moment while it sunk in that I had
broken both my legs at a point just above the tops of my
boots. Freezing rain was beginning to fall. The wind was
picking up, and it was getting cold and darker. I realized
that I had to get to the bottom of the fan and into the lee of
one of the big boulders, or I probably wouldn't survive the
night.
I did a mental survey of the rest of my body and was
pretty confident that nothing else was broken. The only
wound that I had was a cut on my left thumb that probably
resulted from a collision with my axe pick on the way down.
It wasn't bleeding much, but I began to worry about the
amount of blood I might be losing because of my broken
bones. If I lost too much, I'd go into shock and wouldn't be
able to improve my situation. I couldn't feel anything but I
surmised from the color of the snow that blood had to be
pouring into my boots.
Another problem was the fact that the only clothing I
was wearing was my polypropylene long underwear. The
other inner layers and my shell, along with a bivy sack and
64
Mylar emergency bag were all in my pack. I figured that if I
could get my pack off, I could use it as a sled and "dogpaddle" down the fan to get behind one of the rocks and out
of the wind. Then I could place my feet on the high side of
the slope to minimize the flow of blood to my fractures.
I paddled as far as I could (which was exhausting,
but not at all painful) and started to tty to get the clothing out
of my pack. Now I was having all kinds of trouble. To this
day, I can't figure out why I was having so much difficulty
with this task. As I look back on it, I surmise that I must
have been getting a little woozy from time to time. Also pain
was beginning to hit me and break my concentration. It's a
puzzle.
There wasn't anyone in the Ravine. I yelled for help
a couple of times, and then decided that it was a waste of
energy. Thoughts of Ted Dettmar, a good friend and the
caretaker of the Harvard Cabin, crossed my mind. He and I
had made a very tentative arrangement to meet at the cabin
that morning. He was in the Valley getting supplies but
thought that he might return to the cabin that morning and
climb with me. We had decided that I would wait for him
until about eight o'clock. If he had not arrived by then, I
would assume that he would not be coming. I waited until
about nine. Then, out of habit, I made an· entry in the cabin
journal describing where I was going and when I would be
back. I wrote that I would be back by 5:00p.m.
I continued the struggle to get the clothes out of my
pack, and for no good reason, resumed the calls for help.
"Help ... I'm at the foot of Central Gully."
By now it was almost completely dark. The freezing
rain felt like a barrage of pinpricks on my face. I had gotten
only part of my clothing out of the pack and hadn't been able
to put anything on. I was beginning to wonder if I had it in
me to complete the job. It was tiring work because I had to
keep my legs above me while I held my torso up enough to
struggle with my pack. I kept yelling for help at five- or tenminute intervals.
Suddenly, I thought I heard an unusual sound below
me. I stiffened in silence to focus intensely upon it. I saw a
light and heard a voice, "Where are you?" Wow! I was
going to make it out of here after all. I can't ever remember
65
having been more happy. "I'm here, at the foot of Central,"
I called.
A few minutes later, in the closing darkness, I was
elated to see Ted's yellow Marmot shell moving toward me.
When he got within easy voice range, he asked, "Are you all
right?" I answered, "I think I broke both my legs."
Right off, Ted got all my clothes out of my pack and
onto me, and he plied me with warm drinks. Then, he
reached into his jacket for his radio and called the
Appalachian Mountain Club at Pinkham Notch Camp. No
transmission. The new battery, which he had put into the
radio before starting to look for me, was dead.
After making sure that I was warm and out of the
wind, Ted rushed back to the cabin and radioed for help in
getting me off the mountain. Within a few hours he was
back with a dozen or so search and rescue volunteers. By
1:00 a.m. the next morning I was on the operating table at
Memorial Hospital in North Conway being put back together
again.
I'm grateful to a lot of people: Mike Pelchat and the
search and rescue volunteers who carried me over difficult
terrain to the point where the snow-cat could transport me.
Brad Ray, the US Forest Service ranger, who carne from
horne to drive the snow-cat. Phil Maloney, the orthopedic
surgeon who put the thirty-odd pieces of my legs together
again. Bob Tilney, the surgeon who did the skin grafting
and handled my intravenous nutrition. John Connolly, the
surgeon who took care of the left tibia when it turned into a
"non-union." The nurses at Memorial Hospital made the
month that I was their guest (almost) a pleasurable
experience.
Today, thanks to these people and many others I
haven't mentioned, I walk almost normally. Not even a
limp. The only residual damage is a stiff left ankle and a
couple of hammer toes in my right foot. The stiff ankle will
always be with me, but I plan to get the toes fixed up soon.
From 27 March 1991 to now, three years later,
hardly a week or two goes by that I don't relive the
afternoon and evening of "one glissade too many." Four
thoughts dominate my recollection. One, it's really stupid to
climb in the wilderness without a partner. Two, it's just as
stupid to ice-climb without a belay. Third, don't glissade on
66
steep terrain in poor visibility unless you know precisely
where you are and what you are riding on. Fourth, thanks
forever to Ted Dettmar. If he hadn't come looking for me, I
wouldn't be here to tell the tale.
People ask me whether I'll climb again. Sure. You
have to be a little crazy to want to do it in the first place. I
still have that crazy streak, even in my sixty-sixth year. I'm
going back to it, but I'm not going to glissade down
Diagonal!
67
The Kiagna River:
The Best Whitewater River in Alaska
Story of the First Run
May 18-23, 1988
Andrew Embick
It was our "fall-back option," on the fly-in to attempt
Twelve-Mile Canyon of the Bremner River by Chris Roach
and myself, an option which didn't exist until our pilot and
guide, Paul Claus of Ultima Thule Outfitters, showed us his
favorite, "secret" river. It was one he'd often looked at from
the air, as it was in his front yard in the Granite Range south
of the upper Chitina River. On our way in from Chitina in
his wheel-ski equipped Beaver with our two kayaks and gear
for a week, we'd been shown the Kiagna's steep-walled,
narrow, twisting canyon, at the bottom of which lay an
emerald jewel of a river, laced with the white of rapids and
studded (in places choked) with granite boulders. Some
were so huge as to virtually fill the narrow canyon. Paul
described how he'd run, solo, part of the less steep-walled
upper Kiagna, taking out above the canyon section. He
mentioned that the river had a history, two USGS geologists
having been flown in about 1957, and left to float out in their
small raft. Their bodies were found dead along the shore of
the Chitina, downstream from the delta, by guide/pilot
Harold Knutson.
Now, in May, there was new snow at the 1,000
meter elevation in Wrangell-St. Elias National Park. Deep
snow banks remained from the winter, and bears were out
hungrily roaming. Rivers were low, with ice bridges just
going out. That was why we were here to attempt the
Bremner River at a time of low water. At any normal flows,
it was sure death as confirmed by aerial scouting late last
September and study of scores of aerial photographs taken at
the time. Perhaps now, in the third week of May, the rapids
would be more tunable or portageable.
We changed planes, at Paul's beautiful, comfortable,
remote lodge below McColl Ridge on the north side of the
upper Chitina, next to Bear Island. We unfortunately didn't
have time to more than unload the kayaks from inside the
Beaver, tie one underneath a ski-wheel equipped Super Cub,
sign the guest book, and have a cup of (superb) coffee. We
flew across the Chitina, with more expanse of gravel bars in
the river bed than water, and spotted two bison near Bear
Island. The huge animals, transplanted from Montana in the
1920's, roam the upper Chitina Valley. Here, we were
about 140 kilometers upstream from the Chitina's confluence
with the Copper, and only eighty kilometers from Canada.
Heading for the Bremner, we flew up the Tana, a
tremendous river in its own right and one whose big-water
rapids provide a Grand Canyon-style ride in a remote setting
of glaciers, sand dunes and wilderness populated densely
with grizzly bears. We just barely squeaked over the pass
between the Tana and North Fork Lobes of the Bremner
Glacier, under the low-hanging clouds. Flying low and
slow, we had a clear view of Twelve-Mile Canyon, and it
looked terrible. Rushing, mud-brown water, lethal rapids,
and unclimbable cliff walls weren't any more kayakable now
than when scouted last fall. It was a lethal proposition.
Maybe someone else would try it, but not me! Suddenly,
the idea of running the Kiagna became vastly more
appealing. Though long, very steep (dropping an average of
19 meters per kilometer overall and about 38 meters per
kilometer in the canyon), and constricted, at low water it
appeared that we could stop and scout every rapid in the
Kiagna, and either run or pmtage everything.
I knew that Chris, my partner, would agree with my
"thumbs down" decision for the Bremner, with our
switching objectives to the Kiagna. At twenty two years
old, he'd been kayaking in Alaska for seven years, initially
as my protege. Now, with three runs of the Susitna's
Devil's Canyon and seven previous runs of virgin Alaskan
rivers under his belt, he was undoubtedly the strongest
possible paddling partner. We'd been running previously
undescended rivers together for half a decade, and though
we were competitors in kayak races (where he usually won
the slalom and I the wildwater) we were old friends as a
paddling team. This would be my 28th first (exploratory)·
descent of an Alaskan whitewater stream, besides two in
Pakistan, and my ninth season. Though a bit long in the
69
The Kiagna River
tooth (at age thirty-seven) for this sort of thing by normal
standards and with a baby daughter to boot, I hoped that my
technical skills honed through the years (partly by coaching
from world champions and U.S. Team members) and
paying attention would get me through.
After landing briefly on a gravel bar beside the upper
Bremner, Paul flew me over to the Kiagna, climbing to
900m to land on skis on a snow-covered gravel bar, and let
me off. I marveled, as we flew, at the sculpted rock walls of
the canyon. In one place, the river had cut a 180 degree
serpentine bend, leaving only a fin-like blade 90m high,
almost cut in a natural arch. Though there was green forest
above the rim, the canyon was a narrow slot in which the
emerald-green river ran over and around smoothly rounded
granite boulders. Higher along the river, snow had
appeared. Up top, it was seemingly still winter. We settled
gently into the soft snow, and ptarmigan, still white, clucked
all around us. The river was tiny at this point, about 4.3
cubic meters per second, on the West Fork. Paul revved the
engine and took off, an hour later bringing in Chris and his
boat slung like mine under the belly of the airplane. We
joked that the kayaks served as a third ski, necessary to keep
the plane up and able to take off. Paul had no trouble
however, using a down valley wind to even further shorten
his take-off. What a Super Cub can do, in the hands of a
capable pilot, is nothing short of amazing: it's the next best
thing to a helicopter, which are not allowed in the Park.
At five o'clock p.m., we were alone in our dry suits
at the top of a thirty kilometer-long virgin whitewater river.
With no camping gear except a tiny polyethylene sheet and a
few matches, we just had warm clothes and cold food and a
tiny bottle of Jack Daniel's.
By eight p.m., we had covered about nineteen
kilometers, bouncing and scraping on rocks in the shallow
stream, at least until the East Fork came in and provided
enough water to consistently float the boats. We had just
entered the canyon, and stopped next to a huge driftwood
pile, twelve meters across. "Some firewood" we thought and
torched it off with one flick of the lighter, getting nice and
toasty.
Making camp was quite simple with no tent, stove,
70
Andrew Embick in the Kiagna River, Chris Roach photo
sleeping bags, food to cook, or any of the other usual
camping paraphernalia! A tent would have been useless, as
we found only an irregular patch of dry sand among the
boulders just big enough to curl up in, dressed in all our
clothes. We slept for four hours or so, before cold and
stiffness woke us. Another stint at warming ourselves by
the (still burning) fire, and a bite, got us back to sleep fitfully
until a decent hour.
In the morning, adrenaline started flowing, which
was a good thing, as we expected that the canyon would
demand the maximum in both quick reflexes and endurance.
We were not disappointed, either in the canyon's
requirements, or our abilities. Rapids came in such a quick
succession that most never became fixed in the memory,
blurred by the next just a few meters and a few moments
downstream. Every route was guarded by boulders, from
small to truck-size. Holes, waves, narrow slots, and drop
after drop came so fast that we functioned primarily by
reflex. A flurry of rapid sequence paddle strokes were able
to be performed unconsciously as a result of years of
practice on wild rivers and in competition. Our conscious
focus was on the layout of the rapids and the best route. The
71
The Kiagna River
river was not powerful, but was fast. The gradient was
pool drop, rather than continuous, so that each rapid had an
end to it, followed by another calm pool down which we
briefly floated to the next. Then a rock clogged horizon line
would appear, roaring noises would increase in loudness,
and we'd back-paddle at the edge, looking for routes, and
either run (almost all of the time) or get out on the bank to
scout (perhaps a dozen times, out of about 120 rapids). In
its 9.7 kilometers of canyon, the Kiagna contained more
whitewater than ten good whitewater rivers, and
miraculously it was all runable, at this extreme low water
level.
Undoubtedly our equipment made the run easier:
polyethylene boats, graphite paddles, Kevlar helmets, dry
suits with integral spray skirts and booties, ultralight
storage-floatation bags, and multiple layers of modern
insulating clothing. We didn't bring much gear, but what
we did bring was light and strong.
Having superb conditions helped as well; the sun
shone, and the river was clear: perfectly blue-green, not
glacial silty brown as it would be in mid-summer. A clear
river in the Wrangells is a special treat aesthetically, and
permits the rocks and waves to be distinguished clearly
downstream.
The difficulty increased gradually, permitting us to
sharpen our skills "on the job" as it were. The gradient
steepened, the canyon walls became higher and steeper, the
boulders got bigger, and the canyon got narrower. At the
extreme, truck-size boulders were nearly obstructing a
stream only three to five meters wide, cut through polished
white granite resembling marble. Remnants of frozen
waterfalls stuck to canyon walls, the ice in places undercut
by the river. Though we had expected to be forced to
portage in places, each drop proved runable, though some
involved 1.5 to 2.5 meter falls or slots about a meter wide or
both in quick alternating succession, often totaling six meters
of vertical drop per rapid. Ski-jumping boulders is a
legitimate technique in such a setting. Gut-wrenching it
was, both psychologically and because the most powerful
paddle strokes utilize primarily the abdominal and flank
muscles.
72
At some of the biggest drops, we ran one at a time,
permitting photographs with a little Rollei 35mm camera;
Paul had told us to see if we could get some good shots for
him. He came back to check on us by air, circling above the
canyon and watching, enviously I'm sure. There were no
obstructing logs, because the flood which appeared to have
come through the previous year, presumably ajokulhaup (an
outburst flood from a glacially-dammed lake), had been so
big that the high water mark was six or nine meters above
our heads. There were a couple of jammed stumps up that
high on the walls, and piles of eighteen meter long logs
down at the delta, but none at river level in the canyon, thank
God!
Being down in a deep canyon is like being just as
precariously, and as arduously reached on the top of a high
peak. Both are tenuous locations, briefly visited, and then
escaped from, before disaster strikes. We rushed ahead, not
knowing how much progress we were making because we
had no real landmarks. An altimeter would have been the
best navigational tool, I think.
It took us five hours to get down the canyon, and
almost another two days before we physically recovered,
resting at the Kiagna-Chitina confluence. The pilot left a
gear/food dump there for us, and even came back to chat! It
took another three days of endurance paddling to cover the
140 kilometers down to Chitina.
Although not mountaineering in the traditional sense,
kayaking is one of the fastest growing mountain sports. This account
and other descriptions will be published in Fast and Cold: A
Guidebook to Alaska Whitewater, to be published by Skylwuse
Publishers. (ed.)
73
The Gallery
Peter Adler buildering at the Law School,
photo courtesy Peter Adler
K2 and Broad Peak, 1950s, Arthur H. Read photo from the
HMC collection
r
Michael Liftik ice climbing at Frankenstein cliffs, New
Hampshire, Chris Rodning photo
75
The Gallery
Scott Gilbert on Denali West Rib, Harold Payson photo
76
Ian Helfant ice climbing in Tuckerman's Ravine,
photo courtesy Ian Helfant
77
The Gallety
Andrew Noymer on the Owen Rappel, Grand Teton,
Forrest Behm photo
78
HMC History
The following five articles all deal with the history of
the Club, in celebration of the seventieth anniversary of the
founding of the HMC.
p. 80: The article from "47 Years Ago" is Benjamin Ferris's
account of the HMC climb of Mt. St. Elias, a jewel climb in
the HMC crown, then and now. It appeared in Harvard
Mountaineering 8 in May, 1947, and I hope the readership
enjoys seeing it here in facsimile form. William L. Putnam
has written a retrospective on that climb, which brings the
story up-to-date (p. 95).
p. 100: William Lowell Putnam has written an account of
exploratmy climbing in British Columbia during the 1940s.
Maybe the HMC will soon do some re-exploration there?
p. 112: Ted Carman has compiled a history lesson which is
required reading for anyone who has ever turned the bend in
the Huntington Ravine fire road late some Friday night, after
a delayed departure from Cambridge, to find the welcoming
sight of the Harvard Cabin.
p. 127: David Roberts's piece "Rites of Passage" first
appeared in Summit, and it makes a much-valued encore
·here.
May the next 70 years be as prosperous as the first 70!
-The Editor
79
Mount St. Elias
BENJAMIN
A
G.
FERRIS
T what might be termed the pivot-point of Alaska, rises a
mountain which for centuries has awakened man's interest.
Long before it was seen by white man the mountain was known
as Yahste-talz-shalz and it was the home of the spirits of the local
Thlingit Indians. It was their guide on land and sea. This mountain, lying on the 161st meridian in Southeastern Alaska, is Mount
St. Elias. Vitus Bering was the first white man to record seeing it.
He saw the mountain from the sea on July 16, 1741 and again on
July 20. Since both of these days happened to be during the feast
of St. Elias in the Greek Orthodox Church the mountain was named
after that saint.
In the ensuing years of the Russian occupation of Alaska, Mount
St. Elias received only minor attention. It was triangulated at
various distances and by different explorers with widely divergent
results. The rumor was also started that it was volcanic. Seveu
years after the purchase ot Alaska by the United States, a survey
party was sent to the area. This party calculated a height of 19,600
feet for Mount St. Elias, correctly ascertained the nature of the
Malaspina Glacier, and layed to rest the "volcanic" story.
Mount St. Elias received even greater attention as a result of the
belief that it was the highest mountain in North America, and it
was claimed by both the United States :mel Canada. This controversy stimulated early mountaineers. The first attempt to scale the
mountain was made in 1886 by a New York Times expedition
headed by Frederick Schwatka. Mr. Seton-Karr of this expedition
reached an estimated elevation of 7200 feet on one of the ridges west
of the Tyndall Glacier south of the mountain. The next attempt,
also from the south, was made in 1888 by an English party headed
by H. W. Topham. This party followed essentially the same
route used by the 1946 Harvard Mountaineering Club Expedition,
but the earlier party had to land through the swells of the Pacific
Ocean, as Icy Bay was non-existent at that time. With a final
camp at approximately 4500 feet they ascended to the cirque, and
::q
~
):))
a
~
c:
~
):))
s·
(!)
(!)
....,
s·
(Tq
N
+::-.
00
........
MT. ST. ELIAS
Showing H.M.C. route up the southwe;;t ridge from lower right to upper left
Photo, U. S. A. A. F.
47 Years Ago
climbed onto the upper rim. Bad snow conditions prevailed, and
when they reached the western slopes of Hayden Peak and looked
at the steep slopes beyond Hayden Col, they realized that the climb
was beyond their present facilities and retreated.
In 1890 and 1891, an American group under the auspices of the
United States Geological Survey and the National Geographic
Society sent an expedition to explore the surrounding glaciers and
if possible ascend Mount St. Elias. This party, led by I. C. Russell,
piloted out the route on the north side of the mountain, by which
the Duke of the Abruzzi was finally successful in 1897. Another
American party made the attempt in 1897, but was forced to retreat
because of illness. The last serious attempt to climb the mountain
prior to the Harvard Mountaineering Club Expedition in 1946 was
that of the International Boundary Commission in 1913. They
attempted to climb by the great northwest shoulder, which was
successfully climbed, but bad weather and local difficulties forced a
retreat at an altitude of 16,500 feet.
During the war three former presidents of the HMC, Maynard
M. Miller, William L. Putnam, and Andrew J. K•auffman plqnned
another attempt on the mountain by way of the route originally
pioneered. Final preparation of the plans was accomplished in the
spring of 1946 when these members had been discharged from the
services, and in addition to the three presidents, the party finally
consisted of Mrs. Elizabeth Kauffman, William R. Latady, "Dee"
and Cornelius Molenaar, and myself.
The Quartermaster Corps was approached to obtain various items
of equipment for testing purposes. The Air Force agreed to treat
the climb as a tactical mission, and the lOth Rescue Squadron of
Elemendorf Field, Alaska was given the mission of air supply. The
Air Forces also planned to drop certain items of equipment for
testing purposes. The Harvard Fatigue Laboratory obtained Army
Rations for test purposes and delegated a member of the expedition
to supervise the "20-inch step-test" to measure acclimatization.
With these tasks of scientific investigation planned, the party
assembled in Yakutat, Alaska, on June 13, and began to organize
the equipment. This involved deciding what was to be taken to the
base camp in Icy Bay and what was to be packaged for dropping
at the different proposed air-drop sites. With these matters com-
82
pleted, the small "Grace N." was loaded with the supplies for the
base camp and the party sailed from Yakutat on the evening of
June 16. A 60-mile voyage lay ahead with a large portion of it on
the Pacific Ocean, exposed to a rugged south-east gale which
caused a heavy following sea. The majority of the party was most
unhappy and we all decided mountaineering was preferrable to
sailing. We arrived in Icy Bay the following morning and were
met with a grim sight. The wind howled uninvitingly, carrying
intermittent sheets of rain. The front of the Tyndall Glacier was
barely visible 6 miles away, and the ceiling lay at about 1000 feet.
We landed on the north side of the mouth of a glacier stream
and congratulated ourselves that we would have no further streams
to cross. The supplies were landed and we waved farewell to Toni
Novatne, skipper of the "Grace N.", and turned to the task of
moving camp to a point above the highest high water mark. A
reconnaissance party returned with the disheartening news that
another raging glacier torrent lay in our way.
Despite this discouraging news, we spent a dreamless night after
the t0ssing of th~ previous one. The next morning, loads were
relayed to the stream bank, and another reconnaissance party of
Putnam and Dee Molenaar forded an upper portion of the stream
where it braided, but they had extreme difficulty effecting a passage
across a large braid where the water was hip· to waist deep. They
finally appeared on the opposite bank and a rope was thrown
across the stream and a Tyrolean Traverse constructed. The posts
on either side of the stream were 100 feet apart and were the old
stumps of an interglacial forest estimated to be 4000 years old. The
weather was still inclement, and it was not until June 19 that all
the loads were deposited safely across the stream. Then we tied
ourselves into a rope and individually followed the bundles across
the traverse. The last man, Bill Latady, naturally could not utilize
this method as the ropes were an integral pa~t of our future
plans so he ingenuiously fashioned an aquaplane out of the two
sled toboggans and aquaplaned across the torrent without mishap.
Base Camp was then established a short distance away on a
bluff above the river. We were awakened the following morning
by Andy extolling the view with a loud bellow. The transformation
was complete, gone were the howling winds and rain. The sun
83
47 Years Ago
THE FIRST "COLOSSAL ENTERPRISE"
Tyrolean traverse across "Colossal Creek,
Photo, M. M. Miller
TYNDALL GLACIER TRAVEL
84
, ,
Photo, M. M. M•ller
shone and light fluffy clouds drifted idly by. They epitomized our
feelings. A reconnaissance the previous afternoon by the Kauffmans indicated that we should follow the beach to the terminal
moraine of the Tyndal Glacier and establish Camp 4 beyond it at
the western end of the Chaix Hills.
Lazily we shouldered our loads and started up the beach.
About two miles from camp, Betty said, "Look, isn't that a bear
ahead." She was promptly kidded until we realized that she was
right. We had heard that this was a fari:wus bear area, and had
come equipped to protect ourselves. Since this bear was due to
meet us, we felt we should have a reception prepared. Putnam
deployed the troops and took matters in hand. The bear was
dispatched and the excuse to skin him gave us a chance to call a
halt. Portions of the flesh were roasted over a fire and we• pretended to enjoy the fishy flavor. This respite was sorely paid for
as we had to complete the relay in the excessive heat of the noon
and afternoon.
The following three days were utilized to consolidate camp 4
which was located among some small ponds which offered bathing
facilities for the more hardy members, and became known as Palm
Beach. On June 23, an advance party set out to establish Latady
and Miller at the proposed camp 5 on the medial moraine of the
Tyndall Glacier. From this spot they reconnoitred to the base of
the mountain while the rest of us relayed supplies to camp 5. We
were to meet two days later and continue on to the mountain base.
At the meeting following the reconnaissance, we realized that
our meeting date with the airplane was the following day, so the
Molenaars and Putnam were converted into a fast freight and went
directly from camp 5 to 7, the mountain base camp. The rest of
us hoped to reach camp 7 from camp 6 the following day in time
for the aerial drop, but in our enthusiasm to move camp 5 to the
slightly more secure camp 6, we were too tired and overslept the
next day. As a result we had a long range view of the process, and
dragged into camp in the mid-afternoon.
Camp 7 was a wonderful contrast. Since landing in Icy Bay we
had seen practically no greenery, only ice and snow or the uncomforting boulders and rocks of the glacial outwash. Thus there
was joy at camp 7, where a carpet of heather mingled with blooming
85
47 Years Ago
lupen, butte'rcups, fireweed, and other unidentified flowers. Song
birds were nesting in the vicinity, and ptarmigan were available for
the pot if your aim with a rock was good. Marmots whistled
encouragement. At this point we decided HMC s~ood for the "to
Hell with Mountaineering Club." Our glorious weather continued
and we revelled.
However there were still loads to be relayed up from camp 6
and a reconnaissance of the rock ridge above camp. While Putnam
and Kauffman went ahead to examine our future route, the rest of
us brought up the final loads and our mountain base camp was
complete. The Air Corps had dropped nearly a ton of supplies to
us so we were well established.
Our peace was disturbed by Putnam's and Kauffman's description of what lay ahead. In simple terms the mountain was rotten!
On June 30, another fast freight was sent out consisting of Putnam,
Latady and Miller. They were to establish camp 9 at 10,500 feet
ana be on hand for the second plane drop scheduled for July 2.
The rottenness of the ridge was clearly demonstrated by our being
able to follow their progress by the smoke cloud kicked up from the
falling rocks. They reached 7,700 feet late that evening and
established an intermediate camp, camp 8. The following day
the rest of us relayed loads up to camp 8 and then returned to camp
7 to await the plane drop at camp 9. But our good weather was at
an end and we were in for a seven day stretch of bad weather. The
advance party was in cramped quarters, being three in a two man
mountain tent. They made one relay down to camp 8 for additional
food, and in their haste to complete the round trip at night, to profit
from the frozen surface, took the bag containing chocolate in various forms. The Molenaars climbed up to camp 8 with additional
supplies on July 3 and they found a note from the advance party
saying they had come down for a load and all was well.
At the mountain base camp, camp 7, we merely sat in the dampness and whiled away the time ul'ltil July 5, when a partial clearing
permitted us to climb some of the neighboring hills. The plane
came in daily and we could hear it flying about far above us. The
upper party said it was most exasperating as they seemed to be
almost at the limit of the clouds. They could occasionally see blue
sky but they never saw the plane.
86
87
47 Years Ago
At last on July 6 we had another perfect day and the plane
came in at camp 9 and made perfect drops. All the packages landed
within the 100 yard square stamped out by the upper party. We of
the lower party packed up and climbed to the 7700 foot camp, camp
8, amidst a shower of falling rocks from the rotten ridge. About
midnight as we were enjoying our sleep, a tornado, in the form of
the upper party, clescenclecl upon us and sleep ended. This disturbance was mitigated by mail which had been dropped from the
plane. The upper party emhasized the need for night climbing so we
had to bestir ourselves and take off for the next camp, which we
reached in the mid-morning. Our route from camp 8 to 9 lay
along the southern aspect of the cirque which is a prominent feature
of the southern side of the mountain, and then up a moderately
steep scree and snow slope onto the upper rim of the cirque
through a small cornice. We followed the undulations of the upper
rim around to the north edge where the upper party had chosen an
excellent camp-site. Due east, Hayden Peak rose 1500 feet above us,
and to the north we looked directly at the southern face swee;ping
12,000 feet from the summit to the valley floor that lay between.
We were glad to have this· valley between us and the southern face
as this face was continually swept by avalanches. The smoke
produced by some of these avalanches clearly demonstrated how,
with the cirque, the rumor of volcanic activity started.
The clay after we of the lower party became the upper party,
Kay Molenaar and I returned to camp 8 to bring up the final loads,
while Andy and Dee Molenaar reconnoitred the steep snow and
ice .sloops above Hayden Col. As Kay and I returned we saw the
orange banner placed a third of the way up the slope above· the
rocks. We were amazed. When the two returned they brought
encouraging news. The ice slope was covered with snow securely
frozen to the underlying ice and they had been able to walk up the
slope in crampons. A few steps had been cut lower clown in the
couloirs among the rocks. On the next day we all took moderate
loads, and leaving the camp at midnight, headed for Hayden Col,
traversing the north slopes of Hayden Peale The route from the
col led along a snow ridge and two sizeable schruncls had to be
crossed, after which the ridge was again followed until it ran into
the ice slope where it became prohibitively steep. The route then
88
swung to the right and cut through ice couloirs and over narrow
rocky ribs to a granite cleaver which was climbed directly. On the
top of this we were on the snow and ice slope, and were able to
walk with crampons. We climbed steadily and made good progress
until we neared the rocks at the top of the slope, below the last
pitch. Here Kay and I, who were leading, veered too far to the
right and ran into much ice which necessitated extensive stepcutting. We corrected this by turning to the left where we ran
into knee-deep snow which felt most insecure. We cut back above
the rocks for about 200 feet and then headed directly up over shaky
windslab. It was 'with considerable relief that we saw the slope
taper off and knew we were nearing the proposed camp-site at
13,500 feet. Just as we reached the site, we saw the other party climb
up to the rim of the cirque through the cornice. As it was 8 A.M.
when we arrived, we hastily cached the supplies and returned to
climb down to camp 9. A fixed rope was installed at the top of
the rocks for 400 feet and was placed considerably to the left of
where we had climbed up. Our return to camp was made miserable
by the morning heat and softening snow. We arrived in camp at
noon to find the others enjoying their sleeping bags.
The next day was declared a holiday for acclimatization and
doing the step-test, and the following day we set out after lunch to
. climb Hayden Peak. This proved to be an interesting 2 hour climb
with considerable meandering among the schrunds which seamed
the slope, and one really exciting crevasse whose bridge was also
crevassed at right angles to the underlying crevasse. The summit
was surmounted with a tremendous cornice that we took turns
standing on with a secure belay, (see frontispiece).
Since we had signalled the plane to hold up the next drop for
one week, the day after we climbed Hayden Peak was also a holiday
for further acclimatization. The plane checked in and dropped
some mail, and we reaffirmed our appointment. The main party
left camp 9 at 1 A.M. on July 13. Putnam and I remained behind to
give the radios another try. When we awoke at 8 A.M., we saw the
climbing party was only at the rocks, and realized changes must
have occurred in the slope to account for their apparent slowness.
When we arrived the following day, we learned that much melting
had occurred as a result of the past three perfect days, and many
89
47 Years Ago
additional steps had to be cut. They added to the fixed rope so it
was more than 600 feet long. Further news awaited us in the
form of an apple pie for the two of us. Four had been added to
our larder with the message, "Pies like mother used to bake, compliments of the old baker in Yakutat, sawdust, compliments of the
Yakutat carpenter shop." They were indeed a welcome change.
However this was offset by learning that our only loss in all the
drops occurred here. Two boxes of food or 32 man days of food
struck the edge of the drop area where there was an ice cliff,
shattered, and disappeared a few thousand feet down to the glacier.
The clay after the plane drop, Putnam and I climbed to the 13,500
foot camp 10, and that afternoon the plane buzzed us on its way
back to Elmendorf Field. The main party left for the next camp
at 15,500 feet, camp 11, while Putnam and I remained behind to rest
and acclimatize. The advance party ran into deep powder which
made work exhausting. At camp 10 we resumed our day-time
schedule, as melting was minimal. We were able to collect water
even at this elevation by using a melt tarp.
The advance party finally reached the camp-site about 9 P.M.
and experienced bitter cold while establishing camp. The next
morning, July 15, as they roped up to reconnoitre the route to the
summit, Andy stepped into a crevasse almost before the last man
had tied into the rope. They then decided it was really too miserable
for climbing and decreed a day of rest. Putnam and I brought up
the rear that afternoon, being enveloped constantly in clouds and
driving snow. The main party had willow-wanded the trail
thoroughly, for which we were grateful.
The day after Putnam's and my arrival, one month after lea~ing
Yakutat, July 16, the morning dawned clear and cold, but with a
solid cloud level at 10,000 feet and a few higher clouds about us.
Roping up into two ropes we set out for the snow and rock arete
about a mile from camp. we gained this arete by climbing a snow
couloir on the southern aspect of the ridge. The rock on the arete
was just as rotten as that below. This gave rise to the querry as to
how a mountain so high could be so rotten. The route up this
arete consisted largely of inworking around and then up one
tremendous step after the other and often involved direct climbing of
rotten rock. Intermingled with this were traverses of snow and ice
couloirs and direct climbing of the couloirs. This continued until
90
about 500 feet below the summit where tremendous and fantastic
frost feather bosses were encountered. The first rope, consisting of
the Molenaars and Miller, led up these bosses beautifully. After
climbing what seemed forever over the frost feathers, a cry above
was heard which cheered us on, "Give me five feet of slack and I
am on the top." Shortly thereafter we joined the first rope and all
joined hands to step on the exact highest point together at 6 P.M.
The view that lay before us unfortunately was only mountain tops,
as a cloud level at 11,000 feet effectively hid the lower slopes from
view. The imposing massif of Logan rose sprawlingly across the
Columbia and Seward Glaciers, farther to the north rose Mounts
Bona, Lucania, Steele, and numerous unidentified peaks. Far to
the east, the summit of Fairweather was barely discernible. We
remained on the summit a brief hour and a half and then turned
back. Our descent was speeded by roping off down an ice couloir
for 400 feet and walking on the hard snow surface on the northeastern side of our ridge of ascent. We returned to camp just as
the last touch of sunlight disappeared around the great northwest
shoulder and climbed into our sleeping bags too tired to eat.
The next day we deScended to camp 10 where the plane located
us that afternoon and we joyfully stamped out in the snow, "Top
16. Bo~t 8/4." On July 18 we vacated camp 10, having to climb
down the steep snow and ice slope through a whistling cloud layer
that had now risen to 13,000 feet. We reached camp 9 through a
blizzard and were not unwillingly restricted for two days by the
storm. Here we were all diagnosed as suffering from a disease
cureable only with Putnam's "CC1," which turned out to be some
liberated Italian firewater. Needless to say the medicine did the
trick and we quickly recovered!
The remainder of the descent to the base camp on the glacier
outwash was uneventful except for the marked changes that had
occurred in the Tyndall Glacier. The crevasses had widened
noticeably, and much of the snow cover had melted. Here another
colossal enterprise was undertaken in'the construction of the "OmahaWeston Highway," a series of three fantastic routes through the
maze of which ran "the spiral staircase" and "the knife bridge."
We reached the base camp July 31, amid the usual dismal welcoming rains and wind. Once more the silver and gold C-47
roared over our heads, almost blowing over the tents by the
91
47 Years Ago
THE SUMMIT OF 1\IT. ST. ELIAS
Showing the snow·field above camp 10
Photo, D. Mole11aar
92
MEMBERS OF THE ST. ELIAS EXPEDITION
(left to right) back row: l\Iiller, Latady, Ferris, Putnam.
front row: D. Molenaal', E. Kauffman, A. J, Kauffman C. Molenaar,
AERIAL DROP NEAR CAMP 9
93
Photo, M. Mille,.
47 Years Ago
prop wash. We sat out our time until August 2, when we noticed a
boat at the spot where we had landed seven weeks before. After
much fire-building and shooting, we attracted their attention.
Fortunately the wind was in our favor and had blown the floe ice
across the bay so that Toni could bring his new boat in beyond the
second river where we were camped. We promptly climbed aboard
with the baggage. A strong south-easter forced us to spend an
extra day in Icy Bay, but this delay was well repaid. When we
finally left Icy Bay on August 4, we had an exhilarating view of our
mountain and all its lesser satellites.
We arrived in Yakutat late that day to learn that we had climbed
the mountain on St. Elias' day in the Greek Orthodoxy and the
same date on which Vitus Bering had first sighted the mountain.
That night, after a bountiful meal from the Libby, McNeil &
Libby Cannery people, the members of the lOth Rescue Squadron
flew us to Elmendorf Field where we discussed the plane drops.
They returned us to Yakutat a couple of days later and the party
broke up to make their respective ways back to the States.
94
Harvard Mountaineers on Mount
Saint Elias: 48 Years Later
William Lowell Putnam
The 1946 Mt. St. Elias Expedition was a high point
of Harvard Mountaineering and the actual climb is well
described by Benjamin Ferris in Harvard Mountaineering
8 (1947; seep. 80 -ed.) . But where have all those flowers
gone in the years that followed?
William Robertson Latady, the oldest of our party,
though a resident of Cambridge was never an actual student
at Harvard. He was, however, a member of the Finn Ronne
Antarctic Expedition of 1950 which mapped much of the
Palmer Peninsula. An inveterate tinkerer and artisan with
an excellent home workshop, Bill invented a continuous
motion film camera and was party to the evolution of the
techniques of Cinerama. Bill was a director of the
American Alpine Club and served as its Treasurer and its
Vice-President prior to his premature death in 1979.
Dee Molenaar, the lead photographer of our team, is
the only member of our team that actually went on to the
second stage: K2, for the St. Elias trip was originally
planned as the warm-up to a grander event. An employee
of the U. S. Geological Survey specializing in ground-water
research, Dee also evolved into America's premier alpine
artist, whose works are treasured personal possessions and
can also be found adorning ski lodges, specialized maps,
journal covers and even the seal of the American Alpine
Club, of which he also came to serve as a director.
Benjamin Greely Ferris, Jr. returned to his studies
of medicine and entered the field of public health. As a
professor of public health at the Harvard School of Public
Health his researches into occupational diseases took him
from Berlin (NH) to the jute factories of India and the smog
of downtown Tokyo and international recognition. His
subsequent alpinism, often in company with Andy
Kauffman and myself was largely in western Canada. Ben
achieved great distinction for his 25 years of editorship of
HMC on Mt. St. Elias
Pfcs W.L. Putnam and C.M. Molenaar after completing a
climb on Cheyenne Mountain in 1944,
photo courtesy W.L. Putnam
D. Molenaar clowns with W.L. Putnam at 1981 Reunion at
Battle Abbey, photo courtesy W.L. Putnam
96
the "Safety Report" of the American Alpine Club, which he
also came to serve as a director and of which he was
elected an Honorary member in 1975.
Andrew John Kauffman, II, returned to the
Department of State until his retirement in 1976. His
overseas postings varied from Central America to Paris to
Calcutta and back to Washington, where he sometimes
manned the hotline to Moscow. His alpinism continued
with several expeditions to South America an:d into the
bush of British Columbia, but reached a high point in 1958
with his first ascent of Hidden Peak (Gasherbrum 1), the
only American first ascent of an 8000m peak. (See AAJ
23: 165-172, or Harvard Mountaineering 14 [1959] -ed.)
Andy also served as Vice-President of the American Alpine
Club and was elected an Honorary member in 1992.
Maynard Malcolm Miller, the principal organizer of
the St. Elias trip, became the most serious student of
glaciology and came to concentrate most of his subsequent
research on Alaska's Juneau Icefield. His professional
career took him finally to the joint position of Dean of
Idaho's School of Mines, and State Geologist of Idaho.
From his base in Moscow (ID), he organized the Juneau
Icefield Research Project which has, over the last 45 years,
taken hundreds of students to this spectacular region of
snow and spire. Mal, too, served as a director of the
American Alpine Club.
Cornelius Marinus (K) Molenaar became a
petroleum geologist, employed by Shell Oil Company, until
his retirement in 1978. Thereafter he worked with the U.S.
Geological Survey. K never gave up on alpinism, but he
did not follow it subsequently with the vigor shown by
'most of the other team members on St. Elias in 1946. His
time in the field made him a specialist on sedimentary
stratigraphy and brought him the citation of "Outstanding
Scientist of 1990" from the Rocky Mountain Association of
Geologists.
Elizabeth Conant Kauffman was divorced from
Andy in 1956 and subsequently married Robert Burchell.
She lives in the Washington area, and had little relationship
to alpinism over the past 40 years.
I was the youngest of the party, but probably the
97
HMC on Mt. St. Elias
Gathered at the AAC Dinner in 1985
(front row) M.M. Miller, A.J. Kauffman, B.G. Ferris,
W.L. Putnam (back row) C.M. Molenaar, D. Molenaar
(holding model), photo courtesy W.L. Putnam
98
most persistent alpinist of the crowd, though I never sought
high altitude ventures after my lung problems at 4,900
meters on St. Elias. My employment has been as a
television broadcaster, but my mountaineering has been
largely in the mountains of western Canada, where I
followed Roy Thorington as general editor of the climbers'
guidebooks. In my retirement from "the media," I have
written considerably on alpine matters, often in
collaboration with Andy Kauffman and have come to revel
in the sole trusteeship of Lowell Observatory. I have been
a functionary of the American Alpine Club in one form or
another since 1970 and of the Union Internationale des
Associations d'Alpinisme (UIAA) since 1976, and have
been elected to Honorary membership in several
mountaineering organizations.
Is there a moral to our story?
We have all stayed in touch, despite the occasional
rivalries that crop up in all human relationships. And we
have all continued to be mutually supporting to some
degree. I was honored to serve as best man at Ben's
wedding; several paintings by Dee are among my prize
possessions; Mal came to Flagstaff to speak to my
astronomers and advisors, despite my having made the first
ascents of most of "his" peaks on the Juneau Icefield; K
rummaged through old files to find the picture of we two on
a busman's holiday from the 87th Mountain Infantry (on
Colorado's now hush-hush Cheyenne Mountain; Andy has
been "Uncle Andy" to my children and we have met
frequently in the mountains. In 1981 there were five of us
at my domicile for geriatric alpinists in British Columbia
and a couple of years later six of us met at an American
Alpine Club annual meeting in Denver.
99
Harvard Mountaineers in
British Columbia, 1942-47
William Lowell Putnam
This is God's country, though in time I came to
learn that getting around parts of it can be a hellish
exercise, even if some of its prospects are heavenly. My
first exposure to this area came at age seventeen in the early
summer of 1942, when the management of the Harvard
Mountaineering Club, in the form of its president, Maynard
Malcolm Miller '43, decided to tun a three week trip to the
Selkirk Mountains near Glacier after the close of the spring
semester. It was necessarily brief since several of us had to
be back for the opening of the summer school which we
were attending in the accelerated pace of preparing
ourselves for participation in the global turmoil of the
Second World War.
My generation was the last to grow up fascinated by
the mystique of the then ubiquitous steam locomotives and
the steel rails on which they ran. While not all of us
planned to grow up to become engineers, there was still a
lot of romance associated with the building and operation
of railroads, particularly through the grander mountains of
Western North America.
From Montreal to Glacier, our trip was via a railroad whose saga of construction was among the more
heroic, and which had by then evolved into the World's
greatest transportation system: the Canadian Pacific
Railway. Before leaving Cambridge I had known just
enough to be impressed, and on the four day trip west I
picked up enough additional history to stimulate a desire to
learn even more, a condition which has never left me.
Mal Miller, who was already somewhat familiar
with the area around Glacier, had made the arrangements
for all eight of us. But it was Andy Kauffman '43, Miller's
immediate successor as president of the HMC, and myself
who ultimately responded most vigorously to the stimulus
of that first trip into these historic mountains. He was to
come back for the next five years, achieving an unequaled
record of exploratory alpinism, bushwhacking through the
Selkirks south of the Canadian Pacific's main line. My turf
for significant effort of that nature was to come later in the
area north of the railroad. On several future occasions
Andy and I were together, but I never forgot my first lesson
in alpine leadership at his hands, back on Mount
Washington: invariably I picked the route and set the pace.
On that first HMC trip, once off the train, we
camped near the rushing waters of the Illecillewaet River, a
name that was quickly abominated to "Illegitimate," and on
a grassy area that had once been part of the lawn associated
with the Canadian Pacific's, and North America's, first
mountain hotel/resort, the Glacier House. Little did I
imagine at the time that forty years later I would become
the historian of that unique alpine hostelry. When the hotel
had first been opened, in 1886, it was named for the
"Great" Illecillewaet Glacier that was then so prominent in
the local view, but which was now in sad retreat as the
warming trend of global climate has shown its effect on
almost all such glaciers around the world.
We made no new ascents during our two week visit;
the early summer weather was largely atrocious. But we
learned that rain was no deterrent to the local mosquitoes;
only sustained residence above timberline seemed to solve
that problem. Due to Miller's connections with HMC
graduates we had, however, acquired the dubiously great
chance to test certain items of equipment then in the final
stages of preparation for use by the newly authorized
Mountain Troops of Uncle Sam's Army. Principal among
these items was a "sectional" tent, allegedly the brainchild
of Bestor Robinson, a skier and alpinist of note from
California who was helping the Quartermaster Corps
develop equipment.
Bestor's initial concept was sensible. Every GI in
the mountain units would be issued one specially formed,
quadrilateral sheet of rubberized nylon fabric, with sturdy
zipper tracks along its edges and two of those edges
equipped with the necessary sliders. Every man would thus
have a portion of a tent, and could team up with any two,
three or four others to form a pyramidal (Logan model)
tent, supported in the middle with a pair of skis serving as
101
HMC in British Columbia
Bill Latady peers at the camera in one of the ice tunnels we
visited under the lower Deville Glacier. Thirty years later,
all this ice had melted away leaving only bare rock. 1942.
W.L. Putnam photo
Mount Macoun, on the left, and Mount Topham, in the
sunlight, are the twin portals framing the east entrance to
Glacier Circle from the Beaver River. Spillimacheen Hills in
. the distance. 1984. D.C. Vickowski photo
102
its pole. The fabric was the Army's usual olive drab color
on one side, for use in forested areas, and white on the
other, for use when camping on snow. The idea was great
on paper and, in a manner traditional, for throughout World
War II the Army continued to supply every soldier in its
regular infantry units with a medium weight, greenish
canvas item called a "Shelter, half," as it had from time
immemorial.
Anxious to fulfill Miller's testing commitment,
several of us packed loads up to Perley Rock, a location
named for the first manager of the former Glacier House
and set up camp on snow near the snout of the waning
Illecillewaet Glacier. We soon found that the tent segments
fitted only when it was set up for four. With three, there
was a great bunching of surplus material in the center, and
with five, we couldn't close the center floor zippers at all.
But most alarming, once in residence, we discovered the
material was absolutely watertight, a condition that might
seem of value in the almost continuous rain and snow we
were experiencing. Unfortunately, this very characteristic
also meant that whatever vapor we generated, or brought
inside the tent, was guaranteed to stay there. Thus, if we
opened a zipper to ventilate, the rain came in from without;
if we closed it to keep dry, as much moisture condensed
from within. This was our bad luck, as we had brought no
other means of shelter.
Ultimately, our report to the Quartermaster was that
this tent had severe drawbacks, detailing why it should not
be adopted. But, acting on arcane military logic, the Army
decided to change its shape, but retain the same offending
material, reversibly colored and absolutely watertight. For
many of the Mountain Troopers who had to use these tents
in the next few years, of which I was one, the suffering was
often in tents.
The sectional (sex) tent having been tested and
found wanting, we went about our other business, the most
pressing of which was a visit to the strikingly crisp glacial
cirque at the south end of the Illecillewaet Neve, aptly
known as Glacier Circle. In rare but bright sunlight, we
tludged across the eight kilometer expanse of snowfield at
an altitude of about 2700 meters and then sought a way
down the rocks at its southern edge. Tongues of ice
103
reached part way down the steep headwall towards a
delightful looking and partially tree filled basin some six
hundred meters below us; in the late afternoon of midsummer it seemed idyllic. Unroping as we stepped off the
ice, we each sought a safe way down the cliff punctuated
headwall to the flat valley that beckoned so invitingly.
Somewhere in that valley, Miller had assured us, was a
sturdy log cabin we could use.
Our lack of cohesiveness in descent was mandatory
because of the great quantities of rocky debris, dumped
intermittently from above by the glacier, that was lying
loosely on wet and slippery ledges. Since no one relished
the idea of trying to pick a route along the fall line below
someone else, we came down in a mass movement, eight
abreast, each picking his own line and staying in occasional
verbal touch with his neighbors to the right or left. We
went down, however, with the sun, and though some of us
made it to the bottom while daylight existed, others, like
me, at the westerly fringe of the group, found ourselves
delayed among cliff lines of ever increasing difficulty and
were a lot slower in arriving at more friendly terrain.
Then, in the dusk and resumed rain, we had to find
the cabin. Fortunately, Miller had been informed as to its
whereabouts, but what had seemed, from above, to be
grassy meadows surrounding an open forest, turned out to
be acres of swampy tundra abutted by a cheval-de-frise of
fallen timber. After two more hours of stumbling through
bottomless mudholes and over crisscrossed logs, not
noticeably aided by a lot of hallooing back and forth in the
dark, we fumbled our way to the cabin. It was at the
nether, southwest edge of the timber and had been
completely invisible from above.
The cabin was my age, but I was in decidedly better
repair, even after falling flat on my face in several swamps
en route to this dump. Dropping our packs at the door, we
pointed flashlights inside and saw that the place lacked an
effective roof in several areas and was obviously well
frequented by porcupines and other locals. But it was the
best hotel available, so we hastened to check in.
The next morning, while optimistic climbing parties
started out for several nearby peaks, I set out to cover as
many holes in the roof as possible, with massive, skillful
104
assistance from Bill Latady, the senior member of the
group and a technician at MIT's hush-hush Radiation
Laboratory. Then the two of us headed down to the
southeast edge of the valley where the north flowing
Deville Glacier curved in a magnificent sweep to exit (and
end) eastward towards the Beaver Valley through the
narrow gap between Mounts Topham and Macoun.
Years later I was to learn that the first mountain had
been named by the Canadian Pacific Railway authorities
for Harold Topham. This prominent British mountaineer
had been the first person to visit this valley almost sixty
years earlier, the advance guard of a series of subsequent
alpinists. The latter mountain had been named for John
Macoun, an Irish born naturalist whose well-publicized
studies had documented the great agricultural potential of
Canada's West and thus earned the railway's gratitude.
Their names are spectacularly remembered. Edouard
Deville, whose glacier then separated the peaks, had been
an officer in the French navy but became the Surveyor
General of Canada in 1885 and died in 1924, the year the
cabin was built.
Bill and I spent much of that afternoon exploring
Deville's glacier from below. We found tunnels beneath
the hard, grey ice of its tongue that enabled us to walk or
crawl over one hundred meters up under the moving ice.
We looked up to see boulders held in its sliding glass-like
vise and could actually see, as it happened, the carving of
striations on the polished bedrock on which we stood. The
occasional sunlight, striking the glacier above us, was
filtered through the debris overhead, piled ever thicker on
the surface as the glacier melted away in the warmer
environment of lower altitude. Here, the ice was blue, in
other places green, as the thickness of junk overhead varied
with the input of original material from sources kilometers
away to the south. As a first year student of geology, I
soaked up a massive lesson in glacial geomorphology that
day, first hand. It was a great foundation for later studies at
the foot of Professor Kirk Bryan.
From penciled notes on one window frame of the
cabin, we learned that the last visitors had been the
distinguished British scholar and alpinist, Dr. Ivor
Richards, and his equally notable wife, Dorothea Pilley,
105
two years before. On another board we found evidence of
an earlier visit by a party led by Sterling Hendricks, the
American agronomist, and before that, silence.
Despite having been built as an adjunct to the
famous Glacier House in its penultimate year of operation,
this cabin had never become popular with the climbing
fraternity. And after three days residence in its dank,
mosquito-filled slot amid the dark spruce forest, we
evolved a few ideas as to why. Thirty years later, in the
summer of 1972, I took another group that included some
Harvard mountaineers back to Glacier Circle for a massive
rebuilding of the old cabin. By then it really needed help.
Our return trip across the icefield was another
learning experience: eight kilometers of navigation across
a hummocky, crevassed snowfield in the fog. We had little
choice but to make the move, the groceries we had brought
with us were running out and no one relished a diet of
bludgeoned porcupine. So we went back up over the cliff
bands, this time with a bit more finesse, and onto the snow
despite the lowering clouds and cold rain that had
dampened more than our spirits from the moment we
stepped out of the cabin.
If the snowfield had been flat and crevasse-free, we
could have all lined up on one long rope, aimed our
compass north and started to march. But, with the
necessity for much weaving around, there was no way of
getting us all in a straight line; besides, the fog and
snowfall was so thick at 2700 meters that we couldn't hope
to see from one end of the party to the other.
Latady, who was the heaviest, said that whoever
was lightest (me) should be the navigator and go last on the
rope. But obviously the eighth position wouldn't do so we
compromised on two ropes of four, with myself, sans piolet
for greater precision of compass reading, at the back end of
the leading rope. Every few minutes I would take a fresh
reading and steer the trail-breaker right or left so as to
maintain the theoretically proper course across the icefield.
Once underway, Latady's plan worked to perfection and we
came out of the clouds almost exactly on target at Perley
Rock, where we could once again navigate down to our
base by use of local landmarks.
106
*
*
*
The war years intervened; with its members in
uniform or hastened academic programs the HMC became
dormant until I returned to college in January of 1946.
That summer, Miller, Kauffman and his wife, Latady, and I
were joined by the Molenaar brothers, Dee and Cornelius,
of Seattle, and Dr. Benjamin Ferris '40, then still in
uniform, on a venture to climb Alaska's most striking peak,
Mount Saint Elias. This ascent was written up in Harvard
Mountaineering (see p. 80 - ed.), National Geographic
and the American Alpine Journal; it was the climb of the
year but it effectively did nothing to advance the skills or
opportunities for HMC undergraduates.
While visiting Mount Washington in the fall of
1946, to prepare the old Spur Cabin for winter, I acquired a
dog from Joe Dodge, the mayor of Porky Gulch. Skagway
was the last, unclaimed, member of a litter delivered some
three months earlier by Joe's malamute bitch, Juneau.
Unusually light in color, rangy and getting stronger by the
day, he and I formed an instant bond. We even attended
classes together despite Harvard's parietal rules on the
subject; his classic, wolf-like bearing and excellent
manners, malamute style, were such that few officials
cared, or dared, to object to his presence. Indeed, he
became such a draw that I used him as date bait, with great
success. He was even accepted as a resident, though
without formal recognition, by the distinguished proprietor
of Lowell House, Dr. Elliot Perkins.
As time went on, though, I found myself forced to
invent a more sophisticated name for the dog's use in
civilized functions, and entered his name as Henry S.
Pinkham. Two years later, under this name, he was elected
to membership by the American Alpine Club's Board of
Directors. Fully qualified under then stringent rules of
admission, though with his canine status unreported, only a
last minute reflection by then AAC Secretary Bradley
Gilman, Law School'28, denied him admission.
About the time of the dog's first birthday, a second
HMC trip, composed largely of undergraduate members,
was bruited in the living room of Henry Hall, the great
patron of alpinism and honorary president of the HMC.
107
Henry had visited the Waddington area in the Coast Range
of British Columbia some ten years earlier, in company
with the pioneers of alpinism in that area, Don and Phyllis
Munday of Vancouver. After close to a week on the road
from Cambridge, Larry Miner '47, Skagway and I arrived at
the end of the line at Tatla Lake. We were accompanied by
the even then distinguished Fred Beckey, who had agreed
to join the party as co-leader.
Here, by prior arrangement, courtesy of Henry Hall,
we met Batice Dester who had engaged to take much of our
supplies down the Homathko River with his string of horses
to a location near Cataract Creek where Henry advised us
to locate our base. Fred and I had already air dropped a
pre-selected load of supplies on the upper Tellot Glacier,
where we planned to establish a high camp. A generation
later, these kinds of trips were made by helicopter.
Skagway, fortunately for us, developed an instant affection
for the horses, in whose company he spent the best part of
the next four days as we labored to open a passable trail
down the increasingly jungle-like Homathko valley from
the dry interior plains near Tatla Lake.
Sixty four kilometers, countless windfalls and two
major stream crossings later, Batice delivered the four of us
to a pleasant grove of big spruce trees at the southwesterly
edge of the gravel-filled valley below the snout of the
Scimitar Glacier. Henry had said he thought we could find
a route up the side valley that entered at this point to gain
access to the upper Tellot glacier. After one night spent
helping establish our camp, Batice returned for the rest of
our party. He had turned out to be a home-grown
philosopher and teacher of Metis ancestry and insisted that
I stay in the lead from the very start "... so you will learn the
trail, Bill, in case you have to come back this way by
yourself."
Larry, Fred, and I, and, of course, the dog now
bereft of his equine friends, immediately set out to find the
route Henry had promised so that we could locate our
airdrop before any passing snow storm covered it
completely. We could see that the aptly named Cataract
Glacier came down from a high col, beyond which we
knew the Tellot glacier awaited us. Having marched up the
108
HenryS. Pinkham serving as date bait on the quadrangle
lawn at Radcliffe College in May, 1947, W.L. Putnam photo
H.S. Pinkham washing our dishes at Fairy Meadow Camp.
Until we built a stone house, our domicile was under the
green tmp. Note the classy, stone fireplace with
mud-cemented chimney. 1948. A.J. Kauffman photo
109
outwash and moraine in less than an hour from camp, we
stepped onto the still somewhat snow-covered ice and
donned our climbing rope, at least three of us did.
Skagway had always strongly resisted being tied up, and
since he had also consistently demonstrated good homing
instincts there had been no worry. So, we took the chance
and left him to follow near us, or lead the way, as his mood
indicated; after all, snow was his natural environment and
he was never out of our close presence.
However, within less than five minutes, the dog
trotted a few yards off to one side of our line in what we
knew to be a heavily crevassed area - and then he was gone.
Poof! No dog, only a dark hole in the white snow. Crisis!
Leaving Larry, as middle man, to set up a firm
belay, Fred and I moved as close as we dared to the scene
of the problem. I probed with my ice axe, feeling the
strength of the snow, until suddenly I encountered no
resistance at all; I had passed beyond the hard ice lip of the
crevasse. I lay flat to spread my weight over the snow and
slithered, snakelike, to the edge of Skagway's hole.
Canine moans rose from below as my face appeared
over the edge. I spoke reassuringly, but once he heard my
voice, his howling became tumultuous. I saw that he was
able to move well, perhaps too well, for he was stranded on
a little snowbridge only some five meters down, but if he
moved around too much he might take a further tumble to a
possibly irretrievable depth. I convinced him to keep his
cool, that help was on its way and commenced to cut away
the lip of the hole so that Fred could assist me in going
down.
A few minutes later, I was almost wedged between
the icy walls of the narrowing crevasse, but standing beside
my frantic friend. It would have been difficult for me to
fall much further, so I untied myself and made a sling
arrangement around Skag's shoulders so that Fred and
Larry could haul him up. With his sturdy claws acting as
crampons to assist their strong pull, he was soon extricated.
A few minutes later I joined him in the sunlight and we
held a further council to determine if he should be shot for
insubordination, tied to our rope, or left as he was to see if
he had learned anything.
110
Unwisely, we opted to insult his intelligence by
tying him in, and then resumed our upward march. Within
another hundred meters, however, the dog's lateral
perambulations had so snarled our rope and footing that we
decided to try Option 3.
That dog and I made several good ascents in the
next three weeks and climbed together every winter and
during four more summer seasons, in Alaska and back in
the Selkirks, much of it in unmapped glacier country. He
compiled a world's record for canine first ascents and when
the unfortunate necessity arose of reporting the death of
Charley Shiverick '48, his nose for those horses led David
Michael '48 and I out to Tatla Lake in one day, over terrain
that had taken us four to get through earlier.
In an epic march across the Northern Selkirks with
Ben Ferris and Andy Kauffman in the summer of 1948, his
impeccable crevasse-smelling and route-finding ability
through kilometers of bush saved us immense labor, and he
was happily able to subsist on the less desirable
commodities among our airdropped supplies. He accompanied me through thick and thin and gave me six years of
magnificent canine loyalty and intelligence, malamutestyle, and never had another problem with a crevasse.
Indeed, during the first ascent of Devils Paw, in the Juneau
Icefield in 1949, his nose (or ear) for hidden holes proved
more astute than Fred Beckey's or mine.
At a very early stage of our relationship, however,
Henry S. Pinkham taught me the fundamental premise of
our social contract; he was not "my dog." Instead, I was his
person. As long as I remained sufficiently respectful of his
needs and desires, we would have a good working
relationship.
An account of the 1947 Coast Range trip appears in Harvard
Mountaineering 9 ( 1949), which was dedicated to the memory of
Charles Shive rick. The 1948 Northern Selkirk trip was written about in
Appalachia, December, 1948. (ed.)
111
The Harvard Cabins 1932 and 1962:
The 1992 Reunion
TedCmman
The first time I took two of my children on an
extended camping trip was the summer of 1986, Anne was
15 and Ed was 18. The three of us, plus Anna Weid, a
friend of Anne's, hiked along the Appalachian Trail from
Franconia Notch to Crawford Notch and then over
Washington to the Hermit Lake shelters. We used the AMC
huts only for an occasional replenishment of supplies,
carrying tents, sleeping bags and food. It took six days. It
was strenuous. It rained. It rained hard. The sun came out.
We swam at Thoreau falls. We had a good time.
The HMC cabin was in my mind the whole way.
That is where we were headed. Ed had been there once.
Anne never. I had not been back for years. I wanted to
show it to them, and I hoped that when we got there, on the
last day, we could find the key.
I had been told it was in its traditional place.
We found the key. We stepped inside.
A flood of memories came back to me. I
remembered adding logs to the sides and ends until they
were high enough so that when the loft joists were set in
place they would clear Bob Hoguet's 6 feet 5 inches. We
did not want him bumping his head, needing stitches.
Bob Hoguet ... Rick Millikan ... Rittner Walling ...
my brother Pete ... Charley Bickel... Hank Abrons ... Dave
Roberts ... Bert Redmayne ... John Graham .... Tom Roth ...
Chris MacRae; and our carpenter, Freeman Holden. All
these names. These friends. And the work. The unbelievable physical exhaustion of the work that went on, day
after day.
So, I thought, I want to see everyone again. Our
lives have gone in different directions. We should have a
reunion. A 30th reunion in 1992.
Addresses were tracked down. Letters mailed. Dave
Roberts's article in Summit about climbing at Harvard in the
early 60s was sent out to everyone (seep. 127 - ed.).
And we did. We had a reunion. A total of 43 cabin
builders and cabin users and cabin enthusiasts and families
and friends gathered for the long weekend of August 8th,
1992. We hauled a generator up so we could show Bob
Jahn's movie of the construction as well as slides of cabin
building and of climbs of the era.
And, in the process, I was sent some notes and
reminiscences.
Not the least of which was Charlie Houston's
reminder that this cabin was not the first cabin, its history
goes back to the early 30s:
Charles S. Houston - 31 May 1992:
I must say a word about the evanescence of
memory. Your note and the article by Roberts pass
lightly over the real birth of the HMC cabin by ignoring
it completely. The original cabin and the break-through
permit from the Forest Service date back to 1931-32.
It's ancient history, forgotten or dismissed today.
Too bad.
In 1931 Brad Washburn somehow managed to
obtain a permit to build on a small bit of Forest land near
the old Fire Trail a half mile below the Little Headwall.
This was an extraordinary accomplishment. Brad contracted with a lumbetjack to frame a small cabin; I believe
the cost of $250 was paid by Henry Hall. That fall a
small group of us visited the site.
To our dismay the logs had been only slightly
notched, so that there was 4-8 inches between them,
gaps that could not be filled. There was no choice but to
tear it down and start fresh. We did this in a series of
heroic weekends. Leaving Cambridge late on Friday,
pausing for supper at Colby's Diner in Rochester, we
slept in Joe Dodge's parking place or climbed to the
cabin that night and worked for long hard hours before
going horne exhausted and good for no school work late
Sunday night or on Monday. The cabin was finished, a
stove carried up in sections, and the cabin occupied early
in 1932.
To celebrate, the ·HMC challenged Dartmouth to a
downhill race on Washington's birthday, from the Little
113
The Harvard Cabins, 1932 and 1962
Headwall to Pinkham, on the Fire Trail. I remember this
as 1932, but it may have been in 1933. It was a great
party: no one was hurt on the suicidal Fire Trail, and we
had a fine open house before, during and after.
This winter (1992) as I skied with dick Durrance
in Aspen, we reminisced - sixty years after we had first
raced each other on the Fire Trail.
Many of those who worked on the first cabin are
dead and others lost and forgotten: I think of Chuck
Angle, Walt Everett, Harrison Wood, and Sam
Zemurray. Brad inspired us all, Bates, Carter and I were
regular participants. There were a few others whom I
apologize for having forgotten. It's incredible that no
one was hurt, no one flunked out of college, that we
have remained friends ever since. It was before
chainsaws were available, before the ATV, before
pollution was a household word and before permits were
needed to camp. It took many hours over difficult roads
to reach Pinkham, and the climb up was arduous with
heavy packs though Brad had accustomed us to packing
heavy in Alaska.
After college I went to medical school, found the
Himalayas more appealing, and visited the cabin only a
few times before WWII. The cabin burned, I believe by
accident, was rebuilt, I think, and finally torn down and
rebuilt again in its present location.
I suppose this third incarnation was in 1962. I
have not been there. But I cherish some old photos and
scraps of paper which chronicle this important part of my
life.
Us old folks like to look back because there isn't
much to look forward to. But besides that, history is
important, history is real, history should be accurately
preserved. It's trite but true to say that those who ignore
the past will screw up the future. Harvard gave me a lot.
Friends in the HMC continue to give me a great deal.
I hope that 30 years hence some one will recall
the ancient HMC cabin built in 1962, with the same
affection that I recall the first one in 1932.
114
Brad Washburn - 26 October 1992:
For the record in the Harvard Cabin's history,
Pete (Knight) was an expert logger- a sort of logmaster!
We hired a guy from Berlin to do the original "outer
shell" of the cabin, but it was so badly done that we had
to tear it all down and start all over again, and Pete did
the final version, with large numbers of us as his
helpers.
The use of an automobile in the cabin
construction (which Ad and I recollect was in the fall of
1932) was as follows: In the fall of 1929, using part of
my first income from the sale of "Among the Alps with
Bradford" and "Bradford on Mt. Washington", I bought
a Model A Ford Roadster, complete with "Rumble Seat"!
License plate 95921! At one time in the late stages of
building the cabin, we used heavy "roofing paper" over
the boarded roof. I'll never forget those rolls: 4 of them
about 36" long and about 8" in diameter. They weighed
a little over 90 lbs. each. We reached Pinkham for a late
supper on a Friday night in early October. The
temperature was unusually warm, so we decided to bring
the rolls up in my auto, along the new "Fire Trail,"
which was much smoother than it is today after nearly 60
years of erosion. So we put all the rolls in the rumble
seat and drove it up the trail exactly 9110s of a mile. I
can still show you today exactly where we turned it
around in a tiny almost-level part of the trail. ..In fact the
only spot where it could possibly be turned at all!
To do this must have taken a dozen times the
energy (and beer) that back-packing would have
required, but it did get the damned roofing 3/4s of the
way to the cabin and it was a thrilling and memorable
night!
Bob Bates - 12 July 1992:
I remember being with Brad when we made a
special trip to Mt. Washington, climbing Boott Spur to
find a place for the first Harvard Cabin. He already had
a place in mind. My memories of building the cabin
agree entirely with Charlie Houston's. I also remember
115
Dean Henry Chauncy carrying up a large section of the
stove.
And here is my father's description of a weekend at
the old cabin:
Ted Carman (Sr.)- 13 March 1994:
In April, 1935, I was lucky enough to hook up
with several students who had permission to use the
HMC cabin for a week of skiing. I was unlucky enough
to be in the second car which reached Pinkham Notch so
late that we were unable to get anything to eat.
We expected that lack to be remedied at the cabin,
but by the time we arrived the place was dark and cold;
the others were all in bed. We followed suit, hungry.
Things looked better in the morning. We skied
every day, up under the headwall when the visibility
permitted and on the trail or in the woods the rest of the
time, priding ourselves that on one day we managed
10,000 feet, climbing up and skiing down.
Disaster came for me in midweek. A rock broke a
chunk out of the edge of one ski, bad enough to put it
out of use. I had no money for new ones but Joe Dodge
took pity on me and let me use the AMC shop. With
limited tools I managed a repair that lasted the week out.
I recall the cabin as being fairly small - perhaps
12' by 14' with the iron cookstove in one corner, a table
and some benches. There was some sort of shed on the
back for firewood. The loft where we slept accommodated the eight of us, but without much space left over.
In 1963 after Ted's graduation, I saw the new
cabin for the first time. I was impressed by its size. My
small contribution to the enterprise came at that time; I
put the roof on the privy - a task of no glory, just
essential.
A number of years later, problems developed. The
Forest Service had built the Sherburne Ski trail from
Tuckerman's down to Pinkham Notch. It came quite close
to the old cabin. Its WindyCorner, with a falling away turn
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7. Nancy Barbero
8. Lenny Clark
9. Beth McCarthy
10. Jim Alt
11. Sabra Carman
12. Miles Hoisington
13. Dave Roberts
14. Sharon Roberts
15. Ned Fetcher
16. George Clark
17. TomRoth
18. Kurt Roth
19. Mike McGrath
20. Peter Roth
21. Matt Hale
22. Chris Carman
23. Anne Carman
24. John Graham
25. Peter Carman
26. Bob Jahn
27. Charlie Bickel
28. Bob Hoguet
29. Gerry Dienel
30. Mary Carman
31. Ed Carman
32. Ernie Carman
33. Dean Rau
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to the right, was just to the north. Perhaps a desire to make
the trail more skier friendly lay behind the Forest Service's
change of heart about the cabin.
In any event ...
Again, from Bob Bates:
A major memory concerns a phone call from
Craig Merrihue when he was president of the HMC (this
must have been 1958 or so). He had received a call from
the chief warden of the White Mountain Forest at
Gorham saying that the cabin would be burned as a
public nuisance on the corning Saturday. On Friday he,
Gail and I drove to Gorham to talk to the ranger. He
was very pleasant but told us that it had to go. We talked
from 10:30 in the morning to 5 p.m. I finally brought
out the names of all the people who would be infuriated
by this action, and we both insisted that it was the only
place for Huntington ice climbers to stay. Finally he
agreed to let it stay open in the winter, and we agreed
that it would be better to have a cabin nearer Huntington.
Anyway, we postponed the destruction, and
established the fact that winter climbing in Huntington
should be assisted.
· So those of us arriving in Cambridge in 1959 and
1960 found an atmosphere of concern about the future of the
cabin. In the next few years it became clear that something
would have to be done.
George Millikan- 29 July 1992:
Thinking of history, were you present at a
meeting with a Forest Service ranger at Pinkham Notch
one Friday evening in January or February, 1961? My
brother Rick was there, and probably one or two others
from the HMC. I believe the ranger was based in Berlin.
He announced plans of his service to flatten our Boott
Spur cabin to make way for a re-routed fire trail. As a
consolation, they would allow us to rebuild in
Huntington Ravine, and would transport building
materials. As I recall, my best response was a rather
weak, "Oh." I was about to graduate and doubted that I,
119
or anyone else in the HMC, had the energy to build a
new cabin. Luckily, Rick has a more optimistic view of
things, and he thought it would be fun to try building a
log cabin.
I know little more about the cabin st01y, but I can
add a postscript that the cabin appears to have affected
Rick's professional life. After a temporary detour into
physical chemistry, he returned to the drawing board
about 20 years ago and has since supported himself in
the building business (presumably modifying the basic
cabin design to a greater or lesser extent as he went
along).
Although the cabin was built after my time, I had
the good fortune to spend a night there in early 1967
when I was a graduate student down in North Carolina at
Duke. Art Shurcliff and I arrived late on a blustery night
and found the shelter most welcome, although I recall a
certain sadness after our pot of warm soup tipped over
from my notoriously unstable Primus. (The Primus is
still going strong, after minor repairs necessitated by
ingestion of leaded gas in the '70s, but I imagine that the
soup is now lost beneath more recent layers of tragedy).
In the morning I was impressed, because the new cabin
seemed so much lighter inside than the HMC's smokefilled old one. That morning the wind may not have
achieved sufficient velocity to "howl like a banshee"
(Whipple's phrase?), but the ridge above us sounded to
me distinctly like the roar of a freight train. We confined
our tramping to the lower elevations that day and
returned to Boston the next.
This was the context in the spring of 1962 when the
core group of the club decided to try to build a new cabin in
Huntington Ravine. I wrote a fund raising letter to the
alumni in early March. Within a month we had received
funds or pledges for $1,500. We thought that would be
enough. Henry Hall, as with the first cabin, made the
largest contribution, $600. Rick and I called on our
extensive training in high school mechanical drawing
classes, and did a plan for the new cabin. We took it up to
Gorham, and got approval from the ranger to go forward.
120
Years later, the Harvard Cabin came up while talking
with a senior partner of one of the large downtown law firms
in Boston.
He told me that he remembered that approval well.
He had been a committee member of the Appalachian
Mountain Club, and was involved in the discussions about
whether it would be good policy to allow us to go forward
with another non-AMC and non-Forest Service structure in
the National Forest. They concluded that their ultimate goal
was to have no cabins up there, and that since it was unlikely
that a group of undergraduates could actually build such a
structure, there was little harm in giving permission. In a
few years, a new cabin not built, they would be able to take
the position that we had had our chance, and it was now too
late. They would take down the old cabin, and that would
be the end of it.
I told him that in our enthusiasm it never occurred to
us that we would be unable to do it.
So, a few weeks later, lots of snow still on the
ground, Rick, Bob Hoguet and I went up to select the site.
We found a (relatively) flat spot, with plenty of large trees
uphill, fortunately having realized ahead of time that it would
be a lot easier to haul the logs down to the site, rather than
the opposite.
Rick Millikan- 3 August 1992:
My memories of "Fire in the hole!," of Chippy,
of peanut butter spread with 12" spikes, of Freeman's
profanity (I can't quite hear the words- help me out!), of
logs, chainsaws, peaveys and come-alongs, but mostly
they are of friendships, camaraderie and our perverse joy
in being perverse. I am amazed at both the great gaps in
my memory of the building of the cabin as well as the
vividness of certain scenes. I have only a vague memory
of actually choosing the site for the cabin which Bob
(Hoguet) reminded me we did together, yet driving up to
Pinkham early on a spring morning cooking breakfast on
a Primus in the back seat while Ted drove remains clear.
We were to load most of the lumber and materials
for the cabin on a snow-cat to get them up the fire trail
before the snow melted. I remember a tired Tuckerman
121
skier tmdging up the trail and reaching our cache saying,
"God I'd give a buck for a cold beer right now." We
obliged and felt guilty at taking his dollar for what I
suppose was then a fifteen cent can of beer, but he
insisted.
We all assumed that the bottom logs should be
the largest trees we could find in the vicinity. We found
a candidate some two or three hundred feet from the
platform we had leveled out. Because we were unsure of
felling the tree in the one clear direction, a come-along
was attached near the top and cranked on as the chain
saw cut through the bottom. Just as the cut was about
3/4 of the way through, the cable snapped. I volunteered
to climb up to reattach the cable, and still remember my
images of riding down with the falling tree trying to stay
on the top side of the tmnk - but all went well.
I used to like to think of myself as such a
daredevil, but I suspect I had the physics pretty well
worked out! It took some more physics and four of five
of us the better part of a day to manhandle that log,
which we estimated to weigh 5,000 lbs., to the site.
Thinking about the weight of that log led us to
think about the depth of our footings - and so to Rittner
and the dynamite!
"Fire in the hole!" And then the digging through
yards of dirt turned to froth by the explosion. And then
the "Scottish Mason" I remember the name MacRae (am
I making this up?)
There's lots more, but it is pretty jumbled up.
And then there are all the later memories of the cabin in
winter. Chas (Bickel), I know you remember that
incredible stormy night when we kept getting lost in the
woods and it was so cold (41 below with 140 mph
winds on the summit). The cabin kept us from perishing
that night, though we shivered all night with three bags
each.
Rick, you weren't making up remembering Chris
MacRae. Not only a "Scottish Mason," he was a Henry
Fellow at Dunster House, and he and Tom Roth, a tutor at
Dunster, took on one of the most critical tasks during early
June. They built the foundation pier under the southeast
122
corner of the cabin. It is all filled in now, but it goes down
nearly 6 feet; the site sloped more than we realized, and
Chris and Tom spent days constructing a pier of stone from
the stream, cemented in place with Sacrete we hauled in from
the fire trail. Early on we realized that the foundations were
critical. The old cabin base logs were placed directly on the
ground. After 30 years they had substantially deteriorated
and were rotten. We purposely raised the new cabin up off
the ground, ensuring ventilation and little moisture.
It took some time to track down Chris MacRae.
Here is an excerpt from his letter of July 17, 1992.
Your letter eventually reached me - despite the
fact that the address you discovered was where I worked
between 1963 and 1965!.
I am still working for the same outfit: The
British Diplomatic Service. At present I am High
Commissioner (=Ambassador) to Nigeria, a job I've
held for the last 16 months - enormously interesting.
I look back to my taking part in building that hut
with a good deal of pleasure. It was fun, and good
company - and I learned a thing or two about simple
construction techniques which came in handy later.
I have not done any technical rock climbing for a
long time now, but have not stopped going up mountains
when they present themselves (and I remain fit - a
confirmed runner these days).
The last outstanding climb was Mt. Damasrand
(over 19,000 ft.) the highest one in Iran, which I
climbed five years ago, in 1987, when I was Head of
our Mission to Iran briefly, until most of my staff was
expelled and I was eventually withdrawn! ....
Peter Carman- 13 March 1994:
My earliest recollections of the cabin include
struggling up the fire trail in the dark and storm as a
na'ive freshman. My first associations with the HMC
and Mt. Washington were through a letter from brother
Ted. He told me in some detail about his adventures
with the Mountaineering Club in New Hampshire in the
winter. I can still remember sharing these stories with
123
my high school friends in Nashville. I had no idea then
that a short time later I would join the club and begin
associations with people and attitudes which would
change the course of my life. As a freshman I went on a
club trip to Cannon Mountain and the Whitney-Gilman
Ridge. I can still recall sitting, freezing, on a ledge and
thinking "what am I doing here?'' I have been climbing
and living and traveling in the mountains ever since.
The building of the new cabin was undertaken by
older club members and I was less directly involved.
My strongest recollections of the building project are
black flies, firefighters' bug dope, and the hamburger
which we had stored in the stream to keep it cool. I'm
sure we used it well after its shelf life was past.
In the following several years the cabin was the
focus of our winter activity and upon coming back
decades later many images remain:
Rick Millikan and I arriving late one night
and finding that our bottle of whisky had
frozen on the hike up. Don Jensen falling
into the slush pond in Odell's with the
temperature well below zero. Chas
Bickel demonstrating how to play three
harmonicas simultaneously. Joining my
brothers Ted and Ernie there in the early
70s ...
Like Rick and Ted, I have been in the building
business for over 20 years, running Carman Electric in
Jackson Hole, Wyoming, where I often climb with our
fourth brother, David, an Exum Guide.
Brad Washburn- 26 August 1993:
My most vivid memory of the reunion is very
amusing:
While Ad Carter and I were scrambling over the
Huntington Ravine headwall we passed a lot of people
going up- in various stages of agony. Later we learned
from the fellows at the "info desk" at the Summit House
that one of those climbers had reported to them on top
124
that "two old men were passed halfway up Huntington
Headwall and that they might possibly need help!" Sic
transit gloria!
Someday soon I hope that somebody can locate
the exact site of the original Harvard Cabin (just off the
Sherburne Trail) and mark it permanently. That was a
wonderful spot and none of us who built it will evmy
forget those many trips that we made there during the
constmction.
The story of building the 1962 cabin is described in
more detail in the Harvard Mountaineering 16 (1963). The
first cabin building effort is covered briefly in Harvard
Mountaineering 4 (1936).
Like Rick Millikan, I have spent most of my life
doing work that one could conclude was at least partly
inspired by our cabin building experiences. I have been
financing and renovating and managing housing, mostly
apartments, for 30 years. Anne and Ed have spent a lot
more time in the mountains since our first long hiking trip
together, and both came to the reunion; Ed with his wife
Mary.
Charley Bickel and his camcorder made a video of
our gathering. Ritt Walling took the group photo with his 4
x 5. The high point was Bob Jahn's movie of the
construction. Nearly 20 minutes long, carefully and
skillfully edited, it was just extraordinary to see ourselves
engaged in this enterprise 30 years earlier.
As the winter weather on Mt. Washington rages, as
Huntington Ravine challenges generation after generation,
the 1962 HMC cabin continues to provide shelter for those
with adventure in their souls, and a locus for deeply felt
memories.
And to Charles Houston, we haven't forgotten where
it all started.
This is an announcement and a reminder that there
will be another gathering at the cabin the first weekend in
August in 1997. Plan to come.
Now, in summation:
125
John Graham - 2 September 1993:
Well, none of us was a nimble as we used to be.
A bit less hair. A few more pounds. But the spirits
seemed much the same.
And why not? As Dave Roberts's article in
Summit reminded me, we were all oddballs then, one
way or the other. That was part of what drew us
together then. And it was part of why it seemed so easy
and natural to pick up again after so many years.
I couldn't help but notice other ways that
climbing had·shaped our lives. Nine tenths of us had
"dropped out" of traditional career paths in one way or
another, and I'd bet that our average earnings were
substantially less than the Harvard norm - by choice and
not by lack of talent. But we had had a hard time fitting
into any molds 30 years ago - no surprise that so many
of us ended up living our lives that way.
I'd guess that, as a group, we had found more
off-beat, "different" things do with our lives than most
other people: places to live, ways to earn a living,
relationships, adventures... But we'd had plenty of
training in doing off-beat things. Let's face it: we had to
be a little nuts to sit in a puddle of icewater for an hour
belaying a partner up one of the gullies, right?
Finally I was glad to notice how many of us were
still here. I mean still alive. I teach climbing classes for
the Seattle Mountaineers and am now blessed with some
reasonably decent gear. I can't imagine going up steep
ice without frontpoints, as we did then. And remember
the ice screws of the sixties - those pieces of thick hanger
wire? And spending five times as much time as now in
avalanche chutes, because that's what it took to cut the
steps and fix all those belays?
Hey, I still have my old ice axe. I saw an exact
copy of it last year - in a climbing museum in Seattle.
Made me feel like one of those old ex -guides that hang
out in the beer halls in Zermatt, wearing worn lederhosen
and singing the old songs ...
126
Rites Of Passage
David Roberts
Basically, I hated Harvard. Majoring in math, I
degenerated in four years from a natural sprinter to a hasbeen crawling on his knees toward the finish line. My
professors deserved much of the credit: uninterested in
teaching, they slapped equations on the blackboard in a
scribble of chalk. It was our duty to copy down these runes,
go back to our rooms, and stay up all night trying to figure
out what they meant. I have forgotten the classes I nodded
through in psychology, expository writing, and history of
science, but I recall with keen regret the training in snobbery
that was Harvard's relentless subtext. We wore coats and
ties to breakfast, lounged like barons in our common rooms,
and had our bathrooms cleaned for us weekly.
In high school in Colorado I had led a normal social
life, asking girls out to the movies, then on lucky evenings
making out with them at the Twinburger Drive-In. Back east
I froze, witless and sweaty, at Wellesley mixers and
Radcliffe Jolly-Ups. Every November there was the terrible
threat of not having a date for the Harvard-Yale game, a
failure that demonstrated to your hyper-competitive peers
that you were indeed the drooling cretin they had taken you
for. What parties I did accomplish passed in a stupefaction
of rum-and-coke, the Kingston Trio on full blast, the
anonymous girl at my side as incapable as I was of striking
up conversation, let alone romance.
The obligatory Harvard style of those years, 1961 to
1965, was glib, cruel, and invulnerable. Admitting you
needed help, confessing pleasure in another's friendship,
uttering an unironic sentiment - all such behavior was
decidedly uncool. I consulted my academic advisor for
fifteen minutes each year, and at that length only because the
initial meeting was mandatory. Flattened in my freshman
year by a setback of the heart, I sneaked off to a college
shrink. He told me to read C.S. Lewis and everything
would be all right.
Rites of Passage
Slogging across that desert of privilege and
affectation, I managed to land on an oasis called the Harvard
Mountaineering Club. I had climbed before college, but it
was thanks to the HMC that I became a serious mountaineer.
The club at the time was in fact the most ambitious collection
of undergraduate alpinists in the country. But within
Harvard, we were a small band of misfits, apostles of an
arcane cult whose rites might lead to that most pitiful of
heresies, taking a year off. The HMC was barely acknowledged to exist by the University, which let us use a moldy
closet in the basement of Lowell House for a clubroom.
When we trudged back to our rooms on Sunday night after a
weekend at the Shawangunks, grubby and hung with
carabiners and rope, our bridge-playing roommates looked
as if some animal had barged in and peed on the floor.
Twenty-seven years after my graduation, the only Harvard
friends I stay in touch with are my climbing buddies. The
HMC was the most spirited gang of cronies I have ever been
part of; it forms for me a lasting m'odel of how friendship
ought to be organized.
*
*
*
The club didn't recruit; you had to find it among the
fine print of the extracurricular. In my last year of high
school, I had climbed the east face of Longs Peak while it
was legally closed on account of bad snow conditions - a
bold stunt, I thought, but hopelessly minor-league compared
to the exploits I had read about since I was twelve, in library
books by Europeans who went to places called Annapurna
and Nanga Parbat. Boys from Boulder could never climb in
the great ranges: only gods with names like Herzog and Buhl
were admitted.
.
Yet in the fall of 1961, I wandered into my first
HMC meeting prepared to patronize. This was Massachusetts, after all: were there mountains at all in New
England? I thought HMC activities would resemble the
dowdy outings of the Colorado Mountain Club back home,
with their campfire singalongs and blister clinics - an
anathema of chummy backpacking to the avid loner I was at
seventeen.
128
At that first meeting, I got a rude surprise. Two
fellows, a senior and a junior, had just come back from an
ascent of the east ridge of Mount Logan, the second-highest
peak in North America. Five or six others were reuniting
after a raucous month in the Coast Range of British
Columbia, where they had bagged Waddington, Tiedemann,
Stiletto Needle, and dozens of other difficult mountains.
The slide show confirmed: guys only two years older than I
were putting up new routes on mountains whose names
were to me only hazy rumors from the geography of the
impossible.
On my first HMC trips to the Quincy Quarries, Joe
English, and the 'Gunks, I learned how much better rock
climbers these blithe veterans were than I. And on Cannon
Mountain, I discovered that there were cliffs in New
England equal to the east face of Longs. I went to every
HMC meeting, where I mustered the nerve to say hello to the
mountain men who ran things. I envied their camaraderie,
their shared allusions to shaky rappels and unplanned
bivouacs, with a longing as sharp as hunger.
The four juniors who dominated the club that year
and the next bore the brunt of my hero-worship. They were
Ted Carman, tall, boyish, sandy-haired, the eldest of four
brothers who would climb at Harvard; Hank Abrons, a
melancholic from Scarsdale who looked more like a librarian
than a climber; Charlie Bickel, a grizzled gnome with the
soul of a bomb-tossing anarchist; and the hirsute, softspoken Rick Millikan. Rick had a tough act to follow,
genetically: he was the grandson of George Leigh Mallory,
who had said "Because it is there," and vanished near the top
of Everest in 1924; his other grandfather, Robert Millikan,
had snagged the 1923 Nobel Prize in physics for his oil-drop
experiment.
The turning point for me came at the term break in
my freshmen year, when the HMC conducted its annual
ordeal by masochism, an attempt to traverse the Presidential
Range in New Hampshire at the end of January. This was a
serious undertaking, but the club let anybody come who
could walk in snowshoes, regardless of experience. On
Friday night we drove north in Ted Carman's hearse, in the
back of which - unheated, as hearses are - we rookies
hunkered. I had never winter-camped before, and it was
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Rites of Passage
thirty degrees below zero out. Despite having been issued
two Army mummy bags, I was fairly sure, with the glum
fatalism of youth, that we were all going to die, or at least
lose many digits to frostbite. At midnight, near the train
depot in Randolph, New Hampshire, we piled out of the
hearse and, under Rick and Ted's inspired hectoring, got our
tents pitched quickly on the hard snow and our bodies
inside. After three sleepless hours I had just gotten warm
and drifted off, only to awaken to a distant train whistle. An
engine chuffed in berserk rage, the ground shook, the
Doppler wail bent the whistle, and the nightmare passed. In
the morning, we saw that we had pitched our tents six feet
from the drifted-over railroad tracks.
After that it got easier. We lost our trail on the
Bowker Ridge, bushwhacked in circles, and got stormed off
Mt. Adams on the third day. But Ted and Rick praised my
trail-breaking and one night let me cook glop, and by the
spring term I was almost one of the gang.
The HMC had been founded by Henry Hall in 1924,
the year before he took part in the storied first ascent of Mt.
Logan. Four decades later, Henry attended every meeting,
as he would continue to do until his death in 1987 at the age
of 91. By the early 1960s he was starting to be a little fuzzy
about sorting out each crop of undergraduates, but then
somebody giving a slide show about a recent jaunt in the
Canadian Rockies would mislabel an obscure peak, and
Henry would burst in, "I think you'll find that's Mt. Unwin.
Mary Vaux is out of sight from there."
HMCers had pulled off some good expeditions in the
1940s and 1950s, but it was the great mountaineers who had
peopled the club in the 1930s that served as our real heroes.
Thanks to Henry, we had a direct link to these men, who at
regular intervals would come to meetings to relive, always
with cavalier modesty, the deeds of their own youth. Terris
Moore projected glass slides from his extraordinary yearlong expedition to the top ofMinya Konka in China in 1932;
Adams Carter took us up Nanda De vi, at 7,817 meters the
highest summit yet attained in 1936; and Bob Bates
recounted the daring 1938 attempt on K2, which would not
be climbed for another sixteen years. In the imposing
sanctum of his director's office atop Boston's Museum of
Science, Brad Washburn invited us to paw through his
130
collection of aerial photos, as we searched for challenges
worthy of the tradition of this preeminent mountaineer in
Alaskan history.
Another pair of faithful guests was the English critic
and philosopher I. A. Richards and his wife, Dorothy, who
as Dorothy Pilley had written the classic Climbing Days.
We got the feeling that, in his eighth decade, Richards had
perhaps grown less interested in the Meaning of Meaning
than in seeing dusty slides of the Bugaboos and Vowells,
where the two of them had made first ascents in lightning
times in the 1930s.
Before our thrice-yearly "banquets," ordinary dininghall meals dignified by a separate room, the Club's Advisory
Council met with the HMC president. The protocol was
ancient and precise. It would have been a grievous faux pas,
for instance, not to serve Duff Gordon amontillado sherry,
the aperitif of Henry Hall's choice. Henry, of course, never
told anyone this: rather, it was part of the lore handed down
by the outgoing president to his successor. Yet these were
genial affairs, where old lions, men who turned down
invitations to be on boards of directors of corporations,
solemnly deliberated whether we ought to get a new stove
for the HMC cabin.
The roster of HMC activities was rich. In addition to
the banquets, there were meetings with slide shows every
few weeks; rock climbing trips every fall and spring
weekend to the 'Gunks, Cannon, Cathedral, and Whitehorse; impromptu dashes to Quincy Quarries on sunny
afternoons; ice climbing trips to Mount Washington's
Huntington Ravine eve1y weekend in February and March;
the infamous Winter Traverse at term break; cabin-building
frenzies; first-aid courses; and a climbing camp every other
summer in a remote part of Canada. Often members seized
Christmas vacation to mountaineer out west, and in the
summer as many as three or four expeditions sought out
unclimbed summits in Alaska, Canada, or the Andes. The
club also published a ninety-page journal every two years.
This required dunning the graduate membership for funds, a
campaign whose inevitable deficit Henry Hall always
covered out of pocket.
At any given time, the HMC had only twenty-five or
thirty undergraduate members, out of a student body of
131
Rites of Passage
nearly 5000. Perhaps eight or ten grad students, teachers,
and affiliates also came to the 'Gunks with us. Yet these
ranks comprised a remarkable collection of characters and
eccentrics. There was Pete Carman, the best natural climber
I ever saw, stocky yet limber, as aggressive as a pulling
guard; his standard greeting, in lieu of a verbal salutation,
was to bop you on the head with an empty Clorox bottle.
There was tall, squint-eyed John Graham, who smoked
cigars, tended to get lost in the woods, and fancied a career
as a double agent in Africa. There was Chris Goetze, who
as a legendary hut boy in the White Mountains had once
backpacked a pedal organ bigger than himself to Lakes of the
. Clouds; ascetic of temper, he left the rest of us in the dust on
any trail. There was the absent-minded biologist George
Millikan, Rick's older brother, who once (accidentally)
locked his professor inside a walk-in bird cage. Our number
boasted the mad inventor Art Shurcliff, who believed that
adding rubber blobs to ski-jumpers' ski tips would prevent
eye injuries; glowering Mike McGrath, who devised his own
rating system for top-rope climbs (it began with "Glad to Get
Up," and went on to "Ecstatic to Get Up," and so forth);
Paul Rich, a leftist Unitarian minister who got us plowed out
of our minds every Christmas at his eggnog party; the
professional salvage expert and doomsayer Rittner Walling;
and Bill Putnam, who had successfully proposed his dog for
membership in the American Alpine Club on the basis of his
(the dog's) actual climbing record (seep. 100 -ed.).
In those days, when Radcliffe was still largely
separate from Harvard, when the Draconian parietal hours
made cohabitation as rare as marijuana (and it was not until
after Harvard that I saw my first joint), we had a single
'Cliffie, named Mary Ann Hooper, who came to our
meetings and went on our trips. Mary Ann was not a
member, however, because Henry Hall was old-fashioned
about those things, and after all, it was sort of his club, and
the question had never before come up. The Harvard Dean
of Students ruled that if Mary Ann were to attend a cabin
weekend, she had to have a chaperone, a regulation we
happily ignored. Three or four of us took turns dating her,
but there seemed something faintly incestuous about
smooching with someone you might have to belay the next
mornmg.
132
*
*
*
Like the Class of '63, with Rick, Ted, Hank, and
Charlie as the Club's dominant clique, my own Class of '65
was a strong one. Among five or six promising acolytes,
two of us emerged as particularly dedicated. The other was
Don Jensen, from California, a heavy-set fellow who had
spent weeks alone in the High Sierra. Don was warmhearted but given to deep funks, and his long-pondered
speech was the antithesis of glibness, for which traits he
would pay dearly at Harvard. He quickly became my best
friend.
The Class of '66 was weak, with only one
outstanding rookie. We noticed Matt Hale from the start,
because he got up every climb we tried to stump him with,
but he was as mute as a Carmelite, whether out of shyness, ·
deference, or plain stupidity, it was hard to tell. Then, one
day in the spring of his freshman year, at a party in Rick
Millikan's room, Matt swallowed a couple of beers and
suddenly started blurting witticisms. This revelation of
character, along with his skill on .rock, admitted him to the
gang. By the late 1960s, the vagabond passion of the HMC
might have earned us a certain cachet within the college. But
this was an altogether different Harvard from the one the
police raided in '69. In our day the annual May riot was not
about Vietnam but about whether the diploma should be in
Latin or English. Timothy Leary was still a tenure-rubbing
teacher in the Psychology department. Erich Segal was a
marathon-running classics tutor- widely regarded as a nerd,
or, to use the Harvard phrase, wonk- who was sure he was
going to become a famous writer, but whose only claim to
fame was the doggerel in the Dunster House Christmas skit.
Had we rowed crew, or played ice hockey, we might
have been Harvard stalwarts. But climbing was as weird
then as caving is today. We were no doubt wonks ourselves. One cold January night in my senior year, as
practice for Alaska, I bivouacked on my fifth-floor window
ledge, tied in to the radiator inside my room. My roommates
threatened to unclip my anchor, and other friends threw
snowballs, but on the whole I thought they respected my
vigil. A week later, in a chat with a stranger at dinner in
Lowell House, the HMC came up. "You're a climber?" he
133
Rites of Passage
asked. "Did you hear about that asshole over in Dunster
House who slept out on his windowsill?" "No," I muttered.
"Really?"
During freshman year, every Harvard student had to
earn three "PT credits" each week to certify that he was of
sound body. You could rack up a credit for an hour of
softball, golf, or swimming, but it took a vigorous
petitioning of a dubious dean to let us slide by with two full
days of climbing ice gullies on Mount Washington.
On top of official incomprehension, we suffered
from the conviction that by going climbing every weekend
we were ruining our academic careers and thus our futures.
This was not an illusion. Some of us dropped out, and none
of us graduated with distinction. (I managed to flounder
across the finish line in 1965, still transcribing my
professors' equations.) Yet within the HMC we took gleeful
pride in our feckless scholarship. When Ted Carman, a
History major, let his climbing slough off in his senior year
while he labored over a thesis on Walter Bagehot, we
taunted him as a deserter.
Ten years after Harvard, we would find ourselves
teaching Outward Bound, tending the counter at Eastern
Mountain Sports, farming on the ranch back home. Some of
our number earned pitiful sums by manufacturing their
genuinely innovative equipment: Chris Goetze's "Bomb
Shelter" tents, still the best I've seen for Alaskan gales; Pete
Carman's Supergaiters, the prototype of standard Himalayan
leggings today; Dan's Jensen Pack, the first form-fitting
pack you could wear while actually climbing.
At Harvard, as oddballs on the fringe, we indulged
in all manner of antisocial antics. It would be nice to see in
these juvenile outbursts the germs of the protest marches and
sit-ins we would soon take part in, but our deeds were mere
hijinks. An annual event was the Halloween ascent of the
neo-Gothic Memorial Hall, which regularly roused the cops.
One year Charlie Bickel got nabbed because his tennis shoes
protruded conspicuously from the ledge where he was
hiding. He spent a night in the clink after suggesting to the
apprehending officers that their time might be better spent
looking for the Boston Strangler.
There was the Hearse Traverse, a clamber out one
window of Ted Carman's car, across the roof, and in the
134
opposite window, all at sixty miles per hour. The Winter
Traverse could be counted on to produce follies, such as the
time Matt Hale and Rick Millikan had to prod a neophyte
with their ice axes after he sat down exhausted in a blizzard
and said, "It's all right. Just leave me here. I'll catch up
later." Pete Carman and Rick Millikan went off to the
Tetons one summer and came back with a whole new
vocabulary. When it was "grue" out, they waved their fists
at an Australian god and yelled, "Send 'er down, Huey!"
One grim, drizzly day in November, Pete and Rick,
whom the Tetons had turned into first-rate rock climbers,
failed to find the start of a route called ConnCourse on
Cannon Mountain. They ended up forging a desperate line
up horrible rock, lassoing spikes as they went. By the time
November was repeated, more than a decade later, it had
become so apocryphal that experts doubted the first ascent.
The best building climb ever done in Cambridge was
Pete and Matt's ascent of the tower of St. Paul's Catholic
Church, 50 meters of direct aid in the dark on a loosely
stapled lightning rod, passing two overhangs near the top.
The victors left an undershirt flying from the cross. A few
days later I saw Pete in the Dunster dining hall conferring
with a pair of solemn priests. I thought they had his
number, but it turned out the clerics were seeking advice and
had been steered to the best climber at Harvard. "Would it
be possible," they asked, "for mountaineers to climb our
tower?" "Possible," said Pete judiciously, "but they'd have
to be damned good." He offered, for a fee, to attempt
removal of the impious undershirt. The church hired
scaffolding instead.
For each of us who got hooked, the HMC started out
as fun; then it became more than that. The most meaningful
rite of passage of my life came in February 1963, when
Hank and Rick invited me, a mere sophomore, to join their
Mt. McKinley expedition that summer. Though the prospect
of attacking the mountain's unclimbed Wickersham Wall
terrified me, there was no way I could say no. Boys from
Boulder could after all be admitted to the great ranges.
With our expedition to McKinley, climbing became
an obsession for me, by far the most important thing in life.
The weekend trips, the slide shows, even Paul Rich's
eggnog parties, had laid the groundwork. We didn't know it
135
Rites of Passage
at the time, but we stood on the threshold of a golden age in
American climbing. At the 'Gunks, where nowadays the
hordes elbow their way toward favorite routes, we sat
around a single campfire with the best climbers in the east,
men such as Jim McCarthy, Art Gran, and Dick Williams.
There was no guidebook yet: only tattered, mimeographed
copies of a master list of routes. Everybody knew each
other, and unless you were an Appie (a card-carrying
member of the Appalachian Mountain Club, notorious for
rulebound overcaution), you were welcome to the inner
circle. At the 'Gunks that circle was the Vulgarians, whose
wild cavortings gave us glimpses of the mysteries of drugs,
sex, and 5.10.
Out at Camp Four in Yosemite, a band of kindred
souls, penniless and idealistic, was pushing the steepest
walls in the continental United States. Their names came to
us already freighted with legend, Chouinard, Robbins,
Frost, and Pratt, but within a few years we would meet these
bold warriors and share our common enthusiasm. Alaska
and Canada, where the hardest peaks were still unclimbed
and whole ranges lay unexplored, would become our
proving ground.
Within the HMC, in large part because of the legacy.
of Henry Hall and Brad Washburn and their peers, we still
regarded rock and ice climbing not as an end in itself, but as
training for expeditions. Of our gang, only Pete Carman and
Matt Hale ever went on to set new standards at local crags.
But in the big ranges, we made a mark not unworthy of
comparison with that of Washburn's generation.
On McKinley in 1963, my partnership with Don
Jensen was forged. Harvard took it out of Don. He had
already dropped out once, in the spring of his sophomore
year. Don rationalized his defection with a scheme to do
"independent study" somewhere near the High Sierra, but,
like a drunk kicked out of a bar, he couldn't quite get it
together to leave Cambridge. He moved surreptitiously into
the HMC basement clubroom. I would drop by with dining
hall leftovers, to find Don shivering in his down jacket,
staring at Alaskan photos in old journals or sketching
designs for revolutionary ice pitons.
Don never returned to Harvard for his senior year.
The HMC meant as much to him, however, as it did to me,
136
and on three successive expeditions to Mts. Deborah and
Hun tinton, after McKinley, we carried its legacy onto the
untrodden glaciers of the Alaska Range. The obsession had
only begun. I was to climb in Alaska for thirteen years in a
row, and when it came time to make a living, I found that,
paradoxically, the metier I devised owed more to the HMC
than to all my other schooling put together.
I live in Cambridge today, not far from Harvard
Square. When I walk across Harvard Yard, sometimes I
pass the building in which I nearly flunked a course called
Theory of the Functions of a Complex Variable, and a
Dickensian chill never fails to settle in my spine. But the
other day I biked down the alley where Ted Carman's hearse
had pulled away from Lowell House in January 1962 on the
way to my first Winter Traverse. I saw the addled eighteen
year-old hunkering in thirty-below cold in the back, staring
at the precious fingers he was about to lose to frostbite, and I
felt good all over, because I knew how the story went from
there.
137
Caretaking For Five, And A
Sixth Of The Cabin's History
Ted Dettmar
... and now Ted Dettmar will take over
caretaking duties for the 1988-89 season ...
These words appeared in the last edition of Harvard
Mountaineering, and little did I know then that they heralded
only the first of five winters that I would spend as Cabin
caretaker. In my attempts to refle~t on that experience I have
found it impossible to synthesize all my emotions and
insights, especially now that I am removed from the Cabin's
environment. Time and distance have not so much dimmed
my memories of the Cabin as they have allowed other,
different, experiences to take precedence. So instead of
trying to force words onto paper without benefit of the
Cabin's inspiration, I offer two of my favorite essays out of
the Cabin register, written within the walls of the Cabin at a
time when I was thoroughly immersed in the caretaking life.
These are the words that most accurately reflect my feelings
and experiences.
The Perfect Day, 21 January 1991
Looking back I knew that this was going to be one of'
my memorable days here. The first step of my perfect clay
was to lounge around snug in my cubbyhole until 9::H>.
Thoroughly awake, warm and refreshed I got up and
performed the morning routine of washing hands, fwnbling
with contact lenses, writing up the weather forecast, and
having a breakfast of an orange, two cups of hot cl~ocolate, a
bagel, and a bowl of Quaker cereal. I looked outside upon a
clear, still day, a good day to climb but with chores to he
done first.
I cut wood for the night's fire, emptied the ~!llllp
bucket, filled the water bucket, and swept out the ( ah111
upstairs and down. Clean. WCDQ 92FM out of Sanford,
Maine rocked the Cabin and I couldn't help but engage in a
little air guitar. Anyone stepping into the Cabin at that time
would be convinced I had been up here too long.
But I was just having fun! I packed up my climbing
stuff, and when I finally set off for Huntington it was 11:40.
I figured I'd have time to break trail to one gully, climb it
and get back to the Cabin. Lo and behold, fresh tracks led
up into Pinnacle, and I happily followed. It was only 5°F,
but it was so clear and still I didn't even bother to wear my
bibs but instead just put on my Marmot jacket over my
polypro and trunks. I got the usual dose of anxiety from
soloing Pinnacle plus a little bit of icefall from the party
ahead of me. I caught up with them at the bottom of the
third pitch and climbed next to the second to avoid any more
icefall. While Charlie exited up the snow I went up the
rather brittle ice on the right and in the scariest moment of the
day hit a good size water dam. It didn't break completely
but my legs, rather scantily protected, did get a shower. I
opted to climb up a ways and descend Diagonal to stay out
of the wind which, even though it was a mild breeze by
Mount Washington standards, still chilled my legs and other
parts enough to be uncomfmtable.
Diagonal was in optimum condition for descent and
when I reached the bottom I was once again warm and
comfortable. It was 2:15, but Yale just beckoned. Deep,
unbroken snow on the upper half of the gully had defeated
me just yesterday, but I was willing to have another go.
And up I went.
The snow had consolidated considerably, making
travel much easier. I chased the line between shadow ·and
sunlight but when I topped out I hadn't been able to catch it.
No matter. I donned my bibs for a jaunt across the Alpine
Garden and down Lion's Head, but given the time, 3:30, I
once again descended Diagonal.
Down in the fan I was really struck by the utter
stillness. The other two parties had long since departed the
Ravine and I was left in solitude. Not a sound could I hear
except the occasional sharp crack of falling ice. N~ wind,
no birds, no people. Nothing. Absolute. stlen~c.
Witnessing the grandeur of Huntington Ravwe ':"tth
absolutely no background noise was eerie, almost mysttcal.
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Cabin Report
How could a place so big be so completely without sound or
movement? I held my breath and stood perfectly still to
heighten the stillness. Then I let out a series of whoops and
cries which echoed across the walls then disappeared. To
say I felt privileged would be an understatement.
As I descended the fan toward the trail and even as I
left the Ravine I kept stopping and looking back, not willing
to let go of the experience and wanting to catch it from every
angle.
I made it back to the Cabin at 4:45 with daylight to
spare. It was -4 OF and dropping. The Arctic high was here.
Continuity And Change, 6 December 1992
Was it really December of 1988 that I first took up
residence here as caretaker? The years seemed to have
passed so quickly and yet I can still remember most of my
first journal entry. I was happy to be eating pasta and have
the Cabin at 40oF with the wood stove cooking. I have
learned how to coax a few more BTUs out of the stove since
then.
Certain events, the accidents, the memorable climbs,
the great ski runs, the trips, stand out clearly in my mind as
if they had happened yesterday. But most of the days in
Huntington Ravine and nights spent right here seem to blend
together. I take some comfort in that. Life goes on, things
change, and people grow, but there is a continuity here
season after season. I would say that over half of the Cabin
clientele have been here before and close to half qualify as
regulars. I.know that Jud Thurston and Tony DeMeu will be
here the first weekend that the Cabin is open, and that Jud
will bring beer and Tony Drambuie, and I know that all other
fortunate enough to be in the Cabin with them will have a
good time because of their good-natured raucousness. There
is continuity here because people come here to climb, to talk
about climbing and possibly to renew past climbing
acquaintances.
As Huntington remains essentially
unchanged, so does the climbing here.
What is left behind are those things that do change:
jobs, homes, families, possessions. Most visitors here
probably don't think of continuity as a drawing force. After
140
all, we are. all here to climb ice and to experience Mount
Washington in its winter mantle. But I think the regular
visitors do take comfort in knowing that this Cabin is here
and that there will be warmth, light, and camaraderie after
the climbing is done and the sun has gone down.
Just as the presence of the regulars has contributed to
my sense of continuity, I believe my presence here for five
seasons now has added a dimension heretofore nonexistent
in this place. The Harvard Cabin is no longer just a place to
go, it is a person to see. There is a face and a name
associated with this structure, as well as a type of hospitality
and the knowledge that certain rituals have been, will be, and
are observed. Ted will tend the fire and dictate just how
much wood will be burned. Ted will sweep the snow off
the floor almost before it even hits the floor. Ted will talk of
climbing ambitions that almost certainly will not be fulfilled.
The effect that this place has had on me and my contribution
to this place will make it difficult for me to relinquish my
caretaking duties.
But I think that this will have to be my last year. I
have learned much, have grown even more, and have given
back something. If staying here could somehow magically
coincide with my quest for stability and other long-term
goals, I certainly would. But as the hackneyed saying goes,
it is time to move on.
Hopefully the knowledge that this is my last year
here and my last opportunity to climb a lot will inspire me to
fulfill those oft-spoken ambitions. I know that this Cabin
will always have a special place in my heart, and I will return
here often, to work and to climb and to reaffirm the notion
that some things don't change and shouldn't change. And
that's good.
For more on the history of the Cabin, see page 112. The
Club is happy to note that the Cabin continues to be a success. Ted
Dettmar, author of the preceding Cabin Report, defined new standards of
excellence during his five year tenure as Cabin caretaker. His presence
in Huntington Ravine is missed, and the Club wishes Ted luck in all
his fttture endeavors. (ed.)
141
In Memoriam
Terris Moore (1908-1993)
Terris Moore was born in Haddonfield, New Jersey
on 11 April1908. After graduating from Williams College,
he came to the Harvard School of Business Administration,
where he earned two degrees: Master of Business
Administration, and Doctor of Commercial Science. It was
at that time that he became a member of the Harvard
Mountaineering Club.
He began his distinguished mountaineering career
early. In 1927, he climbed Chimborazo (6310 meters) and
made the first ascent of the 5230 meter, very active volcano,
Sangay, in Ecuador. In 1930, he made the first ascent of
4999 meter Mount Bona in Alaska with Allen Carpe and the
first unguided ascent of Mount Robson in the Canadian
Rockies. The next year, he again joined Carpe in making the
first ascent of Mount Fairweather (4658 meters) on the coast
of Alaska.
The climax of his climbing career was doubtless the
first ascent of Minya Konka (now usually called Gongga
Shan) in Sichuan in inland China. This nearly totally
unexplored region was penetrated despite the hazards of
passing territory being fought over by rival warlords. Terry
and his companions surveyed the mountain at 24,490 feet
(7464.5 meters), still very close to the modern figure. They
climbed the peak, the second highest summit to be reached at
that date, hundreds of meters higher than Americans had
ever gone before.
In 1933, Terry married Katrina Eaton Hincks. In the
next few years, he became a very experienced light-plane
pilot. During the Second World War, he served in the Office
of the Quartermaster General in Washington as a consultant
on clothing and equipment for troops in Arctic, winter, and
mountain conditions. As part of this work, he tested
equipment in many places and was a member of the Army's
test expedition that made the third ascent of Mount
McKinley.
Terris Moore 1908-1993, H. Bradford Washburn photo
After the War, Terry continued consulting on
economic matters until he was asked to become president of
the University of Alaska. During his term of office, he did
much to build it into the strong institution it has become. He
continued his flying, establishing many records for highaltitude landings and take-offs. I believe that his landing on
the summit of Mount Sanford at over 4875 meters was a
record that stood for many years. He also helped to
143
In Memoriam
establish the High Altitude Observatory on Mount Wrangell,
and was involved in flying many rescue missions.
After moving back to Cambridge, Terry was actively
occupied with scientific projects, frequently related to
matters in the far North. He continued his active interest in
the HMC and spent many hours consulting with Harvard
climbers and helping them to launch their expeditions. He
always had time to discuss mountain affairs, give sound
advice and council and be a wise and generous friend.
- H. Adams Carter
Gustavo Brillembourg (1958-1993)
Gustavo Brillembourg was killed on 28 September
1993 in a fall in Yosemite Valley, while on a training climb
for the Salathe Wall.
Born in Venezuela in November 1958, Gustavo
Brillembourg lived most of his life in the United States,
carving out a dual existence that embraced two cultures, two
languages, and two worlds. His home was in Caracas but
he was educated at Milton Academy, Harvard College, and
Georgetown University.
Gustavo worked as a lawyer in the corporate
environs of New York City, but he loved the world of
nature, the White Mountains of New Hampshire, the snowcovered peaks of France, Italy, and Peru, and the high sunwashed cliffs of Yosemite Valley.
Gustavo was a man of practicality, a solid citizen of
the business world, a man who planned for the future, who
valued the importance of one's position in society. But he
was also a private person, a dreamer, a poet, a husband to
Fredrika, a father to little Gustavo Jose. It was within this
privacy, this intimacy with others, that he cherished the raw
immediacy of life with all its passion and depth of emotion.
You could feel it in his exuberant bear-hug greetings, in the
quietness of his face during moments of reflection, in the
awe and wonder he felt when he and Fredrika were falling in
love, in his laughter as he played, rolling an orange back and
forth across the table with Gustavo Jose.
144
It was Gustavo's need to partake of life's immediacy
that drew him to the world of climbing and that fostered his
love for the romantic poets. He was grateful to them for
revealing that journey upon which we are all secretly
embarked. He revered their epic tales of love and innocence
lost, their stories of death and remembrance, their
discoveries of faith in learning to love once again.
Gustavo understood that it is through faith that
distances are traveled, through faith that the balance of life is
made. He needed friends around him who could hold onto
that faith, who could carry out their own balance and stand
by his side. That's why Gustavo loved Fredrika. She had
the strength to journey with him to the far-off places that he
loved. They climbed together in the Alps, the Shawangunks, Tuolumne Meadows, and in Wyoming's Wind River
Range.
Let us not forget Gustavo's dream, his quest toward
balance.
- S. Rains ford Rouner
145
Membership of the HMC
Life Members
Aspinwall, Peter 18520 5th Avenue North Plymouth, MN 55447
Bates, Robert H. 153 High Street Exeter, NH 03833
Beal Jr., William D. P.O. Box One Jackson, NH 03846
Benner, MD, Gordon 155 Tampalpais Rd. Berkeley, CA 94708
Brokaw Jr., Caleb 646 West Road New Canaan, CT 06840
Brushart, Dr. Tom 3803 St. Paul St. Baltimore, MD 21218
Carman, Ted 103 Lake Shore Road #2 Brighton, MA 02135
Carter, H. Adams 361 Centre St. Milton, MA 02186
Carter, RobertS. P.O. Box 172 Medina, W A 98039
Chamberlin, Dr. Harrie R. 1001 Arrowhead Rd. Chapel Hill, NC
27514
Clarke, William L. 39 Baldwin Rd. Carlisle, MA 01741
Coulter, Douglas E. P.O. BOX 48 Chocorua, NH 03817
Cronk, Dr. Caspar 8 Langbourne Ave. London, ENGLAND N6 AL
Cummins, Clint A. 761 Allen Court Palo Alto, CA 94303-4111
Den Hartog, Stephen L. 102 Blueberry Hill Dr. Hanover, NH 03755
Dolginow, Dr. Doug 1060 Via Roble Lafayette, CA 94549
Dunn, Dr. Frederick L. 3829 22nd St. San Francisco, CA 94114
Embrick, MD, Andrew Valdez Medical Clinic P.O. Box 1829 Valdez,
AK 99686
Epps, Dean Archie 4 University Hall Cambridge, MA 02138
Erskine Jr., Linwood M. 23 Trowbridge Rd. Worcester, MA 01609
Ferris Jr., MD, Benjamin G. Box 305 10 Town House Rd. Weston,
MA 02193
Fetcher, Ned Harvard Forest Box 68 Petersham, MA 01366 USA
Ford, Charles 14 Apple Hill Road Sturbridge, MA 01566
Forster, Robert W. 2215 Running Springs Kingwood, TX 77339
Franklin, Dr. Fred A. Center for Astrophysics 60 Garden Street
Cambridge, MA 02138
Goody, Richard P.O. Box 430 Falmouth, MA 02541
Griscom, Andrew 1106 N. Lemon Ave Menlo Park, CA 94025
Hamilton, Ian M. The Grange East Chiltington Sussex, Lewes,
ENGLAND
Hartshorne, Robert 768 Contra Costa Ave. Berkeley, CA 94707
Heinemann, H. Eric 7 Woodland Place Great Neck, NY 11021
Henderson, Kenneth A. 29 Agawam Rd. Waban, MA 02168
Hill, MD, George J. 3 Silver Spring Rd. West Orange, NJ 07052
Hoguet III, Robert L. 139 E. 79th St. New York, NY 10021
Howe, David 84 Sasco Hill Rd. Fairfield, CT 06430
Imbrie, John Z. P.O. Box 300 Keswick, VA 22947-0300
Jameson, John T. 1262 LaCanada Way Salinas, CA 98901
Kerney, Keith P. 5505 Glenwood Road Bethesda, MD 20834
Lehner, Michael 2 Brimmer St., #2 Boston, MA 02108
Long, Alan K. 4 Old Stagecoach Rd Bedford, MA 01730
Magoun III, Francis P. Spy Rock Hill Rd. Manchester, MA 01944
Matthews, W. V. Graham Box 381 Carmel Valley, CA 93924
Maxwell, James C. 4053B Trinity Drive Los Alamos, NM 87544
McCarter, RobertS. P. 0. Box 8916 Rancho Santa Fe, CA 92067
McGrath, Michael P.R. 448 Barretts Mill Rd. Concord, MA 01742
McLeod Jr., John 5 Maya Lane Los Alamos, NM 87544
Mil de, Paul 10 Oakley Road Watertown, MA 02172
Miller, Maynard M. 514 East First St. Moscow, ID 83843
Millikan, Richard G.C. 2917 Regent St. Berkeley, CA 94705
Miner Jr., W. Lawrence 894 Weston Rd., Apt.#1 Arden, NC 28704
Nevison Jr., MD, Thomas 0. 130 Pearl St. #301 Denver, CO 80203
Nickerson, Albert W. 115 Mt. Auburn St., Apt. 63 Cambridge, MA
02138
Notman, John 902 Second Avenue Rd. Clinton, lA 52732
Oberlin, John C. 26140 Robb Rd. Los Altos, CA 94022
Ordway III, Samuel H. 19409 Ordway Rd. Weed, CA 96904
Page Jr., Robert A. 3125 Woodside Rd. Woodside, CA 94062
Palais, Bob 2148 South Wyoming St Salt Lake City, UT 84109
Pittman, Charles Valley Forge Towers, Apt. 1306 1000 Valley Forge
Circle King of Prussia, P A 19406
Pomerance, Stephen M. 335 17th St. Boulder, CO 80302
Putnam, William L. Carroll Travel Bureau Box 2130 Springfield, MA
01101
Rich, Dr. Paul Universidad de las Americas Apartado Postal Cholula
7280 Pueblo, MEXICO
Ridder, Walter T. 1219 Crest Lane McLean, VA 22101
Robinson, Cervin 251 W. 92nd St. New York, NY 10025
Rodning, Chris 127 Adams House Mail Center Cambridge, MA 02138
Ross, John H. 150 Upland Road Cambridge, MA 02140
Scott, Douglas C. 14 Northeast Rd. Farmington, CT 06032
Scudder, Thayer 2484 N. Altadena Drive Altadena, CA 91001
Silva, MD, Will 7315 17th Avenue NW Seattle, WA 98117
Sorger, Peter C. 319 Highland Ave. Winchester, MA 01890
Sosman, MD, John L. 648 Lowell Rd. Concord, MA 01742
Spitzer Jr., Lyman 659 Lake Drive Princeton, NJ 08540
Stacey, David S. 423 Sombrero Beach Rd., Apt. 9 Marathon, FL
33050
Story Jr., Leon A. 238 Essex St. Middleton, MA 01949
Streibert, Sam 294 Highland Ave. West Newton, MA 02165
Van Baak, David R. 1643 Hiawatha Rd.,SE Grand Rapids, MI 49506
147
Van Baalen, Mark 124 Witcomb Ave. Littleton, MA 01460
Walker Jr., John B. 643 Oenoke Ridge New Canaan, CT 06840
Walling, Ritner East Coast Salvage 29th and Adams Ave. Camden, NJ
08105
Warren, Steve Univ. of Washington, AK-40 Seattle, WA 98195
Washburn Jr., H. Bradford 220 SomersetStreet Belmont, MA 02178
Whipple, Earle R. 35 Elizabeth Rd. Belmont, MA 02178
White, Eric S. 237 Oblong Rd. Williamstown, MA 01267
Winkler, Jaye S. 872 Massachusetts Ave. Apt 309 Cambridge, MA
02139
Alumni Members
Abrons, Henry L. 675 Colonial Dr. Morgantown, WV 26505
Alt, James Ross Ave Phillips, ME 04966
Anagnostakis, Christopher 141 Linden St. New Haven, CT 06511
Anger, Douglas Psychology Department- McAlest University of
Missouri Columbia, MO 65201
Amason, John Department of Geology Stanford University Stanford,
CA 94305
Arnon, MD, Stephen 9 Fleetwood Court Orinda, CA 94563
Arsenault, Steve 5 Tilden St. Bedford, MA 01730
Atkinson, Bill 343 South Ave. Weston, MA 02193
Axen, Gary 24 Oxford St. Cambridge, MA 02138
Barrett Jr., Dr. James E. 10 Ledyard Lane Hanover, NH 03755
Bell, George I. 794 43rd St. Los Alamos, NM 87544
Bernays, David J. 45 Wenham Rd. Topsfield, MA 01983
Bernbaurn, Ed 1846 Capistrano Berkeley, CA 94707
Biddle, Robert 182 Garfield Pl. #3-F Brooklyn, NY 11215
Black, Linda 5 Hilliard Place Cambridge, MA 02138
Blake, Dr. Judith 9933 Mallard Dr. Laurel, MD 20708
Breen, John 8 Crescent Hill Ave. Lexington, MA 02173
Briggs, Winslow R. and Ann M. 480 Hale St. Palo Alto, CA 94301
Brown, Richard McPike 490 Estado Way Novato, CA 94947
Brown, Wil 13 Williams Glen Glastonbury, CT 06033
Bullough, Per 10 Regent Terrace, Cambridge CB2 1AA, England UK
Burke, James F. 84 East St. Foxboro, MA 02035
Callaghan, Haydie 22 Ashcroft Rd Medford, MA 02155
Carman, Peter T. Box 686 Wilson, WY 83014
Carter, Larry 51 Mystic St. West Medford, MA 02155
Carter, Madeleine 5036 Glenbrook Terrace, N. W. Washionton, D.C.
20016
Chamberlain, Lowell 12 Pacheco Creek Dr. Novato, CA 94947
Cobb, MD, John C. P.O. Box 1403 Corrales, NM 87048
Coburn, Jay 30 Princeton Ave. Beverley, MA 01915
148
Cochran, Nan 233 Ash St. Weston, MA 02193
Collins, Joseph 63 Commercial Wharf Boston, MA 02110
Conrad, Robert 66 Scott Rd. Belmont, MA 02178
Coombs, David 528 E 14th Ave Spokane, WA 99202
Cox, Rachel 352 S. Las Palmas Los Angeles, CA 90020
Crane, Peter 61 Lincoln St. Belmont, MA 02178
Custer, David P.O. Box 823 Cambridge, MA 02142
D'arcy, Ray 480 4th Street Oakland, CA 94607-3829
Daniels Jr., John L. 39 River Glen Rd. Weiiesley, MA 02181
Delappe, MD, Irving 8907 Ridge Place Bethesda, MD 20034
Dettmar, Ted Caretaker, HMC Huntington Ravine Cabin AMC
Pinkham Notch Camp Gorham, NH 03581
Dickey, Tom 1570 Granville Rd. Rock Hill, SC 29730
Driscoii, Ted 11 Sanstone Portola Vailey, CA 94026
Dumont, Jim RR 1 Box 220 Bristol, VT 05443
Durfee, Alan H. 28 Atwood Rd. South Hadley, MA 01075
Echevarria, Dr. Colorado State University Ft. Collins, CO 80521
Eddy, Garrett 4515 W. Ruffner St. Seattle, WA 98199
Eldrige, Harry K. Mountain Meadow Farm Cascade Rd. Lake Placid,
NY 12496
Elkind, James 23 Slough Road Harvard, MA 01451
Estreich, Lisa North House M308 Cambridge, MA 02138
Fair, Tory 1705 Massachusetts Ave., #12 Cambridge, MA 02138
Faulkner, Nathan 9 Bueii St. Hanover, NH 03755
Field Jr., William B. Osgood P.O. Box 583 55 Hurlbut Rd. Great
Barrington, MA 01230
Fisher, Dr. Elliott 65 Wallace Rd White River Junction, VT
05001-2219
Flanders, Tony 61 Sparks St. #3 Cambridge, MA 02138-2248
Freed, MD, Curt 9080 East Jewel Circle Denver, CO 80231
Gabrielson, Curt Student Canter 461 Massachusetts Institute of Tee
Cambridge, MA 02139
Gardiner, William 2612 Maria Anna Rd. Austin, TX 78731
Gehring, MD, John 328 Washington St. Wellesley Hills, MA 02181
Graham, William 64 Linnaean Currier Hse. Masters' Lodgings
Cambridge, MA 02138
Granit, Dennis 74 Webster Court Newington, CT 06111 USA
Green, Peter 77 Massachusetts Ave., 2-039 Cambridge, MA 02139
Gucker, Frank F. 392 a Great Rd., Apt. 302 Acton, MA 01720
Hamilton Jr., Scott D. Waikiki P. 0. Box 8803 Honolulu, HI 96815
Hamlin, Julie Meek Box 156 449 Hale St. Prides Crossing, MA 01965
Hardenburgh, Gordon P.O. Box 598 Morrison, CO 80465
Harding, Robert E. 2208 Newton Ave. South Minneapolis, MN 55405
Heriard, Bertrand 10 Martin St. Cambridge, MA 02138
Hightower, Prof. J.R. 2 Divinity Ave. Cambridge, MA 02138
149
Hoisington, Miles 461 Huron Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138
Hoover, Win 1240 Park Ave. New York, NY 10028
Hope, MD, Peter B. P.O. Box 160 Moultonboro, NH 03254
Houston, MD, Charles S. 77 Ledge Rd. Burlington, VT 05401
Howe, David E. P.O. Box 1137 Southport, CT 06490
Jackson, Paul 471 Washinton Street #5 Brookline, MA 02146-6139
Jameson, John T. 1262 La Canada Way Salinas, CA 93901
Jervis, Steven A. 482 East 16th St. Brooklyn, NY I 1226
Juncosa, Adrian M. Harvard Forest Petersham, MA 01366
Kari, Nadeau 471 Washington Street #5 Brookline, MA 02146
Kauffmann II, Andrew J. 2800 Woodley Rd., Apt. 438 Washington,
D.C. 20008
Kellogg, Howard Morgan 5 I Ivy Lane Tenafly, NJ 07670
Koob, John Route I 13 P.O. Box 101 Silver Lake, NH 03875
Laman, Tim P.O. Box 1604 Cambridge, MA 02138
Lehner, Peter 530 East 86th Street, #14A New York, NY 10028
Levin, Philip D. 10 Plum St. E. Gloucester, MA 01930
Lewis, Claudia 24 Oxford St. Cambridge, MA 02138
Lewontin, Steve Box 87 Marlboro, VT 05344
Lindsay, Derek The City College, Chemistry De Convent Ave, 138th
St. New York, NY 10031
Mantel Jr., Samuel J. 608 Flagstaff Dr. Wyoming, OH 45215
Mares, Dr. David R. 5013 Bristol Rd. San Diego, CA 92115
Margolin, Reuben Berkeley CA
Matelich, Michael San Diego CA
McGrail, Thomas. H. P.O. Box 2 I 9 Great Falls, VA 22066
McGrew, Seth Box 142 B Thetford Center, VT 05075
Merriam, MD, George I 1015 Ralston Rd. Rockville, MD 20852
Messer, Karen 2399 Jefferson #18 Carlsbad, CA 92008
Millikan, George C. 2917 Regent Street Berkeley, CA 94705
Moore, Alexandra 15 Draper St. Oneonta, NY 13820
Morton, Marcus Seaside 850 Baxter Blvd. Portland, ME 04103
Muhlhausen, Carl 10 Harvest Lane Tinton Falls, NJ 07718
Myles, David C. 715 Gayley Ave., No. 213 Los Angeles, CA 90024
Newton, John W. 20 Pleasant St. South Natick, MA 01760
Oberdorfer, Anthony H. I 50 Fletcher Road Belmont, MA 02178
Ousley, Mike 2900 Park Newport Apt. 340 Newport Beach, CA
92660-583 I
Overton, George I 700 East 56th Street, Apt. 29 Chicago, IL 60637
Pasterczyk, Jim 500 N. Roosevelt Blvd. #416 Falls Church, VA
22044
Patterson, William B. 43 Harrison St. Newton Highlands, MA 02161
Paul, Miles 2217 Greenlands Rd. Victoria, BC V8N IT6 C
Pugh, George I 124 Langridge Rd. Oakland, CA 94610
Rau, Dean 840 40th Ave. NE Wilmor, MN 56201
150
Reichardt, Dr. Louis F. 900 Darien Way San Francisco, CA 94127
Reiser, George & Pamela P. 0. Box 224 Lincoln Center, MA 01773
Riker, John L. 47 E 64th St. New York, NY 10021
Roberts, David 61 Dana Street #4 Cambridge, MA 02138
Rockwell, Susan 5001 Sedgwick St., NW Washington, D.C. 20016
Rogers, Peter M. 153 Chapel Road, P. 0. Box 97 Winchester Center,
CT 06094
Rosenfeld, Eric Graubard, Mollen, Horowitz, Po 600 Thrid Avenue,
Suite 3400 New York, NY 10016
Rubin, Alan 135 E. Leverett Rd. Amherst, MA 01002
Salton, Gillian 24 Oxford St. Cambridge, MA 02138
Scheer, David Scheer & Co., Inc. 250 W. Main St., P.O. Box 299
Branford, CT 06405
Schmidt, Christoph 70 Chester Rd. Belmont, MA 02178
Shankland, Susan 6 Mariposa Ct. Los Alamos, NM 87544
Shankland, Tom J. 6 Mariposa Ct. Los Alamos, NM 87544
Shor, MichaelS. 4306 Alton Place, NW. Washington, DC 20016
Sideman, Richard L. 14 Mara Vista Court Tiburon, CA 94920
Slaggie, Leo 6358 Lakewood Dr. Falls Church, VA 22041
Smith, Gordon 21 St. Mary Rd. Cambridge, MA 02139
Smyth, Joseph 230 E. 79th St. New York, NY 10021
Steele, Ben Greensboro Rd. RR #1, Box 374 Lebanon, NH 03766
Strickland, Steve 575 Mill Run Ct. Earlysville, VA 22936
Swanson, David H. P.O. Box 1400 Fort Wayne, IN 46801
Switkes, Eugene University of California Santa Cruz, CA 95064
Sylva, Laurie 80 Birchwood Ln. Lincoln, MA 01773
Taggart, Blake 17 Little Pt Street Essex, CT 06426-1076
Tanaka, Tom 13861 SE 62nd Street Bellevue, WA 98006
Tao, Winston 4 Clinton Court Plainsboro, NJ 08536-2325
Teague, Charles 11 Ellery St., Apt. 3 Cambridge, MA 02138
Useem, Michael 352 Woodley Road Merion, PA 19066
von Eckartsberg, Eric 15 CPL Burns Rd. Cambridge, MA 02138
Voss, John 187 Garfield Rd. Concord, MA 01742
Weiner, MD, Herbert 16666 Oldham St. Encino, CA 91436
Weinstein, Neil 123 N. Eighth Ave. Highland Park, NJ 08904
West, George 1020 Beechwood Little Rock, AR 72205
Wheeler, Quad 97 E. Hunting Ridge Rd. Stamford, CT 06903
Widrow, Larry 19 Chester Rd. Belmont, MA 02178
Williams, Andrea 236 Chestnut St. Cambridge, MA 02139
Active Members
Adler, Peter Currier B I 0 I Cambridge, MA 02138
Baldwin, Ed 11 Parker Pt Rd. Hopkinton, MA 02138
Benoit, Brian 202 Robbins St. #1 Waltham, MA 02154
151
Blair, Michael587 Eliot Mail Center Cambridge, MA 02138
Boyle, Bill Box 681 Weston, MA 02193
Brown, Steve 20 Commenwealth Ave Boston, MA
Bullough, Per 10 Regent Terrace Cambridge CB2 IAA, England UK
Carswell, Ian 404 29 Garden St. Cambridge, MA 02138
Cunningham, Glenn 32 Adams Mail Center Cambridge, MA 02138
Dillon, Theresa 24 Everett Street #203 Richards
Dubois, Chris 170 Lowell Mail Center Cambridge, MA 02138
Erskine, Brian 181 Winthrop Mail Center Cambridge, MA 02138
Finlaysan, Stuart Box 4669 Brown University Providence, RI 02192
Fuchs, Adam 333 Highland Ave. #3 Somerville, MA 02139
Gibbs, Dave 2 Hawthorne Place Apt.l6 Boston, MA
Gilbert, Scott 1431 Cambridge St. #I Cambridge, MA 02139
Gleason, Blake 1508 Harvard Yard Mail Center Cambridge, MA 02138
Goodman, Campe Quincy 304 Cambridge, MA 02138
Graham, Robin 445 Eliot Mail Center Cambridge, MA 02138
Grove, Nate 20 Dewolfe St. #46 Cambridge, MA 02138
Hallinan, Peter 41 Amsden St Arlington, MA 02170
Harrison, Nat Lowell House G-42
Hazelton, Rohan 342 Currier Mail Center Cambridge, MA 02138
Helfant, Ian 415 Broadway St. #5 Cambridge, MA 02138, MA 02138
Hemmer, Dan 28 Dimick St. Cambridge MA 02138
Henikoff, Jamie 335 Beacon St. #3 Boston, MA 02110
Hilton, Bruce Leverett F-25 Cambridge, MA 02138
Jackson, Leon 101 Lowell St. #2 Somerville, MA 02139
Jones, Marc 232 Quincy Mail Center Cambridge, MA 01238
Kantrowitz, Joshua Lowell House B-51
Keith, David 334 Harvard St. #B6 Cambridge, MA 02138
Leak, Jennifer 202 Robbins St. #1 Waltham, MA 02154
Lee, Eric Eliot A-22 Cambridge, MA 02138
Liftik, Michael 309 Lowell House Mail Center Cambridge, MA 02138
Lu, Mary 1899 Harvard Yard Mail Center Cambridge, MA 02138
Martin, Andy 200 North Mail Center Cambridge, MA 02138
Messmore, Beth Eliot G-21 Cambridge, MA 02138
Monteleoni, Claire 2007 Harvard Yard Mail Center Cambridge, MA
02138
Nolan, Jason 3 Sacramento St. Cambridge, MA 02138
Noymer, Andrew 24 Prescott St. #8 Cambridge, MA 02138
Olson, Jeff 264 Leverett Mail Center Cambridge, MA 02138
Parker, Rosalie 368 Lowell Mail Center Cambridge, MA 02138
Peterson, Wil 69 Beacon St Sumerville, MA
Phillips, Carl Kennedy School room G-27 Cambridge, MA 02138
Platts-Mills, Tim 531 Kirkland Mail Center Cambridge, MA 02138
Rice, Joe 628 Quincy House
Ritvo, Jess 2204 Harvard Yard Mail Center Cmabridge, MA 02138
152
Roth, Mark 537 Kirkland Mail Center Cambridge, MA 02138
Sassen, Lee Eliot G-11 Cambridge, MA 02138
Scanlon, Eben Lowell House E-12
Schoellerman, John 442 Kirkland Mail Center Cambridge, MA 02138
Sondheimer, Neil 628 Quincy House
Soschin, Alex Lowell House 0-41
Sutton, Doug Mather 182 Cambridge, MA 02138
Swidler, Joshua Kirkland B-24 Cambridge, MA 02138
Tan, Ray 12 Oxford Street Cambridge, MA 02138
Taylor, Rebecca S. 442 Quincy Mail Center Cambridge, MA 02138
Thompson, Allen 199 Park Drive 41 Boston, MA 02215
Tripp, Matthew 488 Withrop Mail Center Cambridge, MA 02138
Vescovo, Victor 6 Soldiers Field Park #415 Alston, MA 02134
White, Arthur Eliot House
Whitney, Wayne 215 Dunster Mail Center Cambridge, MA 02138
Wright, Rob 2 Peabody Terrace #609 Cambridge, MA 02138
153
About the Contributors
Peter Adler '94 lived in Currier House and concentrated
in Environmental Science.
Edward K. Baldwin Ph.D. '87 became associated with
the HMC while a graduate student in Chemistry, and has
since remained active in the Club. He lives in Hopkinton,
Massachusetts.
David Blumenthal '94, Design Editor, concentrated in
Visual and Environmental Studies and was affiliated with
Dudley House.
Steve Brown '90 is a Ph.D. candidate in Biochemistry.
Wil Brown became active in the HMC through his son
Steve. He lives in Connecticut.
Ted Carman '63, President Emeritus of the HMC, lives in
Brighton, Massachusetts. Ted has been instrumental in the
upkeep of the Cabin, which he helped to build.
Andrew Embick M.D. '77, lives and practices medicine
in Valdez, Alaska.
Peter G. Green works at Caltech and became associated
with the HMC while he was a Boston-area resident.
Andrew Noymer '93-95, Editor, is affiliated with
Leverett House and studies Biology.
Carl V. Phillips is a Ph.D. candidate at the John F.
Kennedy School of Government.
William L. Putnam '45, President Emeritus of the
HMC, lives in Springfield, Massachusetts, and is active in
the American Alpine Club and the Union Internationale des
Assocations d'Alpinisme (UIAA).
David Roberts '65, President Emeritus of the HMC,
lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and is a writer.
Chris Rodning '94 lived in Adams House and
concentrated in Archaeology. Chris was President of the
HMC 1992-3.
Will Silva '74 is a physician in Seattle.
Rebecca Taylor '96 lives in Quincy House and is an
Applied Mathematics concentrator.
Victor L. Vescovo M.B.A. '94 is moving back to
Texas after completing his studies at the Harvard School of
Business Administration.
154
Grandes Jorasses and clouds, Mont Blanc Massif,
Andrew Noymer photo

1994 Issue - The Harvard Mountaineering Club

Transcription

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