Denali's Howl: The Deadliest Climbing Disaster on America's Wildest Peak (19 page)

“
It’s funny, we had some friends here that I knew from college, who knew I had been on the climb, and they introduced me to their friends like, ‘Here’s Paul, he climbed McKinley back in 1967 in a tragic situation.’ All I could think was, Well, that was a long, long time ago and I’m not sure why they brought it up in a first introduction.”

Of the three Colorado climbers, Jerry Lewis had the most difficulty during the climb, and Snyder said Lewis has tried to distance himself from the experience. “
He suffered physically and emotionally way more than we did on this trip and really finds revisiting it to be unpleasant.”

Lewis didn’t respond to my requests to talk about the climb. Neither did Anshel Schiff, whom Joe Wilcox described as being in poor health and uninterested in talking about the past.

My father remained close to many of those who had worked on the Wilcox rescue. Vin and Grace Hoeman were frequent visitors at our home in the park and the one in South Anchorage for a couple of years following the tragedy. Though my father was ten years his senior, he and Hoeman both were avid letter writers and meticulous collectors. My father’s interest was in polar history; Hoeman’s was Alaska mountaineering.
He maintained a card catalog noting the climbing accomplishments of nearly every serious mountaineer actively climbing at that time, and he was working on a comprehensive climbing guide to Alaska’s mountains. Hoeman was thirty-three years old when he died in 1969, swept away by an avalanche on Mount Dhaulagiri in the Himalayas, along with
five of America’s finest mountaineers and two Sherpas. Vin’s wife, Grace Jansen Hoeman, was denied the summit of Denali twice in 1967, both times due in part to altitude sickness, but in 1970, at age forty-nine, she led an all-female expedition to the top. She was traversing Eklutna Glacier north of Anchorage the following year when
she met the same fate as her husband and was buried by an avalanche along with her climbing partner Hans Van Der Laan.

Ray Genet, who reached the summit twice in 1967, remained a close family friend for many years. He presented me with my Eagle Scout Award in 1978, and we often visited him in his tiny cabin near Talkeetna—my father usually went in first to make sure that the attractive young women who often accompanied Genet were appropriately dressed for a family visit. Genet pioneered guided climbing on Denali, founding Genet Expeditions, and made more successful ascents of the mountain than any other climber before he died at age forty-eight on the slopes of
Mount Everest, where his body remains.

The last time I saw Don Sheldon, he was wearing a wool watch cap and a down vest, ambling through the terminal at Anchorage International Airport. He and my father clasped hands like long-lost friends, and Sheldon gave me a wry smile and a vigorous handshake too. Then the two men stood there and talked for what seemed like an hour. Though Sheldon had cheated death scores of times while performing rescues on Denali and in the surrounding country, he died in bed, felled by cancer in 1975 at age fifty-four.

My father’s friendships with these adventurers were always puzzling to me. He was not like them; he did not climb, nor for that matter was he much of an outdoorsman. After leaving the Park Service, my father wore suits and worked in an office, yet he remained close to some of the leading climbers of the ’60s and ’70s, and they treated him as if he were one of their own. I never understood why until after his death in 2005 at age eighty-one.

For as long as I can recall, a framed paper certificate hung on the wall of my father’s office, an honorary lifetime membership in the Mountaineering Club of Alaska. Toward the end of his life, when his memory was poor, he told me he got it for keeping Denali open to climbing but the details eluded him. When he died and I was writing his obituary, I tried to learn more about the award, but his climbing friends were long dead and calls to several current club members revealed nothing. It wasn’t until I was nearly finished with the research for this book that I learned the story.

My sister found the certificate among our father’s belongings and read the faded signature of the MCA president, revealing the name Frank Nosek, now a well-known attorney still practicing law at age seventy-eight, and serving as the honorary consulate to the Czech Republic. When I went to his law firm in downtown Anchorage, he met me in the lobby and said, “
My office is on the second floor; let’s take the stairs, it keeps you young.” By his fit appearance and sharp mind, I figured he knew what he was talking about and followed as he jogged up the steps.

“Your dad was a real friend to the climbing community,” Nosek began as we settled into chairs in his slightly cluttered office. “I remember designing that certificate; it was one of a kind. We’d never given one before. We wanted to thank him.”

The Wilcox tragedy was the worst climbing accident to occur on Denali or in North America when it occurred and the worst accident to take place in a national park. Understandably it hadn’t gone unnoticed by higher-ups in the Park Service. In the fall of 1967 John Rutter, Alaska’s San Francisco–based regional director, called my father and made an unprecedented demand:
end climbing in Mount McKinley National Park.

Because a tragedy had occurred in July, and a near tragedy had occurred in the winter, Regional Director Rutter considered the mountain too dangerous for mountaineering, and his solution was to close it. The regional director didn’t have the authority to ban climbing in the park himself, but the superintendent did.

My father refused.

In 1999 former superintendent George Hall told Park Service historian Kristen Griffen about John Rutter’s demand. “He wouldn’t put it in writing. He wouldn’t take any positive step. He wanted me to stick my neck out. Now, mountain climbing is a legitimate recreation program, it’s just that there should be some more support and control to it.”

Nosek was chairman of the Mountaineering Club of Alaska in 1967 and said the climbing community in Alaska and in the Pacific Northwest was well aware of the threat of closure yet unsure how to fight it.

“
We wanted to show our opposition to that idea, but we didn’t really have any place to show it, except your dad. And so we did. We felt like we had a connection, a reasonable connection, with a very, very unreasonable government agency. It was an agency we couldn’t—we didn’t have the ability to—fight. But we did have an open ear with their local representative, and he was sympathetic and reasonable.”

The pressure to close the mountain eased as winter set in and the horror of the accident began to fade. Some time that fall, Rutter withdrew his demand. In December 1967 the Mountaineering Club of Alaska recognized my father with an honorary lifetime membership signed by Nosek. It hung on the wall of every office my father occupied after he left the Park Service, and in the last years of his life it adorned the wall of his den at our home in Anchorage and remained there until his death.

“The appreciation for your dad having that attitude was enormous in the climbing community here,” Nosek said. “He worked with us. I don’t know what he went through, but he was our front line against that movement to shut down the mountain, so we’ve always credited him with having defeated that very, very bad idea.”

As my father had put it at the review meeting: “The people making the climbs generally were just doing it, they were just guys hanging around. They were just people who wanted to climb the damned mountain. They had no money, and they usually gave up their jobs to come up and climb.”

He didn’t want those people shut out of Denali.

F
our of the men simply vanished. The three bodies found on the mountain revealed few clues to their final hours. And over the decades since the storm engulfed them, no new evidence has turned up. But, as Brad Washburn predicted, climbing has grown in popularity and thousands of climbers can now say they have reached the summit of Denali. A few have returned with stories that might shed light on what it was like inside the storm that engulfed the mountain in late July 1967.

In late May 1997, longtime climbing guide Blaine Smith led a Denali expedition that bore remarkable similarities to the second Wilcox summit team: Smith’s party also consisted of seven men; during their ascent two climbers chose to forego the summit and wait while five went to the top. Near the summit, those five were overtaken by an unexpected storm. And when the wind velocity approached 100 miles per hour and reaching the safety of their high camp became impossible, the party was caught above Denali Pass, unable to move and fighting to find a way to survive in the relentless wind.

Blaine Smith is in his early fifties, lantern-jawed, tall, and fit, with thin brown hair and the energy and mannerisms of a man half his age. His face has acquired some character since we first met more than forty years ago while attending Rabbit Creek Elementary School in Anchorage: his nose is scarred by frostbite picked up on Denali, and one brown eye is surrounded by a titanium socket thanks to a slap delivered by a grizzly bear near his home in the Anchorage suburb of Eagle River. His demeanor, however, remains remarkably unchanged: he is enthusiastic and cheerful, and when he talks about Denali, where he once made his living, Smith laces his descriptions with colorful imagery, humor,
*
and authority gained from decades of climbing and guiding there.

On May 29, 1997, Smith roused his clients at the 17,200-foot high camp on the West Buttress. Though the forecast called for good weather, Smith made his own observation before deciding whether to head out on the 3,000-foot climb to the summit.

The wind blew from the north, and the telltale signs of an approaching low—clouds, either creeping up the lower mountain or amassing around nearby peaks—were nonexistent.

“The lows usually come from the south,” he said. “A lot of times that high ends up outcompeting the low and you’re golden, not a big deal.”

The north wind appeared to be doing just that.

With all signs looking promising, he and assistant guide Willy Peabody set out for Denali Pass around 9:15
A
.
M
. leading five clients. The team carried two ropes, two steel shovels, a scoop shovel, a few snow saws, a stove, a pot, fuel, and extra food and water. Smith also carried an oversized bivouac sack, and each man had a sleeping bag and down pants and a parka. Smith’s pack weighed close to 40 pounds; his clients carried 25-pound packs.

By the time they reached Denali Pass, the thin overcast sky had burned off, and the sun was out. Still, Smith was cautious.

“We were kind of creeping into this thing thinking that if we did get bad weather, that we turn around and bolt,” he said.

They continued on to Archdeacon’s Tower, a rocky 19,550-foot spur rising above Denali Pass, under sunny skies. After a short break, they reached the small plateau below the summit ridge at 19,200 feet known as the Football Field. The entire route was scoured by wind—hard packed and icy, with little loose snow. Where the wind had dislodged wands along the well-traveled route, they replaced them, though the icy crust made planting them difficult. The climbing here isn’t technical, but the thin air, heavy packs, cold, and constant uphill pace is challenging even on a good day.

At the upper end of the Football Field, one of the climbers ran out of steam.

Peabody built a windbreak, fired up a stove to heat water and food, and the two men hunkered down at the foot of a last rise to the summit ridge known as Pig Hill to wait for the summit team to return.

The others continued with two rope teams, Smith in the lead, up the hill and onto the summit ridge.

“That’s usually how it goes. If it’s easy terrain, you usually are in front. If someone has trouble, you can belay him up,” Smith said. “You’ve got a lot more mobility on the end than if you’re tied in the middle.”

When they reached the summit around 6:00
P
.
M
. the skies were clear and the sun shined, but the wind had picked up to about 20 miles per hour. A bit brisk, Smith thought, but not enough to be too concerned.

“That’s not that unusual on top,” he said, “and it was still blowing from the north, which was good for us.”

As his clients posed for photos and celebrated their success, Smith watched the sky begin to change and felt his heart drop.

“In the process of five or ten minutes of being on the summit, it went from clear to opaque to overcast. Then the wind built from twenty to twenty-five from the north. Then the wind all of a sudden shifted and came from the south. As soon as it shifted and the sky turned opaque, I was alarmed.”

The clouds he had been watching for all day materialized as if by magic, and the southwest wind pushed a column of warm, damp air up against the icy mountain, creating a cloud cap with Smith and his team caught inside.

“It was the worst time for it to happen,” he said. “It could have happened at any other time, but right then we were the farthest we could have possibly have been away from safety.”

His first thought was to get the climbers off of the summit ridge as quickly as possible without endangering them.

“I didn’t want us to go in two teams anymore because I didn’t want to lose anybody.”

He put the entire team on one rope and he clipped in last.

“So everybody was out ahead of me, and I was driving them like horses,” he said. “I was yelling, ‘It’s time to go, let’s go!’ I was doing everything but putting my boot in their ass. They could tell I was serious.”

Partway down the ridge, the rope slowed and finally stopped. The men were spread out at 50-foot intervals ahead of him, and from his vantage point at the back of the line, he couldn’t tell what was happening.

“I’m like, Holy shit, let’s get going! What’s the fucking malfunction?”

At the other end of the rope, the lead climber had stopped at one of the most exposed parts of the ridge and began yelling for help. With mist hampering Smith’s view, he had little choice but to unclip his harness from the rope, hook his arm around it, and begin running down the ridge.

“I’ve got my crampons on, my pack, the whole show,” he said.

As he approached each man, he let go of the rope briefly, then hooked his arm around it again and continued running. It seemed to be a good idea until he tripped and went over the north side of the ridge. Suddenly he was sliding down on his knees hoping the rope would come tight. One of the clients saw him go down and jumped off the other side to counteract his fall.

The rope came tight and Smith pulled himself up to the trail.

“Dave was on the other side of the hill in the snow,” Smith said. “It was a gutsy move, but I didn’t have time to thank him. I yelled at him to get up and get going.”

When Smith reached the lead climber he saw that the man’s goggles had fogged up and he was unable to see. “So I calmed down and said, ‘Let’s take them off, let’s put them someplace else.’”

Then he realized why the climber was panicking: ice had built up and the goggles had frozen to his face.

“So I took my fist and hit him in the goggles and the lens popped out,” Smith said. “I grabbed the lens and said, ‘How’s that?’ He said, ‘OK.’ I said, ‘Let’s go!’ I could feel the window closing and I felt like, Oh man, we got to get going, we got to get going.”

Once off of the precarious summit ridge and down Pig Hill, Smith took the lead position on the rope to set the pace.

“I just drug them down the hill. I was just ruthless.”

They collected themselves on the Football Field, but the wind picked up and a full-on whiteout descended. After several desperate minutes spent searching for Peabody and his charge, the party reunited and continued on.

Near Archdeacon’s Tower, two British climbers overtook them, also heading for the 17,200-foot camp on the West Buttress.

“We offered for them to join forces, that they could go down with us,” Smith said.

They refused, saying they could move faster on their own, and disappeared into the fog and wind. As Smith and Peabody led their clients toward Denali Pass the wands grew sparse and they had to slow down. Here the trail leading to the West Buttress can be easily confused with one that leads to a part of the mountain known as the Orient Express, a slope of 40 to 45 degrees that drops 2,000 feet from the top of the West Rib to a crevasse field.

“It’s super easy to get disoriented when you’re in the blender like that,” Smith said. “So, in the middle of this windstorm I dug in the top of my pack, pulled out my map—managed to hang on to my map—dug out my compass, and reoriented myself.”

Soon they were picking up wands again, but as they approached Denali Pass the wind became overpowering. At about 19,200 feet Smith stopped his climbers and continued alone to a ridge that overlooked the pass. When he crested it, the wind knocked him down. “It usually takes a wind of eighty or so to push me over,” he said. “It’s a guess on my part; I only know that I couldn’t stand up.”

It was then that the two guides decided to hole up and wait out the storm.

“So I said, ‘OK, gentlemen, it’s time to dig in.’ Then the adventure started, the fun and games were over, and now it was going to get serious.”

They broke out the steel shovels and discovered that the wind had denuded the slope of snow.

“It was as hard as this table,” Smith said, rapping his knuckles on the wood under his cup. “There is no place to dig in. We thought we’d find a drift someplace.”

But no matter where they probed, they found only ice and rock. Meanwhile the storm was battering his clients.

When one man turned his back to the gusts, the wind filled his mittens and carried them away. Minutes later, both of his hands were frozen. Another’s goggles frosted up, so he removed them and made the mistake of looking into the wind. In a matter of minutes his corneas froze, blinding him.

“We lost two sleeping bags right out of the gate,” Smith continued. “They were trying to get their sleeping bags out and all of a sudden the thing inflates like a balloon. One guy was just hanging on to it and he was getting drug off, he was going to go away. I had to yell, ‘Let go of the sleeping bag!’ and that’s it. It’s gone.”

The guides continued to brainstorm ways to create a shelter; even a windbreak would have helped. But the storm made it nearly impossible to even manipulate a shovel.

“Gravity had totally shifted. The shovel was all over the place. Every time it went crossways to the wind it flipped up in the air and hit somebody in the head.”

Finally, Smith got three men into the large bivouac sack. When he looked up, one of the others was walking away.

“I didn’t know what the hell he was doing. I’ve got to get him back because if he gets a few more feet away, I was not going to be able to find him.”

Desperate to block the wind, he considered emptying the packs and filling them with snow to make a buttress. It would have been a feeble shelter, but better than nothing. Then Peabody found a thick layer of snow that had collected in a small depression. It was hard and deep enough to make blocks, so they pulled out their snow saws and started building an igloo. An hour and a half later, three men were huddled inside the igloo and two were tucked into the bivouac sack.

The diameter of the igloo was about three feet and the men were packed in, elbow to elbow. Spindrift blew through the door, creating a minor snowstorm inside. One man checked the temperature in the igloo; it was 30 degrees below zero.

Outside, Peabody and Smith ran out of snow-block material.

Their clients were safe, but they were not. The wind was moving so fast that it was becoming difficult to breathe.

“You’d have to get a kind of bubble just to breathe,” Smith said. “If you face into the wind, it would pile-drive you, like drinking from a fire hose. If you face downwind then you’d get all of these vortices; you couldn’t even pull air into your lungs. So you try to position your face so you can just take a breath.”

The seriousness of the situation was lost on no one. By now, everyone realized the precariousness of their position, and one of the men in the igloo, overcome by claustrophobia, stood up, bursting through the snow blocks like a girl popping out of a cake.

“So now there’s a hole in the igloo and I’m patching it up again,” Smith says.

Over the next several hours, the two men struggled to build shelter for themselves, but each time they got close the wind destroyed it or one of them knocked it over.

“We were getting punchier and punchier and punchier. It finally got to the point where we dug a ranger trench. It was only deep enough for one of us. So Willy got into it and I put a top over it.”

He didn’t stay inside long, saying being buried in the long, shallow pit was too much like lying in a grave. Finally, after hours out in the wind they gave up on the structure and sat with their arms around each other. Their noses were frozen porcelain white, they were exhausted, and they came to think that they weren’t going to make it.

“I was trying to think how could we salvage the best thing out of this,” Smith said. “We had one client named Andy who was doing really well. He was our strongest client, and I thought that Willy and he could probably make it down.”

Though he was fully capable of descending too, Smith would stay behind.

“I had always wondered, if things got really, really bad, if I would just save myself,” he said. “Could I just say, ‘Well, this didn’t work out,’ and stay alive and everyone else would just croak. So that was a big thing for me. I decided I wouldn’t leave my clients, I decided no matter what it took—even if it cost me my life—I would stay.”

He sat there, huddled against the chaos around him, and thought about his wife, and the burden she would have to shoulder without him.