Denali's Howl: The Deadliest Climbing Disaster on America's Wildest Peak (8 page)

McLaughlin also complained about the fast pace, even though he, Wilcox, Luchterhand, and Janes had been overtaken. Luchterhand had been sick all day, so Wilcox slowed down. Snyder established high camp at 17,900 feet near the base of the north peak’s highest buttress. The spot offered almost no wind protection, but little was to be had anywhere nearby. “
Seeking shelter here was like trying to hide in the cracks of a sidewalk,” observed Wilcox, but the snowless buttress overhead meant avalanche hazard was small. The second rope team finally arrived, and Luchterhand vomited again before retiring to his sleeping bag.

Snyder, Schlichter, Lewis, Wilcox, Luchterhand, McLaughlin, Janes, and Clark settled into camp for the night just a mile and a half from, and 2,500 feet below, their goal, the summit of the south peak. At this point, the miles meant nothing. As the crow flies, they were only 16.5 miles from McGonagall Pass, but each man had walked or skied many times that distance, making multiple climbs and descents to break trail and haul gear. Not only had they successfully threaded the needle between crevasse fall and avalanche hazard, but they also had pushed themselves to their physical limits to reach this point.

Now at altitude, the hazards became less obvious. Their bodies were much less able to absorb oxygen, and the air held half the oxygen they were accustomed to in the first place. The resulting shortage in the bloodstream meant an increase in heart rate as their bodies worked harder to deliver oxygen to crucial organs. At the same time, their bodies demanded twice the calories needed at sea level, but the fats and proteins that best provide those calories are scarce because the digestive system is suppressed in favor of cardiovascular efficiency. In fact, eating fats and proteins above 14,000 feet can hinder acclimatization when the body has to trade cardiovascular efficiency
in order to digest rich foods. Even resting at this altitude takes a toll. Their best bet was to get to the summit as quickly as they could.

The weather continued to guide their movement. The light fog had cleared away as they traversed the Harper Glacier. The high-pressure system that had arisen over the Bering Sea, far to the southwest, continued to hold its ground as predicted, but the low-pressure system was moving from the north, building strength as it approached. Still, there was no reason to think a meteorological event of epic proportions was coming. Clear skies prevailed; there were no surprising wind shifts, no dramatic changes in temperature. The eight men at high camp settled into their sleeping bags for the night.

Before Wilcox’s advance party fell asleep at high camp on the night of July 14, snow began to fall. Nevertheless, a radio conversation gave them further hope that the window of good weather would stay open long enough for them to go for the summit in the morning. At the 15,000-foot Camp VI, John Russell, who was in contact with his teammates above and rangers at the Eielson Center below, asked the latter for a weather report.

“I’m afraid we don’t have any new weather reports for you,” the ranger replied to Russell. “We couldn’t get headquarters very well today. About the best we can do is give you the barometer reading and tendency. Surprisingly enough, it’s up a tenth from yesterday, 30.35.”

It was surprising because although the two-day forecast they had heard the day before predicted a couple of good days, everyone was expecting conditions to start deteriorating, not improve, as increasing barometer pressure typically indicates. But Russell didn’t know that.

“Fine. I’m not very familiar with what barometer readings mean,” Russell responded. “Can you interpret?”

“Well, generally a rising barometer is a good sign,” the ranger said. “That’s about all you can go by without a lot of other data also. If you’re going to want a schedule in the morning, why, we can try to get some information for you by then, but we couldn’t get it this evening.”

“Does that barometer reading mean it’s going to stop snowing pretty soon?”

“I won’t commit myself to that, but what is the weather like up there? The weather was considerably worse down here late morning.”

“Well, it was snowing about five minutes ago and now it’s clear for ten miles.”

The radio conversation went on for almost half an hour, during which the climbers at the upper and lower camps talked with one another and rangers at Eielson, discussing food and the weather conditions in the park and on the mountain. They also had a brief exchange with a radio operator from Sitka, who, by some fluke of meteorological conditions, was able to communicate with them even though he was hundreds of miles to the south. Before signing off, Wilcox told the rangers that he planned to make a summit attempt in the morning, though he wasn’t sure how many would be in the party.

Since reliable communication between the park and the mountain was almost nonexistent prior to the Wilcox Expedition, there had been little demand for the park to provide weather forecasts for climbers. When forecasts were requested, rangers at Eielson could pass on only their own observations and weather reports picked up from Anchorage radio stations.

At the time, the National Weather Service collected information on atmospheric conditions like temperature, wind, and precipitation via balloons launched daily from Anchorage, McGrath, and Fairbanks, locations that roughly triangulate around Denali. However, that information would have been hard to translate into mountain-specific weather forecasts, according to Ted Fathauer, who worked as a National Weather Service meteorologist in Alaska from 1970 until his death in January 2013.

“
It was primitive then,” Fathauer said. “I remember getting a call that first year I was in Alaska. They wanted to know what was going to happen on McKinley. I had no clue. That was like asking someone’s seven-year-old daughter what was going to happen on the stock market. I understood charts and all of this stuff, but I didn’t understand the meteorology up there.” Fathauer would go on to develop reliable weather forecasting for Denali, but it would be more than a decade in the making.

In 1967, according to Frank Nosek, president of the MCA that year, climbers relied on their own weather observations and reports from fellow climbers and mountain pilots like Don Sheldon and Cliff Hudson.

“
They could look at the mountain and look at the clouds and, just from their experience, know,” Nosek said. “I can remember flying in with Sheldon a couple of times and having to turn around and come back simply because while it looked good to go, it wasn’t good when you got there.”

None of the men on the Wilcox Expedition had been on Denali before, and while some, like Snyder, Schlichter, Clark, and Wilcox, had enough experience to recognize the signs of deteriorating weather, none had Denali-specific knowledge.

A juggernaut was bearing down on the mountain. The meteorological forces that would clash were powerful but unremarkable individually. Only when they came together would their potential be released. The counterclockwise-spinning low-pressure system was approaching from the north with its warm, moisture-laden winds. The big high-pressure system was still parked over the Alaska Range, its cold, dry air naturally rotating in the opposite direction. Soon, they would touch, rotating in tandem like cogs in a great weather machine, the air pouring from high to low and generating winds at the summit beyond imagining.

F
our months earlier, while Joe Wilcox was still planning his expedition, Art Davidson, Dave Johnston, and Ray Genet became the first men to conquer Denali in winter when they stepped onto the summit late in the day on February 28. They clutched one another in a three-way hug and looked out into the night. There were no spectacular views of Mounts Foraker and Silverthrone; no thunderheads boiling up into the dark-blue sky; no lowlands stretching off toward the sea: it was dark. A faint glimmer of lights marked the city of Anchorage far to the south on the shores of Cook Inlet.

It was the culmination of an ascent fraught with cold and hardship. Eight men began the journey together; one died early in the climb and four others set aside their summit aspirations to support the three strongest climbers who reached the summit. It would go down in the annals of mountaineering history, but only if they returned home to tell the tale. Standing there, alone in the dark on the highest summit in North America, they had no idea that the hardest part of their journey was yet to come.

That night they bivouacked beneath a parachute 2,000 feet below the summit at Denali Pass and woke in the heart of a ferocious windstorm. As Davidson and Genet huddled under the flimsy shelter, Johnston sought refuge from the wind that threatened to peel them off the mountain.
Neither Johnston nor Davidson can recall why they were using a parachute. Johnston says it was light and didn’t require any setup, so convenience might have been the main reason. He thought they might have found the chute among supplies left by a prior expedition. Such caches were often left on purpose and were fair game for those in need. In any case, the wind soon carried the parachute away.

Johnston dug a snow cave just large enough to fit his two companions and his own six-foot-seven frame, and there the three men weathered the storm for a week. They had little food and almost no fuel to melt snow for water. When it ran out, Genet made a desperate dash into the storm to retrieve a fuel can cached by Johnston when he traversed Denali in 1963. The wind pinned Genet to the ground, so he made his way to the cache on his belly, crawling forward with the aide of two ice axes. He returned with precious fuel that kept the stove melting water, allowing them to survive in the icy cavity for a few more days in hopes of outlasting the wind.

Most of the climbers were Alaskans, and their bid to be the first to reach the summit in winter was big news in Alaska. When Jacques “Farine” Batkin fell into a crevasse and died just a few days into the climb, interest in the expedition only intensified. They climbed on, despite Batkin’s death, tracked by local newspapers and radio stations. But late in the month, as the climbers neared the summit, a storm rolled in and the summit team went silent.

Other team members who waited below could see the stricken men and tried to reach Denali Pass but were pushed back by the howling wind. It was March 5 when a civilian aircraft spotted their distress signal and
notified the Alaska Rescue Group (ARG), a civilian search and rescue organization under contract with the Air Force and the Park Service to perform mountain rescues. Since 1956, when President Dwight Eisenhower signed the National Search and Rescue Plan, the US Air Force—specifically the Alaska Air Command—had sole responsibility for search and rescue on inland regions of Alaska. Search and rescue was (and still is) coordinated by the Rescue Coordination Center (RCC) at Elmendorf Air Force Base (now Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson) in Anchorage. The ARG stood by to execute ground rescues and the Mount McKinley National Park superintendent or his representative coordinated any rescue effort that did not require assistance from the RCC. Soon word was out that the three men had disappeared into a ferocious storm that continued to hammer the upper mountain. Rescuers from the ARG and the Seattle-based Mountain Rescue Council, Air Force representatives, rangers from Mount McKinley National Park, and several reporters gathered in Talkeetna. But all they could do was wait for the weather to break.

“
Nothing moved,” said Gary Hansen, who was chairman of the ARG that year. “There was no overflight, or attempt to search for or rescue the winter group until the storm was over.”

The one exception was Talkeetna pilot Don Sheldon. He had ferried the expedition in to the Kahiltna Glacier, brought out Batkin’s body, and had been checking on them throughout the climb.

Sheldon was known to routinely risk his life when flying rescue missions on Denali and throughout the region. His son, Robert, told me his father had been a tail gunner in a B-17 during World War II and was the sole survivor when his aircraft crashed during a bombing run.

“
He had a great guilt that he had survived when the others didn’t,” Robert said. “He believed all lives were precious and if he could help save one, he would.”

When Sheldon heard his three friends were lost, he launched his plane, but even he couldn’t get close to the peak and found himself running in place on a midair treadmill: “
Yeah, I was hucklebuck’n on up there to take a look at ma boys, when I look out the window . . . Whoa . . . I seen this ridge just standin’ still. I look down at my speedometer and it says 140 miles per hour. Yowza, I had to fly 140 just to keep even with that ol’ wind.”

Gary Hansen visited the Rescue Coordination Center at Elmendorf Air Force Base on the evening of March 6, to ask the commander to launch an observation flight. The commander agreed to send up a plane, weather permitting, and told Hansen he had to go along as an observer.

“
His parting comment was, ‘OK, you’ve got the flight at sunrise tomorrow morning. But you will be on the flight and if anything goes wrong, the crew will have orders to open the big flap in back and kick you out,’” Hansen recalls with a laugh.

The storm broke on March 7, and Johnston, Genet, and Davidson emerged from their cave frostbitten and weak with hunger. The wind had died, but a whiteout enveloped the upper mountain. Davidson dug into an ancient supply cache with his ice ax and unearthed food that looked to be at least fifteen years old but still edible. Thus nourished they descended into the whiteout. With skies clear above the whiteout and the winds diminished, both military and civilian aircraft took off and headed for the mountain. Around noon, Paul Crews of the Alaska Rescue Group, riding as an observer aboard an Air Force C-130,
spotted three men descending near 18,000 feet. Sheldon took his Cessna 180 in for a closer look and recognized his friends. Though he couldn’t land, he dropped a bag of oranges and a radio
before heading back to report their position.

Though Talkeetna had been crowded with would-be rescuers and the Air Force stood ready, neither contributed to the climbers’ survival. Only after the storm broke did the Air Force fly, and by then Genet, Davidson, and Johnston were out of the cave and well on their way to Sheldon’s Kahiltna Glacier airstrip. They had survived because of their experience and strength in alpine arctic conditions. It was only after some debate that the three agreed to board the military helicopter sent to evacuate them.

Frank Nosek was president of
the Mountaineering Club of Alaska and an officer in the ARG in 1967. He helped organize the ARG’s rescue preparations and said that the winter storm’s ability to ground all the people and the extensive resources gathered in Talkeetna was a wake-up call for the Alaska Rescue Group.

“
That one set us back on our heels,” Nosek said. “We didn’t do anything in particular to help out. We tried, but we found out that we weren’t able to help them because they were in an environment where help was very difficult to get to them.”

He said that after the incident the ARG took a hard look at how it could improve its effectiveness. The group established better and more regular communications with the RCC and put greater attention on climbing application reviews, realizing that an expedition’s ability to self-rescue was still paramount.

Ranger Wayne Merry said the ARG’s stringent requirements were effective in that pursuit. “
The club had fairly high requirements for whom they granted permits, and the result of that process was that if climbers were able to get a club permit, then they probably wouldn’t need a rescue.”

Nosek says concerns brought to light by the Winter Ascent, as it came to be called, were still fresh when Joe Wilcox’s application reached the ARG. Around that time George Hall, the new superintendent of Mount McKinley National Park, reached out to the Alaska Rescue Group. My father’s effort was probably motivated by concerns about the Wilcox Expedition raised by rangers Wayne Merry and Art Hayes, rather than Washburn’s diatribe, which arrived long after Wilcox had been approved to climb. Whatever the reason, my father asked to meet with the leaders of the Alaska Rescue Group to discuss the Wilcox Expedition.

“
When it came to the summertime and Wilcox went up, it didn’t seem like anything extraordinary, just a long Muldrow slog,” Nosek said. “But your dad had this idea that it would be good if there was a backup plan in place if Wilcox’s party got in trouble. It wasn’t just picking out Wilcox’s party, it was any party, and Wilcox just happened to be one of the first parties after your dad had that idea.”

The Mountaineering Club of Alaska had planned a Muldrow Glacier ascent of Denali for late June 1967 to be led by Bill Babcock, a twenty-nine-year-old climber who had recently moved to Alaska after spending several years working for the Peace Corps in South America. A veteran of several high-altitude ascents in the Andes, Babcock was a careful climber, fanatical about safety, and a taskmaster when it came to preparing his team.

The Alaska Rescue Group formed a plan around that fortuitous coincidence of the two climbs. Nosek said Babcock and several members of his team were also ARG rescuers who could be activated if the Wilcox party got into trouble. “
We thought that for the Wilcox party we had a good plan in place because ARG members were on their own climb, going up maybe a week behind the Wilcox party. That was a lot of our membership in the ARG on that single climb, so it was considered as the onsite backup for Wilcox.” If the Wilcox Expedition ran into trouble and couldn’t rescue itself like the Winter Ascent party had, a team of rescuers who were already on the mountain and acclimated was the next best thing.

With the exception of Bill’s nineteen-year-old brother, Jeff Babcock, who was attending college in Maine, the MCA Expedition members all lived in Alaska. Leo Hannan was the coleader; anesthesiologist Grace Jansen-Hoeman provided medical support; and Gayle Nienhueser, Chet Hackney, John Ireton, Barney Seiler, and Don Haglund rounded out the team of nine.

Their training began in September of 1966 and they climbed together every other weekend throughout the winter and spring of 1967. Bill Babcock put an emphasis on mountaineering techniques and shelter-building on those training climbs. Six outings were conducted on glaciers
“
where the climbers ascended one-hundred-foot ice walls, ascended forty-foot prussicks, and spent hours cutting steps and placing ice screws.”

He also kept a close eye on the group dynamics and didn’t hesitate to act when he saw problems. “
Each member of the group has come to know the others and there are no serious personality conflicts. Others, who initially joined the group, were eliminated because of personality conflicts that they were responsible for.”

During their training they endured temperatures as low as minus 25 degrees Fahrenheit and winds in excess of 50 miles per hour. On two trips, one in January and one in February,
they went out without their sleeping bags.

Based on his experiences in the Andes, Bill Babcock knew that tents were vulnerable to wind unless fortified by sturdy snow walls. At high altitude he preferred snow caves, which offered unparalleled protection from mountain storms. So, cave and igloo construction was an integral part of their training.

“
You have to practice and practice to get good at digging caves and building walls and igloos,” Babcock said. “It’s the kind of thing that you have to do a lot of to feel comfortable that you can actually whip one out in an hour or so.”

Though the MCA Expedition was better trained and more experienced in alpine arctic conditions than the Wilcox Expedition, it was not immune from hardship, conflict, and discord. Babcock planned to traverse the mountain, ascending the Muldrow and descending the West Buttress and flying out from the Kahiltna Glacier. They did not have the luxury of Berle Mercer’s packhorses to get them to the McGonagall Pass, so on June 29 they gathered at Wonder Lake, shouldered their packs, and headed toward the mountain on foot under a ceiling of moisture-laden clouds piled up on the north side of the Alaska Range. High on the Muldrow Glacier, heavy snows pinned down the Wilcox team for a day. Down on the tundra the clouds loosed rain, sleet, and fog. It was the beginning of a wet, miserable, and meandering march for Babcock’s team.

“Our first seven days were absolutely miserable, rainy, cold, zero visibility,” Babcock said. “It made the going very, very difficult.”