Denali's Howl: The Deadliest Climbing Disaster on America's Wildest Peak (18 page)

After half a century the mountain is unlikely to give up its secrets. Climate change continues to melt away many of Alaska’s glaciers, and Denali’s annual snowline—the delineation between permanent and seasonal snow—is much higher than it was four decades ago. But the upper mountain where the young men’s bodies rest is still one of the coldest places on the planet and, as my father described it to me so many years ago, remains a place where the snow never melts.

T
he Humanitarian Climb had yielded no additional clues to the fate of the lost climbers. The only trace of the Wilcox Expedition that remained was the top six inches of Russell’s bamboo summit flag protruding from the heavy snow that blanketed the upper Harper Glacier. Vin Hoeman retrieved some of the strips of tent cloth that Russell had used to decorate the top of the pole and brought them to the park, where they were filed away in a small envelope.

In September 1967
the National Park Service convened a “critique” meeting in Anchorage to examine the tragedy in an effort to determine what may have caused the tremendous loss of life and evaluate the rescue efforts in hopes of avoiding similar incidents in the future.

Art Hayes, Wayne Merry, and my father represented the Park Service; Brad Washburn and his wife, Barbara, came from Boston; and several members of Alaska’s climbing community attended. Most were members of the Mountaineering Club of Alaska and the Alaska Rescue Group, including Vin Hoeman, Frank Nosek, and Gary Hansen, as well as the veterans of the Winter Ascent, the Babcock party, and Don Sheldon, who had done most of the flying during the Wilcox rescue efforts. Notably absent from the meeting were Joe Wilcox and the survivors of his expedition.

The meeting began with questions about the Wilcox party. Hansen said the combined group’s lack of leadership and experience contributed to the accident. John Ireton, who had inspected the two bodies near Archdeacon’s Tower, defended Jerry Clark’s Antarctic experience. None had
expedition
experience, clarified Hansen. “What is expedition experience?” replied Merry. Hoeman said the amalgamation of the Wilcox and Colorado parties compromised the personal connection necessary for a successful expedition. Art Davidson, who had led the Winter Ascent earlier that year, said the party’s large size made the team weaker. Brad Washburn agreed. Bill Babcock countered that
group strength is not measurable. “Was it Steve Taylor who was found in the tent?” asked Alaska Rescue Group member Paul Crews.

It was an unfettered discussion among a group of men and women who comprised what was probably the greatest concentration of Denali climbing experience and rescue knowledge ever gathered in one place. Early in the meeting discussion dwelled on what might have gone wrong within the Wilcox Expedition, but it went on to cover myriad topics, including the use of handheld radios; requiring climbers to wear dog tags for body identification; construction of a rescue shelter at Denali Pass; climbing fees; insurance for climbers to cover potential rescue costs; and the development of a climbing brochure to inform climbers of Denali’s extreme weather.

There also were criticisms of the rescue efforts. Bill Babcock finally had a chance to let the Air Force, the Park Service, and Don Sheldon know what he thought of their airdrop capabilities, politely describing them as “not always as described.” Sheldon described his own communication challenges and his method for making airdrops on the upper mountain and in other conditions encountered on Denali.

Wayne Merry, perhaps more than anyone else, remained convinced that a rescue could have been pulled off. It didn’t matter that everyone else involved maintained that the weather was too bad; Merry simply disagreed.

To this day, Merry still believes not enough was done. When I visited Wayne and Cindy Merry in their small house on a hill looking out over Atlin Lake in northern British Columbia, Wayne was waiting for me in the driveway. He is a small man with thick, white hair, smooth skin, and thoughtful eyes that give him more than a passing resemblance to Spencer Tracy; talking to him and watching him move nimbly around the house, it was hard to believe he was eighty years old.

We sat at a dining table in the large, book-lined room that overlooked the lake and talked about the park and the Wilcox tragedy. But the conversation returned again and again to the failure to launch an overflight.

“
Whether we could do anything for them or not remained to be seen,” he said. “We couldn’t say until we could find out what the situation was. Chances are good that we couldn’t do much for them directly, but we were legally and morally obligated to try to help these people and we didn’t even try.”

When I described radio logs, journal entries, and weather reports that consistently indicate that weather kept aircraft from flying near the upper mountain until Sheldon flew on July 25, Merry dismissed them.

“This I don’t know, but I do know that I requested it and Wilcox requested it and I radioed this to headquarters. Where it went from there, I haven’t the slightest idea. The radio communication was so poor and so irregular that it is hard to say exactly what the sequence was. A number of times I was told by [Chief Ranger] Hayes that things were being taken care of, or they were thinking about this or discussing that. But I couldn’t seem to get a solid answer.”

When I asked Merry if he continued to ask questions when he returned to headquarters in the fall of 1967, he replied, “No.”

At the end of the daylong critique meeting, three “proposed needs” were identified: improved radio communications, designation of a climbing ranger with authority to deal directly with the Alaska Rescue Group, and construction of a mountain refuge at Denali Pass. After dinner, those needs were debated and critiqued and narrowed to two resolutions noted simply as “
Radio system funding and Climbing personnel.” Whether or not they agreed with one another, all the participants were motivated to learn from the events of July 1967 in order to avoid repeating a similar tragedy in the future.

My father wrote to the families of the victims on September 21 to describe the findings of the meeting.

The critique meeting . . . became more of a discussion of proposals for future protection and, of course, contained positive proposals to check for traces next spring since nature is known to do unexpected things on McKinley. This is not expected to be productive. Every person at the meeting must have wished for a different result and, in fact, probably wished that the meeting did not have to be held at all. Some of these people knew your sons personally, and it was obviously a sensitive matter. No speculation as to the cause of the accident was made that could hold up against the known facts. We know the winds were intense, we know there was a “white-out”—we still don’t know why they did not continue down or dig into snow caves. We therefore have to assume there was an extraordinary factor over which there was no control, one we may never understand completely.

During the critique meeting Don Sheldon brought up the idea of requiring climbers to be bonded (insured) in order to cover rescue costs.
He routinely flew when he was needed regardless of whether payment for his efforts was guaranteed, a policy that often left him empty-handed. Though bonding was a reasonable suggestion, the idea appeared to alarm some of the climbers. Gary Hansen immediately attacked the idea, saying it could restrict those who couldn’t afford insurance for climbing, and might lead to clandestine climbs. Washburn joined Sheldon in pressing the question, suggesting that climbing would continue to grow in popularity, resulting in more possible losses to rescue organizations.

After the meeting, my father further explored the bonding idea and decided that Hansen was right.

“
I explored all I could with everybody I could think of, including Lloyd’s of London, the cost was too high. The people making the climbs generally were just doing it, they were just guys hanging around,” he said. “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.”

Today Joe Wilcox splits his time between Seattle, Washington, and Kailua-Kona, Hawaii, where he teaches astronomy and oceanography at the University of Hawaii.

He is a spare man both in physical appearance and personality. Over the phone his voice is jovial—high yet soft, as if he is talking through a filter of cotton balls. In person he appears somber, with deep-set eyes and a face that, even at rest, seems intense and distracted by unspoken concerns. He has given the years no quarter. He is tall and fit, with the muscular legs of a runner; he is an avid competitor in Masters track and field competitions.

Pictures of Wilcox in his youth show a strapping man who played college football and scaled mountains. Today, after decades of strenuous activity, he has honed his body to a straight, lean, and sinewy version of his youthful self.

In person, his conversation is marked with long pauses and gazes toward the horizon. His impassive face and penetrating eyes are unsettling, but the combination is broken suddenly and frequently by a warm smile.

He still treks in high places, acclimating himself by hiking above 10,000 feet on the slopes of Mauna Kea volcano near his winter home in Kailua-Kona. His most recent climb was Mount Kilimanjaro. And when he isn’t climbing, he is sailing
Shepherd Moon
, his Island Packet 350 harbored in Kona. He has already made the 5,000-mile round-trip sailing to Tahiti and back. Australia is next and he hopes to complete a circumnavigation of the planet. He is seventy years old.

When I visited him in Kailua-Kona, he drove a small convertible Geo Metro. The inside was cluttered but clean. His apartment was similar. The floor was covered with piles of books on astronomy, oceanography, and travel. Maps, vinyl records, and DVDs were stacked on his couch. Like his car, it looked more like the domain of a college student rather than a professor.

His life seems to be an exercise in practicality and restraint. He owns two identical baseball hats, one much dirtier than the other. “
I wear that one when I work on the boat,” he explained. One afternoon we drank beer from big schooners at a bar near the harbor where he keeps his sailboat. Later at his cluttered apartment he poured me another beer in an identical schooner. “I liked their glasses so I got some for myself,” he explained. “They’re big and they stay cold.”

I suggested he join me but he said, “No, I’ll have one next week.” He was not joking.

When I asked why he treated himself so sparingly, he replied, “People ask me if I ever let myself go. I like beer, I eat nasty hamburgers, I just do it once a month; I enjoy these things just like anyone else; I just don’t do it constantly. When I tell people that, they think something is wrong with me. They don’t understand.”

I could only wonder if this ordered existence had been influenced by his experience on Denali or if the rigors of mountaineering had appealed to his ascetic nature. For a dozen years after the tragedy on Denali, Wilcox grappled with survivor’s guilt. He divorced his first wife, Cheryl, and though he returned to Alaska to teach school in the village of Sand Point in the Shumagin Islands and later in McGrath, he never returned to Denali.

He pored over weather records and climbing journals to compare weather statistics with conditions experienced by climbers during windstorms and finally came to the realization that he could not have saved his friends, even if he had been with them when the storm hit. He wrote his own book about the climb titled
White Winds,
an effort he described to me as therapeutic. “At first I felt guilty, I thought I should have died myself. I’m convinced now that it doesn’t matter, it wouldn’t have made a difference.”

During a climbing conference in the 1980s, Joe Wilcox and Brad Washburn met for the first and only time. Wilcox says they never talked about the infamous letter or the specifics of the climb but had a pleasant exchange. According to Washburn’s biographer, Mike Sfraga, that was the closest semblance to an apology Washburn could muster.

“
I never got the impression from Brad that he ever said, ‘Hey, I’m sorry I wrote you that crappy letter,’” Sfraga told me. “He said that he had talked to Wilcox at some conference. That was about as good as it got, as close to an apology as I think you could get from Brad.”

Howard Snyder is the director of the Remington Carriage Museum in Cardston, Alberta, Canada, and remains intensely interested in the expedition. He wrote a book about the climb called
The Hall of the Mountain King,
published in the early 1970s. In it, he was critical of Wilcox’s leadership and the abilities of some of the Wilcox party members, but his attitude seems to have mellowed in the ensuing years.

“
Joe is a real convenient target, but that’s the nature of being the leader of an expedition. He has been, I think, attacked probably unfairly, probably more than anyone else by himself.”

Of all the people interviewed, Snyder’s memories were the most detailed and the most consistent with documentation from the incident. He and Paul Schlichter also seem to be the least affected of the survivors. “Paul and I have talked about it many times and we’re glad we climbed it when we did because we were on a real adventure and we were on our own. Now it’s overrun with people and regulations and rangers.”

Schlichter went on to serve in Vietnam as a rescue and reconnaissance pilot and lost comrades there and in Laos. That experience, he said, had more of an impact on his life than the Wilcox Expedition, which he looks at as one small aspect of his early life.