Denali's Howl: The Deadliest Climbing Disaster on America's Wildest Peak (20 page)

“I remember thinking, Well, who’s going to finish the house? Boy, I’m really going to leave Deb in the lurch here if I don’t pull this one out of my ass—that’s what I was thinking.”

The guides hugged and said good-bye for what they believed would be the last time, then walked over to roust Andy from the bivvy sack.

“Well, instead of saying, ‘Andy, get up, you’re going down,’ I said, ‘Andy, how you doing?’ He said, ‘We’re doing pretty good, we’re staying pretty warm, I think we’re going to make it.’”

Then they went to the igloo and got a similar response from the men shivering inside.

“We weren’t any better off than we were a few minutes earlier, but still, just hearing them say they’re going to make it turned the table for me.”

So the two guides went back to the task of trying to build a shelter for themselves. In retrospect, Smith believes it was the constant activity that had kept them alive through the storm. Then, minutes after returning to the task of building a shelter, they felt the wind begin to diminish. By 11:00
A
.
M
., it was over.

“If it had lasted a few more hours,” he said, “we would have died.”

Smith, Peabody, and their party had spent twelve hours in the heart of the storm and had barely survived. One man was blind, all suffered frostbite on their faces, and most had frozen feet or hands, or both. Getting back to camp and off of the mountain without further injury was an odyssey in and of itself, but they all survived. A few fingers and toes were lost to the mountain, and the blind man regained his sight when his corneas thawed. They knew how close they had come to not coming down at all.

At the time of the storm, the National Park Service had a contingent of climbing rangers on the mountain as well as a Lama high-altitude helicopter parked in Talkeetna, ready to fly. Rangers knew where the climbers had been when the storm hit, and they knew that Smith and his party were overdue. Yet no aircraft flew and no rescuers were dispatched.

Daryl Miller, Denali National Park’s South District ranger, was at the Talkeetna ranger station and in charge of the mountain at the time. Smith and Peabody were popular guides and friends with many of the climbing rangers, including Miller. Deb, Smith’s wife, was with Miller at the ranger station while he fielded calls from rangers on the mountain and monitored the storm. As difficult as it was to do, especially with Deb right there, Miller forbade rescuers from searching until the storm broke. The wind and whiteout made flying out of the question.

“
Too many rescuers are killed in the world today,” he said. “It’s a hero thing. Sometimes people, especially volunteers, practice and practice and they don’t want to see anybody suffer, they want to help. It was great that I had a ranger willing to go. I wasn’t willing to get anyone killed; I didn’t want to make a bad situation a tragedy by killing rescuers. It was hard, but that’s what I had to do to protect my field operations, I had to say, We’re not going, I don’t want anybody else killed or hurt.”

Smith carried a radio through the entire event, yet he didn’t call for help. In retrospect, he said a call might have alleviated some concern, then again he said it would have been hard to sugarcoat the situation, and it might have made things worse.

“
I never even considered calling on the radio, to be quite honest with you. We might as well have been on the moon,” Smith said. “What was I going to call somebody for? What were they going to do for me? I’m in the middle of this huge whiteout with the wind blowing eighty miles an hour. What was I going to say? ‘Hi, things really suck here. Wish I wasn’t here. OK, thanks, bye.’ I didn’t see any use for it at all.”

The emergency response system on the mountain is a lifesaver in many climbing accidents, but in a windstorm like the one Smith’s party endured, it couldn’t help.

“There was no way help could come to me. There was no help that I would want. I would never ask anybody to come out there in the types of conditions we were in. I mean it’s asinine; I was in the spot, I better figure it out, I got to make it on my own. Then, once I can get help, then I’ll talk on the radio, and that’s what I did.

Once he got his team back to the high camp at 17,200 feet, he broke out the radio. “I called down to fourteen [the camp at 14,000 feet] and said, ‘My clients are beat up, we need some help, they’re blasted, frostbit bad, they need to go to the hospital.’ Then, the Park Service was good; they worked it out. We got the helicopter to come in twice, they took the clients away, and it was great.”

Smith guided for six more years but only one more season on Denali. Peabody never guided on the mountain again. The two British climbers they encountered near Archdeacon’s Tower followed the wrong trail. Instead of reaching the West Buttress they walked off the West Rib and plunged down the Orient Express. One died and the other lost both hands to frostbite.

Though the 1997 party bore some similarities to the second Wilcox summit team, it had two elements in its favor that the Wilcox team did not: a leader with ten years of experience on Denali, and a short storm.

Back in the NOAA forecast center, meteorologist Jim Nelson ran a model for me of the 1997 storm and compared it to July 1967. “
The winds were only half what they were in the ’67 storm, and it lasted twelve hours. The ’67 storm lasted seven days. If they barely survived this”—he pointed to the 1997 weather map and paused, then he put the ’67 storm on the screen—“can you imagine what
this
was like?”

I
never learned the identity of the poncho-wearing climber who chased my father and me along the river all those years ago. He was not one of the Wilcox survivors and neither was he a member of the Mountaineering Club of Alaska Expedition. Most of them hiked out to Wonder Lake, with the exception of the four Wilcox survivors and Grace Hoeman, who were picked up by helicopter after the rain-swollen McKinley River blocked their escape from the mountain.

But still, the climber in the poncho haunts me. No matter who he was, he vividly transports me back to those gray, rainy days when my dad wasn’t his usual cheerful self and there seemed a tension in the air that even as a five-year-old I could sense.

I probably associate the Wilcox tragedy with that mysterious encounter because whenever I brought up the man who chased us along the riverbank, Dad would chuckle about how difficult it was to jog with me dangling from one of his arms—and then launch into his memories of the Wilcox tragedy and his difficult discussions with the parents of the lost climbers. I never thought to ask who that young man actually was and what connected him to that ill-fated climb. Ranger Wayne
Merry had no recollection of the encounter;
neither did Bob Hafferman, the Park Service engineer who lived next door to us;
nor Wally Cole, the former hotel manager and longtime owner of Camp Denali near Wonder Lake. Was it a figment of my imagination? No. That much I know. My dad was there, and so was I. No matter who that man was, to me, he represents the ghosts of those lost souls, those men whose lives had barely begun.

The storms that hammered Denali in late July and early August 1967 deluged the park and much of interior Alaska with rain. On the twenty-fourth of July, boulders and washouts closed the Park Road, stranding ten vehicles and
thirty tourists at Eielson Visitor Center. Other park visitors were trapped on the road between washouts and had to hike to safety; I suppose the stranger could have been one of them, though it wouldn’t explain the conversation we had on the long drive home.

On July 25, my sister and I put on our boots and raincoats, climbed into my dad’s green Park Service sedan, and drove down the long, arcing hill to the park entrance where the road crossed Riley Creek. The usually sedate stream was a raging brown torrent that day and had already jumped its banks and undermined the small bridge. As we watched from a safe distance, the bridge spanning Riley Creek slumped into the roiling water,
temporarily cutting off road access to the park.

It was a demonstration of Nature’s power and the kind of lesson our dad often liked to expose us to: he knew a firsthand experience would be much more powerful than reading it in a book or watching it on television. I’ve never seen another bridge collapse, and though it happened forty-five years ago, the memory is still large in my mind.

The rains continued into August, and by the middle of the month, the Chena River rose to inundate the city of Fairbanks, displacing hundreds of people in an event still known as the “Great Flood.”

Who was the young man who walked out of the wilderness on that cool, rainy evening, and what was his relationship to the tragic climb? I doubt I’ll ever know. If I’ve learned anything through the process of writing this book, it is that memory is fleeting and flawed at best. Some of the subjects I interviewed are sure that they remember things clearly, yet their accounts don’t match the documentation and, in many cases, their own journals written at the time of the incident. Others think their memories are flawed, yet they match up almost perfectly with the documentation I was able to find. A few think they are fuzzy on the details, and follow-up research shows they’re right. Rarest is the one who believes his memory is accurate and follow up confirms that he is right.

Where I fall on this spectrum I am not sure.

No book is written alone, and this one is no exception. I had no idea how much work it would entail when I embarked on the venture—if I had, I may never have started. My wife, the author Melissa DeVaughn, knew what was in store and she never wavered in her belief in me—even when I did. For that I’ll be forever grateful.

My sister, Gerianne Thorsness, helped me with recollections of our childhood in Mount McKinley National Park and the events that took place during that tragic summer. She also broke the ice for me with several sources and helped in innumerable ways, not the least of which was her certainty in the importance of telling our father’s story and that of the other rescuers. Her husband, John Thorsness, traversed Denali, ascending the West Buttress to the summit and descending via the Muldrow. When I got lost in the pile of research, he helped me find my way more than once.

My mom, Eileen; sister Marietta; and brother, Kevin also supported me both emotionally and financially when things got tight. I doubt I’ll ever be able to repay them, and I’m not talking about the money.

Daryl Miller, Denali’s former South District ranger, is quoted only sporadically in this book, but he was a guiding influence throughout the research and writing process and was a trusted source when attempting to see the crisis through the eyes of a rescuer.

Joe Wilcox revisited with me what is obviously a painful chapter in his life and has put up with innumerable follow-up questions. Howard Snyder gave me hours of his time, helping me parse through the hundreds of pages of documents and generously allowed the use of his photos taken during the expedition,

Frank Nosek and Gary Hansen, who led the Mountaineering Club of Alaska and the Alaska Rescue Group in 1967, provided unique insight into the climbing culture that existed in Alaska in the 1960s. Their matter-of-fact descriptions of their Herculean rescue efforts, and those of their Alaska Rescue Group compatriots—all done on a volunteer basis—were humbling. Gayle Nienhueser and Bill Babcock, members of the MCA Expedition whose members put themselves at risk in hopes of finding survivors, were generous both with their time and their journals and photos, sharing memories that were clearly painful to relive.

The memories of the incident also weigh heavily on Wayne Merry, who was the Wonder Lake District ranger in 1967. In spite of that, he invited me into his home and spoke frankly about his experiences. I hope this book casts some light on the efforts that took place beyond his isolated outpost at Wonder Lake and helps him shed some of that weight.

Paul Schlichter, Dave Johnston, Bob Hafferman, Butch Farabee, Bob Gerhard, and Louis Reichardt each assisted with details that helped me flesh out aspects of the expedition, the search, the park, the regulatory atmosphere, the weather, and the climbing zeitgeist of the era.

Chuck Sassara drew on more than fifty years of flying in Alaska to portray the perils of mountain flying and what makes pilots do it anyway.

Don Sheldon’s son, Robert, helped me determine which airplanes were used during his father’s flights and offered insights into what motivated Don to put himself at risk time and time again to help others.

My old friends Blaine Smith and Charlie Sassara kept me in line when I was trying to describe the intricacies of mountaineering, something they both did professionally and I pursue only recreationally.

Brian Okonek, the renowned mountain guide and all-around student of Denali, gave me hours and hours of his time, sharing his comprehensive knowledge of the mountain’s history and geography.

Frank Norris’s excellent two-volume administrative history of Denali National Park was a resource I visited repeatedly early in the writing process. The only resource I tapped more while trying to decipher the intricacies of rescue history and jurisdiction was probably Frank himself.

Mike Sfraga, PhD, brought Brad Washburn to life for me in a way that only a confidante to the great man could.

Dave McMahan and I met during the Exxon Valdez oil spill and we’ve seen each other only occasionally since. It was a pleasure to reconnect and again tap the forensic knowledge he’s gained during a truly unique career as Alaska’s state archaeologist.

Meteorologists John Papineau, Jim Nelson, and the late Ted Fathauer collectively painted a picture of the tremendous storm that engulfed the mountain and the Wilcox team. I could not have accurately portrayed it without their assistance.

Kirk Dietz was the archivist at Denali National Park and Preserve when I started the project. He delayed his vacation and took the time to teach me how to properly collect and document my findings; if I hadn’t started this with Kirk, this thing would be a mess.

While writing
Denali’s Howl
, I reconnected with Lloyd Johnson, a friend from college who is battling Lou Gehrig’s disease. I sent him an early draft of the manuscript and asked for his opinion. I wasn’t sure what to expect when he asked me to call him on a Sunday afternoon a few weeks later. When we connected he got right to the point, suggesting I work on character development to differentiate the story’s various players since there are so many. I took his advice and the book is better for it.

Dave Cooley, John Russell’s childhood friend and early climbing partner, shared his memories of the man whom I found to be the most compelling of all the characters in this story. My dad once told me that if anyone could have survived, it would have been Russell. I don’t know what prompted the statement, but I half hoped I’d discover Russell alive and well somewhere during the research process. Alas, it didn’t happen.

Wally Cole, who with his wife, Jerryne, have been pillars in the Denali community for nearly fifty years, allowed me to hole up in their home on Deneki Lakes near Denali National Park in order to kick-start the writing process. The week I spent there got the book moving. Wally also proved to be a font of knowledge regarding the workings of the park during the 1960s. From the phone system, to the old hotel, to mail service, to park staffing, his answers were impressive in their swiftness and detail. He also has a vast collection of mountaineering books, and ready access to them was an unexpected boon during my stay.

I owe Vin Hoeman a debt of gratitude, though he died not long after the Wilcox victims, while I was still in single digits. In the fall of 1967, he began work on his own book about the Wilcox Expedition tragedy, to be called
Denali—Triumph and Tragedy
. Vin wrote to the families and friends of the lost climbers and had collected a trove of background information about them when he was killed while climbing in the Himalayas. His research languished for more than forty years until it was archived and made available to researchers at the University of Alaska–Anchorage’s Consortium Library. The material he gathered, and his own insights revealed in his correspondence with the parents of the victims, were invaluable to me. I hope my book does what he had hoped to do when he set out to write his own.

Nick Jans, the noted Alaskan author and my good friend, was one of my earliest supporters, and if he hadn’t introduced me to my fantastic literary agent, Elizabeth Kaplan, this book wouldn’t have happened. Under Elizabeth’s tough love, the proposal came together and caught the eye of Stephen Morrow at Dutton.

Stephen and his assistant, Stephanie Hitchcock, have patiently and skillfully massaged my crude early drafts into a real narrative. I’m indebted to them and will try to pay them back with fresh salmon and dogsled rides if they ever make it to Alaska.

—Andy Hall

CHUGIAK
,
ALASKA