Denali's Howl: The Deadliest Climbing Disaster on America's Wildest Peak (5 page)

The vistas of wilderness adorned with ragged peaks that rolled past as Hank Janes steered his van through Northern Canada were a far cry from the inner-city school in Portland, Oregon, where he taught during the school year. Janes was small at five foot five, quiet, and introspective. He was a believer in the healing power of wilderness. His students suffered from myriad learning problems, which Janes attributed to their environment. During the summer he ran the mountaineering program at a camp for boys in Colorado where, he said, “
some of the greatest moments of my life have been shared with these kids.” He was a member of Mountain Rescue and Safety Council of Oregon and had climbed extensively in Colorado and in the Tetons.

Janes envisioned combining his love for the outdoors with teaching. “
I feel that I can be of more help to kids by working with them in an outdoor situation rather than in an academic atmosphere—helping them to develop an awareness of others and of themselves—helping them develop a sensitivity to nature and to live—eventually I hope to start a camp of my own.”

In the Green Bomb, Joe Wilcox, Steve Taylor, Walt Taylor, Anshel Schiff, and John Russell fought the monotony and dust of the long gravel road by learning about one another.

Steve Taylor—the Taylor who’d spoken up most heatedly against the merger with the Colorado trio back in Puyallup—was a tall, skinny physics major. Raised in Aurora, Colorado, Steve Taylor had spent his final two years of high school in Pittsburgh before heading west to Provo, Utah, and Brigham Young University. There he met Joe Wilcox, whose stories of mountain climbing piqued his interest. Soon he had joined the BYU Alpine Club and was spending his weekends camping, hiking, and climbing in the nearby mountains. He became a skilled rock climber who also had ice climbing and winter camping experience. He had worked with BYU’s rescue team. Nevertheless, he had no real experience in alpine or high-altitude climbing. He had been the first one to sign on to the expedition, and that simple fact may go some way toward explaining his resistance to the latecomers from Colorado joining the group. He spoke of this adventure with all the exuberance of youth.

“
My parents don’t think it such a swinging idea, my jumping out of airplanes, etc., but I won’t let life pass me by and when my tide comes I will be ready to take it at the flood.”

The sarcastic exchange that had transpired between Wilcox and Brad Washburn was no secret to the expedition. Somewhere along the way, someone spelled out the words “
Brad is a no gooder and a do badder” in the dust on the back of the Green Bomb and they remained there for the duration of the drive.

Jerry Clark was the reason the other Taylor, Walt Taylor, set out from Indiana for Alaska. “
I first learned to water ski with Jerry Clark. I first learned to snow ski with Jerry Clark. I first learned spelunking with Jerry Clark. I first learned scuba diving with Jerry Clark,” Walt said. “I learned to smoke and drink on my own.”

The quick-witted medical student had climbed extensively in the Rockies and the Tetons and had worked as a technical climbing instructor for three summers at the Ashcrofters mountaineering school near Aspen, Colorado, where he got extensive experience between 11,000 and 14,000 feet. A few other lines in the bio he used to introduce himself to the other members of the Wilcox team, probably written off the cuff, carry a whiff of mortality: “I grew up in Indiana. I went to high school in Indiana. I went to college in Indiana. I have a burial plot reserved in Indiana. I plan to die elsewhere.”

Anshel Schiff was, like Walt Taylor, a Clark acolyte and resided in Indiana. He had recently completed a PhD in engineering seismology and was working as an assistant professor in engineering sciences at Purdue University in Lafayette. The thirty-year-old’s outdoor experience was limited to hiking, camping, and “
scrambling as opposed to climbing.” Bespectacled and serious, Schiff was an unlikely addition to the expedition, given his total lack of mountaineering experience, but his mission was to lead the scientific and support team,
not to reach the summit.

It was the Summer of Love, the season of
Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band
. The Doors released their first album and Jimi Hendrix used his wailing guitar to ask, “Are You Experienced?” But to the men headed north to climb Denali, the sounds of the era were little more than background noise. When I asked Howard Snyder what music he remembered from the trip, he said he sometimes sang tunes from the stage production of
Fiddler on the Roof
. Among the straitlaced young men who populated the expedition, only John Russell seemed to have embraced the zeitgeist of the ’60s.

The stocky man with a shock of curly, reddish-blond hair and matching beard was the most enigmatic of the troop. Russell had led an unconventional life compared to the others. The variety of his work, study, and travel experience for a man of just twenty-three years was remarkable. He’d been a sheet-metal journeyman, electronics assembler, calculator and adding-machine repairman, cabdriver, gamekeeper, sandal maker, and logger. He had studied math, biology, chemistry, history, and philosophy but held no degrees. He had traveled in Europe and Central America.

“
He was a fighter from conception,” according to his mother, Jane Russell. “Precocious physically, extremely intelligent test-wise, but not too good in school.”

Jane and John Russell Sr. had three children: two sons, both named John, and a daughter named Johnnie. After high school, Richie Russell, as he had been known since childhood,
began calling himself John Russell and moved to Seattle, where he went to work at Boeing, attending night school at the University of Washington. Soon he left Boeing and spent a year at Idaho State University in Pocatello,
“at which time,” according to his mother, “he was a complete beatnik.” Jane and John Sr. were separated by 1967 and neither had heard from their son in more than four years when he called on June 1 to say he was going to climb Denali. “He was pleased, and we were pleased for him,” Jane said.

How Russell learned of the expedition is unclear, but when he did, he approached Clark and asked if he could join. His logging job had him in prime physical condition. “
I have in the past carried load[s] of over 100 lbs, to over 10,000 ft. and I expect to be able to carry load[s] of up to 150 lbs. by June if necessary,” he wrote. Though no one in the group had ever climbed with Russell, he had the experience, the fitness, and the desire.

Though driving duties were shared among the nine men in the Wilcox caravan, the dust and monotony began to take its toll. One night they were awakened by jolts and bounces that were more violent than normal for the gravel road. Wilcox was behind the wheel at the time and
had meandered off of the road in his sleep. There was no apparent damage, so the drive resumed, but back on the road, Wilcox thought he noticed a new whine coming from the old engine.

When they crossed the US border into Alaska and left the gravel road behind, the quiet of the pavement revealed a disturbing noise emanating from under the hood. At Northway Junction, 40 miles inside Alaska, a mechanic confirmed Wilcox’s suspicion. The engine bearings were shot. The car could no longer carry them forward. McKinley Park was still 500 miles away.

The Colorado men were flagged down and they agreed to take the trailer in tow. In return for the added fuel costs, Wilcox agreed to share more food during the climb, evening out the expenses both parties would incur. This was one expedition, not two, but they were still in the process of coming together. With the trailer attached to the Power Wagon by a hastily fabricated hitch, the three Colorado men continued on. The Green Bomb had bombed; the rest of the group would have to fit as best they could into the Hankmobile.

Nine unwashed young men counted off three days of nonstop driving. Weary, they tried to stake out comfortable spots in the van, which suddenly seemed much smaller. Behind the wheel Hank Janes drove on to the Moon Lake State Recreation Area, 15 miles past Tok, where they spent their first stationary night since leaving Washington State.

In the morning Walt, the Taylor from Indiana, approached Wilcox and told him he was too lax and needed to exert more authority. Half an hour later Clark pulled Wilcox aside and told him he was a little
too
authoritarian. These contrary reviews made Wilcox feel he must be doing something right. Everyone repacked themselves into the van and headed for Paxson and the junction of the Richardson and Denali Highways.

Peering out the windows of the Power Wagon, as he and his companions negotiated the Denali Highway with the poorly balanced trailer doing its best to send the vehicle off the shoulderless dirt road, Paul Schlichter looked up to see Denali for the first time. It was June 17, and the group was close to the boundary of Mount McKinley National Park. Still 100 miles distant, Denali dominated the horizon, its north side in full view. The scene evoked both awe and at least one second thought among the men seated side by side on the truck’s bench seat.

“
Gee, maybe I’d be happier just taking this time and spending it in Colorado, climbing some of the fourteeners there,” Schlichter recalled thinking.

“
Look there,” Snyder said to the others, immediately picking out the route they’d follow, looking right up the maw of the Muldrow Glacier. Despite the distance and the haze that had lowered visibility that day, Snyder could identify the north and south peaks, Karstens Ridge, the Harper Glacier, Denali Pass, and Archdeacon’s Tower. They arrived at Mount McKinley National Park that afternoon. Snyder soon discovered that the conflict between Washburn and Wilcox was not a secret to the park staff and that the details of Wilcox’s letter had been blown out of proportion.

“
The ranger at the Information Center told us that Wilcox made himself out to be ‘God’s gift to Mount McKinley’ in the letter,” Snyder recalled.

They checked in with Chief Ranger Art Hayes, with whom they’d been corresponding, and then set out on the 84-mile-long park road that led to Wonder Lake and the trail to McGonagall Pass.

The Hankmobile, packed with nine men, arrived in the park around 9:00
P
.
M
. and drove on toward Wonder Lake. Wilcox felt a strange loneliness as he passed through the headquarters area, with the bright daylight of the midnight sun illuminating a scene of somber inactivity. Had the van turned into the small neighborhood adjacent to the headquarters area, he might have seen a large truck inner tube in the yard of the first house on the left, and even at that late hour one child bouncing on it: that would have been me. In our house, bedtimes were fluid, often forgotten during the long days of the Alaskan summer. On some nights my parents packed my sister and me into the car and drove along the park road to watch the wildlife that came alive as the midnight sun arced slowly toward its brief, midnight dip below the horizon. With no TV or radio, and a crank telephone system that connected only the residents of the park, we had to create our own entertainment. Mine was the inner tube. One of the maintenance men patched it up and inflated it, and when my dad rolled it down the hill from headquarters and set it up in our yard one night after work, I thought I was the luckiest kid in the park. I may well have been, since there were only a dozen of us.

I spoke to Bradford Washburn’s biographer and confidant Dr. Mike Sfraga about Washburn’s scathing reaction to Joe Wilcox’s letter over dinner at the Captain Cook Hotel in Anchorage one evening not long ago. Sfraga, a vice chancellor at the University of Alaska–Fairbanks, wrote his doctoral dissertation on Washburn and spent many dozens of hours with him. As we ate dinner we joked about our advancing age. Sfraga and I had lived in the same dormitory while attending the University of Alaska–Fairbanks in the early ’80s and had both turned fifty recently. He suggested that Washburn’s age and perhaps a little envy might have played into his reaction. Washburn was in his midfifties in 1967 and wasn’t able to climb as he had in the past—as Wilcox and his team would be climbing that very summer.

T
he climbers had driven the Alaska Highway through Canada to Alaska and traversed the interior on the 135-mile-long dirt road called the Denali Highway. Beyond park headquarters, they were on the 85-mile-long Park Road to its end at Wonder Lake. The gravel Park Road bridges small creeks and rivers and cuts through growths of spruce and birch trees kept small by the short summer season and the layer of permafrost that remains close to the surface year-round. Deeper in the park, the road climbs through a broad valley and the stunted trees give way to willows and tundra and then mineral-stained soil and rock. Caribou, moose, Dall sheep, and grizzly bears were a common sight near and even on the road.

Luchterhand heard the ancient, eerie call of a loon and they stopped the Hankmobile to listen for a moment. Then, just a few miles later, they saw Denali looming above the forest, bathed in pink alpenglow. They stopped, piled out of the vehicle, and stood transfixed.

They continued on as the road cut precariously along the side of the steep, rocky slope of the valley wall and stopped at Eielson Visitor Center. There they discussed communications with the summer season’s rangers George Perkins and Gordon Haber. Eielson offers spectacular views of the mountain to park visitors, and its vantage point also meant it was the only manned facility in the park where radio communication with people on the mountain was possible. Neither the Wonder Lake Ranger Station nor headquarters are in line of sight of the Muldrow Route, line of sight being a requirement for radios of the day to work.

Eielson was a communication hub for the whole park. There were no phone lines beyond headquarters, so all communication with Wonder Lake was radioed via Eielson—
including communications with climbers on the mountain. The idea of talking directly with climbers on the summit was new. Expeditions sometimes carried single-side-band two-way radios, but they were bulky and heavy, and messages from the mountain had to be relayed through Fairbanks to reach anyone in the park. It was an unreliable system, at best. However, in the late ’60s, advances in electronics made small, light, and inexpensive Citizens Band (CB) two-way radios accessible to the general public and these were the kind that Jerry Clark had been tinkering with before meeting up with everyone back in Puyallup.
The radios weren’t compatible with the park’s single-side-band, so when Clark wrote to Ranger Art Hayes suggesting their use,
Hayes arranged to borrow a CB radio from George Robinson, a maintenance man at the park, and placed it at Eielson to try out during the Wilcox climb.

Jerry Clark had drawn up a map of the climbing route and marked the sites where he thought communications would be possible and the dates the party expected to be at each one.
With the rough communications schedule mapped out and in the hands of park rangers Haber and Perkins, the Hankmobile rolled on.

It was late when they found the Colorado climbers at Wonder Lake and pitched the tents in the murky twilight that is midnight during summer in the far north. This was the first night the whole group camped together. The cool night air carried the tang of tundra plants, and the incessant hum of mosquitoes lulled them to sleep.

The next day, Wonder Lake District Ranger Wayne Merry stopped by to introduce himself and conduct a final equipment check. There was no official climbing ranger in 1967, but Merry filled that role. Though his climbing experience was not in alpine mountaineering and he had never climbed Denali, Merry was an accomplished rock climber, having made the first ascent of Yosemite’s El Capitan with two other climbers in 1958.

Only a few weeks before, Ranger Merry sent a memo regarding the exchange between Washburn and Wilcox to my father, George Hall, who, just a couple of months earlier had become Merry’s boss when he was named director of Alaska operations for the National Park Service and superintendent of both Mount McKinley and Katmai National Parks. My father happened to be in the National Park Service field office in Anchorage when Merry’s missive arrived.

“
After reading Brad Washburn’s unusually hot letter, you will probably want some background on this group,” Merry wrote to my father. He noted there were some marginal members but on the whole they were adequately qualified. “Basically, Wilcox ran afoul of Washburn’s mountaineering ethics—and got well singed!”

Aware that Washburn had made his opinion of the expedition known in the park,
Wilcox asked Merry what he thought of his preparations. “On paper,” he replied, “you are the best organized party to ever assault the peak.”

Later that morning, after Ranger Merry had left, their horse packer Berle Mercer stopped by the Wonder Lake campground and said he’d like to leave a day later. Wilcox thought an extra day of rest would do the expedition good. Everyone readily agreed.

Wilcox, still ruminating over the dissenting opinions of his authority during the drive up and maybe Washburn’s letter, too, took advantage of the down day to call a meeting. He wanted to address leadership and organization concerns before they headed for McGonagall Pass and the Muldrow Glacier. “
We seem to be a loose collection of individuals climbing the mountain separately,” he told them. Success would depend on their ability to work together and he pointed out that little work was getting done to prepare for their imminent departure.

The response was notably muted. “
No one even opens cans with gusto around here,” Walt Taylor said, agreeing with Wilcox. In contrast to the late-night team meeting back in Puyallup at the foot of Mount Rainier, Steve Taylor said almost nothing.

They would be following the traditional route established by the Sourdough mountaineers fifty years before. But the Muldrow Glacier had surged a decade earlier and the sudden and swift—at least for a glacier—movement had left its surface a jumble of crevasses and ice blocks, making this route to the summit nearly impassable. The difficult passage forced climbers to seek alternate routes and subsequently, the West Buttress route on the other side of the mountain was becoming the preferred path to the summit. West Buttress climbers flew in from Talkeetna on the south side of the Alaska Range and landed at 7,400 feet. Though that route was easier, the cost of flying in a large expedition and all its gear was
beyond the means of the young men who comprised the Wilcox Expedition.

Though the Muldrow Glacier’s surge had slowed and its surface had smoothed itself out, the route remained longer, more difficult, and more dangerous. Three of the four men who had died on Denali met their ends there: two in crevasse falls on the Muldrow and another from a fall while descending Karstens Ridge at the top of the Muldrow. This was the route the group would follow.

Berle Mercer, a fixture in the region since he came into the country during World War II, arrived the next day with his sons, Kirk, age thirteen, and Baxter, age sixteen, with a string of eight packhorses. Brown-haired and fit, Mercer was neither tall nor short at five foot ten and wore a ready smile that belied an intense and opinionated personality. He had been packing hunters, miners, and climbers throughout the region for two decades and was renowned for his knowledge of local plant life. He and his boys made quick work of the expedition’s gear, which weighed in at almost a ton, and set out for McGonagall Pass. Eight original Wilcox team members, along with Jerry Lewis from the Colorado group, headed out as well, each carrying 50-pound packs. Steve Taylor, for all his initial enthusiasm, was the last of the original Wilcox group to get to the mountain. He was sick to his stomach and waited with Snyder and Schlichter. They would hike in three days later when the Mercers returned for the rest of the gear.

Baxter Mercer, now in his early sixties, still lives in Healy, just 20 miles from the park. The climbers didn’t seem much older than he was, but he didn’t interact with them beyond a few short conversations. “
Dad told us they weren’t happy and to leave them alone. They all seemed to know what they were doing, but it was just like two groups of people that didn’t really want anything to do with each other.”

Snow stopped the horses about 1,200 feet short of the 5,720-foot McGonagall Pass, so the loads were cached there and Wilcox and the other eight climbers began moving the food and gear up to Camp I on the edge of the Muldrow Glacier.

The Mercers returned to Wonder Lake for the Colorado group’s supplies on June 22. Snyder described Steve Taylor’s demeanor during the wait at Wonder Lake as that of a man “
in a continual state of depression,” and believes that Taylor was terrified by the sight of the mountain “and it was literally worrying him sick.” Schlichter agreed, saying, “
I think psychologically he just wasn’t ready for this expedition and I’m not sure why he was there.” Once the horses were loaded, Snyder, Schlichter, and Steve Taylor shouldered their own 50-pound packs.

The hike to McGonagall Pass did nothing to improve Taylor’s attitude or his health. Snyder and Schlichter quickly outpaced him, stopping to wait for longer and longer periods as Taylor moseyed along the trail. At one point he got lost and followed a caribou path up another valley. After Snyder and Schlichter tracked him down and pointed him toward McGonagall Pass, Taylor needed to stop and rest. The two Coloradoans, eager to forge ahead, continued up the valley. Taylor had not caught up when they rolled out their sleeping bags, donned their head nets, and went to sleep beneath a sky that never got dark. In the morning, they went on to the pass without Taylor, believing he’d have no trouble finding his way.

“
At a couple of places going up there these guys weren’t even hiking together,” Baxter Mercer recalled. “You had one on one side of the creek and one on the other. They wouldn’t even talk to each other.”

Wilcox, McLaughlin, and Janes were descending from the camp to the cache when Snyder and Schlichter passed them, still without the struggling Steve Taylor, on the way to Camp I at McGonagall Pass. When they returned to the cache to help carry supplies, Steve Taylor had just arrived and Joe Wilcox was seething.

Accounts of what had occurred along the trail differ dramatically. Snyder described waiting and at one point returning to search for Taylor, who
dawdled incompetently along the trail. Wilcox said Taylor told him
he had been goaded, ridiculed, insulted, and ultimately abandoned by his companions when he fell behind. A heated exchange ensued where Wilcox questioned their commitment to their fellow climbers. They, in turn, questioned Steve Taylor’s competency and ability to climb without delaying the others. Ultimately, Wilcox threatened to send the Colorado climbers back, saying, “
It seems you’re still the Colorado Group.” Then he turned and hurried to catch up with Taylor, who was climbing toward the pass.

The two Colorado men were again on the cusp of losing their opportunity to climb Denali, realizing Wilcox was more than a little upset. According to Snyder, “
We both appreciated the position Wilcox was in as leader of the group,” so they caught up with Wilcox and Taylor and apologized. Taylor said there were no ill feelings on his part.

Though Coloradan Jerry Lewis had no trouble hiking in with the Wilcox group, Steve Taylor’s slow pace and the apparent impatience of Snyder and Schlichter was a distinctly sour episode that threatened the cohesiveness of the group. The Mercers turned for home, leaving the twelve young mountaineers on their own. The expedition was at last on the mountain, ready to begin the ascent, about to step onto Denali’s unforgiving domain of ice and rock.

And wind.