Denali's Howl: The Deadliest Climbing Disaster on America's Wildest Peak (6 page)

The expedition set up Camp I at the top of McGonagall Pass and there, at the margin between green earth and blue ice, they got their first close-up peek into the snowy interior. Before them the Muldrow Glacier inched down the mountain to join the Traleika Glacier at the foot of Mount Tatum. Across the Muldrow, Tatum’s icy flank rose steeply to a high ridge that paralleled the glacial valley all the way to the Harper Glacier and on to the summit.

Their initial ascent was right up the middle of the Muldrow Glacier, a monotonous stretch of slushy, featureless ice, with an elevation gain of just 850 feet over 4.5 miles. Relatively level and uncrevassed, the surface of the glacier is marked by rocky moraines and long, winding scars cut by flowing surface water. The walls rising on either side of the glacial valley are steep—the Muldrow’s nickname is the Wall Street Glacier—and harbor snow, ice, and the occasional hanging glacier poking a blue tongue out of a high, hanging valley. In summer the cold isn’t extreme but it is pervasive, and the confines of the valley give one the impression of walking through a giant chest freezer.

Shortly after the last three men reached Camp I, cool, wet weather arrived, settling in for five days. The rain, however, didn’t put them off of their schedule. To reach the top, each man would climb the mountain multiple times, moving supplies higher and caching them before returning for more, methodically ascending with enough food and gear to support the team as it moved higher and higher.

The rain threw a pall over any excitement of finally being on the mountain and climbing. Clothes and sleeping bags became waterlogged, tent floors pooled with water, and when the sun made its brief appearances the men hustled to spread out their wet things, only to rush them back under cover when the rain returned. Walt Taylor, frustrated at the wetness, turned his face to the clouds and rain and called out, “
C’mon, sun! Show us you haven’t forgotten your chillun!” He also suggested they all walk around naked to show their faith in the Sun God. No one took him up on the proposition.

Jerry Clark led the foray up the glacier on June 24 with Luchterhand, Russell, and Walt Taylor on the rope team. While the others continued to move supplies from the horse cache to Camp I at the top of McGonagall Pass, the advance team checked their harnesses, clipped in to the rope at 50-foot intervals, and set out behind Clark, who led the way over the uneven terrain on skis. They established Camp II close to the base of the Lower Icefall at 6,500 feet.

The Lower Icefall was the first of several they would encounter on the route to Denali’s summit. An icefall is the glacial equivalent of a waterfall. Like the water flowing over a cliff, a glacier moving over a steep or narrow part of its bed becomes broken and chaotic. Glacial ice is somewhat plastic and flexible, but where it bends sharply, its surface shatters and cracks, forming crevasses that vary widely in width and depth, some a few feet deep, others plunging all the way to bedrock. Intersecting crevasses form ice columns called seracs. Where the glacial bed flattens or widens out, the crevasses close and the surface of the glacier becomes smooth again. They would encounter six perilously crevassed icefalls on their route, three on the Muldrow Glacier and three on the Harper Glacier.

Jerry Clark and Mark McLaughlin had brought skis as well as plastic Snowtreads and snowshoes and were using the skis for glacier travel. This did not sit well with John Russell, who let it be known to whomever would listen that he thought skis were unsafe for mountaineering. Already he was gaining a reputation as the one who picked battles, and though he tried to keep calm, another appeared to be brewing just below the surface.

It didn’t stay there long. On Sunday, June 25, only a couple of days after the conflict among Snyder, Schlichter, and Steve Taylor, Russell lost his cool. Clark, McLaughlin, Russell, and Janes were roped together, ferrying loads of gear from Camp I to Camp II. Russell and Janes walked while the other two skied. The slope on that part of the glacier was slight, but one of the skiers—probably McLaughlin since Clark was leading—lost control and nearly pulled Russell and his overloaded pack to the slushy ground. The men exchanged words and Russell stewed in his juices all the way back. Upon reaching the McGonagall Pass camp, John Russell stormed up to Wilcox, face red with anger and said, “
I want four days of food, a tube tent, and a stove. I’m leaving the expedition.”

Wilcox listened and then convinced Russell to stay, promising to gather the team in the morning to work through the conflict.

The sun popped out briefly on June 26, quickly followed by sleet and then snow. Under the pall of wet snow, all twelve expedition members huddled under shared ponchos and rain gear. Wilcox began with an attempt at fostering teamwork but Russell quickly jumped in, complaining that skis were unsafe. McLaughlin and Clark had asked to form a rope team of two for trips down the glacier to take advantage of the speed of their skis.
Wilcox refused, saying downhill skiing was forbidden. The skiers countered that the thousand-foot elevation change over 4.5 miles hardly constituted downhill skiing, and a long argument ensued. Both Clark and McLaughlin had more experience skiing in the mountains than Joe Wilcox and contended that they were more qualified to say whether or not skis were safe.

Howard Snyder, the leader of the Colorado group, tried to end the quarrel: “
Tell you what, Joe. You take one skier on your rope and I’ll take all the rest of ’em on mine.” His attempt at a joke (there were only two skiers) broke the atmosphere of growing hostility.

Wilcox had been lax in enforcing some of the expedition rules thus far, consciously abandoning the plan to rope up to cross the McKinley River and turning a blind eye to those risking giardia by drinking unfiltered water from tundra ponds during the hike in. They were low on the glacier, where crevasses were rare and those oversights might not have serious consequences. Higher up, though, there was less margin for error.

“
I know the rules are conservative,” he said as the wet snow did its best to find a way through his rain gear, “but we have to be overly cautious on a climb of this magnitude.” He continued, “I agreed to assume the responsibility of leading this expedition under a set of ground rules, and I am willing to continue only if I have your full support.”

He asked if there were any other concerns, but the men grew quiet, then the ever-lighthearted Walt Taylor broke the silence. “
I didn’t have any until we called this meeting,” he said. “Now I’m all wet.” Rueful laughter along with nods of agreement broke out as the meeting adjourned.

Wilcox felt he had made it clear that he expected the men to follow the expedition rules, and then further established that the rules could be changed if the change made sense and didn’t compromise safety. The gradient over the 4 miles between McGonagall Pass and the Lower Icefall is nearly imperceptible whether going up or down. McLaughlin and Clark kept using their skis following the morning meeting. Russell had been overruled.

The next day, still angry about the ski use, Russell refused to clip into a rope team that included Clark. When Wilcox heard about Russell’s refusal, he put his foot down and in the heat of the moment told Russell that he might be better off leaving the expedition after all. This time Russell acquiesced, though he managed to avoid Clark’s rope for the remainder of the climb. Russell was revealing himself to be a divisive force within the expedition, and Wilcox recognized it. Still, Wilcox wanted to get everyone up the mountain, and that included Russell despite his outburst.

The piles of gear amassing at the top of the pass had attracted Russell’s ire two days earlier, and he suggested to Snyder and Wilcox that they were carrying too much gear and should leave behind both of the Colorado team’s stoves, one of the four stoves carried by the Wilcox team, and all the expedition’s shovel handles, using their ice axes as handles when needed. Wilcox agreed to jettison a stove and the shovel handles, but Snyder refused. He kept his stoves and would carry the expedition’s only complete shovel.

“
Consequently, the Colorado group’s shovel was in demand at every camp,” Snyder observed.

John Russell’s preoccupation with weight seemed out of character for the man who, upon joining the expedition, boasted of packing 100 pounds above 10,000 feet and promised to carry more on Denali. Indeed, just days earlier he had carried a pack weighing 115 pounds from the horse cache to McGonagall Pass.

Leaving the handles, shovels, and saws behind was a staggering mistake. Though their packs were lighter as a result, shovels and saws were essential for building walls and snow shelters to protect against deadly windstorms. More mundanely, they were needed daily to clear campsites, build tent platforms, collect snow for melting, and to keep tents from collapsing during heavy snowfalls. By leaving them behind they betrayed an ignorance of the power of Denali’s storms, and left themselves vulnerable.

In the years since,
snow saws and steel spades became mandatory equipment for Denali guides. Steel spades enable climbers to dig snow caves in the hard snow commonly found on the mountain’s upper reaches. A snow cave can be dug with ice axes, but it is a dangerously slow process. Snow saws remain the only tools that work for cutting snow blocks for shelter building.

As is true for any group working together in a stressful environment, conflicts occurred, enemies were made, and friendships were forged. One conflict that has been overstated in various accounts of the story is the one between the original Wilcox team and the Colorado group. Interviews with Paul Schlichter and Howard Snyder in 2013 revealed that in spite of the commonly held belief that the Colorado men sequestered themselves from the others, they understood themselves to be part of the Wilcox Expedition.

“
I didn’t see us as very separate at all,” Schlichter said. “We had our own tent, our own meals, a cooking tent, and everything like that, so in that sense we were separate. But in terms of climbing, of the ropes that we were on, it was pretty well mixed around.”

“
We were three guys from Colorado who weren’t an expedition. We were part of the Wilcox Expedition,” Snyder said. He thought the Wilcox Expedition argument-prone, but Schlichter didn’t find the group’s behavior that unusual.

“
Well, you take twelve people, put them on a mountain like that with the weather, the fatigue, all the things that go on,” Paul Schlichter said, “you’re going to have some bickering back and forth, but I don’t think there were any major deals.” Throughout those first weeks Wilcox held regular meetings that sometimes led to heated arguments.

“
We had a couple of meetings where people aired out their grievances,” said Wilcox. “There would be a discussion, not every day but at least every other day, on how things were going. Not on how to climb; the route, the camps . . . that was all worked out in advance.” Still, some decisions fell to Wilcox alone. “
I had the last word. But if all were opposed to something, there was no sense in doing it.” Wilcox led by example, serving on both advance and relay teams, and with the exception of weather delays, the party advanced up the mountain at a moderate but consistent pace without prodding from the leader.

Joe Wilcox’s leadership style sounds loose compared to most modern climbs in which a professional guide has the final word on all decisions—from where to camp to what to eat to evaluating a climber’s fitness. Climbers can be sent back to Base Camp—with the assistance of a guide—for any number of reasons, including illness, attitude, and climbing in an unsafe manner. Professional guides are legally responsible for the well-being of their clients, who, even on Denali, are often novices who would not know what to do without a guide.

Wilcox, however, was not guiding the expedition; he was climbing an unfamiliar mountain with peers, some of whom were older and more experienced than he was.

“
It’s not like a military organization, where you’ve got the chain of command, or the corporate environment, where you have managers and subordinates,” recalls Schlichter, a former Air Force cadet who would go on to see action in Vietnam. “It was a bunch of fairly young guys getting together to go for a climb, and there’s a limit to how much control you have over the people who are up there.”

B
eyond Camp II, the Muldrow Glacier becomes heavily crevassed. The way through it exposes climbers to the danger of unseen crevasses or that of avalanches, and sometimes to both at the same time. They must negotiate two icefalls and a particularly treacherous feature called the Hill of Cracks. Here the glacier bulges as it passes over an unseen mass, creating crevasses that radiate outward and sometimes run at right angles to each other. Finding a safe route is especially difficult.

To get through these crevasse fields, the Wilcox Expedition had to either walk around, jump, or cross over the yawning fissures on snow bridges, formed when snowfall covers and then builds up over an open crevasse. Often the only sign of a hidden crevasse is a slight depression in the snow caused when the heavy, overlying snow droops into the opening below. With the lighter snowfall on the north side of the mountain, the bridges on the Muldrow are often thin and don’t droop as obviously, making them
hard to spot, even by experienced mountaineers. Another route through the icefalls requires climbers to hug the sides of the glacier, passing beneath the avalanche-prone snow and ice that collects on the steep canyon walls. Neither choice is without serious risk.

Brad Washburn warned of the hazards along the margins of the Muldrow in his unpublished climbing guide when he wrote, “
I have often seen huge chunks of ice, which have fallen down the great gullies of Mount Carpe and rolled three-quarters of the way across the level floor of the valley amid a lethal cloud of flying ice and snow.”

While Russell continued to avoid climbing with Clark, Wilcox shuffled the rope teams, giving everyone else a chance to work together and perform the different tasks required during the climb. This also built camaraderie, shoring up the team against the fractures that occasionally threatened to divide the expedition. The routine involved an advance team of four carrying half loads and breaking trail, followed by packers, carrying full loads. They would climb high, cache their loads, and descend again to camp low in order to better acclimate to the thin air at altitude. On a map, the distance from Wonder Lake to the south summit of Denali is 36.5 miles, but each man would travel many times that distance as he relayed load after load of food and gear up the mountain ascending and descending between camps or caches along the route.

After the ski meeting, Wilcox went to Snyder’s tent and told him that he would lead the next push up the glacier, through the Lower Icefall to establish Camp III. Snyder’s team would include Lewis, McLaughlin, and Steve Taylor. They gathered their personal gear and got ready to move to Camp II. Clark, Russell, Walt Taylor, and Anshel Schiff were also heading to Camp II carrying loads of food and supplies. A full load consisted of two one-day food packs, or a single two-day pack. Schiff was on his way out of camp when Walt Taylor noticed that a one-day food pack remained. Someone was carrying half a load and he knew who it was.

“
Come back here, Anshel, you rascal!” he yelled.

Schiff returned and after a good-natured Walt Taylor–style scolding, he reluctantly added the second bag to his load and headed up the glacier.

Schiff was one of the least experienced climbers on the expedition, and given that he had joined to lead the scientific studies, no one was expecting him to reach the summit. Still, he was a member of the expedition and was expected to carry his share of the weight. Walt Taylor was in fact doing Schiff a favor by refusing to let him slack off where the climbing was relatively easy.

Charged with establishing a route through the Lower Icefall, Snyder had to choose between two dangerous options. The left side of the icefall had fewer crevasses, but the canyon wall on that side of the valley was a snow-covered slope, prone to avalanche. The right side was more heavily crevassed, but the slope above was more stable. Brad Washburn’s advice was to skirt the crevasses by hugging the right side of the glacier and briefly moving through the less dangerous avalanche zone.

As Snyder considered his options on the morning of June 27, a thunderous boom issued from the left side of the valley, followed by an escalating roar. A massive avalanche shot down the valley wall, gathering rock and ice before surging far beyond the foot of the wall, well into the left side of the icefall. The men watched speechlessly as the thunder subsided and the snow billows drifted away to reveal a pile of rock, snow, and ice sprayed across the left side of the glacier. Their only option now was to go right.

Snyder led the way and put Lewis in the second rope position, figuring the big man would be able to handle it if he fell. A few hundred feet out, Snyder’s snowshoe binding came loose. He paused to adjust it and told Lewis to carefully move up. Lewis was probing a small crevasse with his bamboo pole when he suddenly toppled into a larger one.

Snyder quickly drove his ax into the ice to arrest Lewis’s fall but it penetrated just an inch or two, providing a tenuous purchase at best. Steve Taylor was third on the rope, and Snyder instructed him to carefully cross the crevasse and take over the ax belay. This was a test for the inexperienced Steve Taylor, whom Snyder and others had thought was not up to the psychological and physical challenges of mountaineering. At some level, it was the kind of test they had all come for. Taylor held fast.

Snyder placed two ice screws into the glacier and secured the rope to which Lewis was still attached. With McLaughlin anchoring the other end of the line by holding an edge on his skis, Snyder peered into the crevasse. Lewis dangled about nine feet below.

“Do you have me? Do you have me?”

“Are you all right?’ asked Snyder

“Hell no, I’m not all right! Do you have me?”

He was wedged in horizontally, facing downward, staring down into the dark maw of the crevasse rather than up toward his rescuers. As his eyes adjusted to the darkness, Lewis found himself suspended above a gymnasium-size cavern with deep-blue walls and a lake at the bottom. Geared up and loaded down as he was, he knew a plunge into the dark lake would be a one-way trip.

They hoisted Lewis’s pack out first, followed by his ax. Then they rigged a pulley system to bring Lewis up, with McLaughlin anchoring the pulley. In the thin, crusty snow over the hard ice, the long, sharp edge of McLaughlin’s ski provided a solid grip—more reliable than the rounded edge of a snowshoe or a
Bunny Boot without crampons. McLaughlin had proven the usefulness of skis, but Russell was not the kind of person to acknowledge such things.

As Lewis’s nerves settled down, he described the scene inside the glacier. “
I wish there was enough light down there to take pictures,” he said. “It was all subtle shades of blue.”

They pushed on and reached the top of the icefall but were halted by a large crevasse and whiteout conditions at about 7,300 feet. Shy of Camp III, they cached their loads, including their high-altitude boots and clothing, and returned to Camp II.

That night, as Joe Wilcox prepared dinner, he overprimed the stove, spilling fuel onto the tent floor. When he lit the stove, the floor went up in flames, which he quickly smothered, leaving the tent unscathed. When the last rope team arrived in camp that night, Russell dutifully reported to them, “
Our Fearless Leader tried to burn down the tent!”

McLaughlin demonstrated the practicality of skis while helping extract Lewis from the glacier while Clark showed how annoying they could be for others on the rope line. He stopped repeatedly during the passage between Camps II and I, adding wax, then removing wax; putting on climbing skins, then taking them off again. Each time he stopped, the others were forced to stop as well, and by the time they reached camp his companions were exasperated.

The rope team of Joe Wilcox, Hank Janes, John Russell, and Dennis Luchterhand pushed up to 8,100 feet the following day and established Camp III between the Muldrow’s two major icefalls and then returned to Camp II. Snow whispered against the nylon walls of the tents throughout the night, piling up on the sides of the tents and muffling the snores and sounds of shifting movements made by the men sleeping inside. A sky opaque with falling snow greeted them when they awoke. Movement beyond the barely visible wands marking the boundaries of the camp would be risky, so they lounged in their tents rather than pushing their luck.

“
The concealing snowfall had made the icefall a treacherous death trap,” Wilcox wrote, “the valley walls echoed with the muffled rumble of distant avalanches.” The whole group would wait until the risk of avalanche from the new snow had subsided.

They had spent four days on a nearly nonstop drive from Puyallup to Denali, hiked cross-country to McGonagall Pass, and then relayed gear up the glacier for five more days. The forced respite was welcome. Between sessions of clearing snow from the camp, snowball fights broke out. Wilcox and Steve Taylor played a marathon chess game. Luchterhand lamented the lack of women on the expedition. Janes read aloud from a book of Zen. Conversation soon moved to the Vietnam War and how each man had come to be hunkered down in a snowstorm on a remote Alaska mountain rather than wading through rice paddies in Southeast Asia.

Most of Joe Wilcox’s original members had deferments; Jerry Lewis, who was thirty, had already served a stint in the Army. Schlichter, an Air Force cadet, would head to Vietnam at the end of the summer. A knee injury suffered when Wilcox played collegiate football had made him physically ineligible—a wonderful bureaucratic irony for the leader of an expedition to the alpine wilderness of Denali. Janes’s teaching job kept him stateside, and McLaughlin had asthma that “
became chronic whenever he got within two blocks of his draft board.” It couldn’t have been much of a surprise when Russell claimed that he had been declared unregimentable.

The snowfall subsided on the morning of June 30, and the men woke to three feet of powder. The dirty, jumbled surface of the glacier had been made smooth and immaculately white by the impossibly bright blanket of snow bathed in dazzling sunlight. The men were soon sweating in their tents as the temperature inside became unbearable, pushing them outside where it didn’t feel much cooler.

A clear summer day on a glacier can be a contradictory experience. While the air temperature might be at or below freezing, the direct sunlight radiating from above and reflecting back from the ubiquitous snow can be uncomfortably warm. For those with fair complexions, the multiplied sunlight can be relentless, raising blisters on exposed skin and surreptitiously burning nostrils, lips, and—at least for mouth breathers—the roof of the mouth. Unprotected eyes can result in burned retinas and painful but temporary snow blindness. Still, it was hard to complain about after days of rain. They took advantage of the conditions by laying out all their soaked gear to dry in the sun while they comfortably moved around on the icy glacier dressed in just their long underwear or shorts.

The new snow clung to the steep walls of the valley with a tenuous grip and the heat of the sun was more than enough to break it free. The avalanche danger forced the expedition to sit tight during the warmth of the day and move only at night when the cold air hardened the snow and stilled the snow slides.

Near midnight, all twelve men set out for Camp III. Eight dropped their loads at Camp III and turned back to Camp II for more, while Wilcox led the advance team of Schiff, Janes, and Schlichter to establish a route beyond the Hill of Cracks and through the Upper Icefall. The first day of July dawned as they climbed, painting the valley once again with alpenglow—first a faint pink, then growing orange and finally gold with the ascent of the rising sun into a blue sky. By the time the packers deposited their loads and returned to Camp II, the blazing sunlight had returned, forcing them to shed their hats, gloves, and jackets.

Early the next morning, they packed up their tents and sleeping bags at Camp II and moved into Camp III, established at the top of the Hill of Cracks in a level spot between two large crevasses. One final carry would complete the move, but Snyder couldn’t muster a full rope team to finish the job, so they settled in to wait for the stable conditions brought on by the cool of the evening.

This was the first camp without a pool of melted glacial water nearby, and soon stoves were hissing away, melting snow for cooking and drinking. As Snyder set a pan packed with clean white snow onto the burner he heard the whump of igniting gas and looked up to see Russell’s stove engulfed in flames. He had apparently overpumped the stove and gas burst through one of its gaskets and ignited. The fire was soon put out. No harm done.

The advance team returned around noon and reported that they had topped the Muldrow’s second icefall, known as the Great Icefall, by going up the middle of the glacier and cached their gear at about 10,600 feet. Schlichter reported that he had taken some of Schiff’s load when Schiff said he was having trouble carrying it.

“
I didn’t mind carrying it,” Schlichter confided to Snyder, “except that he kept looking back at me with a big grin.”