On the Walsh Glacier, Bob and Brad wore bearpaw snowshoes. With wooden frames lashed with crisscrossing grids of shellacked rawhide strips, attached to the boot with leather bindings, these snowshoes were identical to the footwear of many a trapper in the Canadian wilds dating back to the nineteenth century. Carrying a heavy pack, one inevitably feels clumsy shuffling along in snowshoes (it takes a while to master the bowlegged waddle that ensures that the back of the right shoe doesn’t land on the front of the left, sending one sprawling), but bearpaws are surprisingly effective on even fairly steep slopes. On the Yukon expedition in 1935, Washburn’s team had used skis, but there the huge icefields were relatively flat. In 1937, Brad decided that skis would not work as well as snowshoes on Lucania. “We figured that on steep slopes,” he recalls, “you could only carry half as much weight on skis as you could on snowshoes.”
In an age before down-filled jackets and synthetic fabrics, Brad’s and Bob’s clothing essentially consisted of layers of wool and cotton. Bob had a caribou hide jacket with a rabbit-fur hood that he would swear by years later. The men’s mittens consisted of wool inners and shapeless cotton outers. When it was sunny, both men wore the kind of brimmed cotton hats that Edwardians might have sported in African savannahs. For the cold, Brad had a Royal Canadian Mounted Police hat lined, as he recalls, “with muskrat bellies—apparently the softest fur you can get.” Both men used the flimsy, cheap aviation goggles favored by the American military.
The men’s tent would create a crucial dilemma. Anticipating a party of four, Brad and Bob had brought a single four-man Logan tent. Nine-feet square, pitched around a central pole and guyed tight with pullouts, made of Egyptian cotton, the tent was monstrously heavy—about sixteen pounds dry and clean, well over twenty when soaked or caked with ice. For only a pair of men, this cotton mansion was too much of a good thing—it pitched so tall that one could stand near the center pole, and dry out wet clothes by hanging them from the ceiling. Bob and Brad could see no way to refashion the tent into a snug two-man model. The sleeping bags, made by the Wood Company, were equally unwieldy. Brad’s and Bob’s bags were rectangular, wool-lined, hard to compress, and heavy. Though they hauled three sleeping bags up to Basin Camp, the two men decided early on that if they pushed over the Lucania-Steele ridge and east toward Kluane Lake, they would abandon two bags and share the third. Already on June 23, the day after Reeve flew out, Brad’s diary notes, “Bob and I have just tried sleeping double, head-to-foot, in one bag. It is not going to be bad at all.” (Later he would revise that blithe assertion.)
The men had air mattresses, but these too they would eventually jettison, choosing to sleep instead on the hard racks of their Logan packboards. At six pounds apiece, these were not, by modern standards, ridiculously heavy. But as crude wooden frames to which you lashed all your belongings with cordage, packboards were far less comfortable and far harder to climb in than today’s form-fitting nylon packs with internal frames. For stoves, the men used a pair of Primus cookers that burned white gas—an efficient design of Swedish origin that had won favor on the epochal Antarctic expeditions of the first two decades of the twentieth century and that would remain the stove of choice well into the 1960s.
The all-important rope was made of hemp. Despite its diameter of five-eighths of an inch (versus the modern standard of eleven millimeters, or a little less than seven-sixteenths of an inch), Bob and Brad’s lifeline was only about one-fourth as strong as the nylon and perlon ropes that would supersede hemp. Every climber in the 1930s knew gruesome tales of ropes breaking under the strain of a long fall. The rope Brad and Bob used, on the other hand, was only 100 feet long; today climbers never venture out with lifelines shorter than 150 feet.
For glacial travel today, climbers tie their ropes into harnesses designed to cradle the hips and waist, then attach a pair of short slings connecting the harness to the rope with prusik knots. The idea is that if you fall into a crevasse, you can use the prusiks (which slide upward on the rope but, when cinched down, hold tight for a downward pull) to climb back out unaided. Bob and Brad’s setup was simpler. Each man merely tied the end of his rope around his waist with a bowline. If his partner fell into a crevasse, the other would halt in his tracks, using his own body as anchor to minimize the fall. Then it would be his duty to pull with all his might to aid the friend’s floundering as he tried to thrash his way back to the surface. (The system, however, had been designed for parties of four or more: three men pulling from different directions could hope to haul a fourth out of a crevasse. For a two-man party in the event of a serious crevasse fall, it was virtually useless.)
One last piece of gear, which Brad and Bob pondered abandoning in the cache, but ended up taking with them, would prove pivotal in the weeks to come. This was Russ Dow’s thirty-year-old police revolver. The gun was heavy, but Bob thought it might come in handy in the lowlands if the pair grew short on food. There were only about a dozen cartridges in the cache; Bob used up several of these finding out that the revolver shot high and left. From the start, it was understood that Bob—a crack shot who, it will be recalled, had killed a grizzly with one cartridge on the 1935 Yukon expedition—would be the team’s marksman.
Bob and Brad’s food on Lucania likewise bore little resemblance to the freeze-dried casseroles and energy bars of a modern expedition. The staples in 1937 included such heavy items as canned ham and bacon, dates, fresh and dried meat (some of which had to be thrown out after it spoiled), and canned fruit. Breakfast was inevitably a hot cereal, either cornmeal mush or Cream of Wheat or Maltex, floating in reconstituted Klim, the powdered whole milk that several generations of northern adventurers swore by. (Klim, a company whose brand name is “milk” spelled backwards, went out of business in the early 1960s. On June 28, Brad wrote in his diary, “I have succeeded in collecting enough Klim coupons to get a free electric mixer, and have stored them in my shirt pocket!”) Lunch was cheese, chocolate, biscuits, jam, dried fruit, and sardines. There were rice, dehydrated baked beans, macaroni, powdered soups, and canned applesauce for dinner along with the meat. The men’s favorite post-prandial drink was a cup of Ovaltine, the malty beverage that American moms once unfailingly brought up their children to despise. The only other hot drinks were cocoa and tea sweetened with sugar; the two men deemed coffee unnecessary. (On June 24, Brad’s diary sings the praises of an “Ovaltine orgy … a magnificent mixture of it, cocoa, Klim, sugar, and hot water!”) All the water the men drank and cooked with, of course, came from pots of snow melted on the Primus. Bob and Brad had included in their stocks not even a pint of the “victory brandy” that was de rigueur on other expeditions of the day.
Nor did the two men bother with a medical kit. (Modern Alaskan and Himalayan expeditions typically carry everything from antibiotics and prescription painkillers to plastic splints.) Bob and Brad did not even toss in a bottle of aspirin. “We didn’t get headaches,” Brad recalls. “We did have a lot of adhesive tape.”
To haul their heavy loads up the Walsh Glacier, the pair had flown in a collapsible sledge. On June 24, they put the contraption together and loaded two hundred pounds of gear on it, only to have the thing “collapse as flat as a steamer chair.” This was a serious setback. The men pulled the pieces into their tent and set to work repairing the sledge. Brad was surprised and delighted to find in the meager tool kit “a Yankee screw-driver with awls and drills to fit it.” Without this implement, repair would have been impossible. The men broke apart their extra pair of packboards and used the wood to reinforce the badly designed device. “The sledge bows are oak; so nothing but a drill could possibly have bored through them,” wrote Brad in his diary. “Thanks be to the man who put in that Yankee drill. I think it was Norman Bright. It was not on our list, but it saved the day for us.”
In the wake of Reeve’s departure, the temperature hovered around freezing, preventing the glacier surface from hardening up, and the weather got worse. “It snowed hard all night,” Brad wrote on the mo
rning of June 24. “This is the damnedest neck of the woods for snow, rain, and fog that I have ever seen!” Nevertheless, with their plan of action formulated, the men were in good spirits. “I feel fine tonight,” Brad had written the evening before. “Bring on the mountain and we’ll give her hell!”
At last the sledging began. On June 25, Bob and Brad managed to haul 325 pounds of gear two and a half miles up the Walsh. There, because of “a nasty side slope,” they left half the load in a depot and backpacked the rest up to the point they had reached on their reconnaissance two days before. At 2:00 P.M., the men were back at Base Camp, disheartened to have watched a clear morning deteriorate into another blowing snowstorm. They had been able to regain their tent only thanks to the trail of black-tipped willow wands they had placed on June 23. “I have never seen such endless, rotten weather,” wrote Brad. By that afternoon, he noted in his diary, the two men had been on the Walsh Glacier a full week, with relatively little to show for it.
The next day, despite five inches of new snow on the ground and flakes continuing to fall, Brad and Bob sledged another three-hundred-plus-pound load “until we nearly died, for it pushed nearly the whole mountain of loose snow ahead of it.” All day they struggled with their relays. In the afternoon the sun broke out, but instead of facilitating the men’s progress, it turned the glacial basin into a furnace. Despite the fact that their universe was composed of ice and snow, with the sun out it was almost too hot to move. Bob stripped off his clothes and took a “snow bath” to cool off and clean up.
Yet in a herculean effort that stretched from 3:00 in the morning till nearly 9:00 at night, the pair got most of their supplies up to 9,000 feet, where they pitched their tent and established Camp II. As they became familiar with their trail, they deemed the crevasse risk small enough to dispense with roping up; in any event, it was impossible to man-haul the sledge and stay roped a hundred feet apart and ready to arrest a sudden fall. That evening, Brad made a blasé entry in his diary, “While hauling the last load, Bob fell into a crack up to his elbow, but, as usual, the sledge harness held him.”
At Camp II for the first time the men got a good look at the headwall, with its slightly protruding rib. The view was daunting. “Zeus, but that will be a climb!” wrote Brad. “But we’ve got to make it!”
Their minor gain in altitude had won the pair a slight reprieve in terms of snow conditions. During the night of June 26, the temperature dropped below 20°F, the coldest yet. Brad noted a “rock-hard crust” beneath the surface accumulation of new snow. All day on the 27th, however, a “rotten southwester” howled across the glacier. Instead of sledging in the morning, Brad and Bob sorted their gear and food once more, striving to eliminate every inessential ounce. As Brad wrote in his diary, “Our motto from now on is: ‘Chuck it out and we won’t have to lug it!’”
As always when men work hard in the outdoors, food became a matter of supreme interest to the two climbers. On the 27th, Brad recorded, “So far we have eaten virtually no meat at all except a huge four-pound Hormel ham that is delicious beyond words. The dried beef is disgusting. The lemon powder is wonderful. We are gorging on lemonade all the time, and it’s grand in the canteen on the trail for lunch.”
That day the weather stayed so foul that Brad and Bob were able to move only a load of gear apiece a mile and a half up-glacier. A few serious crevasses and a steady side slope meant that sledging was out of the question, so the men had to backpack their supplies. Between them, they lugged only ninety pounds—far less than the three-hundred-plus they had dragged on their sledge.
At the pace they were going, which by Bob and Brad’s high standards was agonizingly slow, they would not reach the head of the basin until July 1. That would mean having spent thirteen days on the Walsh Glacier without having grappled with the first technical obstacle in Lucania’s defenses. The weather continued to bedevil the men. The “rock-hard crust” proved illusory. On June 27, Brad noted, “[I]t is still endless slush from the rain if you dig through only a foot of powder and crust.” That evening, he wrote, “I have two blisters on my right foot, and Bob has a sore toe; otherwise we are conditioning very fast.”
Finally, on June 28, the men got a day of perfect weather. They were moving by 4:00 A.M. With the thermometer at 12°F, a “marvelous crust” had formed, “through which we broke only three or four inches at worst.” To take advantage of such conditions, the men backpacked eighty pounds apiece—prodigious loads, given that Bob weighed only 150 pounds himself, Brad a mere 140. (Among the gear, Brad, always a stickler for precise data, had included a scale for weighing loads.) After dumping their loads, the men returned and packed up everything left in camp, then staggered up-glacier under ninety-pound burdens—pretty much the limit for mountaineers no matter what shape they are in.
Then the weird heat, intensified by the basin’s facing south, took over. Wrote Brad in his diary, “I have basked on the sledge as long as I dared in this terrific sun, and we have chatted and loafed and sipped lemonade and nibbled crackers all afternoon.” (“Loafed” indeed—after hauling eighty- and ninety-pound loads at more than 9,000 feet!) With this day’s effort, Brad and Bob launched a strategy many Alaskan climbers have adopted—to rest or sleep during the day and move at night. In June and July, 350 miles south of the Arctic Circle, even at midnight it never gets darker than dusk, and snow conditions are generally superior in the night.
The fickle weather changed in the late afternoon; by 8:00 P.M. it was once more snowing hard. With their solid day’s work under their belts, the men refused to be discouraged. “We have just finished another delicious ham supper,” wrote Brad, “with raisins, and pea soup, lemonade, Ovaltine, tea, cocoa, jam, and pilot-crackers. This certainly is the life. The barometer is still high and steady; so we may have a good day tomorrow.”
On June 30, plowing through six inches of new snow, the two climbers finally reached the base of the headwall. There they found a protected shelf of snow on which to pitch their Basin Camp. In nine days of all-out effort, they had advanced their campaign against Lucania by a paltry eight miles, though in terms of actual travel, as they had relayed loads, they had covered more than three times that distance. Later that day the two men hauled a second load to their hard-won perch. It would be the last stretch of ground on which they could use their sledge. On July 1, the jerry-rigged contraption became one more piece of debris the two men chucked out. (In 1937, climbers in the remote ranges never dreamed of a day when it would be considered poor style to leave one’s trash on the mountain. Well into the 1960s, when a party came upon a previous expedition’s junk, its reaction partook more of archaeological wonder than of annoyance. On the South Col route on Everest, it would not be until the mid-1980s that the sheer proliferation of garbage and used oxygen bottles inspired the first cleanup expeditions.)
On July 1, a morning fog slowly dispersed, unveiling a perfect day. Brad and Bob sledged the last of their gear up to Basin Camp, at 10,700 feet. The bizarre subarctic heat reached a new intensity: at 2:00 P.M., Brad’s thermometer registered 94°F inside the tent.
During these pivotal days, Brad’s diary, normally so full of jaunty asseverations, sprinkled so liberally with his favorite punctuation mark, the exclamation point, betrays a latent anxiety. “The bottom of the ridge is very steep, but we’ll get onto it somehow,” he writes on June 30. “The conditions are always bad here, but we’ll make it somehow,” he adds on the same day. On July 1: “What we need now is a few really cold nights…. The ridge ahead is not sharp…. [I]t should go all right with PATIENCE, which has to be the password on this trip.”
By now, chucking out things right and left, Brad and Bob had reduced their worldly belongings to 280 pounds—still far too much to carry in a single load. They hoped to transport all this food and gear 4,000 feet up the shallow rib of the headwall to the top of the ridge connecting Steele and Lucania in three carries, averaging forty-five pounds per man per load. (One can backpack on a relatively flat glacier with dou
ble that burden, but not climb a steep slope with technical obstacles on it.) Already the two men had given a name to the camp they so dearly wished to place at 14,000 feet. It was Shangri-La, promising the paradise of high summits and an escape to the east.
Bob recalls the process by which the pair eliminated excess gear. “Brad would say, ‘How much gas do you think we need?’ I would say so much, and he might say, ‘I think we need a little more than that.’ Usually we agreed entirely.”
After dinner on July 1, taking advantage once more of the better conditions at night, the two men reconnoitered the headwall. The first problem was to cross the bergschrund, the gaping crevasse that forms at the base of every alpine cliff where the glacier below pulls away from the immovable mountain itself. Fortunately, the men found a bridge across the ’schrund where ice blocks had slumped into the void and plugged it. Bob and Brad had planned only a short probe, but the snow had hardened up so well that it offered a perfect surface for kicking steps. Here, for the first time, they wore their crampons. They would gladly have abandoned their snowshoes at this point, but both men knew from other Alaskan expeditions that high on wind-swept ridges, you could run into freakish accumulations of soft powder snow.
It was an enchanted evening. Eighty miles to the southeast, they saw Mounts Hubbard and Vancouver tinged with alpen-glow. The men climbed in ghostly shadow, but far above them on the left, as late as 10:30 P.M., the distant summit ridge of Lucania caught the last rays of the sun. In only two hours, the men ascended a full 2,000 feet, solving half the headwall. The last stretch was the trickiest, a gauntlet weaving through séracs—huge detached ice blocks teetering ominously on the verge of collapse. Here the men used their axes to carve steps in the hard ice. Best of all, the sérac traverse ended in a small shelf—a perfect campsite in the middle of a slope so steep the men had feared there would be no place to pitch their tent.
Escape from Lucania Page 8