Bob Bates was the temperamental opposite of Washburn. A peace-at-all-costs go-between, he more than once interceded gently and wisely between expedition teammates who were on the verge of serious conflict. The phrase “the nicest guy you’ll ever meet” comes readily to the lips of most of Bates’s lifelong friends.
If this suggests a certain acquiescent passivity about the man, that was not the case in the mountains. The last person in the world to speak ill of another (The Love of Mountains Is Best is serenely free of rancor throughout its 493 pages), the first to volunteer for any dirty or dangerous job, Bates possessed a will in its own way as strong as Washburn’s. And Bob had a valuable quality that Brad entirely lacked. In an ominous or uncertain fix, Bob summoned up a Zen-like equanimity. If a predicament was beyond his control, he accepted the fact. Stoicism of this sort makes a powerful antidote to paralyzing fear.
As Bob puts it today, “I take things in stride. If I can’t do anything about [the situation], I don’t worry.”
Brad, on the other hand, found it hard to relax when matters were beyond his control. Just as he insisted on being the leader, he felt a nagging anxiety when he could not bend the world to fit his will. And he was the soul of impatience. In a 1983 interview in American Photographer, alluding to his camera work, he acknowledged as much: “A lot of people have said to me, ‘You must have an enormous amount of patience.’ Actually, I’m impatient as hell. I’m just stubborn.”
There was another ingredient to the two men’s remarkable rapport on Lucania. During their downtime on the mountain, when they lay in their tent waiting out storms—those moments when it is easiest to get on each other’s nerves—they whiled away the hours singing cowboy songs and railroad ballads out loud together, for which music they shared an inexhaustible zest. “The Wreck of the Old ’97,” “Ain’t Got No Use for the Women,” “Casey Jones,” “The Red River Valley,” “The Wreck of the CNO No. 5.” (Reminiscing in Bates’s living room in New Hampshire in the winter of 2000, Bob and Brad suddenly burst into dual concert: “I awoke one morning on the Old Chisholm Trail / With a rope in my hand and cow by the tail / Come a ki yi yippee yippee yay, yippee yay / Come a ki yi yippee yippee yay / There’s a stray in the herd, and the boss said kill it / So I slammed it in the ass with the handle of a skillet / Come a ki yi yippee yippee yay …”)
As Brad’s July 7 entry makes clear, the pull of the escape route that lay just beyond their tent door at Shangri-La was powerful. In two days, the men sensed, they could be off Steele and back in the lowlands, with nothing but a long hike between them and Kluane Lake. At 14,000 feet on a windswept ridge, moreover, with a tent missing half its floor, a single sleeping bag that could not be zipped closed, and no air mattresses, Bob and Brad were in an exceedingly vulnerable position. All day on the 7th it snowed, and that night the temperature plunged to minus 1°F.
Yet the men were determined to have a stab at Lucania. On July 7, the 17,150-foot summit lay more than 3,000 feet above them and five miles away, invisible in the storm. Any attempt, the two men agreed, would require an intermediate camp. This in turn raised the specter of an insidious scenario. The broad ridge on which they had pitched their tent at Shangri-La was almost featureless, one stretch of billowing snow looking just like the next. To make another camp closer to Lucania, they would have to carry their tent with them, leaving the rest of their belongings in a cache at Shangri-La. On other expeditions, Bob and Brad had seen just how quickly blowing snow on a high ridge could drift over any object that protruded from the surface. If the storm continued as it had the last several days, with Brad and Bob camped several miles closer to Lucania, they could well lose their Shangri-La cache for good. They had only their three-foot willow wands to mark the depot of supplies.
Undaunted, the two men set out after dinner on July 7, with light snow falling, to carry a load of gear and food toward Lucania. The going was as bad as they might have feared: eighteen inches of new snow, with soft stuff beneath, once more requiring snowshoes. In three hours, they were back at Shangri-La, having deposited ropes, crampons, and eight days’ worth of food on a swale two miles closer to the summit. (It was not so much that Brad and Bob thought it would really require eight days from Shangri-La to get up Lucania, as that the food was in any case expendable, since they could not carry all twenty-five days’ worth down Mount Steele.)
Yet the next day Brad indicated in his diary just how strong the habit of frugality had become for these men living on the edge: “We are trying to save food. We each put one quarter of a teaspoonful of sugar in our cereal (which we have sweetened a bit with raisins); and we save the cereal pot to cook the soup in for lunch and supper, and wash it only once a day.” Because of the weather, the men remained pessimistic. The night before, Brad had closed his long diary entry with “That wind simply must change or we haven’t a prayer. Ovaltine and bed.”
Through most of July 8, the men “loafed” (Brad’s usual word for anything other than all-out activity) as they peeked periodically out the tent door to check on the weather. At last their wait was rewarded, when, just before 4:00 P.M., the snow stopped falling and the clouds peeled rapidly away. Despite the intense cold, Brad and Bob packed up their tent after a quick dinner and set off toward their cache of gear two miles to the southwest. When they arrived there, instead of camping on the spot, they loaded up the food, ropes, and crampons and pushed on. By 10:00 P.M., they were three and a quarter miles from Shangri-La, camped at the very base of Lucania’s summit pyramid. Inside the tent, it was zero degrees Fahrenheit, and an icy wind out of the northeast drilled the cotton walls of their shelter, but the sky remained gloriously clear.
That night the thermometer crept down to minus 8°F. It was impossible for the men to stay warm with their skimpy gear: as the hours passed, the vigil felt more like a bivouac than a normal night in a tent. By 9:00 in the morning on July 9, the temperature was up to a plus 6°F, and the day was still perfectly clear.
From the moment the two left the tent, they were forced to plow along with their snowshoes on. “I doubt if Lucania is ever anything but powder,” Brad later wrote. “It was waist-deep flour with not a trace of crust anywhere.” For four hours, the men inched laboriously ahead, changing the lead often. “One of us would get so pooped that he couldn’t move,” Brad remembers, “and he’d step aside, and then the other guy would do it for a while.” In his diary, Brad recorded, “We fought on as I have never fought in my life.”
The northeast ridge of Lucania unfolds in a long string of subsidiary summits. Rather than climb over each and have to descend into the gap beyond, Bob and Brad skirted several of these subsummits by traversing across a plateau on the north. After four hours, the men bent their course south and upward to aim at a saddle between two of the highest false summits of Lucania. As they neared that saddle, the slope grew steeper and steeper, until they were forced to traverse “a 40 [-degree] sideslope of fathomless powder, veneered with an inch of rock-hard wind-crust.”
Such terrain was impossible to negotiate in snowshoes. In the lead, Brad took his bearpaws off, hoping the crust would support his weight. All at once he plunged through to his knees, so suddenly that he dropped his snowshoes. With a sinking heart, he watched them slide toward the void below—only to fetch up a mere ten feet away on an imperceptible bulge. Gingerly, he crept down and retrieved the invaluable footgear.
There was only one way to proceed. With his snowshoes back on, Brad used his ice axe to smash away the inch-thick crust ahead of him. Gaining only a few feet with each flurry of axe blows, he waddled forward in the powder two feet below the surface. In effect, he was carving a trench through the fiendish snowscape. It took Brad an hour to advance a mere hundred yards. It was the hardest single passage the men had confronted during their twenty-two days on Lucania, and it had to be performed in the rarefied air of 16,000 feet.
Exhausted, Brad turned the lead over to Bob. Finally, at 2:25 in the afternoon, the pair topped out on the saddle. They let out what
Brad later called “a loud huzzah” and collapsed to rest. After five-and-a-half nonstop hours of struggle, they indulged in a snack of chocolate, dates, and raisins. There was not a breath of wind, and the day was holding perfect.
At last, on this final ridge, a true crust gave the men the break they needed. They put on their crampons and started on. The steel points bit cleanly into the hard snow, and the crust failed to collapse beneath their weight. Ahead, the last subsummit beckoned. Near its crest, the ridge serpentined into a plume that seemed to overhang, giving Brad and Bob a last grave doubt about their success. But that apparent overhang was a trick of foreshortening. When they confronted a plume that was merely steep, they found they could crampon right up it.
The true summit looked about a mile away. The intervening ridge was seamed with a few small bands of rock—“the first rock we have seen anywhere for nearly four weeks,” Brad later wrote. Skirting these bands on the left, the men marched forward with a growing elation. Brad’s diary entry late that evening captures the mood of the moment: “It seemed like a dream—the two of us approaching the top of Lucania, with no more difficulties in sight…. We did not want to lose our mountain this time. We both knew that if we failed on this try, we’d probably be too tired to take another crack at it before the weather changed; we were still, as we had been all day, desperately serious.”
At 4:30 P.M.—they had been going for seven and a half hours with only one short break—the men, still roped together, topped a feathery cornice and stood on what they assumed was the summit, only to see yet another, slightly higher crest ahead of them. They stifled their cry of joy and trudged on.
It was a short-lived disappointment. Ten minutes later, Bob and Brad laid the first human footprints on the summit of Mount Lucania. “[O]ur yell of triumph could have been heard in Timbuctoo!” Brad later bragged to his diary.
The hour the men spent on top would turn out to be one of the most magical of their lives. In the cloudless air, a stunning panorama of glaciated peaks ranged about them on all sides. Far to the southeast, 190 miles away, they could see Mount Fairweather, the first Alaskan mountain Brad had attempted, in 1930. Much closer, to the south, sprawled the summit plateau of Mount Logan, the biggest mountain in the world, in terms of sheer bulk, over the right shoulder of which they stared at the graceful summit pyramid of Mount Saint Elias, whose first ascent by the Duke of the Abruzzi in 1897 had launched mountaineering in the Far North of North America. Off Logan’s left shoulder, they saw the peaks in the Yukon that Brad and Bob and their teammates in 1935 had been the first men to approach: Alverstone, Hubbard, Seattle, and many more, some still unnamed.
The men could also see, twisting darkly far below them away to the west, the Chitina valley that had given them such gloomy pause on the flight in with Reeve on June 18. And in the opposite direction, to the east, they caught a glimpse of the lowlands they would have to traverse to reach Kluane Lake. Only there had the weather turned bad, as they peered down on what Walter Wood had named Wolf Creek Valley, “black with pouring rain,” in Brad’s phrase. “Oh, what a relief to know that it could be warm enough to rain somewhere!”
Before they left the summit, Brad was determined to take a team portrait. It was not an easy task, for in the zero-degree air his Zeiss camera had frozen. He found that he could make the shutter work only at 1/200th of a second.
No problem. Brad tied the camera to the top of his axe with a shoelace, got himself and Bob into position, and activated the self-timer. The summit photo from Lucania on July 9, 1937, was the best taken to that date on any mountaintop in Alaska or the Yukon. It remains to this day a masterly evocation of radiant exuberance (see photo insert). In it, perfectly exposed in razor-sharp black-and-white, Brad and Bob stand shoulder-to-shoulder, almost at attention. An ice axe is planted between the men, exactly on the summit. Brad carries coils of the hemp rope over his right shoulder. He holds his hat in his right hand, while Bob’s hood is pulled off his head. Brad’s hair is tousled with the wind, but Bob’s looks almost combed in a neat rightward swoop. Both men grin wearily but with utter joy at the camera, as the strain of twenty-two days of struggle and uncertainty shows in the creases in their weather-beaten faces. As much as an image of triumph, the photo forms an icon of ideal friendship.
Ironically, on the same day that Brad and Bob reached the summit of Lucania, Bob Reeve wrote a letter to Brad’s mother (who had written him, expressing concern about her son). Perhaps the pilot was nagged by guilt for not having checked up on the charges he had left on the Walsh Glacier three weeks earlier, for in the letter he reassures Brad’s mother far more blithely than he had any business doing:
Don’t worry about the boys, Mrs. Washburn, for they are experienced and competent and now that they are above where it is ice and hard snow, their going should be plenty fast. It was only about a three days’ job for them to establish a camp at that level and they will work early mornings and nights when there is a good crust. I, personally, think that it is a certainty they will make Lucania for the approach from where we landed them was almost perfect and fast travelling.
Reeve was either talking through his hat (for at the time he fled the Walsh on June 22, he had no knowledge of conditions higher on the mountain, and good reason to fear the worst) or telling an anxious mother what he thought she wanted to hear. “Nine-tenths of their battle was over when they landed on Walsh Glacier,” Reeve added. This was patent nonsense—as no doubt Brad’s mother suspected.
The pilot closed with a jaunty encomium: “You may well be proud of your boy, Mrs. Washburn, for, as I wired the Associated Press, Father Hubbard and Admiral Byrd are pikers compared with Brad Washburn and Bob Bates.” (Father Bernard Hubbard was a pioneering explorer of the Aleutian chain, who had written a popular book about the region, called Cradle of the Storms.)
On the descent, Brad and Bob stopped at the rock bands on the summit ridge, where they prized loose a pair of chunks of black schist, as mementos of consolation to give to Norman Bright and Russ Dow. Most of the way down, they were forced to wear their snowshoes, which made for delicate going on the side slopes. Something was wrong with the binding on Bob’s left snowshoe, for the bearpaw kept falling off. It was not until 8:20 P.M., after eleven and a half hours of arduous struggle, that the two men regained camp. “We barely had our boots off before falling asleep,” remembers Bob; but Brad’s diary records a celebration of sorts: “And then came quantities of beans, tea, and cocoa brewed from the chocolate in an empty butter tin—and singing old Western Range songs—and a glorious sunset—and, finally, to bed at 10:30.”
In the night the thermometer dropped to minus 10°F, the coldest the men had yet experienced on Lucania, and a sharp wind rose out of the north. Next morning, Brad and Bob performed a further triage on their supplies. They discarded all the white gas they had carried to this supplemental camp, as well as all the food save some soup, bacon, sugar, and beef. Bone-tired from the previous day’s effort, they nonetheless got off by 10:15 A.M. and, lugging fifty-pound loads, arrived at Shangri-La in only two hours.
If ever a pair of climbers had earned a rest day, Brad and Bob were now entitled to one. But they were still in a vulnerable position, and as long as the weather held good, they felt they could not afford to “loaf.” In the late afternoon of July 10, the men carried forty pounds apiece over to the base of Mount Steele, marking the trail with willow wands until, just short of where they dumped their loads, they used up the last of the hundreds of black-tipped dowels they had brought along to demarcate their route. There was a certain poetic justice in this economy, for that ferry toward Steele would be the last time Brad and Bob would have to retrace their steps.
From the base of Steele, for the first time, the men caught a glimpse of Kluane Lake, the goal of their escape, nestled among low green hills to the east—only fifty-five miles away in a direct air line, but much farther by any overland route the men could devise. Having taken in that tantalizing view, the pair dashed back to Sha
ngri-La. That night the temperature dropped to minus 9°F, and the tent flapping in the bitter north wind made it hard to sleep—as did the men’s hopes of getting all the way down Steele’s northeast ridge on the morrow.
They were up at 6:30 in the morning, but waited almost three hours for their world to warm up before setting out. In the meantime Brad recorded the scene: “My, but it was cold writing this diary last evening when we returned. We have a deep pit in the middle of the tent, in which we put the stove. Then we sit on packboards, dangling our legs by the stove, while we alternately drink hot Ovaltine and cocoa, warm our hands and diaries, and write them bit by bit.” (One would give much to be able to read Bates’s diary from Lucania, but somewhere over the ensuing years, perhaps in a change of residence, the little book was lost.)
At 9:15 in the morning, the men set off. The temperature had warmed to 8°F, but the incessant north wind, driving gales of spindrift across the ridge, made for chilly going. Following their own broken trail, the men took only an hour and ten minutes to reach their gear dump from the evening before. They lashed these supplies to their already laden packboards, hoisting burdens of seventy-five pounds each—more than they liked for what promised to be a tricky descent of Steele’s northeast ridge.
The men’s initial plan had been simply to contour around Steele’s summit pyramid on the north, but now, with the weather holding clear, the chance to bag the second ascent of the 16,644-foot peak proved irresistible. Bob and Brad detoured laboriously upward to the crest of the Steele ridge, dumped their packs, and in twenty minutes virtually waltzed to the top. The last stretch required crampons and a bit of step cutting with the ice axe, but presented no real technical difficulty.
Escape from Lucania Page 10