Escape from Lucania

by David Roberts

  On top, the men were stunned to discover, sticking out of the snow, the upper few inches of a bundle of willow wands left by Walter Wood’s party two years before. The find belied the wisdom of the day (to which Bob and Brad subscribed), that the vagaries of storm and snowfall caused the summits of great glaciated mountains to rise or shrink substantially from year to year. Instead, it seemed that some mysterious parsimony of wind conspired with the mountain’s shape to keep the summit drifts nearly as stable as the tops of mountains made entirely of rock. Beyond that geological surprise, however, lay one of purely emotional impact: the willow wands were the first sign of human presence not their own that Brad and Bob had seen in twenty-four days.

  Once more Brad contrived a summit photo, this time with the men kneeling behind the bouquet of the upright willow wands. The smiles on their faces look far more relaxed than the weary grins of two days before.

  Back at their packs, the men sorted out their belongings one last time, determined to chuck out enough food and gear to reduce their loads to sixty pounds each. They discarded one rucksack (the cloth pack each man used for lighter loads than those that required a packboard) and four pounds of food; they cut out the rest of the tent floor, threw away the tent pegs, and even cut the guy strings off the tent. They were left with a mere half gallon of white gas and nineteen pounds of food, as well as a tent that it would now be next to impossible to pitch properly. They did not abandon, however, Brad’s precious Zeiss camera, with his last three film packs, nor Russ Dow’s heavy police revolver and the eight or ten cartridges that remained. At last the loads were down to sixty pounds each.

  On the face of it, nineteen pounds of food would seem to be stretching the pair’s margin awfully thin. Working as hard as they were, Brad and Bob were consuming at an absolute minimum two or two and a half pounds of food each per day. That would mean that nineteen pounds of rations would last only four or five days.

  The men had, however, an ace up their sleeve. They knew that Walter Wood’s party, supported not only by pack train but by supplies parachuted in, had had an excess of food by the time it was done with Steele. They knew Wood had left a substantial cache of food behind, emergency rations for some future party. And they knew precisely where that cache was, on a grassy bench above the right edge of the Wolf Creek Glacier where it bent to the east only fifteen miles from the base of Steele’s northeast ridge.

  Brad and Bob began the descent at 3:30 P.M. on July 11. They covered the first 2,000 vertical feet in snowshoes, despite the steepness of the terrain. At 14,500 feet, a gentle plateau suddenly gave way to a sharp ridge. Here, at last, the men dared abandon the bearpaws without which they would never have been able to reach Shangri-La, let alone climb Lucania and Steele. They switched to crampons and started down the curving crest of the ridge.

  The men’s blithe conviction that “anything Walter Wood can climb up, we can climb down” notwithstanding, it is a far more difficult proposition to descend a route one has never seen before than to ascend it in the first place. From below, a ridge gives away its secrets: a pair of binoculars can usually make plain the traverses that lead to dead ends, the towers that can be circumvented. From above, on the other hand, a ridge unfolds beneath you as a series of nearby cusps and brows, each eclipsing the hidden snags below.

  All the way down Steele’s northeast ridge, Bob took the lead, held on a tight belay by Brad. With more Alaskan experience and his teenage training in the Alps, Brad felt perhaps more comfortable in the role of the partner entrusted with stopping any fall; but Bob had an uncanny instinct for route-finding. Now, at regular intervals, the men pulled out Brad’s album of aerial photographs, trying to correlate their position on the ridge with these omniscient mountainscapes. Each time Bob approached a blank edge, the men felt a heightened tension. Then Bob would call out “Okay!” or “All’s well ahead!” and the tension would ebb.

  On July 7, Brad had predicted that from the shoulder of Steele to Burwash Landing, “there [won’t be] a crack between us and it.” He was quite wrong. At 12,000 feet, Bob entered a zone where vexsome crevasses covered with thin snow bridges lay directly athwart the knife-edged ridge. He fell into several, but caught himself each time only waist-deep, with the aid of Brad’s tight rope. Then the hard crust, so good for crampons, began to give way to a breakable crust with slush beneath. This made for slow going, as the men bruised their shins and cut their socks to tatters on the icy crust.

  The men grew as tired as they had been on the summit day on Lucania. “We could not possibly have made it,” Brad wrote that evening, “if we had not been able to see the green forests in the distance before we started, and felt that each step was bringing us nearer to warmth and running water.”

  Yet Bob unerringly chose the right line: not once did the men have to backtrack in the face of an uncrossable crevasse or a vertical cliff. A thousand feet above the base of the ridge, they threw away their crampons, counting on step-kicking slush the rest of the way down. This proved a mistake when, as Bob later wrote, “the slope became steeper, a sort of frozen, windswept scree, with no belays possible.” Without packs, the men might have tried a controlled glissade, skiing carefully on the edges of their boots; with sixty-pound loads, such a gambit would have been reckless.

  Those last thousand feet proved the hardest and most perilous stretch of the whole descent. Wound to the breaking point with the tension of the treacherous footing, at 8:35 P.M. they stepped at last off Mount Steele. They had completed an extraordinary blind descent of 9,000 feet in only five hours.

  After staggering just far enough out to be safe from rocks falling from Steele’s slopes, Brad and Bob pitched their tent. At last the weather broke, as a light rain started to fall. But Brad still had the energy for an ebullient diary entry that night: “[W]e are down in God’s country again, and for some time there will be nothing but fun!”

  He added, “To bed at 10:30, after a grand supper of dried beef, celery soup, gravy, beans, and tea. My, but it’s grand to have all the water we need, flowing by us in a real brook. No more melting snow!”

  Bob and Brad awoke around 8:00 A.M. on July 12 in the highest of spirits. The rain had stopped. “[W]e had a fine night,” Brad wrote in his diary over breakfast. “The sun is shining. Little streams of water are chuckling outside, and all’s right with the world!”

  The men were off at 9:30. At an altitude of some 7,800 feet, they were lower than they had been at any time during the expedition, and as they hiked along, they basked in the relative warmth. For two hours they traveled roped, until they reached the glacier’s snow line, below which only bare ice obtained, leaving the crevasses open and obvious. The head of the Wolf Creek Glacier (known today as Steele Glacier) curls around the skirts of the 16,644-foot mountain, from which it flows first north, then east-northeast, some twenty-three miles toward the lowlands. All Brad and Bob needed to do was follow this broad highway toward the streams that would lead them to their ultimate deliverance at Burwash Landing. Brad felt so good that, observing the curious geology of the region with his professional eye—granite overlying “a weird mass of highly metamorphosed, steeply tilted, reddish rocks”—he planned to add samples to his load as he marched down the glacier.

  Nine hours after setting out, the men approached the grassy bench where the glacier bent eastward. They left the ice and climbed the scree of the lateral moraine to gain that shelf. All day they had daydreamed about the bountiful cache Walter Wood had left here; already they could taste the goodies on which they would gorge on the spot and the treats they would add to their packs.

  They crested a rise and saw, just ahead of them, metal cans gleaming in the sun. Something was wrong, however. As they came up to the cache, instead of a neatly stacked depot of supplies covered with a tarp, they found cans strewn wantonly in the grass. They picked up several. Each was smashed, with deep holes gouged in the sides. Bob and Brad knew at once what had happened. Sometime during the past two years, a bear or bears had found the
cache and destroyed it, biting into every can to get at the exotic-tasting stuff inside. Virtually all the cans had been licked clean, and those that had not been, the men dared not scrape for the residue of food that was left, for fear of botulism. They found only a single intact container—a small jar of Peter Rabbit peanut butter.

  “All the way down the ridge,” recalls Brad, “we were thinking about what we were going to eat. And we were terribly hungry after that long walk [down the glacier].”

  “That was a shock, a real shock,” Bob remembers. “Suddenly we realized we were going to run short on food.”

  In their packs, they now had less than fifteen pounds of food, good for at most four days at the rate they had been eating (and even at that rate, they were constantly famished). There was still the police revolver. With great good luck, they might run across a caribou or even a moose, which, if Bob made a perfect shot with the old gun that fired high and left, they might kill.

  As the men stared at the wreckage of the cache, an edge of dread, darker than anything they had felt even during the worst of the storms up on Lucania, seized their spirits. And now a host of doubts and worries about the route ahead, which for twenty-five days they had kept safely tucked in the backs of their minds, thronged to the fore.

  FIVE DONJEK

  AT Walter Wood’s demolished cache, Brad and Bob were nearing the eastern edge of the collection of aerial photos Brad and Russ Dow had shot in 1935 and 1936. The only map the men possessed rendered the terrain ahead of them a blank (see photo insert). Their knowledge of the lowlands stretching between them and Burwash Landing was based, then, almost entirely on the experience of Wood’s 1935 expedition. Their predecessor had published photo-illustrated articles about the first ascent of Mount Steele in both Life magazine and The American Alpine Journal, and Brad and Bob had consulted him about logistics.

  Despite the shock of recovering only a small jar of peanut butter from Wood’s cache, Brad, the eternal optimist, wrote in his diary that night, “Walter’s horses came up to his base camp; so I imagine our major troubles are over at last.” What Brad neglected to mention was an ominous detail. The main obstacle for Wood’s team on its approach to Mount Steele had been the Donjek River, a major tributary of the Yukon that flowed from south to north directly across their path. Wood’s party had ridden their horses across the Donjek. On the way back out in August, some of the horses had nearly drowned. As Brad and Bob knew well, even the clumsiest horse was a better match for a flooding river than the nimblest man on foot.

  The pair had already hiked for ten hours on July 12 before stumbling upon the ruined cache. As if to nip in the bud any plunge in morale their sorry discovery might occasion, they pushed on for another two miles before camping. Brad’s diary entry that evening bore only on the positive: “[W]e have a beautiful, almost flat meadow of grass and flowers under the tent…. There are plenty of [Dall] sheep, marmots, and birds, and we have seen several bear-tracks but no bear. It is wonderful to hear the birds twitter … and realize there is still something alive besides ourselves. How funny it will be to see and hear other people!” The Dall sheep, viewed no doubt from a great distance, might have made a tempting target for Bob’s revolver, but among all the wild animals in the Far North, these sure-footed ruminants are the hardest to approach.

  It took a while for the novelty of not having to ferry loads across each hard-won stretch of ground to wear off. As Brad wrote that evening, “It’s grand to move camp ahead with us as a unit wherever we go, and to realize that each step forward means a step closer to Burwash…. To bed on a carpet of flowers—quite a contrast to last night!”

  The men’s delight in green grass and birdsong and running water and shirtsleeve temperatures was intense. (After spending weeks on high glaciers, climbers in the great ranges are often reduced to tears on regaining the lowlands.) Yet underlying that delight, like the ground bass in a baroque chaconne, was a steady current of anxiety. Reminiscing today, Bob will not quite admit that he felt fear on July 12: “Concern is maybe the better word.” A little more frankly, Brad confesses, “We were very worried.” The men knew that mid-July marked the apogee of summer snowmelt on the glaciers that fed every river issuing from the Saint Elias Range. On top of that, it had snowed up high (and therefore rained down low) during nearly every one of the previous twenty-five days. If ever the Donjek was likely to be in tumultuous flood, it was now.

  On the morning of July 13, Brad wrote, “Our only tools for raft-building are a hunting knife, two packboards, and some rope. But ‘necessity is the mother of invention!’” The notion of manufacturing a raft out of driftwood was not as far-fetched as it might have seemed. In 1935, to cross the Alsek River at the end of their monumental traverse of the Yukon icefields, Bob and his two companions had successfully floated a rickety raft made out of skis, air mattresses, and driftwood. But to cross the Donjek in this fashion would be a perilous proposition at best.

  Meanwhile, Brad jotted encomiums on the landscape so euphoric that, were he writing today, he might be accused of that trendy psychological syndrome, being “in denial.” “What a wonderful morning and what an entrancing spot! There is scarcely a cloud anywhere in the sky…. All about the tent the grass is sparkling with dew, and a lovely soft breeze is gently moving the tent…. Everywhere the birds are chirping. This is heaven at its best.”

  Today, Brad and Bob cannot recall whether they carried any cream to prevent sunburn on Lucania (zinc oxide was the only effective ointment of the day). Perhaps not, or perhaps they had run out, for on the morning of July 13, Brad wrote, “We are giving ourselves the Vaseline treatment for our sunburns, which are still quite scaly. We are hoping to come across a brook with a pool or two today, so that we can have a good swim or at least a bath. My dear old suit of [long] underwear was chucked yesterday.”

  Descending the northeast ridge of Steele, Brad had run out of film. The last photo he had shot was a portrait of Bob probing downward in the lead. Now, on the Wolf Creek Glacier, the Zeiss camera represented dead weight, but Brad could not bring himself to “chuck it out.” He was, of course, determined to carry the exposed film that documented the men’s adventure back to civilization—and to keep it dry no matter how the men contrived to cross the Donjek. Surrounded by lowland splendor, Brad was grieved not to be able to capture it photographically. “Oh, if we only had some film to get pictures of this wonderful valley!” he wrote in his diary.

  Driven by the uncertainty that hung over their fate, and by their dwindling rations, Bob and Brad pushed steadily onward for sixteen hours on July 13, covering as many miles. Even while still on the Wolf Creek Glacier, the men found faint vestiges of the horse trail Walter Wood had blazed up to his 1935 base camp. It was a fine day once again—too fine, for by noon the men were drooping under the overhead sun, which, reflecting off the bare ice across which they strode, assailed them with a double dose of blazing heat. They stopped to eat: “[W]e broke into our loads,” wrote Brad later, “and had a fine hot lunch of beans, cheese, and several cups of tea.”

  As the valley broadened, the men found they could walk along the moraine paralleling the glacier and even, at times, on a tundra bench that formed the right bank of the Wolf Creek drainage. Here, the trail beaten into the vegetation by Walter Wood’s thirty-four horses was simple to follow. The hiking was much easier on the bench than on the rubblestrewn glacier, but it came with a drawback. Side streams pouring off the rugged hills that formed the southern rampart of the valley had to be forded. These were surprisingly deep. Brad and Bob waded in with their boots on (the water was too cold, the footing too treacherous to wade barefoot). After each stream crossing, the men stopped, took off their boots, and wrung out their socks. The last ford was the worst, as the water rose to waist-deep and the men felt their legs go numb with cold. The implications were alarming: if these inconsequential sidestreams, draining only a hillside apiece, were waist-deep torrents, what would the Donjek be like?

  At 5:15 P.M., Bob and Br
ad finally passed the snout of the Wolf Creek Glacier, at an altitude of only 4,000 feet. Here, for the first time on the expedition, they found trees—straggling stands of dwarf spruce and willow. The men had been going more than nine hours already, with only a short break for lunch. It would have been a logical time to stop and camp—except that the pair felt the tantalizing pull of another scrap of hope. Harrison Wood—Walter’s brother, and one of the four men who had reached the summit of Mount Steele in 1935—had told Bob that about four miles east of the snout of the Wolf Creek Glacier stood a “well-stocked cabin.”

  At Burwash Landing on Kluane Lake, a French émigré named Gene Jacquot ran a remote trading post. For some two decades, Jacquot had outfitted hunting parties that ranged well to the west, crossing the Donjek on horseback by a ford the guides had worked out over the years. Walter Wood had hired Jacquot’s horses and wranglers to get his piles of gear to base camp in 1935. The cabin that Harrison Wood told Bob Bates about was presumably Jacquot’s, or that of some forgotten trapper from an even earlier day.

  So Brad and Bob pushed on into the evening of July 13. The going was easy, a weary shuffle across an endless level gravel bar interrupted by two or three sidestream crossings. As they hiked, the men paralleled Wolf Creek, a Donjek tributary that flowed out of the glacier the men had spent the last two days descending. Though the creek was several hundred yards to their left, they could hear it “roaring away boisterously.”

  At 7:00 P.M., Brad and Bob walked off the edge of the easternmost aerial photo in Brad’s album. It seemed an appropriate time to stop for dinner. “So we set down our loads and had a good supper of beef, celery soup, and tea,” wrote Brad later. “The water was so murky with silt that you could scarcely tell whether the tea had milk in it or not, and the water without soup looked exactly the same as the soup.” An hour later, the men hoisted their packs once more and trudged on.