Escape from Lucania

by David Roberts

  The sun set behind the Saint Elias Range at their backs, and the shadows deepened into semi-dusk. At 9:55 P.M., Brad let out a shout. He had sighted the cabin in the distance ahead. The pair quickened their pace. Reaching the cabin, one of the men seized the front door and opened it.

  For the second time in as many days, Bob and Brad were stunned with dismay. The cabin was empty, “except for some old tin cans and a bit of wood,” as Brad wrote in his diary—“not even a stove.”

  Bob recalls that moment: “It was a huge letdown. I’d been in hunters’ and trappers’ cabins before, and always found a little something, emergency food of some kind. There was absolutely nothing.”

  Worn to a frazzle, the pair would have used the cabin as a shelter for their camp that night, but they could find no fresh water anywhere near the dilapidated structure. Once more they pushed on into the twilight.

  As they moved eastward down the valley, they closed in on the bank of Wolf Creek. Its aspect ratcheted up the men’s anxiety by several notches. As Brad wrote that night, “It is all in a single channel and very swift. Wolf Creek was the fastest, roughest, and most hazardous glacial torrent I ever hope to see—absolutely uncrossable from start to finish by any means at all.”

  The men’s worst fears about rivers in flood had come to pass. Wolf Creek, only a minor affluent of the Donjek, supplying but a fraction of its volume of silty water, was itself unfordable. The Donjek was likely to be many times worse. The only hope, as Brad and Bob knew from other expeditions, would be to find a place where the Donjek braided into many separate channels, so that the river might be divided and conquered in a series of fords. The men knew further that the best chance of finding such a braided stretch would be to follow the Donjek downstream, in hopes that it began to meander as it entered lower, gentler terrain. But because Wolf Creek itself was uncrossable, and the men found themselves stuck on its south bank, this would not be an option. Any scouting of the Donjek would have to proceed upstream (see map, p. 13).

  As the men stumbled on, pushing beyond exhaustion because of the need to know just how things stood, the semi-dusk grew even darker. Sometime after 11:00 P.M., they got another harbinger of bad news. Before they could even see the Donjek, they could hear it—a deep roar of flooding snowmelt, carrying stones and silt with it as it carved its way north.

  At last the men arrived. The sight that greeted them was appalling. “The Donjek is a terror,” wrote Brad the next morning, “rushing like fury.” Even worse than its dizzying speed was the fact that the current, rather than braiding out across the gravel bar, was confined to a single channel backed by the steep hillside across the river to the east. The men decided to camp on the spot. They did not bother to pitch their tent. Wrote Brad, “We are too tired and footsore to do anything but brew some tea, heat some beans, munch a half a pilot cracker each, and ‘hit the hay,’ sleeping right in the sand and the rocks, with no mattress or anything.” Brad had taken a fall in the rocks on the Wolf Creek Glacier sometime that day; now his right knee was sore and stiff. Both men had blisters on their feet, from relentless trudging in wet socks out of which they had been unable to wring all the silt.

  Because not only the Donjek but Wolf Creek was uncrossable, Bob and Brad were effectively trapped in the quadrant of lowlands south and west of the junction of those two rivers. They were still a good thirty-five miles from Burwash Landing. Even eating far less than they wished, they had at most four days’ food left. Despite the abundance of animal tracks (that day they had found prints of wolf, moose, and Dall sheep), they had seen no game up close—not even a porcupine. Wrote Brad wryly in the morning, “A magpie and a hermit thrush were the sum total of the live game seen yesterday.”

  Brad’s diary does not indicate how much sleep the men got that night, with such a predicament hanging over them. They were slow to get started in the morning. They had decided at least to investigate the possibility of building a raft to cross the Donjek. Near their campsite, they had once more found the old horse trail: that discovery gave the pair hope, for the path ought to lead to the ford that Gene Jacquot’s wranglers had worked out. Indeed, at the end of the horse trail, they found the Donjek braided, rather than flooding past in a single channel. The two men started to gather driftwood, but gave up after a few minutes. Without an axe, it would be next to impossible to craft a vessel. Even the subdivided channels, moreover, looked suicidally deep and swift. And, as Brad wrote in his diary, “The river [is] so huge and divided into so many channels that a raft would have to be taken apart and rebuilt a thousand times to get it across.”

  At noon on July 14, the men sat down to discuss their options. There was really only one possible course. About twelve miles up the river to the south, the Donjek Glacier flowed out of the Saint Elias Range. From their gravel bar, the men could glimpse its dull blue snout in the distance. Their map was useless, and they were well off Brad’s easternmost aerial photo, but it seemed obvious that the glacier was the source of the torrential river. What Bob and Brad had to do was hike all the way up to the Donjek Glacier, climb onto its snout, cross the river on the solid ice that gave birth to the stream, then hike thirteen miles back down the Donjek River on the opposite bank to where the horse trail entered the river from the east. “Twenty-five miles to do three hundred yards!” wrote Brad in his diary in disgust.

  Whether they were simply worn out from the marathon effort of the previous day, or had begun to weaken from consuming barely adequate provisions, on the morning of the 14th, the men found carrying their sixty-pound loads nearly intolerable. (Both had noticed that they had lost a lot of weight, for their trousers hung loose on their hips.) They decided once more to chuck out some of their baggage—or at least to leave it in a cache, in the forlorn hope of being able to retrieve it in the distant future. To that end, they hung one of the two packboards in a tree near the Donjek, with every last piece of clothing they thought they could do without, and—most agonizing of all—Brad’s Zeiss camera and all his exposed film. In that abandonment, there was also a first hint of the pair’s darkest thoughts about the upcoming days, for as the men left the cache, Brad said, “Now at least they’ll know what happened to us.” Bob understood at once: should the two of them vanish in their effort to escape the range, some hunter or mountaineer, perhaps years hence, might come across the cache, retrieve the film, get it developed, and thereby apprehend all but the very end of the story of the first ascent of Mount Lucania.

  As they began their march south along the west bank of the Donjek, one man carried a packboard, the other a rucksack. Because the loads were unequal, they traded off every half hour or so. The fuel for their stove was down to a pint of white gas. Their “kitchen” comprised one pot, two cups, one knife, one fork, and two spoons.

  At 3:00 P.M., Brad heard a chattering noise in a nearby tree. Veering off course, he spotted a red squirrel scurrying among the branches. Both men dropped their loads, while Bob stealthily unpacked Russ Dow’s old police revolver.

  Some forty-five years later, Bob recalled the mock-epic hunt that ensued: “I shot—missed. Brad groaned. I went around the tree, shot from the other side, missed. Brad groaned. The third shot, I shot the branch right out from under the squirrel, and he fell down and hit his head. I ran up and grabbed him and finished him off, and Brad said, ‘Gee, that was a good shot.’ I didn’t dare tell him until much later what actually happened.”

  The men added the squirrel to their rucksack larder and headed on. Soon they came to a mossy glade from which sprouted an abundance of small, light brown mushrooms. They stopped to gather several handsful. Bob remembers the pair’s discussion on the spot: “Brad said, ‘What do you know about mushrooms?’ I said, ‘Not very much. I know if there’s a death cup you certainly shouldn’t eat them.’ And I said, ‘What do you know?’

  “Brad said, ‘They say if you cook ’em with a quarter and the silver turns black, they’re poisonous. Do you have a quarter?’

  “‘No.’

 
“And then Brad said, ‘Well, Jim Huscroft [a homesteader the two men had met on the 1933 Crillon expedition] once told me that if you don’t eat the brightly colored ones or the white ones, mushrooms in the North are okay.’”

  Half an hour later, beside a pretty side stream, the men stopped to cook a late lunch. Into their single pot, they dumped celery soup, a handful of raisins, the stash of mushrooms, and the skinned squirrel. The stew seemed particularly delicious, though Brad commented that the squirrel was so stringy it tasted like piano wire. Afterward, the men lifted their packs and continued south. “As we walked along,” Bob recalls, “I would look back at Brad, only to see him turn and look at me….”

  The mushrooms proved nonlethal. Six miles from their last night’s camp, however—only halfway to the snout of the Donjek Glacier—the men hit a snag they had not anticipated. A stream known to the natives as Spring Creek ran athwart their path. Though it drained a far smaller basin than Wolf Creek, Spring Creek too was glacier-fed, dark with silt, deep, and (in Brad’s words) “flowing like the devil.” To reach the Donjek Glacier, the men would have to ford this unexpected tributary of the Donjek River.

  Fortunately, where the men approached the creek, it was split into eleven channels. They waded into the first, watching uneasily as the current rose to their knees. Almost at once, their legs went numb, and a searing pain, like a bad headache, seized their brains. Shuffling along, feeling with their feet for the underwater stones they could not see through the silt, the men forced their way across one channel after another. The worst one rose waist-deep—the practical limit for men carrying loads in water so swift and cold. On the verge of turning back, Bob and Brad broke through to shallower ground. Spring Creek was behind them.

  It was 7:00 P.M. Shivering on the verge of hypothermia, the men took off their trousers, boots, and socks and wrung them as dry as they could. They snacked on a few bites of cheese and “a snatch of raisins” (as Brad called it), and then got back to their feet. Once more, it seemed imperative to push on and resolve the question mark that hung over their lives. The snout of the Donjek Glacier grew nearer by the minute. If they could climb onto it and use it as a heaven-sent bridge, they might by evening reach the east bank of the river—and safety.

  At 9:00 P.M., marching along a monotonous gravel bar, the men approached the steep slopes of dirty ice that formed the glacial snout. Across the river they could see small birds flitting among the willows. They could taste deliverance on their tongues.

  During the last three days, from the moment when they had stepped off the northeast ridge of Steele to rejoice in running water and green grass, Brad and Bob had felt their exuberant confidence steadily slip away, as a series of setbacks turned what had loomed as a blithe hike to Kluane Lake into an increasingly desperate struggle to survive. The first setback had been the bear-ruined cache on the bend of the Wolf Creek Glacier; the second, the empty hunters’ cabin; the third, the uncrossable torrent of Wolf Creek; and the fourth, the raging flood of the Donjek itself. Though they had solved it, even Spring Creek had loomed for about an hour as a fifth setback.

  Now Bob and Brad discovered, in the incredulous blink of an eye, the sixth and most crushing setback, and it shocked them into despair. The Donjek Glacier, massive though it was, supplied only a portion, well less than half, of the water that thundered north in the Donjek River. The birds darting among the willows on the far bank mocked the men in their freedom—for what Brad and Bob saw in the near ground was a single cataract of foaming, crashing river. The main course of the Donjek flowed through a stygian canyon, pinched between the rock cliffs of the far shore and the near-vertical ice of the glacier’s snout.

  Bob and Brad comprehended the sight in an instant. The true source of the Donjek River was not the glacier of the same name. It must be some other glacier upstream to the south—how far, the men could not even guess. (In fact, that source is the Kluane Glacier, its snout a full twenty-two miles away from where the men stood on the gravel bar, staring at their ghastly discovery. With the little food they had left, in the debilitated condition that twenty-seven straight days of extreme exertion had reduced them to, a further march of forty-four miles—to be added to the thirteen more downstream, and the thirty-five that would still separate them from Burwash Landing—was simply beyond their powers.)

  In a state that even the perpetually optimistic Brad recorded as “utter dismay,” the men threw down their packs, dug out the stove, and brewed up a dreary supper of dried beef, soup, and tea. Then, because there was nothing else to do, they wound their way through mud, bushes, and morainal scree until they had scrambled several hundred feet up onto the snout of the Donjek Glacier. Perhaps, they thought, they could at least get a view up valley to judge just how far away that other glacier, the true source of the Donjek, lay.

  But they were too tired to go far. At a quarter before midnight, the two men stopped to camp, leveling out a pitiful platform in the rocks of the moraine between two humps of ice. Having thrown away their tent pole, they used the remaining packboard and their sole ice axe (they had discarded the other up on Wolf Creek Glacier) in a vain effort to prop the drooping roof of the tent a few inches above their noses. “We swathed ourselves with the tent,” Brad recalls. They struggled into their head-to-toe bivouac in the single, damp sleeping bag, with nothing between it and the ice beneath. They ate a few raisins apiece. To make their bivouac even grimmer, a steady drizzle began to fall.

  “That was the worst night of all,” Bob remembers. “That was the most miserable and frustrating night I’ve ever spent in the mountains,” adds Brad. “Up till then, we felt as though we were sort of in charge. Now, for the first time, we began to wonder what the hell was going on.”

  Neither man slept more than a few minutes that night. Too exhausted to discuss their plight, each of them lay in the private cocoon of his fear. For the first time, in fact, true fear overruled the plucky self-confidence that had seen the two men through every previous challenge.

  Gazing back on that night’s ordeal from the vantage point of sixty-four years of hindsight, Brad summons up a metaphor he borrowed from Andy Taylor, the Klondike veteran, trapper, and mountain man who had been a stalwart member of the 1935 Yukon expedition. “You know the phrase, ‘scared shitless’?” asks Brad today. “Well, Andy used to say about his own worst scrape—‘The shit was right up in the back of my throat.’ That’s what Bob and I felt that night.”

  SIX RABBIT’S FEET

  SHIVERING through the night, Bob and Brad sorely regretted having thrown away their long underwear. They rose at 7:00 in the morning on July 15, played out from lack of sleep. For breakfast they shared two strips of bacon and half a cup of cornmeal mush—the last of their cereal, and nearly the last of their meat. For a day or two, they had been counting their dehydrated baked beans. Now they had only six left, which they decided to save for supper. The rain had stopped, but what Brad called “a wild old southeast wind” rushing down the Donjek valley chilled them to the bone.

  Their situation was so desperate that, over breakfast, Brad and Bob briefly discussed the notion of heading all the way back up the Wolf Creek Glacier, reclimbing the 9,000-foot northeast ridge of Steele, crossing the Steele-Lucania ridge at Shangri-La, descending the 4,000-foot headwall to the Walsh Glacier, retrieving their base camp cache, and stocking up for a hundred-mile hike out to McCarthy. It took only minutes, however, to realize that this was but the wildest of fantasies. If the men lacked the food and energy to hike to the source of the Donjek River and back, they certainly had no hope of reclimbing Mount Steele.

  There was nothing to do but push ahead, finish crossing the snout of the Donjek Glacier, and see what lay beyond. For an hour, the men wove their way among piles of talus the glacier had carried down from the highlands through centuries of imperceptible ice flow. Then they came to “a terrible mess of white ice-cracks” (in Brad’s words). These were not hidden crevasses covered with thin snow bridges such as the ones Bob had repeatedly
fallen into high on Lucania and Steele. The cracks here were bare of snow and thus plain to sight: but they made up a maze of glacial gashes through which the pair had to force a devious route.

  Now they regretted another load-saving economy they had performed four days before, when they had abandoned their crampons a thousand feet above the base of Steele’s northeast ridge. At the time, neither man had dreamed he would once more face technical ice. Here, in the “mess of white ice-cracks,” crampons would have made the going far easier.

  Through the worst stretch, a sixty-foot diagonal traverse off a knife-edge of ice, Brad summoned up the technique he had learned as a teenager from the masterly Chamonix guides, as he carved a “downhill staircase” with his axe. (It is much more awkward to chop steps going downhill and sideways than straight up. What was more, Brad had to carve veritable buckets, steps big enough so that the men’s sloppy shoepacs didn’t slip out of them.)

  Just as the two men began to think they were out of the woods, they ran smack into a vertical ice cliff. It dropped away for only twenty feet beneath them, but it was far too steep for chopping steps. They would have to rappel down the cliff.

  In the 1930s, to anchor a rappel, a climber normally drove one or more pitons into a crack in the rock, or, on ice, specially designed ice pitons or screws directly into the ice. Brad and Bob had no such gear. The only possible anchor would be a bollard.

  The dicey technique of rappelling off a bollard was invented in the Alps around the turn of the twentieth century, before pitons became commonplace. Brad had only read about the dubious technique, which was not one of the pieces of icecraft his Chamonix mentors had taught him in the late 1920s. Now he took his axe and carefully sculpted a ring in the ice near the lip of the cliff—a kind of donut-shaped trench around the fist-sized knob he left in place. When he was done, that knob protruded like an upward-slanting horn. The trick was to hang a doubled rope over this bollard, slide down the rope, which one wrapped in an S-shaped configuration around one’s body (all the while praying that the rope didn’t slide off the bollard or the bollard itself break), and then retrieve the rope by pulling one end from the bottom.