Escape from Lucania

by David Roberts

  Short on time and rations and, vexingly, almost out of matches with which to light their stoves, the team established Houston and Petzoldt at Camp VII to make their only try for the summit. On July 21, that pair gave up at 26,000 feet, Petzoldt climbing a few hundred yards above his exhausted teammate to prospect a line for the future. Theirs was a gallant defeat, a mere 2,200 feet below the top: K2 would not be climbed until 1954.

  Meanwhile Brad spent the summer of 1938 in Alaska. It turned out to be one of his finest seasons in the mountains, for, in clockwork fashion, his teams made the first ascents of 13,176-foot Mount Marcus Baker, the highest peak in the little-explored Chugach Range east of Anchorage, and of 16,237-foot Mount Sanford in the Wrangell-Saint Elias wilderness. On Marcus Baker, undaunted by his near-disaster on the Walsh Glacier, Bob Reeve once more flew Brad’s party in, this time making a series of successful landings at 5,000 feet on the Matanuska Glacier.

  On July 9, 1937, Mount Sanford had become the new highest unclimbed peak in North America. A sprawling glaciated mountain like Lucania, it is far more accessible: on the very western edge of its range, Sanford lords its lofty summit over the Glenn and Richardson Highways, which connect the towns of Tok and Glennallen and Valdez. Brad’s approach to this new challenge was something of a throwback to the pioneer days, as he and Harvard crony Terris Moore (who had been on the first ascent of Fairweather in 1931) horse-packed in to the mountain’s base, mushed a dog team to a 10,000-foot advance camp, strolled to the summit, then skied all the way down in one glorious 6,000-foot run.

  In view of their near-perfect friendship, there is a slightly rueful irony in the fact that after Lucania, Bob and Brad would share only a single other expedition. That came in 1942, when, with the country newly at war, the Army Air Corps and the Office of the Quartermaster General collaborated with the American Alpine Club to put a large team on Mount McKinley’s Muldrow Glacier. The rather ponderously named U.S. Army Alaskan Test Expedition had as its rationale field-testing cold weather gear in extreme conditions. Among its seventeen members were not only Brad and Bob, but Terris Moore and Walter Wood.

  The expedition indeed performed a great deal of valuable testing of equipment, which would later pay its dividends in the Tenth Mountain Division’s campaign in Italy. For Brad and Bob, however, this was also a chance to bag the third ascent of McKinley. They succeeded, with two teammates, on July 23, in glorious weather, after a night during which the temperature dropped to minus 23°F. The Test Expedition, however, with its cadres of specialists (dog mushers, scientists, and a cook, as well as climbers), with massive support in the form of supplies air-dropped in by parachute, stood as the antithesis of the fast-and-light style Brad and Bob had perfected on Lucania.

  Nor, among the tent colonies of a seventeen-man expedition, was there any vestige of the intense intimacy that had welded Brad and Bob together five years before in the Saint Elias Range. It is ironic that on summit day, Bob and Brad were roped not to each other, but to other partners, Bob with Terris Moore, Brad with a climber from California named Einar Nilsson.

  In 1939, as he pursued grad-school work at Penn toward his dissertation on the English writer and antiquarian John Aubrey, Bob was surprised to be offered a job teaching English at his former prep school, Phillips Exeter Academy. With minor interruptions for World War II and other service abroad, Bob would teach at Exeter for thirty-seven years, until his retirement in 1976. Legions of students, many of whom became first-rate climbers themselves, fell under the spell of Bob’s gentle pedagogy in the classroom.

  The same year that Bob took the Exeter job, Brad accepted the offer that would shape his own professional life, as he was appointed director of the New England Museum of Natural History. At twenty-eight, he became the youngest director of a major museum in the country. During the next forty-one years, Brad turned the ramshackle and moribund New England Museum into the Boston Museum of Science, one of the leading institutions of its kind in the world.

  Among his first acts at the New England Museum was to fire what Brad recalls as “a battle-axe of a secretary” and replace her with fresh blood. One candidate recommended by an acquaintance was Barbara Polk, a good-looking, twenty-four-year-old Smith College graduate then working as a secretary in the Harvard biology department. Barbara’s initial reaction to the lead was not auspicious. “I don’t want any part of that guy Washburn,” she told the friend who had recommended her. “The last thing I want is to work for a crazy mountain climber in a stuffy museum.”

  The friend pushed her into a trial interview, which got off to a dismal start. As a child, Barbara had been taken to the New England Museum by her parents. Her strongest memory of the place was of a whale skeleton, covered with dust, hanging from the ceiling. Barbara double-parked her car outside, so sure was she of a quick termination to the interview. “My heart sank as I entered the museum,” she wrote in 2001, looking back on that long-ago day. “It seemed even more depressing than I remembered.”

  The twenty-eight-year-old director’s bearing upset her expectations: “He was rather slight, had no beard, and bore no resemblance to the pictures of explorers I had seen in picture books, pictures of men like Lewis and Clark.” Brad at once started talking about finances. Anxious to reclaim her double-parked car, Barbara snapped, “I don’t know anything about finances.”

  “But you can learn, can’t you?” Brad countered. Barbara took the job. She and Brad were married on April 27, 1940.

  Though Barbara had little experience in the outdoors, Brad insisted at once on taking her along on his Alaskan expeditions. She proved a natural adept, reaching the summit on the first ascents of 10,182-foot Mount Bertha, in the Fairweather Range, in 1940, and of 13,740-foot Mount Hayes, the highest peak in the Hayes Range in central Alaska, the following year. Both climbs were actually technically more difficult than Lucania. The capstone of Barbara’s mountaineering career came in 1947 when, against her own better judgment, she left her three young children in care of both sets of grandparents to join Brad on a three-month expedition to Mount McKinley, where he made his second ascent and she became the first woman ever to stand on the top of the North American continent.

  In 2001, Barbara published a memoir of her life with Brad, disarmingly titled The Accidental Adventurer. Not surprisingly, her vignettes of her husband at work and play in the mountains characterize him more pithily than anything Brad ever wrote for The American Alpine Journal. In a dicey moment on McKinley, for instance, as Barbara and Brad struggle to down-climb a steep ice pitch as a storm gathers,

  Brad jerked the rope and shouted to me, “You’ve simply got to move faster. The storm is approaching rapidly.”

  I looked at him, fifteen feet away, and said calmly, “I am the mother of three small children and I’ve got to get down from here safely.”

  He replied immediately, “Don’t forget, I’m the father of those small children and I want to get down safely, too.”

  For more than two decades, from 1930 to 1951, Brad led expeditions to Alaska and the Yukon approximately every other year. His first three ventures, on Fairweather in 1930 and on Crillon in 1932 and 1933, had been failures, in the sense that his teams were stopped short of the summit. From 1934 on, however, not once did Washburn attempt a climb in the Far North without reaching the top. In the process, he racked up a roster of first ascents that stands as the most dazzling record of any mountaineer campaigning in Alaska and the Yukon.

  It is significant that Brad never climbed in the Himalaya or the Andes. Once he had focused on the North American sub-arctic, he had found his life’s work as an adventurer. Brad’s swan song came in 1951, at the age of forty-one, when he led a two-pronged assault on the unclimbed West Buttress of McKinley—a route he had discovered from his own aerial photographs. Presciently, Brad predicted that the West Buttress would turn out to be the easiest route on the mountain. Today, it is the voie normale, thronged yearly with 90 percent of the thousand-plus alpinists who set out to add Denali to their troph
y lists (only half of whom succeed).

  After 1951, Brad ceased to lead major expeditions in quest of first ascents. But his passion for aerial photography in Alaska and the Yukon only intensified. At first, that passion had amounted to a pragmatic hobby, as Brad sought (as he did in scouting Lucania in 1935) to bring back pictures that would help him plot his own future ascents. Soon, however, the effort became an end in itself. Thanks to his own perfectionism—he insisted on flying with the airplane door removed, his body roped to the fuselage as he leaned out, swaddled against the wind and cold, cradling in his lap a large-format camera that weighed some fifty pounds—the photos attained the quality of true art.

  It was not Brad, but others, who first recognized the worth of his oeuvre as art. Well into the 1970s, Brad sold his pictures to climbers (for whom that collection had become a gold mine of new-route possibilities) at the cost of printing them. Today, his photos fetch high prices at auctions, and in the 1990s he was invited to mount one-man exhibitions at the prestigious International Center of Photography in New York and at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts. In 1983, Ansel Adams hailed Brad’s achievement, writing, “[T]he photographs look almost inevitable, perfectly composed. These are not simply documents …; we sense in each one the presence of an individual, highly intelligent eye. The photographs are the result of the explorer’s consistent energy of mind and spirit—and so they truly mean something.”

  Among his other accomplishments, Brad became an innovative cartographer. His maps of Denali and Everest, produced in conjunction with the Swiss Foundation for Alpine Research and the National Geographic Society, are perhaps the most exquisite mountain charts ever made. Brad’s fascination with Everest had been sparked way back in 1926, when Captain John Noel had lectured at Groton on the fateful Mallory-Irvine expedition of two years before. Though Brad has never even hiked to Everest base camp, in the 1980s he began coordinating stereo photography of the world’s highest mountain from the air, and he persuaded young climbers to carry GPS surveying equipment to its summit, which, coordinated with Brad’s measurements from the lowlands, produced the beguiling result in 1999 that Everest was seven feet higher than everyone had thought it was for most of the century.

  Not many people realize that in the 1930s, Brad also became a first-rate small-plane pilot. His skills in the cockpit were so highly thought of that, in January 1937, Brad was invited to a soirée at the home of his erstwhile publisher, George Palmer Putnam, and his wife, Amelia Earhart. The pair wanted Brad’s advice about the feasibility of what was still a secret project—Earhart’s attempt to fly a Lockheed Electra around the world. Implicit in the meeting was a possible invitation to Brad to serve as Earhart’s navigator.

  Brad surveyed the charts and plans, fingered the crucial weakness in them, and bluntly told Putnam and Earhart what he thought. On the next-to-last leg, it would be crazy to take off from New Guinea and try to hit Howland Island in the mid-Pacific, a needle in the haystack, by dead reckoning. On the other hand, if Earhart took the trouble to get a ship to stop at Howland beforehand and install a radio transmitter sending out a signal that Earhart could pick up from her plane, the scheme might work.

  Impatient with such details, Earhart ignored Brad’s advice. Heading for Howland Island, 2,550 miles away, she took off from Lae, New Guinea, on the evening of July 1, 1937—eight days before Brad and Bob would stand atop Mount Lucania—with Fred Noonan as her navigator instead of Brad. She intended to fly through the night and land on the tiny island in the morning. Her last radio call was heard by a ship near Howland at 8:45 A.M. on July 2.

  At the age of 92, Brad is a minor celebrity, with a string of medals and honors (the Lowell Thomas Award of the Explorers Club, the Discovery Lifetime Award of the Royal Geographical Society, the National Geographic Centennial Award, honorary doctorates from Harvard and Boston University, etc.) the likes of which, were he British, would probably earn him a knighthood. Looking back on his career, Brad often says that his proudest achievement is the founding and directing of the Museum of Science. Mountaineers, however, will always hail Brad’s climbing and exploration, buttressed by his six decades of mountain photography, as the reason history will remember the man.

  Bob Bates did not marry until 1954, at the age of forty-three. He had met Gail Oberlin, the sister of a climbing friend, a few years before, at an American Alpine Club meeting in Philadelphia (she was the club’s secretary). Gail had climbed in the Alps long before she met Bob. After their marriage, they shared many a far-flung exploratory trek together, to the Ojos del Salado on the Chile-Argentina border, to Iceland, to Sikkim in India and Bhutan, and to the Ruwenzori Mountains of Uganda, among other destinations.

  With his 1938 K2 expedition, Bob had ventured for the first time beyond the realm of Brad’s favorite ranges in Alaska and the Yukon. Though he would climb again in the Far North, Bob was interested in mountains all over the world. Nor did he give up serious climbing in his early forties, as Brad did. In 1966, at the age of fifty-five, Bob teamed up with H. Adams Carter, a Harvard pal three years his junior (and a veteran of the 1933 Crillon expedition), and the legendary British climber Eric Shipton, who was fifty-nine, for an attempt on a new route on Mount Russell, southwest of McKinley. A vicious storm shredded the men’s tents and forced them to make a grim retreat just to save their lives. As late as 1985, at the age of seventy-four, Bob joined a Chinese-American team that made an arduous trek into little-known Xinjiang Uygur region of China to reconnoiter a major unclimbed mountain, 22,917-foot Ulugh Muztagh.

  Ensconced at Exeter, Bob has led a professional life far less public than Brad’s—as befits his modest nature. He did serve as president of the American Alpine Club (today he is the club’s honorary president), and as the first director of the Peace Corps in Nepal from 1962 to 1963, work he found, with his limitless curiosity about other cultures, both fascinating and, in the end, frustrating. (In Kathmandu, Gail developed a mysterious illness and lost thirty-five pounds before returning to the United States.)

  It was in 1953 that Bob underwent the single mountaineering tragedy of his life—as well as, with Lucania, one of his two closest calls. Though they were forty-two and forty years old respectively, Bob and Charlie Houston decided to mount their second attempt on K2. They put together a strong team of younger climbers from all over the country. As they headed off to Pakistan, Bob and Charlie had every expectation that this time they would reach the top of the world’s second-highest mountain. After a hiatus during World War II and the four years following, when no Himalayan expeditions entered the field, the fourteen peaks in the world higher than 8,000 meters (about 26,247 feet) were starting to fall, beginning with Annapurna in 1950. Everest itself would be climbed in 1953 by Hillary and Tenzing, and Nanga Parbat in a unique solo summit push by the fanatical and gifted Austrian Hermann Buhl.

  High on the Abruzzi Ridge on K2, however, team member Art Gilkey, a Columbia University geologist and Teton guide, suddenly developed an ailment that so crippled him he could not walk. Houston, a doctor, diagnosed thrombophlebitis, caused by a blood clot in the leg. Instead of going for the summit, the whole team had to bend its efforts to saving Gilkey’s life, lowering him, swathed in a sleeping bag, with ropes. On the technical terrain of the sharp ridge, this proved a nearly impossible task, forcing the men to take risks they would normally never have countenanced.

  On August 10, disaster struck. As the team descended in roped pairs, one man slipped and fell; the rope dragged his partner off his feet. Their rope tangled with Bob and Charlie’s, pulling them in turn from their footsteps: suddenly four men were sliding out of control toward the void. Highest on the slope, a Seattle stalwart named Pete Schoening had paused to anchor the helpless Gilkey, while a seventh team member, also roped to Gilkey, probed ahead. The falling ropes yanked this man too from his stance. It seemed inevitable that seven men would plunge, linked by their tangled ropes, to their deaths off the Abruzzi Ridge.

  Schoening thrust his axe into the slope uphill
from a large rock, leaned on it, and hung on for dear life. In what is still known nearly half a century later as “Schoening’s miracle belay,” he held the shock, which came not all at once, but in a series of jolts, as the ropes that had pulled the men from their feet now served to stop their falls one by one.

  Several team members were injured and frostbitten. Houston was in shock, delirious and disoriented, barely comprehending which mountain he was on. The less injured teammates worked into the night getting tents pitched on precarious perches and their friends into their sleeping bags. Meanwhile, the men left Gilkey tied off to an anchoring ice axe, only a hundred yards away.

  In the midst of their frantic toil, an avalanche they failed to hear scoured the nearby slope. When Bob and two others climbed back to get Gilkey, they were shocked to see nothing but bare ice. The avalanche had swept their teammate, anchoring ice axe and rope with him, off the mountain. (Gilkey’s body was not found until 1993, when a party stumbled across his skeleton below the Abruzzi Ridge, carried by the glacier’s flow during those thirty-nine years four miles from where he had fallen.)

  Though none of the survivors could acknowledge as much at the time, Gilkey’s death came not only as a tragedy but as a deliverance. It was all the other men could do to get themselves down the ridge and back to base camp. The book Bates and Houston wrote about the expedition, K2: The Savage Mountain, has become a mountaineering classic.

  HAD Brad and Bob drowned in the Donjek in 1937, they would be remembered today—though perhaps only dimly, like Allen Carpé, who vanished in the crevasse on the Muldrow Glacier at the zenith of his Alaska career—as meteoric martyrs to an indifferent wilderness. Their coevals might recall them as the brightest of their generation of northern mountaineers, their lives snubbed out by the whim of a flooding river at the denouement of their finest climb. It is even possible that no one would have ever known what Brad and Bob accomplished on Lucania and Steele. Their bodies would almost certainly never have been found. They had left nothing on the summit of either mountain to record their passage. The chances would seem relatively slim that some other mountaineering party, twenty or forty years later, might climb Steele’s northeast ridge and discover, not yet buried under the snows of the decades, the crampons or the snowshoes or the tent pole the men had discarded on their descent.