by Timothy Egan
Parts of this valley, fed by snow from the 10,778-foot volcano of Mount Baker and the 9,127-foot rockpile of Mount Shuksan, were trod by Theodore Winthrop when he passed by in 1853. When he paddled his dugout into Bellingham Bay and came ashore for a look, the Yankee got quite an eyeful. The local Lummi tribe told him about the volcano with fire in the belly and ice on top: Koma Kulshan, they called it, meaning “white, steep mountain.” He was the first to commit the native name to print, but it didn’t stick. “As to Baker, that name should be forgotten,” Winthrop wrote in The Canoe and the Saddle. “Mountains should not be insulted by being named after undistinguished bipeds.…”
Winthrop ate a feast of boiled salmon with the Lummi, who never dreamed of trying to attain the volcano’s summit, or that of any of the other big peaks in the range. The idea was absurd, as well as a form of spiritual trespass. The Lummi and the other tribes of Puget Sound would no more try to climb vertical ice towers than they would attempt to live underwater. It was always the outsiders, whether from England or from the Midwest, who wanted to go up among the eternal snows.
I see one tent, a red dome, inside this deep-shadowed hideaway. Looks new. I cup my hands around my mouth and call out, “Beckeeeeeeey.”
The sound bounces from one snow wall to the other, and then falls away. It’s late in a long day at a time of year when the light hangs around till nearly 10 P.M. I notice the fluted summit of the Nooksack Ridge, about seven thousand feet above me. I have to sit down in the snow to take it all in: the summit rim is an intense pink, lit by the fading sunlight from the west. It reminds me of a twilight hour in Manhattan when I watched the late color on the apex of the Chrysler Building. “It’s like the spires of the North Cascades,” I said at the time, my first visit to New York, and my friend looked at me funny. I dragged him into Grand Central Terminal, where I heard there was a full-color picture of Mount Shuksan, the centerpiece of these mountains. A Czech émigré named Dusan Jagersky had seen this picture when he first came to America in 1968, on the run from the Russian tanks that had rolled into Prague that year. Pointing to the mountain, Jagersky asked if he could purchase a ticket to such a place.
“I am not Beckey,” says the man in the dome tent, which is obvious when he steps outside his shelter. He’s from Germany, perhaps thirty years old, on a tour of America’s national parks. He can’t get over how much dead timber and snags are on the ground in North America: in Germany, the forest floors are clean of loose limbs and downfall. He’s heard of Beckey.
“Everybody knows Beckey,” he says. He shows me the little red book, Beckey’s bible: Cascade Alpine Guide. There are three such volumes by Beckey, each one revered by the cult of climbers who’ve followed his every handhold. In the books, he gives a staggeringly detailed description of every climbing route on every mountain in the Cascade Range from the Columbia River to the Fraser River, more than 1,500 peaks in all. The language is insider jargon, coating high-risk alpine route-finding in a peculiar descriptive shorthand.
Beckey is also German, born near Düsseldorf, the son of a doctor. He was two years old when the family moved to Seattle in the early 1920s. Fred and his brother Helmy learned about the outdoors through the Boy Scouts, and on weekend trips to the Olympics the Beckey brothers usually went beyond the call of merit-badge duty. As teenagers they joined the Mountaineers, a formal climbing group whose members are given to long and somber discussions about their long and somber mass expeditions to the high points of the Cascades. By the age of sixteen, when Beckey started leading his own expeditions to peaks which the Mountaineers had declared unclimbable, it was clear that he would never be an organization man. He skied, played some football and ran cross-country, but directed most of his energy to the fulfillment of two passions: mountains and women. After graduating from the University of Washington (where he scaled the brick walls of the Gothic campus buildings in tennis shoes), he took a job as a delivery-truck driver, rather than pursue something more in line with his degree in business administration, because the job served both needs. It was part-time, which meant more time could be spent in the neighboring peaks near Snoqualmie Pass, forty-five miles east of Seattle. And along the truck route Beckey kept several girlfriends. During his days off, he pioneered new climbing routes; during the rest of the week, he pioneered an imaginative delivery route.
Early on, the Beckey brothers picked up with a climber from their neighborhood in West Seattle, an engineer named Lloyd Anderson. They drove to the mountains in a Model A, or hitchhiked. When the old mining and timber roads gave out, they slogged through thick brush or picked their way up streambeds and over goat paths toward the high ice. They sang dirty ditties to pass the time, and moved at an uphill, cross-country clip of better than five miles an hour. Where previous twentieth-century explorers, almost exclusively miners and government geologic surveyors, had called the North Cascades dark and chaotic and dangerous, Beckey came back with descriptions like “enchanting” and “stimulating.” He compared climbing virgin rock to “erotic exercise.” Even the savage storms that blew in from the Pacific were “morally uplifting,” he used to say.
Until 1972, when the North Cascades Highway was opened, there wasn’t a single east–west road that crossed the expanse of alpine country from Stevens Pass to the Fraser River. The Indians used trade routes, a few well-trodden trails over the mountains that brought the salmon-eaters of the west to the horse-riders of the east. Simon Fraser, a Northwest Company explorer who followed the river named after him from tidewater to headwaters during an adventure in 1805, said this part of the world was more rugged than any he’d seen in North America. “I have been for a long period in the Rocky Mountains, but never seen anything like this country,” Fraser wrote. “It is so wild that I cannot find words.” Alexander Ross, a trapper for the Pacific Fur Company, had claimed to be the first white man to find an overland route across the North Cascades: the Indian path from the east, up the Stehekin River and then westward over Cascade Pass and into the Skagit River. Whether he completed the route or not is still in doubt. But there is no record of any white crossing the mountains again for another forty years, until Washington Territorial Governor Isaac Stevens sent a railroad survey crew into the Cascades in 1853, the year Winthrop bumped into the surveyor near Naches Pass as the Yankee was making his own pioneering traverse of the range.
One other visitor of note came before Winthrop. In 1825, David Douglas, a young Scottish botanist, spent a year in the Cascades searching for specimens on behalf of the Royal Horticultural Society. Similar to a lunar explorer, Douglas discovered plants and trees that had never been found in the known universe. On the west slopes of the Cascades, he identified the tree that would be named for him, the Douglas fir, and measured its average diameter at seventeen feet in the lower valleys—the biggest tree found in North America at the time. When he sailed back to England, Douglas took with him seeds and samples from 150 previously unknown plant species.
Without exception, the early mountain visitors compared the North Cascades to the Swiss Alps. It was Winthrop who said the Old World comparison was not worthy of these New World peaks. While gazing up at the Cascade skyline from his canoe near the San Juan Islands, Winthrop argued that the new residents of the Pacific Northwest should forget Europe when discussing these mountains. He predicted that a regional style and outlook would evolve as the North Cascades were appreciated for their singular beauty. From the ice caps of the Northwestern summits would blow fresh inspiration for artists and climbers and everyday souls anchored in the mire of sea level.
In urging “recognition for the almost unknown glories of the Cascade Mountains,” Winthrop wrote:
We are poorly off for such objects east of the Mississippi. There are some roughish excrescences known as the Alleghanies. There is a knobby group of brownish White Mountains. Best of all, high in Down-East is the lonely Katahdin. Hillocks these—never among them one single summit brilliant forever with snow, golden in sunshine, silver when sunshine has gone;
not one to bloom rosy at dawn, and to be a vision of refreshment all the sultry summer long; not one to be lustrous white over leagues of woodland, sombre or tender; not one to repeat the azure of heaven among its shadowy dells.…
In the fifty years following his endorsement, most of the people who wandered above timberline for a look were prospectors and surveyors. Periodic goldstrikes fostered bursts of primitive road building in the valleys and construction of boomtowns which were often wiped out by avalanches. Unlike the Swiss, who built town-saving barricades where the gullies drained into their villages, the Northwesterners never mastered the avalanche. Early into this century, when the mother lodes were spent, the North Cascades were mostly forgotten again. By then, the basin of Puget Sound was filling up with people; only when pushed by urban elbows did the city dwellers start to look up at the peaks in their midst with anything approaching Winthrop’s awe. Within easy distance from the smokestacks of the new cities was a mountain range that could still humble, or bring to the visitor a sense of discovery.
The first climbers were English, from Victoria. They compared Mount Baker to the Jungfrau in the Bernese Oberland area of the Alps. Early pictures show men in neckties, sometimes joined by women in ankle-length dresses and floppy hats, slogging up steep glacial slopes. They had little influence beyond their mostly upper-class circles. Bob Marshall, the legendary Forest Service walker, hiked the Cascade Pass area in 1930 and recommended that the entire area be set aside as wilderness, an idea that took form years later with piecemeal creation of the Glacier Peak, Alpine Lakes and Pasayten wilderness areas and the North Cascades National Park on the American side, and Manning Provincial Park and Cathedral Park north of the border.
Beckey, singing his dirty songs, traveling in tennis shoes and carrying a Boy Scout rucksack, made his first mark on the climbing world in 1939, when he, Lloyd Anderson and Clint Kelley climbed Mount Despair in the North Cascades. An ice pyramid of 7,292 feet, Despair had been labeled unclimbable by a Mountaineers publication a few years earlier. Whacking through the brush, Beckey’s party found a way above timberline, then scrambled on rock and ice face to the summit, as if pulled by magnet. It was not so much the conquest of the peak that got Beckey excited as it was the conquest of his own fear. What triumph: to be unbound from the leash of mortality. He began to feel a certain invincibility.
From then on, he climbed virtually nothing but peaks that had never been ascended. All over the West, from the Teton Range in Wyoming to the Maroon Bells in Colorado to Yosemite in the High Sierras to the Cascade peaks of Mount Baker and Shuksan and Rainier, Beckey blazed a trail. By the end of the 1940s, he was the best-known climber in the West—and arguably in America—at least among the odd circle of European immigrants and loners who spent time in the mountains. But he’d also picked up a reputation as arrogant, dangerously careless, a youthful fireball who would soon burn out. Beckey was that rare athlete who knows he’s the best and can’t contain it. The climbing journals, feuding constantly with Beckey over his methods and routes, and the devil-may-care way in which he described his astonishing feats—on any given day, he could ruin an existing hero or make a longtime expert look silly—would give only passing mention to his first ascents, usually no more than a paragraph or two in the last pages of a mountaineering annual. In the late 1940s, he sought to have the Mountaineers publish his first climbing guidebook for the local peaks. When they turned him down, he went to the well-established, mostly upper-class American Alpine Club, and they agreed to print a few thousand copies for a flat fee—no royalties. Beckey made little money on the 1949 publication, and so he went back to driving a delivery truck. It would be years before he would return to writing about the mountains as a means of supporting himself.
Beckey’s fame spread through word of mouth. There were stories about his wolf howl, a blood-chilling sound, which Beckey would use to scare tourists away from his favorite campsites. Whereas Mount Baker was first climbed by English gentlemen, Beckey went up and down like a vandal on the run; coming off the volcano in the 1950s, he found a logging truck at the trailhead, a violation, in his mind, of the wilderness. So he proceeded to disengage the truck’s gear and roll it several miles down the valley. Climbing Devil’s Tower in Wyoming, he was nearly arrested after urinating in front of gawking tourists in the parking lot below. Beckey had had no ill intent, he explained—it was just that he was stuck on the wall with no place to hide.
While many of his early climbing partners anchored themselves to desks at sea level, Beckey continued to take odd jobs, sleeping on friends’ floors and cadging rides to and from the mountains. Lloyd Anderson, his partner on Mount Despair, founded Recreational Equipment Inc., an outdoor co-op set up as a way to get good European hardware at reasonable prices. After the war, with the surge in leisure-time activities and the surfeit of Army camping gear, the backyard operation took off. By the 1950s, Anderson’s creation, known by the initials REI, had grown to be the largest consumer co-op in the nation. More than two million members have registered since Anderson’s days with Beckey in the late 1930s, and there are now eighteen REI stores in ten states. REI is one of the largest sporting-goods retailers in the world. But the outdoors brought no riches to Beckey. The Man with No Permanent Address made few plans beyond the next outing.
He is supposed to be up there somewhere today, a sixty-five-year-old man who can’t sit still. Beckey’s apparent target, the Nooksack Tower, is a black hulk six times as high as the World Trade Center, coated in ice. Beckey was the first human to touch the summit, on July 5, 1946.
As the rose-tinted light bleeds out of the sky to the west, I leave the German and set up my own campsite below the walls of the tower. A moist wind invades the cirque, a harbinger of the next frontal system. Perhaps Beckey is bivouacked somewhere up high, and I’ll catch him in the early morning. Then again, maybe he’s gone. Now the light has disappeared, and the peaks are black and white, the shades of a killer whale just beneath the surface. At night, with a cannonade of avalanches all around, I have trouble sleeping. The sound comes first as a crack, and then whooomppfff. Mount Shuksan, joined to the Nooksack Tower by the shoulder ridge above me, means “roaring mountain” in the native tongue. Everything that any mountain could have—flower meadows, alpine firs, small lakes, glaciers, serrated rock walls, colors found only above timberline at a certain time of day, and a summit that defies easy ascent–is on Shuksan. But at night, all it does is roar. In the morning there is no Beckey, and the German is gone. I scan the tower, its peak bathed in the bronze of dawn, and see a speck of a man moving upward—the German—no doubt muttering directions from the Beckey book in his backpack.
At sea level, I look up Beckey’s closest friend, a Lithuanian émigré named Alex Bertulis, who has an architecture practice in Seattle. I’ve put out the word that I’m looking for Beckey, and Bertulis has a message for me from the man himself: Beckey has gone to the Coast Range for the month. The Coast Range is a largely roadless spine of low-elevation wilderness rising from the fjords of British Columbia and stretching hundreds of miles north into the panhandle of Alaska. Most of the peaks are unnamed and unclimbed and heavily glaciated by year-round storms. The Coast Range, at his age? And then I remember a saying of Beckey’s. Loveliness, he said, is paid for “in the currency of suffering.”
Bertulis shrugs. Don’t worry, he says. He’ll be back.
“It’s just something he has to do.”
Bertulis has climbed with Beckey for three decades; he provides a couch for his sleeping bag whenever he’s in Seattle. Beckey, he says, “goes through climbing partners like a gypsy goes through horses.” Beckey may spend ten days on rock and ice, and within a few minutes of arriving back in Seattle he’s on the phone, trying to find somebody to go with him back to the mountains. Usually his partners are half his age. While in town, he’s constantly on edge until he’s secured a mate for the next trip.
I ask Bertulis about the 1950s, when the Northwest was coming into its own as the climbi
ng center of North America. The Army’s Tenth Mountain Division, created as a ski unit to fight the Nazis in the Alps, was put together with climbers from Mount Rainier. After the war, many of them stayed together and started to pursue mountaineering as something more than a weekend hobby. Beckey was too young for the division; he enlisted near the end of the war and missed most of the action. By the late 1950s, an effort to put the first American atop Mount Everest was underway in the Northwest, led by Jim Whittaker, a West Seattle neighbor of Beckey’s and an early manager of REI.
Like Beckey, Whittaker learned about the outdoors through the Boy Scouts, scrambling up the peaks of the Cascades and Olympics. Beckey, in the 1950s, had made three daring first ascents on comparatively unknown Alaskan peaks. He had done them all alpine style, a method of mountaineering later popularized by Reinhold Messner, the first man to climb each of the world’s eight-thousand-meter peaks, fourteen in all. Rather than rely on an army of supplies and porters, the alpine idea is to travel light and fast without bottled oxygen or cumbersome support camps. Beckey, given his superhuman reputation, seemed a natural for the 1963 Everest trip. But he was not chosen. Four Americans made the high point of the planet. While Beckey was scrounging for gas money, Jim Whittaker became a national hero, joining John Glenn in the Kennedy circle of Camelot demigods, his picture on the covers of Life magazine and National Geographic. Whittaker went on to market a line of outdoor clothing under the label Because It’s There.