Denali's Howl: The Deadliest Climbing Disaster on America's Wildest Peak

by Andy Hall

  Wilcox, however, was not guiding the expedition; he was climbing an unfamiliar mountain with peers, some of whom were older and more experienced than he was.

  “It’s not like a military organization, where you’ve got the chain of command, or the corporate environment, where you have managers and subordinates,” recalls Schlichter, a former Air Force cadet who would go on to see action in Vietnam. “It was a bunch of fairly young guys getting together to go for a climb, and there’s a limit to how much control you have over the people who are up there.”

  CHAPTER 5

  FROM A CREVASSE TO BROTHERHOOD

  Beyond Camp II, the Muldrow Glacier becomes heavily crevassed. The way through it exposes climbers to the danger of unseen crevasses or that of avalanches, and sometimes to both at the same time. They must negotiate two icefalls and a particularly treacherous feature called the Hill of Cracks. Here the glacier bulges as it passes over an unseen mass, creating crevasses that radiate outward and sometimes run at right angles to each other. Finding a safe route is especially difficult.

  To get through these crevasse fields, the Wilcox Expedition had to either walk around, jump, or cross over the yawning fissures on snow bridges, formed when snowfall covers and then builds up over an open crevasse. Often the only sign of a hidden crevasse is a slight depression in the snow caused when the heavy, overlying snow droops into the opening below. With the lighter snowfall on the north side of the mountain, the bridges on the Muldrow are often thin and don’t droop as obviously, making them hard to spot, even by experienced mountaineers. Another route through the icefalls requires climbers to hug the sides of the glacier, passing beneath the avalanche-prone snow and ice that collects on the steep canyon walls. Neither choice is without serious risk.

  Brad Washburn warned of the hazards along the margins of the Muldrow in his unpublished climbing guide when he wrote, “I have often seen huge chunks of ice, which have fallen down the great gullies of Mount Carpe and rolled three-quarters of the way across the level floor of the valley amid a lethal cloud of flying ice and snow.”

  While Russell continued to avoid climbing with Clark, Wilcox shuffled the rope teams, giving everyone else a chance to work together and perform the different tasks required during the climb. This also built camaraderie, shoring up the team against the fractures that occasionally threatened to divide the expedition. The routine involved an advance team of four carrying half loads and breaking trail, followed by packers, carrying full loads. They would climb high, cache their loads, and descend again to camp low in order to better acclimate to the thin air at altitude. On a map, the distance from Wonder Lake to the south summit of Denali is 36.5 miles, but each man would travel many times that distance as he relayed load after load of food and gear up the mountain ascending and descending between camps or caches along the route.

  After the ski meeting, Wilcox went to Snyder’s tent and told him that he would lead the next push up the glacier, through the Lower Icefall to establish Camp III. Snyder’s team would include Lewis, McLaughlin, and Steve Taylor. They gathered their personal gear and got ready to move to Camp II. Clark, Russell, Walt Taylor, and Anshel Schiff were also heading to Camp II carrying loads of food and supplies. A full load consisted of two one-day food packs, or a single two-day pack. Schiff was on his way out of camp when Walt Taylor noticed that a one-day food pack remained. Someone was carrying half a load and he knew who it was.

  “Come back here, Anshel, you rascal!” he yelled.

  Schiff returned and after a good-natured Walt Taylor–style scolding, he reluctantly added the second bag to his load and headed up the glacier.

  Schiff was one of the least experienced climbers on the expedition, and given that he had joined to lead the scientific studies, no one was expecting him to reach the summit. Still, he was a member of the expedition and was expected to carry his share of the weight. Walt Taylor was in fact doing Schiff a favor by refusing to let him slack off where the climbing was relatively easy.

  Charged with establishing a route through the Lower Icefall, Snyder had to choose between two dangerous options. The left side of the icefall had fewer crevasses, but the canyon wall on that side of the valley was a snow-covered slope, prone to avalanche. The right side was more heavily crevassed, but the slope above was more stable. Brad Washburn’s advice was to skirt the crevasses by hugging the right side of the glacier and briefly moving through the less dangerous avalanche zone.

  As Snyder considered his options on the morning of June 27, a thunderous boom issued from the left side of the valley, followed by an escalating roar. A massive avalanche shot down the valley wall, gathering rock and ice before surging far beyond the foot of the wall, well into the left side of the icefall. The men watched speechlessly as the thunder subsided and the snow billows drifted away to reveal a pile of rock, snow, and ice sprayed across the left side of the glacier. Their only option now was to go right.

  Snyder led the way and put Lewis in the second rope position, figuring the big man would be able to handle it if he fell. A few hundred feet out, Snyder’s snowshoe binding came loose. He paused to adjust it and told Lewis to carefully move up. Lewis was probing a small crevasse with his bamboo pole when he suddenly toppled into a larger one.

  Snyder quickly drove his ax into the ice to arrest Lewis’s fall but it penetrated just an inch or two, providing a tenuous purchase at best. Steve Taylor was third on the rope, and Snyder instructed him to carefully cross the crevasse and take over the ax belay. This was a test for the inexperienced Steve Taylor, whom Snyder and others had thought was not up to the psychological and physical challenges of mountaineering. At some level, it was the kind of test they had all come for. Taylor held fast.

  Snyder placed two ice screws into the glacier and secured the rope to which Lewis was still attached. With McLaughlin anchoring the other end of the line by holding an edge on his skis, Snyder peered into the crevasse. Lewis dangled about nine feet below.

  “Do you have me? Do you have me?”

  “Are you all right?’ asked Snyder

  “Hell no, I’m not all right! Do you have me?”

  He was wedged in horizontally, facing downward, staring down into the dark maw of the crevasse rather than up toward his rescuers. As his eyes adjusted to the darkness, Lewis found himself suspended above a gymnasium-size cavern with deep-blue walls and a lake at the bottom. Geared up and loaded down as he was, he knew a plunge into the dark lake would be a one-way trip.

  They hoisted Lewis’s pack out first, followed by his ax. Then they rigged a pulley system to bring Lewis up, with McLaughlin anchoring the pulley. In the thin, crusty snow over the hard ice, the long, sharp edge of McLaughlin’s ski provided a solid grip—more reliable than the rounded edge of a snowshoe or a Bunny Boot without crampons. McLaughlin had proven the usefulness of skis, but Russell was not the kind of person to acknowledge such things.

  As Lewis’s nerves settled down, he described the scene inside the glacier. “I wish there was enough light down there to take pictures,” he said. “It was all subtle shades of blue.”

  They pushed on and reached the top of the icefall but were halted by a large crevasse and whiteout conditions at about 7,300 feet. Shy of Camp III, they cached their loads, including their high-altitude boots and clothing, and returned to Camp II.

  That night, as Joe Wilcox prepared dinner, he overprimed the stove, spilling fuel onto the tent floor. When he lit the stove, the floor went up in flames, which he quickly smothered, leaving the tent unscathed. When the last rope team arrived in camp that night, Russell dutifully reported to them, “Our Fearless Leader tried to burn down the tent!”

  McLaughlin demonstrated the practicality of skis while helping extract Lewis from the glacier while Clark showed how annoying they could be for others on the rope line. He stopped repeatedly during the passage between Camps II and I, adding wax, then removing wax; putting on climbing skins, th
en taking them off again. Each time he stopped, the others were forced to stop as well, and by the time they reached camp his companions were exasperated.

  The rope team of Joe Wilcox, Hank Janes, John Russell, and Dennis Luchterhand pushed up to 8,100 feet the following day and established Camp III between the Muldrow’s two major icefalls and then returned to Camp II. Snow whispered against the nylon walls of the tents throughout the night, piling up on the sides of the tents and muffling the snores and sounds of shifting movements made by the men sleeping inside. A sky opaque with falling snow greeted them when they awoke. Movement beyond the barely visible wands marking the boundaries of the camp would be risky, so they lounged in their tents rather than pushing their luck.

  “The concealing snowfall had made the icefall a treacherous death trap,” Wilcox wrote, “the valley walls echoed with the muffled rumble of distant avalanches.” The whole group would wait until the risk of avalanche from the new snow had subsided.

  They had spent four days on a nearly nonstop drive from Puyallup to Denali, hiked cross-country to McGonagall Pass, and then relayed gear up the glacier for five more days. The forced respite was welcome. Between sessions of clearing snow from the camp, snowball fights broke out. Wilcox and Steve Taylor played a marathon chess game. Luchterhand lamented the lack of women on the expedition. Janes read aloud from a book of Zen. Conversation soon moved to the Vietnam War and how each man had come to be hunkered down in a snowstorm on a remote Alaska mountain rather than wading through rice paddies in Southeast Asia.

  Most of Joe Wilcox’s original members had deferments; Jerry Lewis, who was thirty, had already served a stint in the Army. Schlichter, an Air Force cadet, would head to Vietnam at the end of the summer. A knee injury suffered when Wilcox played collegiate football had made him physically ineligible—a wonderful bureaucratic irony for the leader of an expedition to the alpine wilderness of Denali. Janes’s teaching job kept him stateside, and McLaughlin had asthma that “became chronic whenever he got within two blocks of his draft board.” It couldn’t have been much of a surprise when Russell claimed that he had been declared unregimentable.

  The snowfall subsided on the morning of June 30, and the men woke to three feet of powder. The dirty, jumbled surface of the glacier had been made smooth and immaculately white by the impossibly bright blanket of snow bathed in dazzling sunlight. The men were soon sweating in their tents as the temperature inside became unbearable, pushing them outside where it didn’t feel much cooler.

  A clear summer day on a glacier can be a contradictory experience. While the air temperature might be at or below freezing, the direct sunlight radiating from above and reflecting back from the ubiquitous snow can be uncomfortably warm. For those with fair complexions, the multiplied sunlight can be relentless, raising blisters on exposed skin and surreptitiously burning nostrils, lips, and—at least for mouth breathers—the roof of the mouth. Unprotected eyes can result in burned retinas and painful but temporary snow blindness. Still, it was hard to complain about after days of rain. They took advantage of the conditions by laying out all their soaked gear to dry in the sun while they comfortably moved around on the icy glacier dressed in just their long underwear or shorts.

  The new snow clung to the steep walls of the valley with a tenuous grip and the heat of the sun was more than enough to break it free. The avalanche danger forced the expedition to sit tight during the warmth of the day and move only at night when the cold air hardened the snow and stilled the snow slides.

  Near midnight, all twelve men set out for Camp III. Eight dropped their loads at Camp III and turned back to Camp II for more, while Wilcox led the advance team of Schiff, Janes, and Schlichter to establish a route beyond the Hill of Cracks and through the Upper Icefall. The first day of July dawned as they climbed, painting the valley once again with alpenglow—first a faint pink, then growing orange and finally gold with the ascent of the rising sun into a blue sky. By the time the packers deposited their loads and returned to Camp II, the blazing sunlight had returned, forcing them to shed their hats, gloves, and jackets.

  Early the next morning, they packed up their tents and sleeping bags at Camp II and moved into Camp III, established at the top of the Hill of Cracks in a level spot between two large crevasses. One final carry would complete the move, but Snyder couldn’t muster a full rope team to finish the job, so they settled in to wait for the stable conditions brought on by the cool of the evening.

  This was the first camp without a pool of melted glacial water nearby, and soon stoves were hissing away, melting snow for cooking and drinking. As Snyder set a pan packed with clean white snow onto the burner he heard the whump of igniting gas and looked up to see Russell’s stove engulfed in flames. He had apparently overpumped the stove and gas burst through one of its gaskets and ignited. The fire was soon put out. No harm done.

  The advance team returned around noon and reported that they had topped the Muldrow’s second icefall, known as the Great Icefall, by going up the middle of the glacier and cached their gear at about 10,600 feet. Schlichter reported that he had taken some of Schiff’s load when Schiff said he was having trouble carrying it.

  “I didn’t mind carrying it,” Schlichter confided to Snyder, “except that he kept looking back at me with a big grin.”

  Wilcox said Schiff appeared to be the only man on the expedition who was not growing stronger as they progressed up the mountain. At one point he suspected that Schiff was dieting in an effort to lose weight. In reality Schiff suffered from acute heartburn and couldn’t eat before or during strenuous activity. He was secretly consuming a dozen antacid tablets a day, but the medicine was doing little more than masking a growing problem.

  Two rope teams set out for the final trip to Camp II near midnight on July 3 and by 1:25 A.M. on July 4 had reached the camp and packed up the last of the supplies to be carried up the mountain. McGonagall Pass, the escape hatch to the lowlands, was still in view, but once they moved up the glacier, it would disappear from sight and the expedition would be isolated and completely self-sufficient with no easy way back. Independence Day, indeed.

  The Fourth of July dawned gray. Russell was nominated to lead the first rope team out of Camp II and up the glacier. At lower elevations and latitudes their friends and families were wearing T-shirts and shorts, preparing to celebrate the nation’s birthday with parades, cookouts, and fireworks. To usher in the special occasion high on Denali, Russell lit a firecracker. The cavernous acoustics of the glacial valley made the pop sound like the demise of a party balloon. Before Russell led the way up, the expedition decided to take advantage of the sunny weather and take group photos. What proved to be a tedious process required each man to strap his camera to an ice ax, engage the self-timer, and hustle back in time to pose with the others. Luchterhand’s camera wasn’t working properly. He strapped it in place, pushed the release, jogged back to the line of men in his massive Bunny Boots, and waited the appropriate amount of time. Silence. He bowed his head, began to step forward, and heard the shutter click. Others waited to take their turn, so he decided he’d live with whatever image the camera captured. He removed his camera and asked who was next. After two hours had passed, the smiles began to turn wooden. Unhappy to be wasting good climbing weather, Russell began ducking behind Schiff just before the shutter clicked and finally retreated to a tent, refusing to leave until the cameras were put away. The group photo that ended up in the files at Mount McKinley National Park is one with Russell hiding—something that always bothered my father. More than once he mentioned the photo and the climber who ducked whenever a camera came out, and wondered what he was hiding from. Russell appears in at least two group photos, one taken by Snyder and the other by Luchterhand. (Denny Luchterhand cached his film on the ascent; Anshel Schiff retrieved it on his way down.) Those photos show a stocky young man wearing a plaid shirt and squinting in the bright sun. Curly hair and a thick beard frame his serious face. />
  Not a day was lost setting out for Camp IV. Luchterhand and McLaughlin chose to carry traditional wood-and-rawhide snowshoes rather than plastic Snowtreads. The others may have chided them about the extra weight but when the snow came, they ate their words. The big shoes were superior in the deep powder and invaluable in breaking trail through Great Icefall, to Camp IV at 11,000 feet, which was established by the evening of Tuesday, July 4. Many of the Snowtreads had been discarded between the Muldrow’s Upper and Lower Icefalls.

  The group had reached the head of the Muldrow Glacier and entered the great cirque beneath the spectacular Harper Icefall, a jumble of snow and blue ice that cascades down an increasingly steep 1,500-foot face before dropping off a vertical, 500-foot granite wall above the upper Muldrow Glacier. The dangling glacier nourishes the Muldrow with regular and spectacular avalanches that can cast enormous blocks of ice a half a mile beyond the Harper’s overhanging snout. Here the expedition’s route veered left off of the Muldrow Glacier and onto Karstens Ridge, a 1.8-mile-long spine of snow-covered ice that circumvents the Harper Icefall and culminates at Browne Tower, an outcropping of pink granite at 14,600 feet. Though the wind remained calm, here the climb entered a new level of difficulty.

  The advance team of Wilcox, Russell, Snyder, and Walt Taylor gained the ridge a few hundred yards past a feature known as Karstens Notch early on July 5. The recent snowstorms had not missed the narrow ridge, and as the four men ascended, the snow grew deeper, reaching knees, then hips, then shoulders. In these conditions snowshoes were no help; moving through it was more like swimming in loose sand, and gaining enough traction to move uphill was nearly impossible. That they made any progress at all is a testament to their strength and tenacity. Whiteout conditions prevailed during the arduous slog, and the 4,000-foot drop to the Traleika Glacier on one side and the lesser but equally deadly fall off to the Muldrow on the other side exacerbated the risk. A narrow but level 50-by-30-foot notch in the ridgeline at 12,100 feet was the only viable camping spot on the ridge, so when the advance team reached it, they dropped their loads and established Camp V.