by Andy Hall
To this day, Merry still believes not enough was done. When I visited Wayne and Cindy Merry in their small house on a hill looking out over Atlin Lake in northern British Columbia, Wayne was waiting for me in the driveway. He is a small man with thick, white hair, smooth skin, and thoughtful eyes that give him more than a passing resemblance to Spencer Tracy; talking to him and watching him move nimbly around the house, it was hard to believe he was eighty years old.
We sat at a dining table in the large, book-lined room that overlooked the lake and talked about the park and the Wilcox tragedy. But the conversation returned again and again to the failure to launch an overflight.
“Whether we could do anything for them or not remained to be seen,” he said. “We couldn’t say until we could find out what the situation was. Chances are good that we couldn’t do much for them directly, but we were legally and morally obligated to try to help these people and we didn’t even try.”
When I described radio logs, journal entries, and weather reports that consistently indicate that weather kept aircraft from flying near the upper mountain until Sheldon flew on July 25, Merry dismissed them.
“This I don’t know, but I do know that I requested it and Wilcox requested it and I radioed this to headquarters. Where it went from there, I haven’t the slightest idea. The radio communication was so poor and so irregular that it is hard to say exactly what the sequence was. A number of times I was told by [Chief Ranger] Hayes that things were being taken care of, or they were thinking about this or discussing that. But I couldn’t seem to get a solid answer.”
When I asked Merry if he continued to ask questions when he returned to headquarters in the fall of 1967, he replied, “No.”
At the end of the daylong critique meeting, three “proposed needs” were identified: improved radio communications, designation of a climbing ranger with authority to deal directly with the Alaska Rescue Group, and construction of a mountain refuge at Denali Pass. After dinner, those needs were debated and critiqued and narrowed to two resolutions noted simply as “Radio system funding and Climbing personnel.” Whether or not they agreed with one another, all the participants were motivated to learn from the events of July 1967 in order to avoid repeating a similar tragedy in the future.
My father wrote to the families of the victims on September 21 to describe the findings of the meeting.
The critique meeting . . . became more of a discussion of proposals for future protection and, of course, contained positive proposals to check for traces next spring since nature is known to do unexpected things on McKinley. This is not expected to be productive. Every person at the meeting must have wished for a different result and, in fact, probably wished that the meeting did not have to be held at all. Some of these people knew your sons personally, and it was obviously a sensitive matter. No speculation as to the cause of the accident was made that could hold up against the known facts. We know the winds were intense, we know there was a “white-out”—we still don’t know why they did not continue down or dig into snow caves. We therefore have to assume there was an extraordinary factor over which there was no control, one we may never understand completely.
During the critique meeting Don Sheldon brought up the idea of requiring climbers to be bonded (insured) in order to cover rescue costs. He routinely flew when he was needed regardless of whether payment for his efforts was guaranteed, a policy that often left him empty-handed. Though bonding was a reasonable suggestion, the idea appeared to alarm some of the climbers. Gary Hansen immediately attacked the idea, saying it could restrict those who couldn’t afford insurance for climbing, and might lead to clandestine climbs. Washburn joined Sheldon in pressing the question, suggesting that climbing would continue to grow in popularity, resulting in more possible losses to rescue organizations.
After the meeting, my father further explored the bonding idea and decided that Hansen was right.
“I explored all I could with everybody I could think of, including Lloyd’s of London, the cost was too high. The people making the climbs generally were just doing it, they were just guys hanging around,” he said. “They were just people who wanted to climb the damned mountain. They had no money, and they usually gave up their jobs to come up and climb.”
Today Joe Wilcox splits his time between Seattle, Washington, and Kailua-Kona, Hawaii, where he teaches astronomy and oceanography at the University of Hawaii.
He is a spare man both in physical appearance and personality. Over the phone his voice is jovial—high yet soft, as if he is talking through a filter of cotton balls. In person he appears somber, with deep-set eyes and a face that, even at rest, seems intense and distracted by unspoken concerns. He has given the years no quarter. He is tall and fit, with the muscular legs of a runner; he is an avid competitor in Masters track and field competitions.
Pictures of Wilcox in his youth show a strapping man who played college football and scaled mountains. Today, after decades of strenuous activity, he has honed his body to a straight, lean, and sinewy version of his youthful self.
In person, his conversation is marked with long pauses and gazes toward the horizon. His impassive face and penetrating eyes are unsettling, but the combination is broken suddenly and frequently by a warm smile.
He still treks in high places, acclimating himself by hiking above 10,000 feet on the slopes of Mauna Kea volcano near his winter home in Kailua-Kona. His most recent climb was Mount Kilimanjaro. And when he isn’t climbing, he is sailing Shepherd Moon, his Island Packet 350 harbored in Kona. He has already made the 5,000-mile round-trip sailing to Tahiti and back. Australia is next and he hopes to complete a circumnavigation of the planet. He is seventy years old.
When I visited him in Kailua-Kona, he drove a small convertible Geo Metro. The inside was cluttered but clean. His apartment was similar. The floor was covered with piles of books on astronomy, oceanography, and travel. Maps, vinyl records, and DVDs were stacked on his couch. Like his car, it looked more like the domain of a college student rather than a professor.
His life seems to be an exercise in practicality and restraint. He owns two identical baseball hats, one much dirtier than the other. “I wear that one when I work on the boat,” he explained. One afternoon we drank beer from big schooners at a bar near the harbor where he keeps his sailboat. Later at his cluttered apartment he poured me another beer in an identical schooner. “I liked their glasses so I got some for myself,” he explained. “They’re big and they stay cold.”
I suggested he join me but he said, “No, I’ll have one next week.” He was not joking.
When I asked why he treated himself so sparingly, he replied, “People ask me if I ever let myself go. I like beer, I eat nasty hamburgers, I just do it once a month; I enjoy these things just like anyone else; I just don’t do it constantly. When I tell people that, they think something is wrong with me. They don’t understand.”
I could only wonder if this ordered existence had been influenced by his experience on Denali or if the rigors of mountaineering had appealed to his ascetic nature. For a dozen years after the tragedy on Denali, Wilcox grappled with survivor’s guilt. He divorced his first wife, Cheryl, and though he returned to Alaska to teach school in the village of Sand Point in the Shumagin Islands and later in McGrath, he never returned to Denali.
He pored over weather records and climbing journals to compare weather statistics with conditions experienced by climbers during windstorms and finally came to the realization that he could not have saved his friends, even if he had been with them when the storm hit. He wrote his own book about the climb titled White Winds, an effort he described to me as therapeutic. “At first I felt guilty, I thought I should have died myself. I’m convinced now that it doesn’t matter, it wouldn’t have made a difference.”
During a climbing conference in the 1980s, Joe Wilcox and Brad Washburn met for the first and only time. Wilcox says they never t
alked about the infamous letter or the specifics of the climb but had a pleasant exchange. According to Washburn’s biographer, Mike Sfraga, that was the closest semblance to an apology Washburn could muster.
“I never got the impression from Brad that he ever said, ‘Hey, I’m sorry I wrote you that crappy letter,’” Sfraga told me. “He said that he had talked to Wilcox at some conference. That was about as good as it got, as close to an apology as I think you could get from Brad.”
Howard Snyder is the director of the Remington Carriage Museum in Cardston, Alberta, Canada, and remains intensely interested in the expedition. He wrote a book about the climb called The Hall of the Mountain King, published in the early 1970s. In it, he was critical of Wilcox’s leadership and the abilities of some of the Wilcox party members, but his attitude seems to have mellowed in the ensuing years.
“Joe is a real convenient target, but that’s the nature of being the leader of an expedition. He has been, I think, attacked probably unfairly, probably more than anyone else by himself.”
Of all the people interviewed, Snyder’s memories were the most detailed and the most consistent with documentation from the incident. He and Paul Schlichter also seem to be the least affected of the survivors. “Paul and I have talked about it many times and we’re glad we climbed it when we did because we were on a real adventure and we were on our own. Now it’s overrun with people and regulations and rangers.”
Schlichter went on to serve in Vietnam as a rescue and reconnaissance pilot and lost comrades there and in Laos. That experience, he said, had more of an impact on his life than the Wilcox Expedition, which he looks at as one small aspect of his early life.
“It’s funny, we had some friends here that I knew from college, who knew I had been on the climb, and they introduced me to their friends like, ‘Here’s Paul, he climbed McKinley back in 1967 in a tragic situation.’ All I could think was, Well, that was a long, long time ago and I’m not sure why they brought it up in a first introduction.”
Of the three Colorado climbers, Jerry Lewis had the most difficulty during the climb, and Snyder said Lewis has tried to distance himself from the experience. “He suffered physically and emotionally way more than we did on this trip and really finds revisiting it to be unpleasant.”
Lewis didn’t respond to my requests to talk about the climb. Neither did Anshel Schiff, whom Joe Wilcox described as being in poor health and uninterested in talking about the past.
My father remained close to many of those who had worked on the Wilcox rescue. Vin and Grace Hoeman were frequent visitors at our home in the park and the one in South Anchorage for a couple of years following the tragedy. Though my father was ten years his senior, he and Hoeman both were avid letter writers and meticulous collectors. My father’s interest was in polar history; Hoeman’s was Alaska mountaineering. He maintained a card catalog noting the climbing accomplishments of nearly every serious mountaineer actively climbing at that time, and he was working on a comprehensive climbing guide to Alaska’s mountains. Hoeman was thirty-three years old when he died in 1969, swept away by an avalanche on Mount Dhaulagiri in the Himalayas, along with five of America’s finest mountaineers and two Sherpas. Vin’s wife, Grace Jansen Hoeman, was denied the summit of Denali twice in 1967, both times due in part to altitude sickness, but in 1970, at age forty-nine, she led an all-female expedition to the top. She was traversing Eklutna Glacier north of Anchorage the following year when she met the same fate as her husband and was buried by an avalanche along with her climbing partner Hans Van Der Laan.
Ray Genet, who reached the summit twice in 1967, remained a close family friend for many years. He presented me with my Eagle Scout Award in 1978, and we often visited him in his tiny cabin near Talkeetna—my father usually went in first to make sure that the attractive young women who often accompanied Genet were appropriately dressed for a family visit. Genet pioneered guided climbing on Denali, founding Genet Expeditions, and made more successful ascents of the mountain than any other climber before he died at age forty-eight on the slopes of Mount Everest, where his body remains.
The last time I saw Don Sheldon, he was wearing a wool watch cap and a down vest, ambling through the terminal at Anchorage International Airport. He and my father clasped hands like long-lost friends, and Sheldon gave me a wry smile and a vigorous handshake too. Then the two men stood there and talked for what seemed like an hour. Though Sheldon had cheated death scores of times while performing rescues on Denali and in the surrounding country, he died in bed, felled by cancer in 1975 at age fifty-four.
My father’s friendships with these adventurers were always puzzling to me. He was not like them; he did not climb, nor for that matter was he much of an outdoorsman. After leaving the Park Service, my father wore suits and worked in an office, yet he remained close to some of the leading climbers of the ’60s and ’70s, and they treated him as if he were one of their own. I never understood why until after his death in 2005 at age eighty-one.
For as long as I can recall, a framed paper certificate hung on the wall of my father’s office, an honorary lifetime membership in the Mountaineering Club of Alaska. Toward the end of his life, when his memory was poor, he told me he got it for keeping Denali open to climbing but the details eluded him. When he died and I was writing his obituary, I tried to learn more about the award, but his climbing friends were long dead and calls to several current club members revealed nothing. It wasn’t until I was nearly finished with the research for this book that I learned the story.
My sister found the certificate among our father’s belongings and read the faded signature of the MCA president, revealing the name Frank Nosek, now a well-known attorney still practicing law at age seventy-eight, and serving as the honorary consulate to the Czech Republic. When I went to his law firm in downtown Anchorage, he met me in the lobby and said, “My office is on the second floor; let’s take the stairs, it keeps you young.” By his fit appearance and sharp mind, I figured he knew what he was talking about and followed as he jogged up the steps.
“Your dad was a real friend to the climbing community,” Nosek began as we settled into chairs in his slightly cluttered office. “I remember designing that certificate; it was one of a kind. We’d never given one before. We wanted to thank him.”
The Wilcox tragedy was the worst climbing accident to occur on Denali or in North America when it occurred and the worst accident to take place in a national park. Understandably it hadn’t gone unnoticed by higher-ups in the Park Service. In the fall of 1967 John Rutter, Alaska’s San Francisco–based regional director, called my father and made an unprecedented demand: end climbing in Mount McKinley National Park.
Because a tragedy had occurred in July, and a near tragedy had occurred in the winter, Regional Director Rutter considered the mountain too dangerous for mountaineering, and his solution was to close it. The regional director didn’t have the authority to ban climbing in the park himself, but the superintendent did.
My father refused.
In 1999 former superintendent George Hall told Park Service historian Kristen Griffen about John Rutter’s demand. “He wouldn’t put it in writing. He wouldn’t take any positive step. He wanted me to stick my neck out. Now, mountain climbing is a legitimate recreation program, it’s just that there should be some more support and control to it.”
Nosek was chairman of the Mountaineering Club of Alaska in 1967 and said the climbing community in Alaska and in the Pacific Northwest was well aware of the threat of closure yet unsure how to fight it.
“We wanted to show our opposition to that idea, but we didn’t really have any place to show it, except your dad. And so we did. We felt like we had a connection, a reasonable connection, with a very, very unreasonable government agency. It was an agency we couldn’t—we didn’t have the ability to—fight. But we did have an open ear with their local representative, and he was sympathetic and reasonable.”
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The pressure to close the mountain eased as winter set in and the horror of the accident began to fade. Some time that fall, Rutter withdrew his demand. In December 1967 the Mountaineering Club of Alaska recognized my father with an honorary lifetime membership signed by Nosek. It hung on the wall of every office my father occupied after he left the Park Service, and in the last years of his life it adorned the wall of his den at our home in Anchorage and remained there until his death.
“The appreciation for your dad having that attitude was enormous in the climbing community here,” Nosek said. “He worked with us. I don’t know what he went through, but he was our front line against that movement to shut down the mountain, so we’ve always credited him with having defeated that very, very bad idea.”
As my father had put it at the review meeting: “The people making the climbs generally were just doing it, they were just guys hanging around. They were just people who wanted to climb the damned mountain. They had no money, and they usually gave up their jobs to come up and climb.”
He didn’t want those people shut out of Denali.
CHAPTER 13
THIRTY YEARS AFTER
Four of the men simply vanished. The three bodies found on the mountain revealed few clues to their final hours. And over the decades since the storm engulfed them, no new evidence has turned up. But, as Brad Washburn predicted, climbing has grown in popularity and thousands of climbers can now say they have reached the summit of Denali. A few have returned with stories that might shed light on what it was like inside the storm that engulfed the mountain in late July 1967.
In late May 1997, longtime climbing guide Blaine Smith led a Denali expedition that bore remarkable similarities to the second Wilcox summit team: Smith’s party also consisted of seven men; during their ascent two climbers chose to forego the summit and wait while five went to the top. Near the summit, those five were overtaken by an unexpected storm. And when the wind velocity approached 100 miles per hour and reaching the safety of their high camp became impossible, the party was caught above Denali Pass, unable to move and fighting to find a way to survive in the relentless wind.