Limits of the Known

by David Roberts

  LIMITS

  of the

  KNOWN

  David Roberts

  W. W. NORTON & COMPANY

  INDEPENDENT PUBLISHERS SINCE 1923

  NEW YORK | LONDON

  For Sharon—

  Then, now, and forever

  Contents

  Prologue

  ONE: FARTHEST NORTH

  TWO: BLANK ON THE MAP

  THREE: PREHISTORIC 5.10

  INTERLUDE: THE QUEST FOR THE OTHER

  FOUR: FIRST DESCENT

  FIVE: FIRST CONTACT

  SIX: THE UNDISCOVERED EARTH

  SEVEN: THE FUTURE OF ADVENTURE

  Note on Sources

  Acknowledgments

  Prologue

  In June 2015, Matt Hale and I spent nine days in Alaska. We were anxious about our mission: if our visit failed to generate the kind of enthusiasm we hoped for, we’d return to our homes in Virginia and Massachusetts humbled and depressed.

  It was our plan to give slide shows in Anchorage and Talkeetna celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of our first ascent of the west face of Mount Huntington. That climb had been in many respects the cardinal achievement of our careers as mountaineers. Now I was seventy-two, Matt seventy-one. We’d be reliving the exploit we had performed at twenty-two and twenty-one. But what if nobody cared about some long-ago climb? What if only sparse gatherings showed up in the auditoriums we had rented? What if a trickle of polite applause for our antiquarian adventure was all we might wring from those jaded attendees?

  We had reason to hope otherwise. Back in 1965, as we set our eyes on the soaring wall on one of the most beautiful mountains in the world, we told ourselves that if we got up the route, we could claim bragging rights to “the hardest thing yet done in Alaska.” Huntington had been climbed only once by any route, just the year before, when eight crack Frenchmen led by the legendary Lionel Terray—Matt’s and my hero for his expeditions all over the world, from Annapurna to Fitz Roy—had struggled for a month before taming the northwest ridge.

  Young though we were, the four of us felt that we had enough experience under our belts to prepare us for a challenge as daunting as the west face. Don Jensen and I were the veterans of two previous Alaskan expeditions, one of which had made the first direct ascent of the Wickersham Wall, Mount McKinley’s north face, at 14,000 feet from base to summit the tallest precipice in the Western Hemisphere. And though Matt and Ed Bernd had never before been on an expedition, they had proved their mettle on trips to the Colorado Rockies in winter, the ice gullies of Mount Washington’s Huntington Ravine, and crags such as Cannon and Cathedral in New Hampshire. It was the Harvard Mountaineering Club that had brought us together, and in the early 1960s the HMC was the leading collegiate climbing organization in the country.

  We spent forty days in July and August 1965 on the Tokositna Glacier and the west face. During the first twenty-five days, plagued by horrendous weather and nightmarish logistics, we got almost nowhere. Our morale plunged in the teeth of Huntington’s stern demands, and we began to think that after all we weren’t good enough for such a route. But slowly we inched our way upward, toward the near-vertical headwall where the serious climbing began. And then, seizing a stretch of five days of perfect weather, we blitzed our way to the top, all four roped together. We stood on the summit at 3:30 AM on July 30, the thirty-second day of the expedition.

  During the next few years, our Huntington climb acquired a certain cachet. I wrote my first book, The Mountain of My Fear, about the expedition, and gradually that narrative gained the status of a minor adventure classic. Other climbers tipped their caps to our feat. As late as 2009, one of them, Doug Robinson, wrote, “I’ll say it was the state-of-the-art alpine climb in the world [to that date].”

  By 2015, Matt and I had been for more than four decades the only surviving members of our team. Only twenty hours after we stood on top, Ed Bernd was killed when his rappel anchor failed and he plunged, without a word, 4,000 feet to his death. And in 1973 Don Jensen died when he was hit by a truck while bicycling to work at a university in Scotland.

  In Talkeetna and Anchorage, Matt’s and my fears that no one would care about our ancient deed proved gloriously unfounded. The auditoriums were packed. Raucous attendees hooted at the photos of our period gear (goldline ropes, Kelty packs), but cheered our moves on the golden granite of the upper wall. The applause at the end was long, and folks came up to chat; some even sought our autographs. We both signed copies of The Mountain of My Fear, still in print forty-seven years after Vanguard Press rescued it from the slush pile.

  The whole return to Alaska was halcyon. We greeted old cronies we hadn’t seen in years, and downed beers with some of the best young climbers who live in the Far North today. We gossiped about unclimbed prizes off in the hinterlands as if we still imagined that we might do battle with them.

  Matt and I hoped to fly around Huntington. I’d made two trips by small plane past the scene of our triumph in later years, but Matt hadn’t seen the west face in half a century. Alas, the Alaska Range stayed socked in during the span of our visit, just as the storms had seemed to doom our chances in 1965. We never got to fly.

  As we walked the dirt streets of Talkeetna, marveling at the gift shops and restaurants that had turned the town into a tourist mecca, we stopped in at the only landmarks that had been there fifty years before—the Fairview Inn, the Roadhouse (famed for its gargantuan breakfasts), and the B & K Trading Post, whose candy counter the two great bush pilots of the day, Don Sheldon and Cliff Hudson, had shattered in an epic fistfight. The arts center where Matt and I gave our slideshow had been converted from Sheldon’s hangar, inside which the four of us had camped as we waited for the skies to clear so that the pilot could fly us in to the Tokositna.

  Yet our rambles through the streets of Talkeetna had a melancholy tinge. The old dirt runway Sheldon used for takeoffs and landings, overgrown with weeds, conjured up the bursting ambitions we had nursed in 1965, when all of Alaska gleamed with peaks and routes no one had attempted. Knowing that we would never again set forth so boldly into the unknown, Matt and I now heard the mournful echo of the siren song that had sounded so keen in our youthful ears.

  And Talkeetna was redolent with memories of the glum aftermath of our Huntington expedition, when the three of had slowly packed our gear, while the hours ticked off until I faced the dreadful duty that had hung over us since midnight on July 30—the phone call to Ed’s parents in Pennsylvania, when I would have to tell them what had happened to their son.

  On our second day in Talkeetna, as we sat in our motel room planning the day’s activities, I noticed a small lump on the right side of my neck. I wondered if it was located on a lymph node, or only nearby. I asked Matt to look at it. He’d had a cyst on the back of his neck the year before, much larger than my incipient lump. Though it became annoying, after he had the cyst lanced and took a course of antibiotics, it cleared up completely.

  Matt’s guess was that my lump was also a cyst. Through the rest of our Alaska trip, I didn’t worry about it. But on the long plane flight home, I noticed that the lump had grown a little. It was hard to the touch, but not at all painful.

  Back in Boston, I went to my general practitioner. He didn’t think the lump was a cyst. To be safe, he ordered, in succession, an ultrasound, a CT scan, and a needle biopsy, none of which produced a clear result. So I turned to a Dr. Wang for an open biopsy, with local anesthetic. By this time, the lump had grown considerably beyond the swelling I had noticed in Alaska.

  The suspicion voiced by all the doctors who had seen me so far was that I had lymphoma. The few friends I told about my worries were quick to reassure me, citing other friends who had quickly bounced back from such
a malignancy. But now, as he completed his work, Dr. Wang said, “I don’t think it’s lymphoma.”

  I felt a surge of relief. “What is it, then?”

  The doctor hesitated. “I don’t want to freak you out, but I think it could be throat cancer.”

  That verdict was soon confirmed. The official name of my ailment was squamous oropharyngeal carcinoma. In early July I was assigned a trio of experts at Dana–Farber, one of the best cancer hospitals in the world. My team was made up of a surgeon, a radiologist, and a general oncologist. They seemed in a hurry to start treatment. I had been reading up on my diagnosis on the Internet, and now I asked my doctors, “What stage?”

  “Stage four,” one of them admitted.

  I sucked in my breath. The scale of stages, I knew, went no higher than four. The general oncologist quickly added, “That’s not the same as, for example, stage four melanoma.” Coincidentally, stage four melanoma was what my father had died of in 1990, at the age of seventy-four. His last two years had amounted to a steady decline into pain and helplessness, punctuated by short bursts of hope for illusory cures.

  “What are my chances, then?” I asked.

  None of the doctors would answer. After an uncomfortable pause, the radiologist said, “We believe that our treatment regimen can be effective.”

  The experts did explain their choice of procedures. Surgery, normally the first resort, was ruled out in my case, because the carcinoma was already widespread. Worse, it was bilateral—present on both sides of my neck and throat.

  On July 20, I began treatment: six weeks of once-a-week high-dose chemotherapy, followed by a week or two of rest, followed by thirty-five doses of daily radiation (they would give me weekends off) stretching across seven weeks, with once-a-week chemo on top of the zapping. On October 29, the onslaught would end.

  The treatment felt weird. Both the chemo and radiation were tedious though painless, but slowly my body grew weaker and weaker. In April, just two months before going to Alaska, I had joyously rock climbed with a gang of old friends near St. George, Utah. By November, I could barely walk a single city block, having to stop, sit down, and rest every fifty yards. Four times during the treatment, I had to go to the emergency room, for setbacks ranging from constipation to fainting. For weeks, I could eat almost nothing, yet I vomited my guts out almost every other day.

  In October, I had to be admitted to Brigham and Women’s Hospital (Dana–Farber’s sister institution), after nausea, vomiting, and aspiration pneumonia left me unable to cope at home. For two weeks, I hardly left my hospital bed as, drugged with painkillers, fed intravenously, I drifted in and out of consciousness. In fourteen days, I managed to read only a third of a Lee Child thriller. Sharon, my wife, stayed with me as many hours of the day as she could, and slept most nights on a cot beside my bed. I clung to her desperately, as she dealt with nurses and doctors whose queries and ministrations only feebly pierced the miasma of my predicament.

  The doctors had told me that recovery would last from one to three months. Perhaps the experts lay out that rosy prescription to allay the fears of the victims whose bodies they assault with poisonous rays and chemicals. Or perhaps my oncologists were reluctant to admit that the treatment they had had to marshal against my cancer had fallen on the severe end of the spectrum. But more than four months after my last submission to the smothering green plastic mask, bolted to the table, through which the techies aimed the lethal radiation, I still felt like a cripple.

  By February I could walk a mile, slowly. My salivary glands were shot for good, so I knew I would have to carry a water bottle with me for constant sipping the rest of my life. I never felt hungry, and eating—mostly yogurt, soups, smoothies, soft pastas, and the like—was a daily chore, a pleasureless regimen through which I grimly tried to keep my weight at the emaciated plateau to which I had sunk after losing thirty pounds. To complement that intake, I used a feeding tube protruding from a hole in my stomach to force down cans of Ensure.

  A dry, hacking cough that had begun in August was still with me. Radiation had ruined the hearing in my left ear and compromised what was left in the right. Movies were impossible, and my beloved classical music was reduced to screeching noise. Reading became my chief pleasure, as I tore through four or five books a week. During the seven months after I started treatment, except for stints in the hospital I spent not a single night away from home, and ate in a restaurant only once. On top of these deprivations, I felt a constant, overwhelming fatigue. After nine hours of sleep (plagued by dreams in which I was whole again), I would wake exhausted.

  In February 2016, at Dana–Farber, I had CT and PET scans to ascertain how well the treatment had eradicated the cancer. The verdict was mixed. It looked as though the carcinoma in my throat and neck was gone, but several new nodules in my chest could be malignant. They were too small to biopsy, so I had to wait two months to see if they grew or diminished. At worst, they might herald the metastasis of cancer to a new part of my body. If so, I would start over, with tubes pumping newer poisons into my veins as chemotherapy made a last-ditch campaign to keep me alive.

  In November 2015, my latest book had appeared. The publisher had set up a tour with my coauthor, the climbing wunderkind Alex Honnold, that would have taken me across the country, beginning with a launch at the Banff Mountain Film and Book Festival. I had been eagerly awaiting the tour, but now I had to cancel my part in it altogether. Likewise, I canceled an autumn trip to the Southwest, the latest installment in my biannual pilgrimage to the canyon country that has become my favorite place on earth.

  Instead, cancer plunged me into a reassessment of life itself—of mortality, of the meaning of worldly aspiration, of the value of love and friendship. For more than fifty years, I had thought of myself as an adventurer. During the first two decades, adventure meant mountain climbing. And once getting up the west face of Mount Huntington had ceased to be the most important thing in life, I sought out other kinds of adventure all over the world.

  For me, the passion was always allied to discovery and exploration. That was what made adventure so much more than a sport. Attempting a first ascent in Alaska, I was driven by the giddy awareness that no one before me had ever laid hand or foot on the perilous stretch of rock or snow I traversed. Later, I felt the same sense of discovery as I rode a raft down a river in Ethiopia that no one had ever run. And even now, in southeast Utah, when I climb to an alcove high on a sheer sandstone cliff where seven hundred years ago the Anasazi stored their precious corn, in rediscovering that locus mirabilis I taste a communion with vanished ancients whose worldview we only dimly comprehend.

  From 1981 on, I made my living as a freelance writer. In magazine articles and books, I sought to explicate not only my own compulsions but those of kindred souls, whether they were today’s elite practitioners of their esoteric trades or figures from history whose motivations I could fathom only through their deeds and their writings. The fun-house mirrors those men and women held up to me only deepened my grasp of the complex phenomenon of adventure.

  Climbers and other explorers are notoriously inarticulate when it comes to explaining why they spend their lives pursuing phantom goals. Yet in the end, why is the ultimate question.

  Cancer, with its foreshadowing of my own mortality, has injected a sharp new urgency into that eternal conundrum, on whose margins I have skated throughout my adult life.

  Why have I spent my life trying to find the lost and unknown places of this world? What benefit has that pursuit brought to others? What has my passion cost me in missed opportunities to connect with those who do not share my desire?

  And what have the passions of explorers across human history delivered to our understanding of life? What did it mean in 1911 to reach the South Pole, or the highest point on earth in 1953? What is the future of adventure, if any, in a world we have mapped and trodden all the way to the most remote corners of the wilderness?

  Why do we do it? Why do we care? Why does it matter?<
br />
  The purpose of this book is to grope toward an answer.

  ONE

  FARTHEST NORTH

  “It is always hard to part,” observed Fridtjof Nansen, “even at 84˚, and maybe there was a tearful eye or two.”

  The date was March 14, 1895. The ship carrying the thirteen members of Nansen’s expedition, the Fram, had been frozen fast in the sea ice for eighteen months. Theirs was far from the first vessel to be trapped in the crushing grip of polar ice. Seventy-six years earlier, in 1819–20, a pair of ships under Rear Admiral William Edward Parry, charged by the British government with discovering the Northwest Passage—the hypothesized shortcut north of Canada from Europe to the Orient—had spent the winter frozen in near Melville Island in the high Arctic. For that matter, any record of Viking warriors or Irish monks whose seacraft may have stuck fast in northern ice as early as the ninth or tenth centuries is lost to history. As far as well-documented exploratory missions go, Parry’s was the first to face unrelenting entombment in a frozen ocean.

  More often than not, such turns of nautical fate spelled catastrophe. The ultimate disaster of this kind befell the crew of the British ships Erebus and Terror under Sir John Franklin, who in 1845—charged like Parry with finding the Northwest Passage—steamed into a frozen trap in another forlorn corner of the Canadian Arctic. When two successive summers failed to deliver the ships from the ice, the surviving men set out on a desperate march, hoping to reach some outpost of settlement far to the south on the mainland. All 129 crew members died, not before some of them ate others.

  The search for Franklin exhausted the finest efforts of the Admiralty for a decade and a half, turning a fiasco triggered by the commander’s incompetence into an enduring myth of sacrifice and heroism. In the Victorian imagination, that quest blazed into a legend not unlike the panorama of the American Wild West half a century later.