Mount Logan – Part 1

Dear Readers,                                                                                                                           As you all know by now, if you’ve been with me for a while, nearly all the content on my website is my own material. Some exceptions to that have been excellent pieces written by climber friends such as Brian Rundle, Andy Bates, Mark Adrian and Mike Byers. But like any writer, sometimes I read a story written by another climber that blows me away. Back in 1979, I came across such a story, and what a tale it was. It was written by an author by the name of Paddy Sherman, an Englishman who emigrated to Canada in 1952.

So who was this guy? A little digging around on the internet revealed an impressive climbing résumé, part of which I share with you here. In 1954 Paddy made the first ascent of Mount Gilbert (the closest unclimbed 10,000-footer to his Vancouver home that he could find), then in 1955 he made the first ascent of Homathko Peak and the second ascent of Mount Queen Bess. 1957 saw first ascents of Joffre Peak and Mount Matier, then in 1958 he organized and led the British Columbia Centennial Expedition to Mount Fairweather, at 15,300 feet the highest point in British Columbia, which had never been climbed before by Canadians. In 1964 he made the first ascent of Mount Harrison, the last unclimbed 11,000- foot peak in the Canadian Rockies. As part of the Yukon Alpine Centennial Expedition in 1967, Sherman was the team leader on the attempt of Mount Manitoba. Two years later, his team made the first ascent of the Western Spur on Peru’s highest mountain, Huascarán.

What struck me most about Paddy’s writing was that it was so engaging. He had a way of grabbing your attention and never letting go, and I absolutely loved reading anything he wrote. His first book, Cloud Walkers (sadly, out of print) contained six gripping stories of climbs in Canada. They were all excellent, but the first one in the book was an almost-unbelievable account of the first ascent of Mt. Logan, Canada’s highest peak. This story tells of such difficulty, such hardship, such determination that it almost seems impossible. Surely, in all the annals of mountaineering, there has never been a more challenging first ascent of a peak anywhere in the world.

I’ve wished for years that I could share Paddy’s account of this climb with you, my readers, but never quite knew how to go about it. After some sleuthing, I came up with an address in Vancouver. Was it even valid? I posted a letter by snail-mail in which I introduced myself and boldly asked permission to reprint the story in its entirety, and to my great delight soon received an email from Paddy himself. He had just returned from a day at the Squamish Chief, which seemed so fitting at his tender age of 87. He graciously allowed me to publish his story, which pleases me to no end. He asked me to be sure to mention that the Canadian Alpine Journal had allowed him to use their articles as a source of material. So, without further ado, I now share with you Paddy’s story in its original form – nothing has been changed from the original text. I think you’re going to love it.

Mightiest Hump of Nature

MOUNT LOGAN

Mount Logan, some two hundred miles west of Whitehorse in the Yukon Territory, is Canada’s highest peak; it soars to 19,850 feet, a scant 450 feet lower than Alaska’s Mount McKinley, the apex of North America. Twelve years after the first ascent of McKinley, in 1913, Logan was the highest unclimbed peak on the North American continent: the highest, and perhaps the toughest, for in its eternal armour of snow and ice, and in the grim ferocity of its defences, it is no mean match for Everest itself.

Many of the world’s great peaks are taller than Logan. But it is a coastal mountain, rising almost from the sea, not from a Tibetan plateau 15,000 feet above sea-level. Glaciers from its base flow right to the Pacific Ocean. If Logan’s uplift above its base were to be superimposed on a Tibetan interior plateau, it would rank with Everest. And seldom is there found a single mountain massif with Logan’s monumental bulk. It measures 100 miles around at the base, a snow-white fang protruding from 25,000 square miles of ice that constitute the biggest glacial area in the world apart from the Antarctic and Greenland.

If the mountain could be sliced off at the 16,000-foot level, which is higher than Europe’s loftiest peak, the resulting plateau would cover thirty square miles. Its many-toothed summit ridges, twenty miles long and 3,000 miles farther north than Everest, are a cosmic comb, raking the moisture from countless year-round storms spawned in the far Pacific. The result is astonishing.

On the cold north side of Everest, eternal snow and ice stretch down to the I 6,500-foot level, giving a vertical snow-and-ice region of 12,500 feet. The comparable zone on Logan covers I6,000 feet, and the summit broods, remote and frightening, a clear 14,000 feet above the general level of the surrounding glaciers. At the time of the first attempt on Logan, the nearest habitation was 150 miles away, and the approach included almost eighty miles of glaciers on which no man had ever set foot.

The first recorded sighting of the giant mountain was by Israel C. Russell of the United States Geological Survey. In I890, he was trying to make the first ascent of Mount St. Elias (18,008 feet), then believed to be the highest peak in Alaska. He didn’t reach the peak but he did spot Mount Logan, twenty-six miles away. He reported his find this way: “The clouds parted towards the northeast, revealing several giant peaks not before seen, some of which seem to rival St. Elias itself. One stranger rising in three white domes far above the clouds was especially magnificent. As this was probably the first time its summit was ever seen, we took the liberty of giving it a name. It will appear on our maps as Mt. Logan, in honour of Sir William E. Logan, founder and for long director of the Geological Survey of Canada.”

The fame of Mount St. Elias had spread throughout the world, and in 1897 the Duke of the Abruzzi, one of the most colourful figures in mountaineering history, travelled there from Italy. With his vast retinue of Italian guides and porters, he climbed the peak.

His famous personal photographer, Quintina Sella, took from the summit the first photographs of Logan. They showed mile after mile of seemingly impossible precipices and ice-falls. In 1913, H. F. Lambart of the Canadian Geological Survey decided from his triangulations that Logan, almost astride the Yukon-Alaska border, was in fact not an Alaskan giant but Canada’s highest mountain.

In 1913, Albert H. MacCarthy and William Wasbrough Foster were also making a big contribution to Canadian mountaineering history: they made the first ascent of Mount Robson (I2,972 feet), then believed to be the highest peak in Canada outside the Yukon. As they celebrated the event around an Alpine Club of Canada camp-fire, the club’s director, A. O. Wheeler (whose son, later Sir Oliver Wheeler, was to be surveyor on the first Mount Everest expedition in 1921), proposed that Mount Logan should be climbed. Plans were started at once, but had to be abandoned when the war came.

In 1923, Albert MacCarthy, now a captain in the United States Navy, was appointed leader of the expedition, and he soon realized just what he was in for. The mountain’s “stupendous bulk”, he said, after a lot of research, made it “the mightiest hump of nature in the western hemisphere if not the largest in the world”.

There were three possible approaches: from Yakutat Bay on the coast; from Kluane Lake on the north-east; or from McCarthy, Alaska, which was to the north-west. Yakutat Bay was ruled out almost at once. Although the Duke of the Abruzzi had used it for St. Elias, the area was notoriously stormy and dangerous. There was no satisfactory base there then, and the approach wound up the wrong side of the mountain. The Kluane Lake route, which is today crossed by the Alaska Highway, then involved a stretch of sixty miles that was completely unexplored. It was obvious to MacCarthy that whichever way he tried to reach the mountain he was in for many problems. So, instead of attempting to climb it in 1924, he decided to spend a season on reconnaissance, concentrating on the route from the village of McCarthy.

This meant an eighty-six-mile trek alongside the Chitina River, an unpredictable glacier-fed stream – one moment peacefully murmuring among the rocks, the next hurling giant boulders about like peas, and fighting to burst from its low, confining banks. Apart from winter, the only time a climbing party could use it safely would be in the slack spell between the early run-off from melting snow and the main run-off caused by melting on the billions of tons of glacier ice.

With Andrew M. Taylor and Miles (Scotty) Atkinson, two McCarthy guides, Captain MacCarthy made a thirty-seven-day trip up the Chitina and over the fifty-two miles of ice beyond it to Cascade, the logical site for base camp. Despite a tremendous amount of work, they were frustrated by bad weather, and the farthest point they reached was eighteen miles from the peak and only I0,200 feet in altitude. But he made the decision: tough as it was, this was at least a possible way to get onto the mountain. From there, the mountaineers would have to make their own way. .

It was obvious to him that if they were to have a chance of reaching the summit the climbers must arrive on the mountain in good condition, not exhausted by carrying in tons of supplies. So it was proposed, almost casually, in the way of men of forceful action, that the supplies should be taken in and cached during the coming winter.

This feat in itself was worthy of comparison with Antarctic sledging epics, and it is still considered one of the greatest winter freighting jobs ever tackled in that wild and inhospitable border country.

It began in February 1925, at the height of an exceptionally cold winter in the valley, with everything buried deep under an unusually heavy snowfall. Almost three and a half tons of supplies had to be taken in for the climbers to allow them to make an extended siege of Logan. A ton of hay and oats had to be transported for the climbing party’s pack-horses, as no grass would be growing when the assault got under way in May. On top of all this, the freighting party Itself needed more than five tons of supplies for its·three-month task. To move this total of ten tons a distance of some I50 miles over frozen river-beds and tumbling glaciers, a party of six men was chosen, with six horses and three teams of seven sled dogs.

From February 4 to February I3, Andy Taylor and Austin Trim with six horses broke trail up the first forty-five miles of the Chitina Valley. Often the temperature went down to -45°F.; once it dropped to a paralysing -52 degrees. Despite this, the two big bobsleds pulled by six horses left McCarthy at 9 a.m. on February 17. Two hours later, the wildly excited dogs hauled their sledges along McCarthy’s main street and down to the frozen river at a run. The fight was formally on.

The route along the river-beds was longer than the land trail, but had the great benefit for the heavily loaded horses that it was generally at an easy gradient. Much of Alaska’s heavy freighting is done in winter when turbulent rivers turn, by the physics of frost, into wide, strong highways. This has its problems, of course. When the equivalent of a highway pot-hole appears, the results are likely to be calamitous, with a team plunging through a hole into the still-flowing water beneath.

MacCarthy’s party had no serious trouble on the first day’s march of sixteen miles, which took them to the junction of the Chitina and Nizina rivers. But they did have to flounder through patches where the water had overflowed and was covered by only an inch or two of ice. Often the party sank down into water ten inches deep. Combined with stretches of seemingly bottomless, fluffy snow, this did not help the unconditioned muscles of men and beasts. That night, rather than jam with the others into a two-man cabin, MacCarthy put up his tent in a snow-bank and slept snugly.

The snow-storm that began next morning was just the start of weather problems that plagued them from there on. Nature seemed to have got everything backwards, MacCarthy complained. Because of the bitterly cold winter, the river level was low and the sleds often had to be hauled over boulder-strewn gravel bars. Despite the cold, stretches of open water often appeared, forcing them to make difficult detours. And, when they reached stretches that they knew should be good, insurmountable ice jams, piled high by the tremendous pressure of the river, confronted them.

The dogs somehow seemed to thrive on the difficult conditions. They always had enough energy to start a furious fight at the least little chance. On the second day of the trip, Driver, leading one team, set too fast a pace for a team-mate known as Scotty Dog. Scotty attacked Driver from behind and with a sudden slash bit out his left eye. There was nothing the men could do for the poor dog, but as it seemed reluctant to lie down and die they left it in the harness. Time and again Driver licked his paw and then rubbed the wound. Within a week, it had healed completely. MacCarthy marvelled: “What would have happened to one of us had we sustained such an injury and received such scant treatment? Dumb animals are possessed of much that men must envy.”.

But there was not much to envy about the horses. For thirteen days it was impossible to take off their harness. It was frozen solid. And in the mornings, it was not hard to be sorry for both horses and dogs. To make the most of the daylight, early starts were important. Yet day after day they had to wait until 10 a.m. because the early air was so cold that the deep breathing needed for the hard work of hauling would have frozen the lungs of all the animals. The carefully planned schedule fell apart. But by February 27 they reached Hubrick’s Camp, the ramshackle home of a former prospector at the head of Chitina Valley. Barely two miles away was the bush-coverered snout of the Chitina Glacier. This growth of bush right out of the ice is one of the most striking oddities of Alaska’s giant glaciers. Many of .the rivers of ice come right down to sea-level, in a mild and humid climate. Vegetable growth is prolific in the short, warm summer with its almost continuous daylight. Under the circumstances, the coating of rubble old glaciers have gouged from the mountains’ flanks is rich enough to produce dense stands of slide alder.

Reaching this point through the deep, soft snow and Arctic cold had brought problems enough, but these were to serve as a mere apprenticeship for the work ahead. This was the end of the “easy” valley stretch; ahead were the perilous gorges and glaciers of the mountain section.

Right in front of them was a major worry. They had to get to the west side of Baldwin Glacier to know they were sure of reaching base camp on Ogilvie Glacier. There were two conceivable ways to get there – along the south side of Chitina and Logan glaciers, or along the north side of Chitina and across it and another glacier to the Logan. The second was obviously impossible for heavy loads, and the first had been abandoned as impossible by Lambart’s party when It was surveying the border in 1913.

MacCarthy decided to try the route that the earlier party had abandoned. On February 28, he and Atkinson set out on snow-shoes for the south side of Chitina Glacier, and headed with considerable trepidation up the canyon formed by the steep edge of the ice and the mountain side. MacCarthy went as far as a narrow, impressive cleft between vertical granite cliffs 150 feet high. He called it “The Portal”· The summer river boils through here in an angry spate.

Atkinson pushed on and late that night reported that the route was feasible right onto Baldwin Glacier. He cautiously refused to guess at how long it would stay feasible. But before he knew this MacCarthy was working back from The Portal, marking an ice route into the valley. He was not a demonstrative man by nature, but even as he worked he found himself calling the route, in his own mind, “The Gorge of Fate”. Some subconscious instinct, with its roots in frequent association with danger, must have been warning him of trouble to come. But even this did not tell him how near the whole party would come to catastrophe.

There were more stretches of open water, and the very next day the ice-bridge spanning the first of these collapsed. Logs were hauled in to make a new bridge. By March 5, the entire load of supplies was cached four miles beyond The Portal. This was the limit at which the heavy horses could work. Already there had been problems with their weight on the sometimes flimsy ice-bridges. Next day the horses went back to McCarthy, and the rest of the party headed another two and a half miles up-stream to find a final, safe camp where everything could be stored.

The final part of the gorge was by far the most dangerous. Here the tumbling cataract raced along, and many patches of open water leered up at them, inviting the misstep that would promptly bury them under the solid ice a few yards down-stream. Often the only way to go was on a fringe of ice still sticking to the steep rock-wall. A few feet to the side, the torrent gradually undermined their road. One piece especially bothered them – the last apparent danger on the route. This was a ten-foot slit in granite cliffs “which because of its narrowness, its latent dangers and the satanic appearance of an ice pinnacle that seemed to stand guard over it, we called the Devil’s Door”.

On March 6, they set up Gorge Camp beyond these dangers. Next day, while MacCarthy stayed to wash the dishes, the others left with the dogs to start the dangerous business of hauling heavy sledges of supplies through on the inadequate bridges.

The temperature was still around 25° below zero, and Gorge Camp was a frigid, cheerless place under its shroud of snow. Yet they dreaded the thought that the warmth and new hope of spring were on the way. With warmth would come weakness. Already the ice was showing signs of deterioration. Would it last long enough for them to finish the job? If they could not get the supplies through here now, the expedition would not be able to start for at least another year. It would be impossible to follow this route with loads in summer.

It was this urgent undercurrent of haste that sent MacCarthy quickly through the camp chores that morning. Then he hurried on down to help at the bottle-neck wooden bridge. Here, each sledge-load had to be unpacked, carried across item by item, and then loaded again on the other side. Within a few minutes, the worries he wouldn’t admit fully even to himself came true.

The dog-teams were coming back – the sledges empty and defeat scrawled dully in the haggard, bearded faces of the men.

Andy Taylor told him, “The Devil’s Door is shut. The ice we crossed on yesterday is ten feet under water. The trail for 200 yards up-stream is now twenty feet down at the bottom of a lake.”

Almost everything they had was stored in the cache below the blockage. There was no food in camp for the dogs, and practically none for the men.

The dogs were immediately taken back to camp and tied up, and by 10:30 a.m. MacCarthy, Taylor, and Atkinson set off on snow-shoes to try to find a way down to the supplies. They crossed the river upstream, struggled onto the glacier, and then, in five hours of desperately hard work, outflanked the door. They felt it would have been impossible to get the loaded dogs through by this route. Inching slowly back into the gorge below the Devil’s Door, they soon found the cause of the trouble.

It was simple but spectacular: thousands of tons of ice had broken from the towering glacier-wall and filled the bottom of the gorge. The speeding river was stopped, and it rapidly backed up into a lake. But the current was fortunately still at work. Already the surging water had cut a small channel through the ice-jam. By the time the tired men were ready to pack their loads of food back, the gorge was passable again.

The warning was obvious, and they took note of it. Next morning they were out at dawn. Taylor and MacCarthy hacked at the ice-jam with axes and shovels, clearing a narrow, reasonably smooth route for the dogs. Atkinson and Henry Olsen started rushing supplies up to the wooden bridge, using twenty-one dogs on the two sledges. As they made repeated trips to the bridge, there was ever-increasing need for haste: the slabs of ice on which the logs were resting were being noticeably eaten away by the rushing water.

They worked until dark. As Taylor brought the loads from the bridge, he found things rapidly nearing the impossible stage at the door. Their original trail had followed a fringe of ice along the southern wall. But this had now broken off, and its northern side was under water. It was still possible to cross it, though it lay on its side, but the angle was steepening as the water worried away at the edges.

Even the dogs were frightened by its obvious threat. They cringed, tails down, as they approached, and slid along it on their bellies. Some of the dogs refused to cross it at all, and had to be dragged by their drivers. With every trip, the tension increased; there was much to be done yet, but if the bridge went out, so would their plans.

It went at 6.30 that night. A quiet crack as if it was weary of holding out so long, and the slab sank slowly into the hurrying waters. But the last load was through – less than five minutes before. The tension cracked too, and the men found themselves laughing, almost involuntarily – cheering and pounding each other on the back.

This was no time for rest and relaxation, however. They were far behind schedule and still had several glaciers to negotiate. Day after day they toiled. First move a load; then dump it and go back for more. Dump this just past the first, and go back for more – and more and more and more. Soon every tiny detail of their snow-white world became monotonously familiar. But it was never so familiar that they could quite forget the danger they were in. The route was often covered with the debris of huge ice-blocks hurled down by the glacier in seeming defiance.

MacCarthy wrote: “No matter how long and how hard we worked the task seemed to be unending. But we had had the temerity to undertake the job and there was no help for us. We must carry on and see It through to some sort of finish.”

On March 12, he almost came to a premature sort of finish. As he prospected alone for a sledge route on the glacier, he became hopelessly lost in a blizzard. At one stage he found he had walked in a complete circle, despite his long experience. He tried to retrace his tracks, but the wind had wiped them out. It was getting dark, and he was preparing to spend the night out when he recognized the ice pinnacle standing guard at the Devil’s Door. The ogre of foreboding that had frightened him when first he saw it was his salvation now. He knew where he was: on top of towering, dangerous ice-cliffs only a mile below the camp. It was dark as he climbed slowly down the cliffs and back to camp.

The temperature was almost 30° below zero that night and the storm raged unabated. But, since most things in life are relative, Albert MacCarthy curled up in his sleeping-bag on his bed of boulders, shuddered at the thought of being lost, and spent the most comfortable night he could ever remember.

From here the going became progressively rougher. On some steep stretches the dogs could barely pull even a light load. Slowly, exhausted by hard work and monotony, they crossed the Baldwin Glacier and started towards the open, easy-looking flat stretches of Logan Glacier.

Before they could reach it, though, they had to cross three miles of moraine – a jumbled, senseless tangle of boulders gouged from the cliffs by the irresistible ice and piled in millions of tons across their path. It was March 31 before they finally set up camp in the middle of the smooth white face of Logan Glacier, pitching the tents three feet deep in a bank of snow. The slow-motion rush went on, step by step, up the Logan Glacier and onto the Ogilvie. On April I3, two and a half tons of equipment, comprising the whole advance base camp the climbers would use, was stored nine miles up the Ogilvie. All the meat and other uncanned foods likely to attract bears, wolves, or wolverines were carefully stowed in the centre of a huge mound. The whole thing was covered with heavy tarpaulins, and weighted down with rocks and cases of gasoline for their stoves.

They took photographs of the cache in relation to prominent landmarks so that the climbers would be able to find it, and on April 14 the party ran for home. They reached McCarthy on April 26, having been forced to take a different route to get around the Devil’s Door. Even travelling light, they took five days to negotiate twenty miles there, proving to their satisfaction that the job would have been impossible with heavy loads.

Under Arctic conditions and in dangerous country, the winter party had travelled over 950 miles in ten weeks, and cached in various key places the four and a half tons of food and equipment without which the ambitious assault on Mount Logan could not even begin.

Should the summit expedition fail, it would be no fault of theirs. Their exploit is still without equal as a mountaineering preliminary, despite the great exploration that has been done in some of the world’s highest and most remote ranges. It fittingly prepared the way for one of the world’s great feats of mountaineering, which today is almost unknown though it qualifies as perhaps the most outstanding epic of endurance in Canada’s rich and vibrant frontier history.

It was the springboard that launched six mountaineers on the way to one of the loneliest places on earth – to the brink of life, that little known limit where the body abandons the fight and only the prodding of the brain keeps death away.

Stay tuned, Readers, for Part 2 of this adventure – as they say, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet!!