Mount Logan – Part 2

MacCarthy was waiting on the dock at Cordova when the steamer arrived on May 7, 1925, bringing the climbing party from a trip along a thousand miles of some of the world’s most spectacular coast. The official party consisted of MacCarthy himself as leader, Foster, Fred Lambart (deputy leader), and Allen Carpe, who represented the American Alpine Club. It was an unusual group. Lambart was the man who first measured the mountain. MacCarthy, of Annapolis, Maryland, and Wilmer, British Columbia, was forty-nine. So was Lieutenant-Colonel Foster, a former deputy-minister of public works for British Columbia, holder of the Distinguished Service Order and two bars. Allen Carpe, thirty-one, was a research scientist in radio and telegraph, and one of America’s best exploratory mountaineers.

At this time, mountaineering was going through one of its most popular phases in Europe and North America. The series of British assaults on Everest, culminating in the tragic death of Mallory and Irvine in 1924, had focused public attention on great feats of exploratory mountaineering. After I924, the Dalai Lama of Tibet closed his country to climbers. As a result, the climbers of the world turned their eyes to the Alaska region and Logan, in its way as remote and challenging as Everest itself. The American Alpine Club eagerly helped the Alpine Club of Canada organize the assault. It formed its own fund-raising committee, which raised much of the $11,500 that the expedition cost.

It provided something else, equally important: strong recruits for the climbing party. Many United States mountaineers had volunteered to pay their own expenses and help in any way requested if only they could be taken on the trip. On this basis, three outstanding United States climbers now arrived on the steamer. They were Henry S. Hall, Jr., of Boston, R. M. Morgan of Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, and Norman H. Read of Manchester, Massachussetts. Hall, later president of the American Alpine Club, became one of the best and most experienced climbers in the United States and made many difficult expeditions in British Columbia’s wild and difficult Coast Range. These men brought the climbing party to seven. To them were added Andy Taylor as transport officer, and H. M. Laing, a naturalist who stayed at Hubrick’s throughout the expedition and surveyed the wildlife and plants of the Chitina Valley.

They left McCarthy on May 12 and in six days had reached the end of the trail eighty-eight miles away. Even the eighty-pound packs they put on for the first part of the glacier journey did not slow them much – but they were all relieved when they reached Logan Glacier and used sleds instead. On May 26, they reached the final, main cache at 6,050 feet on the Ogilvie. Cascade, the site of their advanced base camp, was clearly visible eight miles away over the ice, and they immediately started to relay the stores there from the tarpaulin-covered mound.

Now at last they were in a truly alpine area, and their very first relay journey to Cascade impressed this on them. A giant avalanche peeled off the walls of ice overlooking Ogilvie and foamed for thousands of feet through the air in a billowing fountain of white. It was lovely, but lethal for anybody near where it fell. For at least ten minutes after it crashed to the glacier with a battle-front roar, clouds of ice-dust from the pulverized blocks went blowing up the glacier.

It was alpine, too, in the fact that early starts were essential. The nights were no longer really dark, and the miles of white snow in every direction magnified even the faint light of midnight. So they were away by 1 a.m. each day, making sure that they could finish at least one trip in comparative ease over the night-frozen surface. Coming back through the soggy snow was unpleasant, but it was not difficult, as the sleds were empty.

Moving the supplies took five days, and by May 31 they were established in their advanced base camp. It was 7,800 feet above sea-level and took the name of Cascade Camp from the cataract of a splendid ice-fall that tumbled a branch of King Glacier to the Ogilvie.

If a glacier is likened to a river, then the ice-fall is the counterpart of the rapids. A sudden drop in elevation speeds and disrupts the smooth flow, and the tortured ice fractures and splinters in all directions. Blocks as big as skyscrapers fall often, dwarfed in the giant perspective of the peaks. Each looses a roar to match its majesty, and rarely is there peace in the ever-moving ice-fall. Even then it is at best a patchwork truce, shattered by the sporadic crack and rattle of dissension as more blocks settle, preparing to leap to their own spectacular ends.

It was an incomparable spot, epic in its scale and beauty, and a perfect psychological stimulant for the mighty task that had now fairly begun.

The stimulant did its job well. During the next two days the eight men carried three-quarters of a ton of supplies to the top of Quartz Ridge, a rib of rock that soared a thousand feet above camp on the west side of the ice-cascade.

The ridge became more than just a pile of gaunt and barren rock to them. It was the last sizeable outcrop of rock they would see for a month. Beyond was the world of eternal snow and ice where man has a different set of problems, and sometimes has a hard job holding on to his sense of values. Once here in the vast deep-freeze, the body and the mind begin to get rough treatment.

As they walked, for instance, their feet would get numb from the cold of the snow beneath. Yet their faces, not six feet away, would be blistering in a temperature perhaps fifty degrees higher. Snow and ice act as a magnifying reflector, doubling and tripling the burning power of the sun. The thin air never really warms up, but anything directly exposed to the sun’s rays will almost bake: At all times, from now on, the climbers’ faces were smeared with thick layers of protective cream. Their eyes, too, were guarded, with various types of dark glasses.

MacCarthy’s eyes, never very strong, were shielded by two pairs, but the glare was so strong that even then he had frequent pains and headaches. Even when clouds or fog keep out the direct sun, burns and glare can be serious on a mountain. And the climbers were now embarked on a stay of forty-four days on snow and ice.

But they prepared as best they could, and carried twenty-eight loaded packs and one sled to the top of Quartz Ridge. Slowly they began to feel at home. To the mountaineer, things are not quite right until he gets onto steep slopes – slopes where he doesn’t have to lean far to rub his nose against the rock or ice. He may mutter as he struggles up them, but this, after all, is the lure of steep and high places that has made him what he is.

The snow route up to the top of the ridge was steep enough for all of them. For considerable stretches, the slope measured forty-five degrees, and they quickly decided to put in a fixed rope handrail for safety as they hauled up the loads. The snow was firm, and the iceaxes, plunged in to the head, held tightly and kept the ropes in place. Early on the morning of June 3, they abandoned Cascade and with heavy loads began the leap-frog march up King Glacier. Along the west side of the glacier, mountain ramparts soared to 12,000 feet. Bulging along them were heavy loads of hanging ice, which frequently broke off and fell towards the party. But along the base of the ridge was a huge crevasse, which swallowed up the avalanches and kept the climbers safe. It took them three more days to move the loads to Observation Camp at 10,200 feet.

This was the highest point MacCarthy had reached during his summer reconnaissance the year before. From here on, they were heading where no one had been before. Yet, by the standards of most of the world’s mountain ranges, they were not even at the foot of their peak. They still had eighteen miles and almost 10,000 vertical feet to go.

The weather maliciously emphasized their isolation. They pitched the tents in a strong wind that lashed stinging sheets of snow in their faces. That night, it rose to a pitch of extreme violence and several times the climbers struggled to hold up the tent-poles, frightened that their three tiny shelters would be tom away.

Then, suddenly, in the freakish, unpredictable way of big mountains that brew their own weather, the storm ceased. Instead, there was a dead calm and dense fog. The fog swathed and muffled them as they left camp at 9 a.m. next day. This was to be an easy day. Packs weighed only thirty-one pounds, and fastened to each one was a thick bundle of willow wands. This was Andy Taylor’s idea, and like all great ideas a very simple one. On big areas of featureless snow and ice, which are common on Alaska’s giant glaciers, there is nothing to guide the traveller when the clouds come down. Perspective vanishes; the frowning cliff that towers ahead may tum out to be a foot high. As skiers know to their cost, it is sometimes impossible to tell even whether the ground ahead slopes up or down.

But when a slim willow switch is planted in the snow, without even a break in the planter’s stride, the picture changes. The eye has something of recognized stature to focus on. The willows are placed about a hundred feet apart. This way, even in the worst of weather, the last man on the rope can stay with one wand until the leader, casting about in the blizzard, can find the next. Step by hundred-foot step this continues, making safe travel relatively simple in weather that would otherwise be impossible. The thin wands stand up well to storms. Even on icy patches where they cannot be pushed in, three of them tied into a tripod give little for the wind to grasp, and will stand through gales.

They planted them as they went now, even though it was foggy. They knew the line to take, for in the earlier sunshine they had seen King Col and the route of approach. King Col is the flat saddle between the bulk of Logan and the difficult spire of King Peak (16,971 feet).

By 1 p.m. they were four miles above camp, at the base of an icefall a thousand feet high. It was a gentle gradient, however, and the hundreds of crevasses were well bridged with firm snow.

But if the gradient was gentle, the weather was not. It became worse as they pushed upwards, and when they went over the top of the icefall the blasts became so strong that several of the men were almost skittered into crevasses. They struggled on for another mile in what they called a “mild blizzard, with temperature about zero”. At 13,200 feet by their small pocket altimeters they stopped and dumped most of the contents of their packs into the snow. This was about two miles short of the saddle, which they had hoped to reach. As they returned, visibility became even poorer and the wind had wiped out their track, but the wands were easy to follow.

Their success at following the wands decided them to push ahead the next day, June 7, no matter what the weather, and relay more loads to the col. Almost seven hundred pounds of food and fuel were loaded onto the sled, and with all eight either hauling on the lines or pushing on the handles they made four miles to the foot of the ice-fall in four hours. Then they carried the loads to a spot a mile beyond their earlier cache and a mile short of the saddle itself. Terrible winds can howl through high saddles in the mountains, and the site they chose ·would be sheltered from at least some of them. It was at 14,500 feet. They could hardly wait to dump their loads there and hurry along to the saddle. This was the key: did it lead easily to the base of Mount Logan? Or was it impossible? Nobody had ever seen it.

They stumbled and ran the last few feet to the crest. Then their hope, like their footsteps, staggered at the view. The smooth slopes of the saddle did not connect gently with the upper slopes of their mountain. There was a gap of at least a thousand feet, filled with a chaotic mass of steep and broken ice-blocks. And, just beyond where these finished, the slope curled away out of sight, with no view of the problems beyond.

At the other end of the saddle, however, gentle slopes led to 15,000 feet on King Peak, giving the possibility of a better view of the route. So while Lambart took his rope of climbers back to camp to get more loads ready, MacCarthy’s rope climbed the shoulder of King Peak. The going was fine when they strapped crampons – long, sharp ice-climbing spikes – to their boots and set off. Soon they were on top of the shoulder, within 2,000 feet of King Peak’s summit – yet it would not be climbed until I952!

From their eagle’s eyrie, almost as high as the greatest peak m the Alps, they could see the route, at least to 17,000 feet. It was possible, all right, but even the mountaineer’s eye of faith could not grade it as easier than “feasible”.

As they sat and studied it, they began to be aware of two phenomena of high altitude. First, the dark-blue sky that shades almost to purple at great heights. It framed the finest view they had on the entire expedition. To the south, the fabulous St. Elias Range hurled its ice-tipped spears into the sky. In every direction swelled the corrugated ranks of mountains, straining to burst the clamp of age-old ice. Beyond was another blue, the greenish-blue of the far and cold Pacific.

The second effect of altitude introduced yet another shade of blue -the blue of melancholy. Several of the climbers had already begun to suffer badly from the effects of high altitude.

This depression can hit at any height above roughly 10,000 feet. It is a feeling for which there is no valid single basis of comparson at sea-level. The air is thin; it contains less oxygen and is under far less atmospheric pressure than our bodies are normally accustomed to. The lack of oxygen is enervating, quickly bringing on the symptoms of exhaustion; but the lack of accustomed nitrogen pressure affecs the responses of the brain. One experienced Himalayan mountaineer, describing his feeling of altitude sickness, said he felt like a sick man climbing in a dream”.

Men of strong will find their drive evaporating. Men of gargantuan appetites often want to do nothing more than nibble. And men of great physical strength and perfect condition puff and pant from merely turning over in their sleeping-bags. The brain doesn’t work very well but often, as with drinkers, this seems to bring a feeling that the judgement is better than it is. Usually, nobody else in the party notices, as the critical faculties of all are likely to be impaired, even though different people react at varying heights.

At this height of 15,000 feet, however, these men of long experience on big mountains were able to shake off the effects of the altitude for a while. They hurried back down to Observation Camp at 10,200 feet and immediately felt better. On June 8, once more they wearily carried more loads up to Col Camp. Foster, Read, and MacCarthy stayed there, digging several feet down into the snow to provide some sort of wind-break for the tents. Lambart took the others down to continue the exhausting, uninspiring, yet all-important job of bringing up the food.

This night was one of torture for MacCarthy. He tossed and turned for hours in the agony caused by the intense glare in his weakened eyes. Foster, getting into practice for grimmer things to come, treated him as best he could, and they set off at 8 a.m. to see if they could find a way through the worrying ice-fall.

In seven hours they reached I6,500 feet, after five miles of turning and twisting through an incoherent jumble of ice-blocks. Many of these were simply grotesque. Others, in the savage detachment of their birth, had acquired outlines that lent themselves easily to naming, in case a rendezvous should ever be necessary in this wilderness of ice. There was Tent City, the Corkscrew, the Dormer Window, the Stage Coach, and the Friendly Crevasse. The odd adjective for the crevasse, so often the curse and worry of the climber’s progress, was simply explained: at one featureless spot where it would be easy to lose the way in fog, the crevasse lip led them directly where they wanted to go. They moved slowly on, hearing always the squeaking and growling and occasional muffled roar that showed the ice-fall was slowly moving, a giant escalator to its own destruction. But none of the blocks toppled near them now, and they chose a camp-site at 17,000 feet, to be known prophetically as Windy Camp.

They were within 3,000 feet of the summit now and were beginning to feel a vague optimism when the weather cleared. But the mountain was simply playing another mean and cunning trick on them: it gave them a clear view of the double peak that topped the ice-mass ahead. This looked suspiciously like the summit and built their hopes too high.

Close as they seemed to be, however, they were once again a little like an advancing army that has to stop its triumphant march to let the supply train catch up. This mountain, though impersonal and nonselective in its fight, was a dangerous enemy, able at any moment to throw a ring of impassible weather around them. At every camp they had to be prepared to wait out a siege of blizzards that might pin them down for a week or more at a time. So all day on June 10 the backbreaking work went on as they hauled supplies to Col Camp, making it a fortress. If they were routed anywhere else on the giant peak, here at 14,200 feet at least was warmth, comparative comfort, and safety.

Early next day it began to snow, which was common for June 11 at this height and so far north. But this was the start of a chain of developments fraught with implications of disaster.

It was almost noon before MacCarthy, Lambart, Foster, and Hall set off with heavy packs towards Windy Camp. The carefully placed footsteps in the snow they had made before, so big a psychological stimulus when men are weary and long for rhythmic guidance to their feet, had vanished under the heavy fall of new snow. They planted willow wands as they navigated the route now established through the clouds, and the careful observation that had gone into the naming of the ice-blocks served them well. Tent City still looked like a city of tents, even if more opulent with its rich re-roofing. Hog Back was still a hog’s back, though the hog was sleeker, fat with its surfeit of snow. A little higher, at 15,400 feet, the wallowing became too tough; so they dumped their packs and turned back.

The snow continued to fall monotonously throughout the next two days. They could do little but lie in the tents, joking constantly to hide the fact that although they were vexed and anxious at the delay they were rather glad of the chance to rest.

When all eight set out again at 6:30 a.m. on June 14, the snow had an exasperating crust of ice that was not quite strong enough to support them on snow-shoes. As the weight of their forty-five-pound packs made the crust break, time and again the clumsy snow-shoes would catch on the jagged edge of crust, tripping them up and destroying the rhythm so vital at this altitude. And there was a new danger around them now, the threat that the fresh top layer of snow would peel off with a sibilant hiss and sweep the whole party to destruction. In five and a half hours they climbed 900 feet to the Hog Back – a pleasant half-hour saunter at sea-level. To their forty-five-pound packs they now added the loads dumped here earlier, and moved on, almost imperceptibly. Five trying hours later, they had gained a mere 400 feet, and as they were trying to decide what to do the weather solved their problem: a blizzard hit them with frightening speed. It roared to new heights as they pitched their wildly flapping tents and struggled to crawl through the circular sleeve entrances.

It blew throughout the next day, and the clouds were so thick that it was hard to see the adjoining tents. Early on the sixteenth the wind dropped; so they set out at 6.30 a.m. Twelve battling hours later they reached Windy Camp at almost 17,000 feet, beneath the great southwest wall of Logan. It was a strenuous day, one with which any climbing party could be well satisfied. Instead Foster, Lambart, and MacCarthy left Hall to set up camp and climbed on to prospect the route ahead.

When they came back, just before 8 p.m., the temperature was 27° below zero. That night it went down to 33° below.

Before he settled down for the night, so close to the summit, MacCarthy took a realistic look at the men around him. He was as optimistic as he could reasonably be, but the best entry he could make in his diary was: “Party all in fair shape, but not strong for the work to be done.” The night did not improve things. All slept badly, despite the insulation of their sixteen-pound Arctic bedrolls.

When men reach a tired and worn-out state like this, the start of each new day brings a difficult conflict of feeling. The part of the mind that has the body’s welfare to worry about puts up a protest. It half prays for fog, snow, a blizzard – anything to give a valid reason for resting longer. The other part, focused by conscience on the job to be done, prods dully but usually irresistibly at the will, striving to convince it that a fine day is most welcome so that they can get on with the hard work.

June 17 started out to be a fine day and, the sleeping-bag skirmish with conscience having been won, they all turned out and began to prepare. MacCarthy summed up their situation with a piece of priceless understatement that would have made any good English stiff upper lip quiver with admiration: “There appearing some need for relaxation from drudgery,” he wrote, “all hands went on a reconnaissance in order to determine our exact location on the massif.” Many people would have abandoned the whole project right there, for what MacCarthy’s statement meant in simple English was: We were too tired to pack camps any farther, and we didn’t know where we were anyway.

Please stay tuned for the incredible Part 3 of this story.