Denali, A love Story

Denali-A love Story

           The day had been a slog. As we ascended off of the Kahiltna Glacier a constant 20 mph wind had been banging away at us for the better of six hours. This was day five of our climb as we moved off the top of the 11,000-foot glacier trying to reach the safety of the upper Base Camp  at fourteen. (14,000 feet) The ultimate goal was to summit Denali, North Americas tallest peak. The big mountain tops out at 20,320 feet and is so massive, it can create its own weather system. It. has a land mass the size of the state of Delaware. The climb is not a technical climb, per se, such as Everest or K-2, where ropes and carabiners and ladders are involved. It is more of an assault, with long sustained days of walking. And because the mountain is so far north the oxygen levels are extremely low and extremely dangerous the higher you climb. It is a phenomenon called polar flattening The slow ascent was designed to allow climbers bodies to acclimate to the thin air.

           Our client group was made up of five fat cat oil executives from Texas. They were each paying $20,000 for their great life’s adventure to reach the top of the mountain. Theirs was a world of ego. A world where money equaled power.  You could almost see them sitting around their clubs after their adventure, crowing to anyone who’d listen. They rubbed me the wrong way from the moment I met them.

 “Alaska aint so tuff. Why, we thought about breakin’ up some of that mountain and usin’ it for ice cubes to pour our bourbon over,” cackled Tilman, their team leader, He was a tall imposing man, with a crooked nose, and a crooked personality, who’s swagger told everyone, HE was in charge. As he bit off the end of one of his Cuban cigars, he surveyed the landscape. “We should be up and down in about seven, eight days,” right, son?” he asked me. I promised my wife we’d be in Paris by the end of the month.”

 Tilman was like a small pebble in your shoe. I didn’t respond. I nodded politely and shook my head as I walked away. A normal climb took between fifteen to twenty days, and he knew it.

           I was one of three assistant guides. All of us just a whisker under thirty. Alaska at the time was a young State…in many ways, as were we. It had been a State for just over twenty years. The population was young too:  average age was 26. And Alaska was just getting its traction as an economic giant.  The Trans-Alaska Oil Pipeline had just come online, and all that oil money was starting to pump through the economy.  I was at an age of self-discovery, as were many of my generation, searching I guess for some greater meaning to life.

Marta our first guide, was a German immigrant. She was stocky, confident, and had a no-nonsense demeanor. She was all business, all the time. Her strong suit was she had no fear. None.  The other assistant guide was a woman named Mary. She had a bit of a sharp personality; a little fire, but not too much, just enough to let you know she meant business. She had long dark braids that hung down to the middle of her back. She smiled with her eyes, which were a nice shade of green and always seemed to make you feel happy.  I liked being around her right from the beginning.  She was of solid midwestern stock from South Dakota. A salt of the earth kind of thing.

I was a thrill-seeking scientist My Biological research career however was in the past tense. It pained my mother Julia, the nurse, that my five years of college,  earning a science degree had floated away like smoke from a campfire.  Nevertheless, on the first day of the climb, perched on a mountain glacier at 7,300 feet above sea level, flanked by two neighboring peaks towering well over 17,000 feet, it was not hard to get a sense of being insignificant in this world  I felt as though I was the luckiest guy on earth. It just made you feel alive. But it also gave you a sense of reality. I was 28 years old and had just written a will. Not that I had anything to will anybody.

Our team leader was a barrel-chested Swiss immigrant named Claud LaMay. He was 35, had a big black beard, an oversized personality and had pretty much written the book on how to guide a successful climb of Denali. He was a legend in his own time.  LaMay was always the first out of the tent in the morning. He was a born leader and if there was a problem, he was always…always the first to respond.

. As assistant guides, we were essentially chief cooks and bottle washers for the expedition. Our job was to set up and break down camp, cook and make sure the oil boys were happy. We were to see they got their money’s worth and make it to the top. 

           The camp at 14 had an NPS (National Park Service) presence. There was a full-time radio communications tent and a medical research team. The camp was situated in a football sized field where climbing parties could R & R, lick their wounds from the first part of the climb and get ready for the assault on the summit.

           As we dragged into camp LeMay began barking orders. “Get the tents sent up over there behind that little ridge. It will give us a break from the wind. I’ll report into the Ranger Station,” he said as he pulled ice chunks of off his thick black whiskers. “I’ll get a weather report for tomorrow.” The three of us got the tents up and began melting snow to cook the evening meals.  

           “I’m worried about that Tom guy,” Mary said as she wolfed down her dinner. “He could barely keep up the last few hours, he’s the weakest of the five.  He dropped his climbing poles four or five times and fell at least twice.” 

           “I saw you back there,” I said. “Shit, there is no way he will make the big climb up that headwall tomorrow. That SOB should not be out here, He’s twenty pounds overweight and out of shape.” I knew Mary was the right person for dealing with Tom. She was firm yet encouraging. 

“What was LaMay thinking, allowing that guy out here?” Mary moaned. “He can’t seem to breathe very well either.”

“Every day he’s worse than the day before,” I said. I had a bad feeling in my bones.   Five days into the climb and all the bravado had gone out of the Texans. They were listless, they just collapsed into their tents after dinner, and the hardest part of the climb still lay ahead. Things didn’t bode well.

About seven the next morning as we were preparing breakfast, one of the oil guys poked his head out of his tent and started screaming. “Help! …Help! Somebody get over here now!”  As I got to the tent, I could see the guy was panicked. His dark eyes darted back and forth from me to the inside of the tent and back again.  His face was beet red, and he spit as much as he screamed. “Something’s wrong with Tom! Somethings wrong with Tom!”

A minute later Mary skidded up to the side of the tent. She calmed the guy down, got him out of the tent, and lead him over to where LaMay was rolling up his sleeping bag. When she returned, she scrunched into the tent next to me.

I looked straight at Mary, shook my head and mumbled the words, “This guy’s dead. He’s not breathing, he’s got no heartbeat, he’s as white as a ghost.  He’s dead.”  A deafening silence hung in the air between us for a very long minute. “You better go get LaMay,” I grunted. “He is going to have to deal with this.”

We passed the next two hours trying to keep the group busy. We delt with the four remaining Texans, who were really spooked, while LeMay sorted things out with the medical teams and the Park Service.  

“Park Service says these marginal weather conditions will hold for the next five to seven days,” LaMay said. “No chance of getting any air support at this altitude in this weather.  We can climb, but they can’t fly. The medical team wants the body back in Anchorage, ASAP.”  He nodded at Mary and me. “The only way that’s happening is if you two walk him back down to Base Camp at 7, (7,000) so a plane can come get him.”

 It was decided that LeMay and the four remaining oilmen along with Marta would try for the summit. There was still $80,000 worth of climbing deposits in play, so the group would continue.   It would be up to Mary and me to descend back to Base Camp with Tom’s body, where better conditions would allow for a plane to come pick him up.

“I’m not sure I can do this,” Mary said. “Jesus Christ, it’s going to take us two full   days to get down. We’ve got a dead guy, wrapped up like a mummy, tied into this small toboggan. The weather is shit. This is going to be tough, “she growled.

“I didn’t answer, I just looked at her… shook my head, …looked at the ground, and kicked a pile of snow, and walked off.  She was always so matter of fact, a trait I admired. She didn’t sugar coat anything.  I knew this was going to be a test.

 I knew Mary in only a casual sort of way before this climb. We had mutual friends but didn’t travel in the same circle. I shared the same fear, but somehow, I trusted her and her ability and was pretty sure that we could do this. It would have to be a team effort though.  I got the impression that LaMay knew Mary and I made a good mix. Although she never said so, I’m pretty sure Mary felt the same. By late morning we were off.

The first hour went well. Winds were light as we started our descent. But as we rounded the shoulder of the ridge called Windy Corner the wind picked up. The light snow on the trail gave way to a downhill section of blue Ice. Mary was out front, roped to the toboggan She would help steer. I was behind, with a taut  rope tied to my waist  to keep the sled in a controlled decent. Part way down the ice field the 200-pound sled began to slide sideways. It kept jerking me off my feet, bashing me down onto the ice. We would slide twenty or thirty feet, which would in turn pull on Mary’s rope knocking her over as well. We had to jam our ice axes into the icy sidehill to arrest our slide. Once stopped, we would start again only to have it happen again and again. This went on for over two hours.

When we finally made it off the ice field to the snow-covered glacier, we collapsed into a giant snowbank, out of the wind. “We’ve got another twelve hours down this damn snow field to base camp,” Mary snarked. “Tomorrow is going to kick our asses. Let’s take a thirty-minute break, eat something, and try to make another two hours before we quit for the night.”   

By now, I knew we had this, I knew we were a good team, but I was pissed at the world. My right knee was swollen and sore. I’d been knocked around and dragged for the past three hours. “Here we were risking our lives dragging this goddamn dead Texan who had more money than sense, down North Americas tallest peak. “What the hell am I doing out here.”  I screamed to myself.

After another two hours descent, we made camp in the middle of the glacier.  There was a silent calm between us. We were both exhausted and without talking we went about our tasks.  I set up the tent as Mary melted snow and cooked what was a tasteless dehydrated noodle something or other. Between us we drank a warm half gallon of Tang, the sickly-sweet orange flavored circus water concoction that was invented for the early Astronauts. To this day I cannot even stand to look at it. We crawled into our sleeping bags, and I was asleep before my head hit the pillow.

We were on the trail early the next morning. As we slept four inches of snow had fallen and by 10 AM the wind had picked up again. We were now in a mini ground blizzard. Mary was still out front, roped to the toboggan. She was about twenty feet ahead of me and would disappear into a cloud of snow for as long as ten minutes at a time. I’d get a glimpse of her red parka coming in and out of the whiteness ahead. Sometimes the tug on the rope was the only thing that told me she was still there.

 The Kahiltna Glacier is a dangerous place. It is a large bowl, anywhere from a half mile to four miles wide and forty some miles long. It’s filled with deep unseen crevasses that were covered by snow bridges. The trail skirted big avalanche fields that continually roll off Mt Hunter and Mt Foraker, fanning into the valley.  There is danger with every step forward you take. Climbing big mountains is inherently risky. We did not dwell on it but took it for what it was worth. As guides, we both knew this is what we had signed up for.

  As long as I could feel the tug on the rope, I knew Mary was safe.  She was like a bloodhound on the path of an escaped convict. She never varied. How she stayed on that trail I will never know.

 By now the dead oil man strapped into the toboggan had long ceased to be anything but cargo. As callus as it may seem, we were concentrating only on ourselves. We were both pushing our own limits. We snacked on dried fruits, nuts and granola bars, eating and drinking on the move, not stopping as we struggled down the mountain; Mary, still leading the way.     

After almost twelve hours, just before dark, we struggle up the last little hill into the Kahiltna Base Camp. The Rangers took our cargo, gave us a big meal and stuffed us into our sleeping bags in the back corner of the medical tent. We didn’t say more than 5 words to one another.

The next day we learned from the camp at 14,000 that LaMay and the oil execs had experienced worse weather. Upset by the death of their friend and dangerous weather conditions, they’d canceled their summit attempt and were on their way down. We were ordered to wait for their return. Mary and I spent the next two days reading, catching up on sleep and getting to know one another better. I knew we had just accomplished something pretty remarkable.  It was a team effort, completely… absolutely.

Less than a week later, we were off the mountain, back in Anchorage eating very greasy food instead of eating glop of rehydrated mush out of bags with plastic spoons. Quite a luxury. We learned that Tom had died of Acute Pulmonary Edema., a not uncommon cause of death attributed to the thin air on the Mountain.

This was my last trip as a mountain guide. I learned that the life span of a guide had limits.  I reflected upon the fact that as Mary and I trudged through that white out, we could have easily gone into a crevasse. The blowing snow would have covered out tracks and we would never have been seen again. Life is that fragile. But we didn’t faulter.  We just kept moving. We persevered.

 After that climb, back on firm ground in southcentral Alaska I started a construction business building home, a much safer occupation. LaMay continued his guiding career on Denali. He died two years later, on the slopes of Mt Everest after his team had made the summit. The remaining Texans flew home, without the ice of Denali for their bourbon.

 As for Mary, well, she stayed in Alaska. She expanded her engineering degree and created the science and math program at a Career and Technical school just north of Anchorage.  We continued to be friends, spending more time together. We were married a year later. At last report we were living Happily Ever After.