Imaginary peaks, p.19
Imaginary Peaks, page 19
The next wave of explorers through the region were drawn to the tallest peak on the continent, and they showed no discernable interest in the obscure granite towers called Gurney, Lewis, and Augustin, or in the group of peaks that had come to be known as the Cathedral (and later the Kichatna) Spires. Within a few years, as if conjured into being by their quest, a new imaginary mountain would take shape in the wilds of Alaska. In 1906, American mountaineer Frederick Cook would claim that he’d stood on the summit of Denali, and he would publish a series of photos as alleged evidence. His critics would develop another term for the prominence he reached: “Fake Peak.” Over time, amplified by decades of debate, the controversy would become so immense that it would cast its shadow across all other phantom peaks in the northern ranges, including the Riesenstein.
CHAPTER 15
The Ascent of Fake Peak
PERHAPS IT AROSE FROM DEEP longings for adventure and escape, colliding in a man’s mind like tectonic plates and creating an eruption of dreams: visions of heroes cutting thousands of steps to create a grand staircase of ice; fantasies of white cornices and misted summits glowing above a land of frost and gold. Perhaps it materialized out of the optical illusions and ice crystals that filled the Northern air with strange lights and hues. Or else it combined with the incalculable layers of memories and myths that folded and overlapped in the Alaska Range, pushing its slopes ever higher toward the sky. However it emerged, the invisible summit that became Fake Peak soared for thousands of feet above a small nondescript rock outcrop, while its base slid miles across the glaciers to the geographic point of Denali.
Born in 1865, Frederick Cook was, as one biographer, Robert M. Bryce, later put it, “a true romantic,” at least in some regards. Like others of his era, Cook fantasized about quests for realms beyond “the life-sapping conditions of modern city life” and “the maddening pace of this material age,” as he wrote in his memoirs. His prose sometimes resembles an overwrought version of Harvey Manning’s, without the sharp edge of self-deprecating satire. Growing up, Cook had also been vulnerable to bullying. And he’d sought refuge by exploring the wooded hills and caves near his childhood home in Hortonville, New York, where he felt a “yearning for something that was vague and undefined.”
He had more reasons than most dreamers do for wanting a way out of reality. His father had passed away when Cook was four years old, leaving the family impoverished, and his early memories were full of relentless struggle and, at times, scant food. From age twelve on, Cook worked while going to school. Later, while a medical student at Columbia University, he woke at 1:00 a.m. each day to deliver milk before his classes started at 9:00. In 1890, just as Cook was about to graduate, his first child died several hours after birth. His wife, Libby, succumbed soon afterward. Depressed and adrift, the young doctor lost himself in adventure books, imagining uncharted regions of Africa and the Arctic. A year later, he picked up a newspaper and read that Robert E. Peary was planning an expedition to map the northernmost parts of Greenland. “It was as if a door to a prison cell had opened. I felt the first indomitable, commanding call of the Northland,” Cook recalled.
The turn of the century was a time when distant visions of the Far North flashed like fata morgana across the minds of American city dwellers. During the early 1900s, British Canadian poet Robert Service would further spread unearthly images of high-latitude lands, where a wanderer might search “the Vastness for a something . . . lost” amid “big mountains heaved to heaven” and “the map’s void spaces.” American novelist Jack London would pen his popular gold rush saga The Call of the Wild. Tales of actual polar explorers already enthralled commuters packed into trains on their way to the dull routines of factories and offices. Newspaper publishers realized that sponsoring expeditions in exchange for exclusive coverage led to big profits. The resulting stories—heavily edited, ghostwritten, or sensationalized—tended to avoid banal or complex realities in favor of more marketable epics of indomitable heroes traversing magnificent worlds of ice. Over time, the relationship between publicity and future funding put even more pressure on adventurers to achieve (or concoct) success.
Cook wrote to Peary and offered to serve as a doctor on his 1891 expedition. When their ship struck floating ice, a tiller swung against Peary’s leg and fractured two bones. In his account of the journey, Peary praised Cook’s ability to heal him, to tend to the rest of the crew, and to remain calm throughout the crisis. Cook, in turn, extolled Peary’s “sublime courage.” Their mutual esteem gave way to rivalry as Cook began his own attempts to reach both the North Pole and what he called “the Alpine North Pole”—the apex of Denali. In 1903, accompanied by Native guides (probably Dena’ina Susitnuht’ana), whom he referred to as Stephen and Evan, and carrying the incomplete maps of prior expeditions, Cook left Tyonek with four other companions to try to climb what he called “perhaps the most inaccessible of all the great mountains of the world.”
Cook wasn’t exaggerating the difficulties of attaining Denali’s summit. A previous explorer, Alfred Brooks, had suggested that climbers should attempt the mountain from the north side. Merely to reach that aspect of Denali from Tyonek, however, they would have to traverse hundreds of miles of swift rivers, tangled forests, and boggy tundra, crossing some of the same terrain where Spurr’s and Herron’s teams had nearly perished. Once there, they’d need to ascend about 18,000 feet of vertical relief from the surrounding glaciers toward the frigid, windswept 20,310-foot summit. As Cook and his teammates trudged with their pack horses toward Simpson Pass, gaps in the mists revealed tempting views of distant lower spires, but there was no time to waste.
Beyond the crest, after scouting various options, they headed for the northern flanks of Denali. To their surprise, they passed the abandoned campsite of another mountaineering party. A rusted tin can was still full of salt, the very thing they’d craved since their horses had devoured their own supply. They later found out the can had been left earlier that same year by Alaskan Judge James Wickersham and his teammates, who turned back at the start of a steep wall that soared for about 14,000 feet to the north summit. Cook’s expedition hadn’t brought enough mountaineering axes for everyone, so while they teetered their way up the frozen slopes of a lofty northwest buttress, one climber had to lean on a wooden tent pole. They gave up their attempt as the precipices multiplied, after reaching a high point of roughly 10,000 to 11,000 feet above sea level and spending a night perched in an aerie chopped into a cliff of sheer blue ice.
Once they’d descended the mountain, Cook’s party continued northeast into unfamiliar regions where waves of snowy peaks crested above vast seas of glaciers. “And it is all unmapped, undiscovered, bleak and shriveled under the breath of autumn,” one member, newspaper journalist Robert Dunn, declared. By the end of the trip, they’d traveled a thousand miles and circumnavigated the entire Denali massif. On the map that Dunn sketched of their journey, the Indian trail of Herron’s map has vanished, as have the Cathedral Spires, leaving only a blank space between the Fleishmann and Caldwell Glaciers. Perhaps the Kichatnas seemed too insignificant compared to the continent’s highest mountain, or their sheer walls simply too inconceivable.
Three years later, Cook returned to try to reach the summit of Denali again. This time, in addition to horsepacker Edward Barrill and several others, Cook was joined—fatefully as events would prove—by two mountaineers who would become his future critics, Belmore Browne and Herschel Parker. Cook intended to find a different way over the divide to attempt the peak from the southwest. And so they squandered days near the upper forks of the Yentna, searching for a pass that their pack horses could manage. When at last they turned farther south toward distant foothills, the expedition lost even more time flailing through streams and swamps. After chancing upon a new settlement of gold prospectors at Sunflower Creek, they hired a Dena’ina guide they called “Susitna Pete” (Tsel Ch’a’ilk’elen), and they made their way to the headwaters of the Tokositna River and the start of the ice. By then, Browne realized failure was inevitable: “Between us and the mountain was a tangled, chaotic mass of rugged mountains and glaciers. The night air was already beginning to have the tang that presaged the coming of frost, and we knew that with the coming of frost our horses would die.”
The team soon began the long retreat to Tyonek. Once there, in late August, Cook announced that he wanted to examine another approach to Denali with Barrill. In the meantime, he asked Browne to go hunting up the Matanuska River so they could send wildlife specimens to a museum. Cook promised Browne that he wouldn’t attempt the summit without him.
Upon his return from this second foray, however, Cook announced that he and Barrill had continued to the top of Denali, and they’d attained the summit on September 16. Already, hints of possible fiction had emerged like tightly packed leaves poised to unfold. Cook and Barrill hadn’t been gone long enough to trek all the way to the mountain and to climb it. Browne later asserted that when he spoke with Barrill alone, the horsepacker offered an ambiguous reply: “I can tell you all about the big peaks just south of the mountain, but if you want to know about Mount McKinley go and ask Cook.”
Many people initially believed Cook’s version of the story, though the prose in his climbing descriptions could sometimes be hard to follow. Nineteenth- and early twentieth-century exploration accounts are replete with ornate descriptions of ice-sculpted wonderlands and shimmering northern lights. Yet when Cook began to describe the upper portions of Denali in his book To the Top of the Continent, the sheer excess of his metaphors became striking. The written topography morphs continually in shape and hue. “It is a region of pulseless eternity where the spirits with the clouds fall to the earth in weeping sadness,” Cook wrote in one section. In another, he compared the peak to a “geography of heaven” attainable on Earth. This was the language of the old imaginary voyages, and a reader might almost expect to see Denis Vairasse d’Allais’s pack train of unicorns trotting by. Perhaps, when Cook declared, “This supra-cloud world is a land of fantasy, of strange other-world illusions,” he was, in fact, revealing an emotional truth: his Denali was merely a dream summit of his own creation. One Alpine Journal reviewer described the difficulty of discerning any specifics of the actual ascent beneath the jumbles of ethereal phrases: “The author alleges that his subject ‘strains the English Dictionary.’ He has accordingly done his best to enlarge that volume . . . words are put to what may seem . . . strange uses. For instance . . . the Alpine rope is a ‘life-line,’ an avalanche a ‘reducing train.’ Even the ‘foot hills’ are ‘sky piercing’ and loftier summits are alternately ‘heaven-scraped’ and ‘sky-scraping.’ ”
In 1909, Cook emerged from the Arctic after another expedition to declare that he and two Inughuit companions, Aapilak and Ittukusuk, had reached the North Pole on April 21, 1908—about a year before Peary claimed to have arrived there with the help of Black American explorer Matthew Henson and Inughuit teammates Ukujaaq, Uutaaq, Iggiannguaq, and Sigluk. Many critics have disputed Cook’s and Peary’s stories, in part because neither man could ever offer conclusive proof. Peary reported seemingly implausible speeds of travel, as well as an itinerary based on unreliable compass readings and dead reckoning. Cook published a hazy, florid account of his achievement of the long-coveted objective. Images of mirages seem to float like colorful gossamer across the pages. According to two Arctic travelers, Knud Rasmussen and Paul Rainey, Cook’s Inughuit companions later said they didn’t think they’d actually reached the North Pole.
In October 1909, Barrill signed an official affidavit that Cook’s Denali claim, at least, was fraudulent. Cook agreed to answer questions about the climb at an Explorers Club meeting in November, but he never appeared. Meanwhile, a group of local miners made plans to summit the mountain themselves and prove that Cook had lied. In the spring of 1910, members of their Sourdough expedition climbed, unroped, for thousands of feet. They used a coal shovel, pike poles, and “ice-irons” (as they called their nine-pointed crampons) to move over sheer ice and deep snow. As provisions for their final dash to the lower north summit, they packed little more than a bag of doughnuts and thermoses of hot chocolate. Two members planted a spruce pole as a sign of their arrival. But when they returned to tell the tale, they found their own stories doubted. For men with no mountaineering experience, they’d made an astoundingly rapid ascent, and one of their teammates had inflated their feat by claiming they’d reached the higher south summit as well.
Later that year, Belmore Browne and Herschel Parker set out with six companions to make another attempt on Denali—and to search for the location of “Fake Peak,” where they believed Cook had taken his purported summit picture. “Our mountain detective work was based on the fact that no man can lie topographically,” Browne wrote. “We knew that if we could find one of the peaks shown in his photographs we could trace him peak by peak, and snowfield by snowfield, to within a foot of the spot where he exposed his negatives.” Recalling the horrific suffering of the horses on past expeditions, Browne decided that his teammates should carry supplies on their own backs. After lurching up snag-filled rivers in a kerosene-powered boat, they ferried loads across thirty-seven miles of underbrush, swamp, moraine, and slush to the Ruth Glacier (unwilling to use Cook’s 1903 name for the place, Browne referred to it as the “big glacier”).
Within the crystalline silences of a northern dusk, Browne forgot the pain of a sprained ankle and the eighty-pound weight of his pack. A jagged line of peaks above a tributary glacier fit the contours of those in Cook’s photos. Ice surged against rock cliffs and broke into frozen waves. Their tracks vanished into a quiet blue ether that stretched endlessly before and behind them. Browne recited poetry to create a beat to snowshoe by.
Soon, he discovered another piece of the puzzle: above a col, there was a cliff that resembled the precipice below the top of Fake Peak. As Browne and Parker climbed toward the saddle, the contours of the landscape continued to align. Nonetheless, Browne felt bewildered. Cook had described the cliff face as 8,000 feet high, but the one that Browne saw seemed only a few hundred feet higher than the glacier, its altitude about 5,300 feet. Its summit was merely a small stone outcrop. Just below the top, Parker, who was in front, paused to knock down a little cornice. Then Browne heard his voice ring out. “We’ve got it!”
Browne’s group took their own pictures for evidence. In one image, Parker is photographing Browne, who is photographing expedition member Herman L. Tucker atop Fake Peak, who is re-creating Barrill’s pose on the “summit” of Denali. Silhouetted against the sky, Tucker looks like an iconic image of a mountaineer holding a flag. The exposed cliff edge near his feet and the finshaped snow ridge beyond him generate a dramatic effect—as if this were a parody of some major ascent heralded in bombastic fashion in newspapers around the world.
For a moment, however, as Browne rested on the sun-warmed stone, he forgot about the hoax he’d come to unravel. Cook’s “heaven-scraped granite” had turned out to be a mere knoll. Yet Fake Peak’s surroundings were captivating. Bright sunlight set the glacier aflame. Sharp ridges jutted out like cathedral ruins. Nearly twenty miles away, the real Denali dazzled his eyes. It was, he recalled, “a picture of such sublime beauty that our powers of appreciation seemed benumbed.” A bluish mist lit other enigmatic peaks along the horizons. Far away, he thought he saw “green meadows and hunting grounds as yet untouched by man.” Although he’d banished the illusion of Cook’s summit, another delusion took its place: the idea that no human being had ever wandered in those distant valleys.
Browne’s own attempt on Denali stalled before the steep maze of ice walls, cliffs, and crevasses along its southern buttress. A rival team also failed to summit Denali that season: a group from the Mazamas (an Oregon-based club) led by Claude E. Rusk, who hoped to clear Cook’s name by climbing his alleged route to the top of the continent. By the end of his trip, Rusk, too, became convinced that Cook had lied: the discrepancies between Rusk’s own experience of the mountain and the descriptions in Cook’s account appeared too great. The loss of his belief in a former hero left Rusk with a sense of melancholy. Even without an act of imagination, the high peaks of Alaska seemed too grand to be real. In a subsequent report, Rusk retold Cook’s story as an allegory of a paradise lost and a Biblical temptation:
Since the morning of Creation solitude reigned, through countless centuries, over the stupendous panorama at the head of the Ruth Glacier. Then came two human atoms to marvel for a few hours at the wondrous sight. . . . That one trip alone—when with a single companion [Cook] . . . penetrated the wild, crag-guarded region near the foot of Mt. McKinley—should have made him famous. But the Devil took him onto an exceeding high mount and showed him the glories of the icy alpine world and—the Doctor fell.
The story of Fake Peak wasn’t over. In another twist, some of Cook’s supporters insisted Browne had faked his own evidence that the Denali summit photo was a hoax. One of them, photographer Ernest Rost, even claimed that Browne had painted over the views from the top of Fake Peak himself, doctoring the photo to make it look like Cook’s image. Another Cook advocate, Edwin Balch, traced the topographic contours of Browne’s Fake Peak and Cook’s alleged Denali summit pictures, placing one outline on top of the other to indicate small variations.
In 1956, hoping to put the fifty-year-old controversy to rest, Bradford Washburn went on his own expedition to Fake Peak. He waited until late summer to get conditions similar to those in Cook’s photo, without the heavy snowdrifts that had impeded Browne’s efforts to capture an entirely identical view. Browne, Washburn determined, had taken his picture just a few feet away from the right place. The stone knobs and fissures visible in all the images—Cook’s, Browne’s, and his own—matched each other “as precisely as in a fingerprint,” Washburn observed in his American Alpine Journal report. Yet the angle of his photo was slightly off. Fake Peak had thawed and shrunk over the decades, he realized. Some of its fragile stone had toppled. No lichen grew on the lower two thirds of the outcrop, as if a blanket of snow had melted off the rock. “It would be impossible for us to have done any better than we had in duplicating Cook’s ‘summit picture,’” Washburn determined, “as the point from which he took it was at least forty feet up in the air in August 1956! . . . A substantial part of the right skyline is gone forever (and what still remains is going fast).” Fake Peak itself was becoming a phantom.
