Imaginary peaks, p.24
Imaginary Peaks, page 24
After they passed their footprints from the day before, Art and Rick climbed over a thin sheet of snow and rime that crumpled beneath their weight, exposing rock so rotten that their crampons stuck in it. Then they crept along a crest of soft cornices with thousands of feet of air on either side. Right before the summit, a large block poked out from the ridge. For a moment, Art thought they were stuck. Aware that any fall could be fatal, he picked his way over the steep, loose stone and snow. Finally, they stood on the apex of the Kichatnas. Before them, the snow flutings of Mount Augustin shone for thousands of feet. Dim granite walls hinted at unknown possibilities on other peaks. But the sun was on the brink of setting, and the autumn sky now glinted like cold glass. They descended into the rising dark.
Art and Rick flashed a light to indicate they were safely back at their bivouac ledge. To David, who was watching from far below, the signal seemed “like a bright star.” That perfect summit day proved to be the last moment of crystalline weather. In the morning, David, Pete, and Dave climbed up the Secret Passage through drifting clouds to assist their friends. While David accompanied Art and Rick down to base camp, Pete and Dave lingered to remove the team’s fixed ropes and pitons. That night, David waited, sleepless, for the two to return as stars faded into the gloom of another approaching blizzard. Near midnight, the small light of a headlamp glimmered through the mist. When Pete and Dave arrived, they explained that a rappel rope had gotten stuck and they’d had to abandon it.
During their last few days at the Shadows Glacier base camp, the group hoped to climb the sharp-walled tower that the Vulgarians called “the Spyder” (now known as “The Citadel”), which rose between them and the Cul-de-Sac Glacier. But when no second lull appeared in the storms, they confined themselves to smaller objectives. Dave and David finished slogging to the top of the 6,900-foot mountain, and they named it “Avalanche Peak,” for the slide that had struck David and Rick there during their earlier attempt. With Rick, they also climbed a nearby “rock prong” to a 6,500-foot summit.
Once the pilot showed up to collect some of their gear, the five men began a forty-five-mile circuit of the range, an old-fashioned adventure “in the spirit of Shipton and Tilman,” as David described it. After trudging over the Shadows Glacier, they intended to cross the snout of the Cul-de-Sac Glacier and traverse the full length of the Tatina and Monolith Glaciers (which they named). They would continue to Rainy Pass Lodge, where a plane could pick them up. Untracked expanses of ice and snow unrolled beneath their feet like blank spaces on a giant map. Peak after peak surged in a staggering array. Wintry gusts crashed against rime-crusted walls. In the fading October light, the icy towers resembled the architecture of an underworld metropolis. Beyond the Shadows Glacier, the group clambered over the glittering schist of a rocky pass and down soft drifts. The next day, the flat light on the snow erased the landscape. Invisible in the vast white, an avalanche rumbled.
Past the edge of the Cul-de-Sac Glacier, two lakes, not yet frozen, glowed a gem-like blue. Ducks floated across the water. The western walls of Triple Peaks, three unclimbed spires, came into view. Sheer rock faces, coated in frost and shadow, soared for thousands of feet into the sky. To Dave Johnston, the cliffs appeared like mirrored images of Yosemite’s El Capitan, multiplied and enlarged into gigantic proportions before they vanished into the clouds. The mountains seemed infinitely high. It was hard to imagine anyone climbing to their summits. That night, eerie noises resounded as shards of ice tumbled through the air.
When the group headed south, images flickered by like scenes from a dream. The early winter of the glacial world was vanishing behind them. Green grass and moss, tinged with autumn gold, emerged from the snows. Birds called. Water flowed. Light rain returned while they wove around large boulders toward the Kichatna River. They thrashed through wet, clinging alder branches and forded icy currents until their clothes became drenched. On one occasion, a giant bull moose stood on a rise and looked at David, who seemed frail and vulnerable in comparison, his ice axe as small as a toy. He thought of how ice age human wanderers could have traveled by these frozen crags. Somewhere nearby, he realized, Herron’s 1899 expedition might have camped.
Snowflakes began to fall again in damp, thick clumps. They shivered whenever they stopped moving. A square on their map indicated the possible presence of a hunting cabin. Inside the empty building, they lit a fire in its stove as a respite from the deepening chill. The next day, they hiked along moose tracks through snow-bent willows. Dave noticed that their footprints had turned purple—there were still blueberries and cloudberries underneath the early drifts. Hungry and weary, he crawled, picking at the fruit. One last obstacle lay ahead: the Happy River. Near a place where members of Spurr’s expedition almost drowned in 1898, the 1966 team shook as the frigid waters rose to their hips.
At Rainy Pass Lodge, hunting guides offered them dry clothes, a blazing fire, and glasses of scotch. Already, David regretted the end of their journey. In the American Alpine Journal, he concluded: “Our hike across those frozen stretches of land seemed to me alive with echoes of the wanderings of ancient tribes, of migrations in the wake of vast herds of reindeer, of the first superstitious voyages into the unknown north, and, finally, of the endless mythic journeys of our hearts. . . . What if we had climbed a certain mountain? It is still there, surrounded on every side by summits no man has ever visited, offering, as only the wilderness can, this world’s last illusion of paradise.”
IN 1968, DAVID PUBLISHED A GUIDE TO THE KICHATNAS IN SUMMIT “to shortcut, for future visitors, the problems of a Spires expedition by chronicling what is known about the place, and to entice serious mountaineers with a prospect of some of the most exciting mountains on earth.” A few names on the hand-drawn map recalled choices from the 1965 and 1966 expeditions, though the Vulgarians’ “Cool Sac Glacier” had already morphed into the statelier “Cul-de-Sac.” Others were remnants of early exploration history: Augustin Peak, Gurney Peak, and Lewis Peak (of which David complained, “Today their untouched summits still officially bear the surnames of those three men whom obscurity would otherwise rightly have claimed.”). Several glaciers were still only designated with numbers. Within a year, a trio of Californian climbers—Royal Robbins, Joe Fitschen, and Charlie Raymond—flew in to the Kichatnas to establish major routes to three unclimbed summits above 8,000 feet and to fulfill Yvon Chouinard’s prediction that the techniques of Yosemite big-wall climbers would prevail on the “great granite ranges of the world.” In the American Alpine Journal, Robbins raved about a future of difficult rock ascents in the spires, “a tale which promises to be long and exciting.”
FOR A SHORT WHILE, SOME OF THE EARLY CLIMBERS KEPT GOING BACK to the Kichatnas, as if they couldn’t let go of the original dream. In 1970, David made a second trip with Hank Abrons, another Harvard Mountaineering Club alum, “on a whim,” David wrote in his expedition report. “We knew June was the wrong month, but greed at the prospect of Middle Triple Peak, second highest of the Spires . . . interfered with our judgment.” A snowstorm trapped them on the col between Gurney Peak and Kichatna Spire for four days. Although they managed to establish a base camp, David recalled, “the rest of the trip was a porridge of white-out, drizzling snow, and insincere patches of blue sky. We called our home ‘Sunshine Glacier,’ counting on future climbers to share in the irony.” They named the pass they’d struggled to cross “Credibility Gap.” When they trekked out to Rainy Pass Lodge, the waters were even higher than they’d been in October 1966. The two men faced a “truly hairy crossing” to escape with their lives. It was the last time David ever visited the range.
TWO YEARS LATER, AL DEMARIA RETURNED TO TRY TO CLIMB MIDDLE Triple Peak with Roy Kligfield and David Loeks. “Unfortunately,” Al commented, “we did not attempt the peak by the route suggested by David Roberts in his Summit article.” They landed, instead, on the west side of the mountain. “Our aim was to do an alpine-style ascent,” Al noted with perhaps some understated humor. “Basically this was the main factor in our retreat.” They spent an entire day toiling up sheer ice and snow to the col. From there, they faced a daunting surprise: what had looked like a ridge from below turned out to be a 1,500-foot-high wall. Higher up, a jagged edge of stone and snow sliced up and down for about a half mile. A rare blue sky reflected off the summits around them, but the flawless weather only deepened their gloom: they hadn’t brought enough supplies for such a lengthy climb. Once more, Al left without attaining his fantasized peak.
Soon, promises of a hidden wonderland lured other climbers. Although the spires remained remote, steep walled, and storm battered, their summits were no longer “the epitome of inaccessibility” that Al DeMaria and Pete Geiser had called them. By the mid-1970s, the spread of water-resistant clothing and synthetic-fiber sleeping bags had diminished at least some of the misery of the Kichatnas’ damp winds, cold rain, and wet sleet. And as alpinists became more adept at moving light and fast on steep walls, they could take better advantage of scant clear days. In the 1980 Ascent, Mike Graber described the Kichatnas as a “crowded Klettergarten.” Four years prior, he and his partners had established Illusory Ridge on Middle Triple Peak, “route ‘3’” of the original lines inked on the Riesenstein photo. It was as if the fictitious mountains were emerging, at last, out of the imaginary and the sublime and into the attainable, the measurable, and the true.
Fragments of the backstory of the hoax also rose from the underground. While Graber was working on his article for Ascent, he’d become curious about the origins of the Riesenstein. Someone (Graber no longer remembers who) suggested he get in touch with Dee Molenaar, one of the most knowledgeable climbers in the Pacific Northwest. Molenaar told him to contact a certain notorious guidebook writer. “[Harvey] Manning was very reluctant [to talk] at first,” Graber told me when I reached out to him in 2020. “He ’fessed up to being a participant in the hoax, but I recall him saying the other two participants were people who had respected scientific positions and he didn’t want to compromise their credibility by tying them to a hoax.” After a couple of persistent phone calls from Graber, and perhaps some time to talk the matter over with Austin Post and Ed LaChapelle, Harvey shared the names of his fellow conspirators. Finally, the basic details of the plot appeared in print.
As so often happens in mountaineering history, subsequent climbers questioned some of the topographic accuracy of the Vulgarians’ story. In the 1981 American Alpine Journal, George Schunk wrote that he believed his own team of Andy Embick, Alan Long, and Randy Cerf had made the actual first ascent of the 7,785-foot mountain called “Vulgarian Peak” and that Pete Geiser and John Hudson had scaled a different 7,700-foot peak, now named “Whiteout Spire.” When I sent Schunk’s report and the most current map to Pete Geiser, he replied, “I can’t dispute the AAJ record one way or another. We did climb a number of the 7,000-foot peaks, but which ones on your map are lost in the mists of time . . . also in the actual mists since a bunch were climbed in cloud, so we probably didn’t know where we were anyway.”
TO THE ORIGINAL RIESENSTEIN CLIMBERS, THE OUTSIDE WORLD HAD begun pressing in closer around the Kichatnas almost as soon as the first few expeditions ended. In 1968, Al DeMaria had picked up a local newspaper in Fairbanks to see headlines announcing the discovery of oil in Prudhoe Bay—a sign of battles ahead between environmental groups and oil companies over the construction of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline. For Al, this was the moment when he realized, starkly, “the difference between what was wild and what was not.”
Conflict erupted over what, exactly, the fabled “Last Frontier” of Alaska meant. Some Americans saw it as a place where undeveloped areas might be rapidly settled and exploited with the help of modern technology, or they believed its landscape was so rugged it could protect itself. Others felt that wild places needed to be actively preserved for the sake of natural beauty, unrestricted adventure, or cultural history. In a 1974 book for Friends of the Earth, Cry Crisis!, Harvey Manning warned that the pipeline might be a rehearsal for a future doomsday, as the rise of energy demands and the burning of fossil fuels contributed to the melting of ice caps and the drowning of coastal cities. (“A fitting climax,” he added, with bitter humor, to the “full-speed-ahead-and-damn-the-torpedoes down the road of America’s hellbent highball ride.”)
But many Alaska Native people, who had never given up their territories in treaties, would continue to struggle to protect their lands. As oil companies rushed to exploit the resources, executives found themselves legally bound to take into account the original residents’ claims. During the 1960s and 1970s, Indigenous organizations interviewed elders to demonstrate that they had continued to dwell in these coastal and mountain regions since time immemorial. Paul Ongtooguk—a now-retired director of the Alaska Native Studies program at the University of Alaska, Anchorage—recalled that the elders’ lists of “significant rocks, creek bends, outcrops . . . names and locations for collecting kinds of rocks, fish, plants, driftwood, shelter areas, slide-danger places, overflow locations, traditional trade routes and meeting places” proved much too vast and detailed for any previously published maps.
By the 1970s, conservationists such as Harvey found new allies—and new concerns—in the booming outdoor industry. As the American historian Roderick Frazier Nash wrote in Wilderness and the American Mind, many trends converged to bring people into the wild, including the countercultural ideals of getting back to the land, the advancements in backcountry gear, and the proliferation of guidebooks and outdoor media. In 1973, John Denver’s song “Rocky Mountain High,” about a man who climbs “cathedral mountains,” was one of the top songs in the US. “Ironically,” Nash observed, “the very increase in appreciation of wilderness threatened to prove its undoing.”
As the number of climbers grew, the mythic allure of American road trips mixed with unease about overcrowding and overdevelopment. In 1974, Lito Tejada-Flores, editor of Ascent journal, described a popular route as “an ugly thoroughfare.” He proposed that climbers should try to keep certain areas out of guidebooks, leaving “not only the cracks, but the sense of discovery intact.” Proponents of the clean-climbing revolution urged others to abandon the use of pitons, which scarred the stone, in favor of removable gear. But the impacts were multiplying. Crowds of climbers trampled the ground at the base of crags. First ascensionists ripped rare plants from cracks to “clean” new routes—an act they called “gardening.” In his memoir, David Brower described the damage from some of his own first ascents with deepening regret: “As long as you think there is an unlimited supply of something, then you think it will replace itself, if you think at all. . . . Today there aren’t so many alpine gardens left.”
The Vulgarians’ friend Jim McCarthy had compared his generation of climbers to the free-ranging “mountain men” of nineteenth-century folklore. Now, in the November–December 1971 issue of Summit, he urged an increased sense of environmental responsibility: “Bluntly put, we can no longer do just as we damn well please.”
Soon, Summit had multiple competitors. Newer magazines became more specialized, promoting the hardcore and the cutting edge. By the eighties, sport climbers were drilling expansion bolts like glittering trails up once unimaginably smooth, steep walls. To some readers, Summit seemed old-fashioned, its homespun appearance and gregarious accessibility a holdover from the mass outings of the Sierra Club. Its editorial vision had more to do with pure fun than with extreme sport, and its philosophy stemmed from the idea that “mountainlore” (as a letter writer put it) included not just one form of mountaineering, but all the multifaceted ways that people approach the hills.
In 1989, Jean Crenshaw and Helen Kilness sold Summit and retired to enjoy more time in the mountains with each other. A new owner relaunched the magazine as a high-end quarterly in 1990, but Summit closed for good six years later. In its place, many readers turned to glossy publications with images of lithe young people in brilliant Lycra hues and, eventually, to the unlimited, rapidly streaming social media images that flashed on computer screens and mobile phones.
CHAPTER 19
The Exploration of No Place
BACK IN 1964, A CERTAIN “H. Hawthorne Manning” had published a satirical article in The Mountaineer that expressed sly pity for editors who become the targets of hoaxes. Among the origins of the problem, Harvey argued, was the exponential growth of climbing. Previously, news of first ascents traveled mainly by word of mouth, and since the protagonists were relatively few, they often knew about each other’s accomplishments firsthand. “With so many new top climbers in operation,” he noted, “this is no longer possible, and the journals play a necessarily enlarged role.” Furthermore, as readers’ expectations for evergreater technical difficulties rose, some writers embellished the angle of a route, adding “overhangs” to every trip report or claiming “summits” that didn’t exist:
One climber might attempt a mountain, get lost in the fog on the summit ridge, find himself baffled atop a nondescript block of rock, and scratch off the trip as a fiasco. Another climber, lost in an identical fog on the same summit ridge, might find himself atop the same block of rock, name it, and write it up for the journals as a first ascent. . . .
. . . Consider [the editors’] situation—flooded annually with reams of copy from climbers they never heard of before. Since most of the copy sounds very much the same, how can editors decide which story deserves feature status, and which brief notice in fine print? Furthermore—incredible as it may seem—some climbers deliberately tell mistruths.
