Imaginary peaks, p.26
Imaginary Peaks, page 26
to be alone
to be friends
to look out
to look within
a reaching out
a soaking in
Since “the experience requires vulnerability,” he explained, it would be better to bring “a tarp than a tent” and to consider “going without guidebook or even map on purpose.” In another attempt at a definition, he wrote, “A wilderness is a place where it is possible to get lost,” which could happen even in the wooded outskirts of Seattle—as he had learned, decades ago, in the now-vanished forest of Hidden Lake. “Thus, wilderness experience in Seward Park can be the equal of that in the Brooks Range. Neither is real in the 1930s sense. But both are real, equally so, in the 1980s,” he explained. “More of the wilderness seeking will be done near home,” he hoped. “More must be done,” he added, because of “the energy cost” of travel to distant places.
During the last decade of Harvey’s life, he imagined staring into a crystal ball and seeing a future in which every scrap of remaining undeveloped space was preserved in the North Cascades, only to be ravaged by climate change. The heavy, luminous winter snows of the Cascades would turn to dreary rain. Summers would become longer and drier. Wildfires would burn through forests that had endured for centuries. Glaciers would vanish into thin air, leaving only outlines of their former glory on old topographic maps. Faced with the loss of beloved landscapes and the deaths of aging friends, Harvey became more vehement. Many late-twentieth–century hikers seemed impatient with his exhortations. They wanted to consume the wild as efficiently as possible, without “politics” getting in the way. In the introduction to Best Winter Walks & Hikes: Puget Sound, Harvey responded: “To readers’ complaints that they want directions on where to go, not lessons in how to behave, we answer, ‘If you don’t want sermons, don’t go to church.’ ”
It was the last guidebook that he and Ira Spring would work on together, and the last time that Harvey agreed to work with Mountaineers Books. Harvey’s friendship with Ira had ruptured in part because of the growing differences in their approach to the wild. During the late 1950s, when they’d started collaborating on their guidebooks, the logging industry razed acres of trees in regions that relatively few hikers knew. “Do the North Cascades Really Exist?” conservationist John Warth had asked in the title of a 1961 article for The Wild Cascades. Warth had noticed so many errors and blanks in tourist maps and brochures of the time that the range appeared like a lost continent in the midst of the United States. By the beginning of the twenty-first century, Harvey and Ira had described hundreds of Washington peaks and valleys in words and images. Partly as a result, numerous regions of the Cascades had become protected from clear-cutting, but crammed with guidebook-toting excursionists. Ira had often spoken of what he called “Green Bonding,” promoting trails to bring people closer to nature and to turn them into defenders of the woods. It was a goal that Harvey had shared with him, up to a point. Now, Harvey thought trail builders had gone too far. Too many paths strayed from the fringes of deep forests, where he felt they belonged, into the rare, trackless portions of the maps—into places that he thought should be kept quiet for wild creatures and perhaps for occasional solitary wanderers, thrashing through slide alder and devils club as they searched for their own version of the divine. “Over-building, over-civilizing is a threat just like wreckreating,” Harvey wrote to Ira in 2001, combining the words “wreck” and “recreating” into one.
All Harvey’s efforts couldn’t prevent the advance of development up the unprotected parts of Cougar Mountain. Urban lights now turned the sky a sickly pinkish-orange at night. Rush-hour traffic roared like the rapids of a giant river. In a 2002 letter to conservationist Gene Duvernoy, Harvey explained that he felt besieged: “The very thought of venturing off this little island of green we (still) preserved . . . into the maw of the Beast inevitably reminds me that we are here as on a darkling plain swept with sounds of struggle and flight where ignorant armies clash by night.” The description of the “darkling plain” was an allusion to Matthew Arnold’s poem “Dover Beach,” about “the Sea of Faith” that recedes, leaving only a world of “naked shingles” and “edges drear.”
As Harvey struggled with his aging body, even walking short distances became difficult. He grew increasingly reclusive. Manuscripts piled higher in the loft office. Moss and ferns thickened on the roof. Dale Cole thought his friend was trying to freeze time. “I think he just did not want to see things move ahead, and yet invariably, inevitably, they were going to do exactly that.” McMansions sprouted across Cougar Mountain, encircling ever-smaller patches of forest around the Mannings’ and the Coles’ homes. Dale felt as if he were watching his memories disappear, one by one. Unable to bear the loss, he and Lyn moved away.
Yet while his beloved geographies shrank, Harvey’s imagination kept expanding. As a young man, he’d abandoned his boyhood dreams of climbing in the Himalaya and the Mountains of the Moon, but he’d found his “Shangri-La,” first in the alpine basins of the North Cascades and the Olympics, and then in the backyard forests of the Issaquah Alps. As Harvey got older, he realized that a paradise of wonder existed in the jewel-bright multitude of birds’ wings outside his windowsill.
On a typewritten scrap of paper attached to one of his notebooks, he’d written the words: “I had learned, by then, that a peak doesn’t have to be remote to be wild—very wild. There is wildness next to our railroads, our highways, our lowland homes. I had relearned, as I’d known for some time, that at the far boundary of wilderness is . . . death.”
Perhaps Harvey sensed that the common European idea of wilderness at its extreme becomes a void—an imaginary place emptied of human history and inimical to life. But he also loved to plant literary allusions in his writing. And “Death,” as Hamlet pronounced in Shakespeare’s play, is “The undiscovered country from whose bourn / No traveler returns.”
Ever since college, Harvey feared that he’d die young from heart failure. But when the “tick” of his heartbeat did finally falter, he survived, recovering from triple-bypass surgery. He lived to age eighty-one before passing away on November 12, 2006, from colon cancer. Betty died nine years later. A new subdivision has consumed the Mannings’ wooded lot—and with it, the spaces where their children explored and where their friends drank homebrew and philosophized under the stars. Dale has also lost his wife, and while he still goes hiking, the mountains seem haunted by the absences of friends. For him, the story of the Manning hoaxes now represents, most of all, his love of their instigators. “Where I kind of get choked up now and then about it is when it reminds me of not just Harvey but every one of those people I mentioned, and a lot of others,” Dale told me. “In your mind, you’d like to keep them just like they were, wouldn’t you? I can’t help but, when I talk to someone like you, look back on my life and think how fortunate I was, . . . Harvey gave me a deep passion for the mountains and the outdoors that is carried with me right up to today. You could say, ‘Now, how could you do better than this?’ I don’t really think you can.”
In The Wild Cascades, a few months before he died, Harvey urged his readers to “take a look at the 2006 map of public land ownership in the state. . . . Do a bit of dreaming.” For numerous people, one of Harvey’s most lasting gifts was the power of imagination to see the world differently. Like many Cascades conservationists who try to carry on his work, Dick Fiddler recalled learning from Harvey the value of humor and creativity as forms of resistance, “how to make something that’s ugly,” such as human hubris in nature, “also look ridiculous.” For Paul Manning, what captured “the Manning family appreciation of mountains is that we were always reading some book like Lord of the Rings. . . . The natural world and [Harvey’s] literary imagination were always tied together.” Because his father had written the guidebooks to “politicize” his readers as “spokespeople” for the wild, Paul explained, “some areas he was quite happy to tell everyone about. Other areas, he never really spoke much about in his writings, that is to say he didn’t give very good directions to them.” To reach one of the places that Harvey kept secret, you have to hike for miles into the mountains and find a junction where a clearly marked trail points to a well-known fishing destination, but a faint, eroded path—resembling a mere creek bed—leads to a concealed alpine paradise.
Claudia Manning remembers another hike she took with her father near Snoqualmie Pass when she was young. The sun beat down on them as they walked along a logging road, past stumps of trees, and up a steep mountainside. “I just turned to Daddy at one point and I said, ‘You know, Daddy, you get no place exploring.’ He thought that was so funny. When we got to the top of the peak and then there was this lake below that wasn’t on any map. . . . He said, ‘See, Claudia, you do get places going exploring.’ ”
I’m intrigued by the idea of experiencing “no place” as a place. Perhaps by slipping the bounds of ordinary cartography, we can start to glimpse something elsewhere—that “deep wilderness” that Paul says his father sought, a realm found only when you get truly lost. Long after he’d given up climbing to summits, Harvey kept exploring the flanks of mountains, searching for seemingly unnoticed cols and hidden valleys, finding wonders that he kept to himself or deliberately obscured in his published books. “To the day he died, when he was hiking, he had these little notebooks,” Paul told me. The entries included “notes about flowers and things on the trail. There’s little Xs on them. The little Xs were the places where his heart had a murmur. He marked it down each day, every day of his life.” A map of the human heart.
CHAPTER 20
What Lay Over the Horizon
AS I EXPLORED HARVEY’S IMAGINARY mountain worlds, I began to picture him as a kind of Prospero, the magician in Shakespeare’s The Tempest who uses his enchanted books to cast spells across a fictitious island. There, visions of “cloudcapp’d towers” and melodies of strange music drift through the air. Prospero’s “art” brings characters together into a wild plot that alters their existence long after the magician retires from the scene. I think Harvey would have been pleased to know that he, too, had a lasting impact on the people he duped and inspired.
While Frederick Cook’s claims to have summited Denali still spark controversy and ire, most climbers who fell for the Riesenstein came to appreciate its whimsy. Or at least they accepted the purpose behind the hoax. The late George Whitmore, one of the first ascensionists of the Nose on El Capitan, was initially angry when he realized the Riesenstein story was false. “I did not take kindly to people who found it humorous to mess with the facts and create confusion,” he explained to me in 2019. Yet his opinion had changed since the 1960s. “I used to be obsessed about first ascents, too,” he admitted. “But there certainly wasn’t much glory involved—most climbers had no idea what I was doing, and didn’t care.” The challenges George faced were with the unknown, and with himself. “What is in this area where there is a blank on the map? What is beyond that ridge? Can I ford this river? That mountain looks pretty formidable—I wonder whether I can get up it?” George, too, thought that self-promoting peakbaggers were climbing for the wrong reasons. Like Harvey, he ended up devoting much of his life to conservation. “So Harvey and I might have had something in common,” he concluded.
After I shared what I’d been able to glean of Harvey’s motivations, Art Davidson told me that the hike out from the Kichatnas—when he and his climbing partners had immersed themselves within neglected contours of the maps—conveyed its own lingering wonder. “It’s just the magic of not knowing what is going to lie around the corner. . . . A hoax like the Riesenstein, it wouldn’t happen again, now, because so many things are known, right?”
By the late 1960s, Art had found a new symbolic “mountain” to climb through his work with environmentalist groups and Alaska Native activists to protect some of the regions he’d come to love and to preserve the rights of their Indigenous stewards. Still, Art wishes he could persuade his aging teammates to go back to the Kichatnas, even just to camp there one more time. “I think we all had this feeling that we just shared something very, very special. Even in that era when there were so many unclimbed mountains.”
Some Kichatnas climbers sought out similar experiences again and again. Several months after their expedition, Art and Dave Johnston participated in the first winter ascent of Denali. For Art, the climb was part of his ongoing search for a way to enter “an unexplored land.” In the long Northern twilights, the upper regions of Denali seemed like another unseen world, lit by drifting shapes of moon-silvered clouds, changing hues of aurora borealis, and translucent crystals of falling ice, like “a dream half remembered, like a memory from earliest childhood,” he wrote in Minus 148°. That summer, Art and David Roberts joined Matt Hale, Rick Millikan, Rick’s brother George, and Ned Fetcher on a six-man expedition to a cluster of distant towers that they’d noticed from high on Kichatna Spire. The Revelation Mountains, as they’d named the peaks, contained unclimbed formations as fantastical as those of the Riesenstein. One of them, the Vanishing Pinnacle, seemed to fade into a wall behind itself when viewed from certain angles. The team made the first ascents of nine peaks. But the very top of the most desired mountain eluded their six attempts. Only 750 feet below the summit, under a crystalline sky, Matt and David turned back. The final ridge glistened, white and frozen, in the dwindling late-summer light, and they’d brought only one axe and no crampons or headlamps on that foray. They called the peak “The Angel” because its ridges lifted above the icy land like outstretched wings.
Looking back on his Riesenstein days, Rick Millikan told me, “I feel so fortunate to have been able to climb when it was possible to be that remote, to have no contact with anybody.” A few years after the Revelations, he began to drift away from mountaineering. As a youth, he’d felt a sense of pride in the attempts of his illustrious grandfather George Mallory to climb Mount Everest. But after his own children were born in 1970 and 1972, Rick’s perspective changed. “I do fault someone that takes those kind of risks when they have a family,” he said. “[Mallory] left three children, including my mother. [His disappearance] had lasting scars. So I don’t glamorize him too much.”
Dave Johnston kept climbing in Alaska for much of his life, working as a state park ranger and building trails. There was so much to explore, he recalled when we talked in 2020, that “every now and then, when another mountain beckoned, you had to go AWOL and join friends on a climb.” Even over the phone, in the midst of the global pandemic, I could hear the smile in his voice. In 2001, he and his wife, Cari, had accompanied their eleven-year-old son, Galen, as he became the youngest person to summit Denali. Although the effects of a 2015 stroke have likely ended Dave’s own exploratory mountaineering days, he assured me there are still plenty of unclimbed routes in the Alaska Range. “Even if I never get out there, it’s heartwarming to know that they are there.” He added, with self-deprecating humor: “I guess I’m just a peakbagger at heart. But you can get the same thrill just on an ice gully that no one has been on before or a big boulder. And in the end, friendships forged in the mountains are still strong and as meaningful as when we were in the hills.”
Though he never made it to the Kichatnas, Don Jensen looked for his own version of the Riesenstein myth in other places, pursuing an elusive ideal that transformed from granite spires into something radiant and undefined. In 1967, he made one last attempt on Mount Deborah with Pete Carman, Frank Sarnquist, and two Vulgarians, John Hudson and Art Gran. Among the books that Don brought with him was Hermann Hesse’s Journey to the East, the 1930s novel that depicted seekers of paradise wandering freely across mythic space and time. A storm shook the walls of Don’s tent as he read, and new ideas stirred in his mind. “Seldom specifics now, but just feelings,” Don wrote in his diary, “and I would like to be able to put them (if they really are) in practice as love with Joan,” his future wife.
Unwilling to return to his misery at Harvard, Don completed his BA at Fresno State and got a PhD in mathematical logic at the University of Southern California. He became the chief guide at the mountaineering school in the Palisades. He and Joan celebrated their wedding feast atop a giant, flatsummited rock, the “Banquet Boulder,” along the North Fork of Big Pine Creek. Over the following years, they visited many alpine sanctuaries amid the spiny ridges, splintered arêtes, and stark light of the Sierra. In 1969, with his client Rex Post, Don and Joan made the first traverse of all twelve pinnacles of the Palisades Crest, naming each summit after characters in J. R. R. Tolkien’s books. But Don never forgot the horrific ending to the Mount Huntington expedition. “I guess I will suffer Ed’s death over and over again thousands of times,” he wrote to Joan, “because, in my heart, I believe that exposing people to the mountains will make them more happy.”
By 1970, Don realized that his true “career” was to build a “Happy and Productive Life” with Joan. They made plans to homestead in the North, staking a claim in the Yukon to have a base for future explorations. “I felt I could have become the greatest of mountaineers,” he told her, “but chose to integrate the joy of the mountains into my life—instead of making it control my life.” He never got a chance to complete their personal utopia. In 1973, he and Joan moved to Scotland for a year so he could accept a post-doctoral fellowship. That November, Don was bicycling to school on an icy road when a truck hit him. He died at age thirty, leaving behind his own geographic enigmas. Fellow guide Doug Robinson recalled a recipe box in a Palisades mountaineering school tent where Don kept notes of unpublished first ascents. The box is now missing. Still, Doug explained, subtle “clues” might be found in the rock itself. Don had a habit of polishing sharp edges where the strands of a climber’s rope might break. The traces of his work create a faint trail, only distinguishable to those who know how to look: small dots of mirrored sunlight on burnished stone.
to be friends
to look out
to look within
a reaching out
a soaking in
Since “the experience requires vulnerability,” he explained, it would be better to bring “a tarp than a tent” and to consider “going without guidebook or even map on purpose.” In another attempt at a definition, he wrote, “A wilderness is a place where it is possible to get lost,” which could happen even in the wooded outskirts of Seattle—as he had learned, decades ago, in the now-vanished forest of Hidden Lake. “Thus, wilderness experience in Seward Park can be the equal of that in the Brooks Range. Neither is real in the 1930s sense. But both are real, equally so, in the 1980s,” he explained. “More of the wilderness seeking will be done near home,” he hoped. “More must be done,” he added, because of “the energy cost” of travel to distant places.
During the last decade of Harvey’s life, he imagined staring into a crystal ball and seeing a future in which every scrap of remaining undeveloped space was preserved in the North Cascades, only to be ravaged by climate change. The heavy, luminous winter snows of the Cascades would turn to dreary rain. Summers would become longer and drier. Wildfires would burn through forests that had endured for centuries. Glaciers would vanish into thin air, leaving only outlines of their former glory on old topographic maps. Faced with the loss of beloved landscapes and the deaths of aging friends, Harvey became more vehement. Many late-twentieth–century hikers seemed impatient with his exhortations. They wanted to consume the wild as efficiently as possible, without “politics” getting in the way. In the introduction to Best Winter Walks & Hikes: Puget Sound, Harvey responded: “To readers’ complaints that they want directions on where to go, not lessons in how to behave, we answer, ‘If you don’t want sermons, don’t go to church.’ ”
It was the last guidebook that he and Ira Spring would work on together, and the last time that Harvey agreed to work with Mountaineers Books. Harvey’s friendship with Ira had ruptured in part because of the growing differences in their approach to the wild. During the late 1950s, when they’d started collaborating on their guidebooks, the logging industry razed acres of trees in regions that relatively few hikers knew. “Do the North Cascades Really Exist?” conservationist John Warth had asked in the title of a 1961 article for The Wild Cascades. Warth had noticed so many errors and blanks in tourist maps and brochures of the time that the range appeared like a lost continent in the midst of the United States. By the beginning of the twenty-first century, Harvey and Ira had described hundreds of Washington peaks and valleys in words and images. Partly as a result, numerous regions of the Cascades had become protected from clear-cutting, but crammed with guidebook-toting excursionists. Ira had often spoken of what he called “Green Bonding,” promoting trails to bring people closer to nature and to turn them into defenders of the woods. It was a goal that Harvey had shared with him, up to a point. Now, Harvey thought trail builders had gone too far. Too many paths strayed from the fringes of deep forests, where he felt they belonged, into the rare, trackless portions of the maps—into places that he thought should be kept quiet for wild creatures and perhaps for occasional solitary wanderers, thrashing through slide alder and devils club as they searched for their own version of the divine. “Over-building, over-civilizing is a threat just like wreckreating,” Harvey wrote to Ira in 2001, combining the words “wreck” and “recreating” into one.
All Harvey’s efforts couldn’t prevent the advance of development up the unprotected parts of Cougar Mountain. Urban lights now turned the sky a sickly pinkish-orange at night. Rush-hour traffic roared like the rapids of a giant river. In a 2002 letter to conservationist Gene Duvernoy, Harvey explained that he felt besieged: “The very thought of venturing off this little island of green we (still) preserved . . . into the maw of the Beast inevitably reminds me that we are here as on a darkling plain swept with sounds of struggle and flight where ignorant armies clash by night.” The description of the “darkling plain” was an allusion to Matthew Arnold’s poem “Dover Beach,” about “the Sea of Faith” that recedes, leaving only a world of “naked shingles” and “edges drear.”
As Harvey struggled with his aging body, even walking short distances became difficult. He grew increasingly reclusive. Manuscripts piled higher in the loft office. Moss and ferns thickened on the roof. Dale Cole thought his friend was trying to freeze time. “I think he just did not want to see things move ahead, and yet invariably, inevitably, they were going to do exactly that.” McMansions sprouted across Cougar Mountain, encircling ever-smaller patches of forest around the Mannings’ and the Coles’ homes. Dale felt as if he were watching his memories disappear, one by one. Unable to bear the loss, he and Lyn moved away.
Yet while his beloved geographies shrank, Harvey’s imagination kept expanding. As a young man, he’d abandoned his boyhood dreams of climbing in the Himalaya and the Mountains of the Moon, but he’d found his “Shangri-La,” first in the alpine basins of the North Cascades and the Olympics, and then in the backyard forests of the Issaquah Alps. As Harvey got older, he realized that a paradise of wonder existed in the jewel-bright multitude of birds’ wings outside his windowsill.
On a typewritten scrap of paper attached to one of his notebooks, he’d written the words: “I had learned, by then, that a peak doesn’t have to be remote to be wild—very wild. There is wildness next to our railroads, our highways, our lowland homes. I had relearned, as I’d known for some time, that at the far boundary of wilderness is . . . death.”
Perhaps Harvey sensed that the common European idea of wilderness at its extreme becomes a void—an imaginary place emptied of human history and inimical to life. But he also loved to plant literary allusions in his writing. And “Death,” as Hamlet pronounced in Shakespeare’s play, is “The undiscovered country from whose bourn / No traveler returns.”
Ever since college, Harvey feared that he’d die young from heart failure. But when the “tick” of his heartbeat did finally falter, he survived, recovering from triple-bypass surgery. He lived to age eighty-one before passing away on November 12, 2006, from colon cancer. Betty died nine years later. A new subdivision has consumed the Mannings’ wooded lot—and with it, the spaces where their children explored and where their friends drank homebrew and philosophized under the stars. Dale has also lost his wife, and while he still goes hiking, the mountains seem haunted by the absences of friends. For him, the story of the Manning hoaxes now represents, most of all, his love of their instigators. “Where I kind of get choked up now and then about it is when it reminds me of not just Harvey but every one of those people I mentioned, and a lot of others,” Dale told me. “In your mind, you’d like to keep them just like they were, wouldn’t you? I can’t help but, when I talk to someone like you, look back on my life and think how fortunate I was, . . . Harvey gave me a deep passion for the mountains and the outdoors that is carried with me right up to today. You could say, ‘Now, how could you do better than this?’ I don’t really think you can.”
In The Wild Cascades, a few months before he died, Harvey urged his readers to “take a look at the 2006 map of public land ownership in the state. . . . Do a bit of dreaming.” For numerous people, one of Harvey’s most lasting gifts was the power of imagination to see the world differently. Like many Cascades conservationists who try to carry on his work, Dick Fiddler recalled learning from Harvey the value of humor and creativity as forms of resistance, “how to make something that’s ugly,” such as human hubris in nature, “also look ridiculous.” For Paul Manning, what captured “the Manning family appreciation of mountains is that we were always reading some book like Lord of the Rings. . . . The natural world and [Harvey’s] literary imagination were always tied together.” Because his father had written the guidebooks to “politicize” his readers as “spokespeople” for the wild, Paul explained, “some areas he was quite happy to tell everyone about. Other areas, he never really spoke much about in his writings, that is to say he didn’t give very good directions to them.” To reach one of the places that Harvey kept secret, you have to hike for miles into the mountains and find a junction where a clearly marked trail points to a well-known fishing destination, but a faint, eroded path—resembling a mere creek bed—leads to a concealed alpine paradise.
Claudia Manning remembers another hike she took with her father near Snoqualmie Pass when she was young. The sun beat down on them as they walked along a logging road, past stumps of trees, and up a steep mountainside. “I just turned to Daddy at one point and I said, ‘You know, Daddy, you get no place exploring.’ He thought that was so funny. When we got to the top of the peak and then there was this lake below that wasn’t on any map. . . . He said, ‘See, Claudia, you do get places going exploring.’ ”
I’m intrigued by the idea of experiencing “no place” as a place. Perhaps by slipping the bounds of ordinary cartography, we can start to glimpse something elsewhere—that “deep wilderness” that Paul says his father sought, a realm found only when you get truly lost. Long after he’d given up climbing to summits, Harvey kept exploring the flanks of mountains, searching for seemingly unnoticed cols and hidden valleys, finding wonders that he kept to himself or deliberately obscured in his published books. “To the day he died, when he was hiking, he had these little notebooks,” Paul told me. The entries included “notes about flowers and things on the trail. There’s little Xs on them. The little Xs were the places where his heart had a murmur. He marked it down each day, every day of his life.” A map of the human heart.
CHAPTER 20
What Lay Over the Horizon
AS I EXPLORED HARVEY’S IMAGINARY mountain worlds, I began to picture him as a kind of Prospero, the magician in Shakespeare’s The Tempest who uses his enchanted books to cast spells across a fictitious island. There, visions of “cloudcapp’d towers” and melodies of strange music drift through the air. Prospero’s “art” brings characters together into a wild plot that alters their existence long after the magician retires from the scene. I think Harvey would have been pleased to know that he, too, had a lasting impact on the people he duped and inspired.
While Frederick Cook’s claims to have summited Denali still spark controversy and ire, most climbers who fell for the Riesenstein came to appreciate its whimsy. Or at least they accepted the purpose behind the hoax. The late George Whitmore, one of the first ascensionists of the Nose on El Capitan, was initially angry when he realized the Riesenstein story was false. “I did not take kindly to people who found it humorous to mess with the facts and create confusion,” he explained to me in 2019. Yet his opinion had changed since the 1960s. “I used to be obsessed about first ascents, too,” he admitted. “But there certainly wasn’t much glory involved—most climbers had no idea what I was doing, and didn’t care.” The challenges George faced were with the unknown, and with himself. “What is in this area where there is a blank on the map? What is beyond that ridge? Can I ford this river? That mountain looks pretty formidable—I wonder whether I can get up it?” George, too, thought that self-promoting peakbaggers were climbing for the wrong reasons. Like Harvey, he ended up devoting much of his life to conservation. “So Harvey and I might have had something in common,” he concluded.
After I shared what I’d been able to glean of Harvey’s motivations, Art Davidson told me that the hike out from the Kichatnas—when he and his climbing partners had immersed themselves within neglected contours of the maps—conveyed its own lingering wonder. “It’s just the magic of not knowing what is going to lie around the corner. . . . A hoax like the Riesenstein, it wouldn’t happen again, now, because so many things are known, right?”
By the late 1960s, Art had found a new symbolic “mountain” to climb through his work with environmentalist groups and Alaska Native activists to protect some of the regions he’d come to love and to preserve the rights of their Indigenous stewards. Still, Art wishes he could persuade his aging teammates to go back to the Kichatnas, even just to camp there one more time. “I think we all had this feeling that we just shared something very, very special. Even in that era when there were so many unclimbed mountains.”
Some Kichatnas climbers sought out similar experiences again and again. Several months after their expedition, Art and Dave Johnston participated in the first winter ascent of Denali. For Art, the climb was part of his ongoing search for a way to enter “an unexplored land.” In the long Northern twilights, the upper regions of Denali seemed like another unseen world, lit by drifting shapes of moon-silvered clouds, changing hues of aurora borealis, and translucent crystals of falling ice, like “a dream half remembered, like a memory from earliest childhood,” he wrote in Minus 148°. That summer, Art and David Roberts joined Matt Hale, Rick Millikan, Rick’s brother George, and Ned Fetcher on a six-man expedition to a cluster of distant towers that they’d noticed from high on Kichatna Spire. The Revelation Mountains, as they’d named the peaks, contained unclimbed formations as fantastical as those of the Riesenstein. One of them, the Vanishing Pinnacle, seemed to fade into a wall behind itself when viewed from certain angles. The team made the first ascents of nine peaks. But the very top of the most desired mountain eluded their six attempts. Only 750 feet below the summit, under a crystalline sky, Matt and David turned back. The final ridge glistened, white and frozen, in the dwindling late-summer light, and they’d brought only one axe and no crampons or headlamps on that foray. They called the peak “The Angel” because its ridges lifted above the icy land like outstretched wings.
Looking back on his Riesenstein days, Rick Millikan told me, “I feel so fortunate to have been able to climb when it was possible to be that remote, to have no contact with anybody.” A few years after the Revelations, he began to drift away from mountaineering. As a youth, he’d felt a sense of pride in the attempts of his illustrious grandfather George Mallory to climb Mount Everest. But after his own children were born in 1970 and 1972, Rick’s perspective changed. “I do fault someone that takes those kind of risks when they have a family,” he said. “[Mallory] left three children, including my mother. [His disappearance] had lasting scars. So I don’t glamorize him too much.”
Dave Johnston kept climbing in Alaska for much of his life, working as a state park ranger and building trails. There was so much to explore, he recalled when we talked in 2020, that “every now and then, when another mountain beckoned, you had to go AWOL and join friends on a climb.” Even over the phone, in the midst of the global pandemic, I could hear the smile in his voice. In 2001, he and his wife, Cari, had accompanied their eleven-year-old son, Galen, as he became the youngest person to summit Denali. Although the effects of a 2015 stroke have likely ended Dave’s own exploratory mountaineering days, he assured me there are still plenty of unclimbed routes in the Alaska Range. “Even if I never get out there, it’s heartwarming to know that they are there.” He added, with self-deprecating humor: “I guess I’m just a peakbagger at heart. But you can get the same thrill just on an ice gully that no one has been on before or a big boulder. And in the end, friendships forged in the mountains are still strong and as meaningful as when we were in the hills.”
Though he never made it to the Kichatnas, Don Jensen looked for his own version of the Riesenstein myth in other places, pursuing an elusive ideal that transformed from granite spires into something radiant and undefined. In 1967, he made one last attempt on Mount Deborah with Pete Carman, Frank Sarnquist, and two Vulgarians, John Hudson and Art Gran. Among the books that Don brought with him was Hermann Hesse’s Journey to the East, the 1930s novel that depicted seekers of paradise wandering freely across mythic space and time. A storm shook the walls of Don’s tent as he read, and new ideas stirred in his mind. “Seldom specifics now, but just feelings,” Don wrote in his diary, “and I would like to be able to put them (if they really are) in practice as love with Joan,” his future wife.
Unwilling to return to his misery at Harvard, Don completed his BA at Fresno State and got a PhD in mathematical logic at the University of Southern California. He became the chief guide at the mountaineering school in the Palisades. He and Joan celebrated their wedding feast atop a giant, flatsummited rock, the “Banquet Boulder,” along the North Fork of Big Pine Creek. Over the following years, they visited many alpine sanctuaries amid the spiny ridges, splintered arêtes, and stark light of the Sierra. In 1969, with his client Rex Post, Don and Joan made the first traverse of all twelve pinnacles of the Palisades Crest, naming each summit after characters in J. R. R. Tolkien’s books. But Don never forgot the horrific ending to the Mount Huntington expedition. “I guess I will suffer Ed’s death over and over again thousands of times,” he wrote to Joan, “because, in my heart, I believe that exposing people to the mountains will make them more happy.”
By 1970, Don realized that his true “career” was to build a “Happy and Productive Life” with Joan. They made plans to homestead in the North, staking a claim in the Yukon to have a base for future explorations. “I felt I could have become the greatest of mountaineers,” he told her, “but chose to integrate the joy of the mountains into my life—instead of making it control my life.” He never got a chance to complete their personal utopia. In 1973, he and Joan moved to Scotland for a year so he could accept a post-doctoral fellowship. That November, Don was bicycling to school on an icy road when a truck hit him. He died at age thirty, leaving behind his own geographic enigmas. Fellow guide Doug Robinson recalled a recipe box in a Palisades mountaineering school tent where Don kept notes of unpublished first ascents. The box is now missing. Still, Doug explained, subtle “clues” might be found in the rock itself. Don had a habit of polishing sharp edges where the strands of a climber’s rope might break. The traces of his work create a faint trail, only distinguishable to those who know how to look: small dots of mirrored sunlight on burnished stone.
