Imaginary peaks, p.27
Imaginary Peaks, page 27
In 2016, faced with a diagnosis of terminal cancer, David Roberts looked back on his friendship with Don and felt a keen longing. “However ephemeral it proved,” he wrote in Ascent, “the bond that linked us made its founding credo self-evident—that not only was climbing the most important thing in life, it was worth more than all else combined. That state of grace was like first love: a glimpse of a forbidden paradise.” While he recovered from rounds of radiation and chemotherapy, David continued to ponder what desires drew mountaineers like themselves to search for “lost and unknown places.” Unsettling thoughts filled his mind as he composed his next book, Limits of the Known. With the prospect of death before him, he rejected the delusory promises of terra incognita and the fantasies of transcendence that lured adventurers away from their loved ones: “For one who does not believe in God, prayer is a waste of time. In its place, I have only hope, or wish. What I wish for, then, in that last conscious moment before the darkness closes in forever, is not the shining memory of some summit underfoot that I was the first to reach, not the gleam of yet another undiscovered land on the horizon, but the touch of Sharon’s fingers as she clasps my hand in hers, unwilling to let go.”
The Vulgarians, too, faced inconsolable grief. In 1967, before he left to spend a year working on an oceanographic research ship, John Hudson gave his motorcycle helmet to Aaron Schneider. “You have a closet,” John said to him, by way of explanation. In November 1968, his job over, John met up with another Vulgarian, Roman Laba. The two friends headed to the rime-feathered granite spire of Fitz Roy in Patagonia, where they remained for one hundred gale-plagued days, waiting for better weather and making repeated attempts. After they’d been stormed off twice from high on the mountain, Roman mentioned a surreal route, still unclimbed, in the Cordillera Real of Bolivia: a crest of ice and stone that separated the high desert of the Altiplano from the green shadows of the rainforest. The northeast ridge of Huayna Potosí would be the most difficult climb anyone had accomplished on the mountain so far, Roman promised. Several other teams of American, Bolivian, French, and British climbers had attempted it, and Roman suggested asking one of the English aspirants, Roger Whewell, if they could join forces for another try.
John whiled away the time before their expedition by studying Spanish in La Paz, Bolivia. In late June 1969, he started up Huayna Potosí with Roman and Roger, staggering through heavy winds beneath a hanging glacier that seemed about to calve. After John’s crampons snapped and Roger’s fell off, they retreated. About a week later, the three men were back with British climber Keith Miller. All night, gusts blew snow on them and cold air seeped into their bivouac sacks. “The Englishmen looked dour and hard,” Roman recounted. “We Vulgarians giggled.” The next morning, the Vulgarians climbed on, leaving their grim-faced partners behind. Ahead, the slope hardened into metallic blue ice, veined with bands of rocks. Below them, mountainsides plunged into deep-green woods. At the instant before nightfall, the summit flashed like a candle flame in the tropical dusk. The next day, from the apex, John and Roman released balloons and watched them float above the rainforests. “What more could we do,” Roman thought, “but dream of future climbs under the clear morning sun?”
Weeks later, while the two men were attempting a new route on Huascarán in Peru, their crampons sliced through what looked like a firm layer of snow. Then the slope cracked. John slipped, struck a ten-foot rockband, and continued tumbling to his death. When Pete Geiser heard the news, he remembered their first attempt on the mountain they called “Vulgarian Peak.” There, too, the surface of the snow kept breaking like a series of trapdoors until they were up to their waist in sliding debris. Looking back at Austin Post’s photos of the Kichatnas, Pete realized just how close he and John had been to the summit of the Spyder when they retreated. Now all that mattered was the time they’d spent together. For Pete, as well, perhaps the real lost paradise was a bond with a departed friend. “We were soulmates,” he realized.
In a June 1968 letter to fellow Vulgarian Joe Kelsey, John Hudson had mused: “Perhaps we should start our own journal. We could hopelessly confuse real and imaginary events—indiscriminately mix reality and fantasy—until even we would forget whether [ J. R. R. Tolkien’s] orcs had appeared on the summit of Geikie or had merely been seen at a distance as they scurried from our tent when we returned to the meadow.” When the first edition of the Vulgarian Digest came out in the spring of 1970, the editors included a commemorative photo of John, his middle finger in the air. For three issues, the magazine blended ribald tales, fictional stories, real trip reports, made-up routes, and invented peaks with sharp and whimsical satire that would have made Harvey Manning proud. One anonymous contributor critiqued And Not to Yield, a book about an imaginary Himalayan peak where “there was only the purity of snow and stars.” The author, James Ramsey Ullman, was known for his gripping adventure tales. (In one of his memoirs, Harvey referred to “the allegorical solemnity” of Ullman’s novel The White Tower as a “favorite joke.”) In a passage quoted from And Not to Yield, Ullman’s protagonist declares, “As a boy his mountain dream had been Everest. But no longer. Let the British have their Everest; they had tried it seven times and they deserved it. For him, Eric Venn, it would be Dera Zor. . . . He would climb it, top it. It would be his.” The Vulgarian reviewer commented sardonically that “Venn has, in 444 pages, an affair with every known stereotype of woman. . . . One lovely tells Venn he will freeze his balls off. Sure enough, ten pages later . . . ‘his private parts, he realized, had gone numb with cold. Somewhere, a long way off, someone seemed to be grinning.’ ”
Some Vulgarians continued to wander in search of ideal places. As the Vietnam War continued, Aaron Schneider became more active in protest movements and he grew discouraged with American politics. After Ruth finished her PhD in English, the couple bought land in the St. Ann’s Bay area of Cape Breton, Nova Scotia—an old farm down a remote gravel road. Eventually, they settled there year round. Aaron patched together a living as a substitute teacher, kayak guide, freelance writer, and fish farmer. Ruth found work at Cape Breton University and penned short stories. In an anthology called Local Hero, she described the 1964 crevasse fall on Mount Marcus Baker: “I emerged like a new born snowbaby.” Looking back, she realized that her concept of a meaningful life for herself and Aaron had coalesced in that moment when she first understood she could die. “We had children, created a home, and built careers,” she wrote “Now . . . sitting in the warmth of my study with the map of Alaska in front of me, I know that I had to go to the edge before I could find the core.” The couple chose to focus their love of exploration on the forests and coasts near their new home. “It’s these little places that you discover that are interesting,” Aaron told me. “People know about them, but not a lot of people. . . . Little gem places and holes in the woods.” They got involved in local environmental activism, and Aaron wrote poetry. His 1998 collection, Wild Honey, includes an elegy for John Hudson: “You outclimbed us all / in your ass-torn pants, / bootsoles held on by the laces.’” He pictured John’s fall down the mountainside, his body turning into a speck and vanishing beneath the snows: “Through vertical acres / nothing could be found, / but one door opens like a memory. / It is what the dead tell us / about our lives: / ‘Fear only suffering,’ / your helmet, / still hanging in my closet.”
In 1975, bush pilot Don Sheldon died of cancer. By then, the silver speck of his plane had flashed across the Alaskan sky in countless mountaineering tales. Aaron Schneider memorialized his hero in a poem about the 1965 Kichatnas expedition. Its verses are full of nostalgia for a place where “the glaciers lay in the spaces between / the spread fingers of a granite hand” and “the wind sang.” With Don’s help, Aaron recalled, he and his friends had “searched for a way to the sheer icy tower” that remained “inviolable.” The light of the North’s long summer days had appeared eternal, and for a moment, an escape from world and time seemed possible. “I wondered how we flew so free from fear / as (it is believed) the soul flies out at death,” Aaron concluded, “freed from the gravity of living.”
Claude Suhl had never stopped looking for enchantment. Among other jobs, he and Al DeMaria had both worked as teachers, and they’d taken many summer climbing trips together. One year, they went on an expedition to the Logan Mountains in Canada’s Northwest Territories, near the Nahanni River. It was not far from there that early twentieth-century explorer Raymond Patterson once encountered, as Claude described it, “a magic valley surrounded / rimmed by cliffs and accessible through a narrow slot—laden with crystals and other wonders.” Although Claude didn’t rediscover the valley on that trip or on any of his subsequent ones, he has stumbled upon plenty of other “magical spots” since then, he assured me—even just bushwhacking and hunting around the low summits of the Catskills and Adirondacks in New York.
Meanwhile, Claude had also settled into family life. He married Alice Bridges in 1978, and her adventurous six-year-old daughter, Susan, soon joined her new stepfather on climbs at nearby crags. Around the start of the new millennium, Claude returned to Alaska to revisit his Riesenstein memories with his and Alice’s son, Jean-Claude. In Talkeetna, Claude recalled, “The Ranger station seemed unimpressed by my eager display of ‘pictures from the first human visitors ever to the now National Parked Kichatna Spires,’ but assured us that some Ranger was keeping historical stuff.” As he looked back at the Riesenstein Hoax, Claude thought, “The story, is / was just a story—a corollary fragment—amazing but true—as are lots of other phenomena, when we were there, climbing, eating, getting trench foot. . . . Everything about climbing and Alaska is / was mythic—that is why I do it and why I travel and why sometimes I stay at home!”
Over time, the Vulgarians themselves became legends. Year after year, as so often happens with folklore, the most frequently told stories amplified the eccentric, dramatic, and humorous details of their antics and pranks. “It’s all myth,” Claude reflected in a recent email, “or as [ Joe] Kelsey quotes Ken Kesey in at least one of the now mythical Vulgarian Digests, ‘It’s the TRUTH, even if it didn’t happen.’ Often it does and did happen . . . holy shit???” Roman Laba recalled that as late as the 1990s, he’d hear rumors among Wyoming climbers that the Vulgarians were returning to wreak more havoc in the Tetons. “I didn’t tell them that the Vulgarians are [now] old,” he said to me. “They don’t have the energy to come out West anymore.”
Today, Claude and Al still live near each other, close to the Gunks. When I visited them in 2014, the bands of cliffs shone golden-gray in the late autumn light. Nearly fifty years had passed since they’d headed to the Kichatnas on their “treasure hunt,” but when Al got out the map they’d made of the spires and spread it on a table in his house, the paper was still crisp, their invented place names inked clearly in blue. In Claude’s wide eyes, I could still see the startled wonder and madcap creativity of his Riesenstein tales.
Their friend Pete Geiser had since moved to the hills north of Lyons, Colorado, near the occasional home base of his grown daughter, Alisa May, an adventure filmmaker who inherited his wanderlust. On a visit three autumns later, I found myself surrounded by small, mist-wreathed summits and pinnacled crags. It was like a landscape from an old painting or a dream. “I look at mountains,” he told me. “I kind of toddle among them.” Throughout his long career as a geologist, the Riesenstein stayed in his memory, an image of misty summits that drew him onward. As Pete and his colleagues studied how the earth’s crust resonates, they learned how to hear the sounds the planet makes while mountains form, like string music “plucked by the stress waves of earthquakes and tides,” he said. “Nearing the end of my journey,” he later wrote to me, “[I realize] the Earth sings to me and to all of us. It is an incredibly moving gift.” He still struggles to understand what it was that he experienced in the Kichatnas. “Not necessarily a warm and nurturing place, but a place that you can learn from. But again, I come back to why do we have that connection? Why do [mountains] have that power? Why is that part of our collective psyche? I don’t believe that it’s something just restricted to people who climb. Possibly it goes back to when humans first left Africa and started to spread across the world. There’s always that mystery of what lay over the horizon.”
AND WHAT OF HARVEY’S CO-CONSPIRATORS, WHO HAD HELPED HIM set the adventure in motion? In the decades after the Riesenstein Hoax, they, too, searched for other mysteries in the mountains. Ed LaChapelle sometimes affixed a tape recorder to his skis so he could listen to notes created by ripples of snow. The differing shapes of the crystals altered the natural music he heard, and he became aware of changes otherwise too faint to perceive. “This raises the question of how much of the ‘feel’ of snow is a subconscious perception of similar vibrations,” he wrote in his last book, Secrets of the Snow. Ed’s scientific writing was often poetic. He’d compare crystals of surface hoar to “small, flat leaves” that sparkled under the sun and rustled under swift-moving skis. He’d describe the way the light blazed over firn or softened over rime; how separate crystals bumped into each other and linked together as they drifted down through the air, their “intricately branching arms” intertwined.
Beyond what could be quantified, Ed maintained, lay realms of persistent mystery: “All the rest of the information, less easy to define or describe, also keeps flowing through our senses and influences our decisions. . . . These kinds of data are just as important as measurable information like air temperature or wind velocity or slope angle, or visual information like the curve of a cornice . . . but are relegated to the realm of seat-of-the-pants feel or intuition because they are difficult to communicate.”
Ed never stopped recording the weather, ice, and snow. After his marriage to Dolores dissolved, he spent his final twenty-five years with Meg Hunt in a remote, off-the-grid home in McCarthy, Alaska. The two of them went on frequent hikes to observe the Kennicott Glacier. “It was always changing form,” Meg told me, “and the glacier was always, of course, backing away.” In 2007, at age eighty, Ed died of a heart attack after a morning of flawless powder skiing at Monarch Pass in Colorado. He’d recently driven to nearby Silverton to attend a memorial service for Dolores, who had passed away just eleven days before.
Today, Ed’s and Dolores’s legacies remain intertwined. In now-classic books such as Deep Powder Snow, Dolores had pieced together a philosophy of ecology and outdoor mysticism influenced by some of their shared adventures. While gliding through powder, she wrote, she’d attained a sense of flow in which there seemed to be no borders between herself and the myriad crystals of ice and snow that drifted beneath her skis. The world, as she saw it, was formed of interrelationships in which all individuals are inextricably linked to a greater, natural, luminous whole. In the best moments, she felt herself making turns with other skiers, each following a natural, individual path down the mountain and “still flow[ing] with one another and with the earth. . . . Just as in a flight of birds turning through the air.”
Blending ideas from both his parents, their son, David, imagined that he could uncover metaphors in the peaks and glaciers his family loved, signs to help him find his way in an increasingly precarious world threatened by environmental degradation and climate change. In one fiction story published in 2001, eight years before his own death, David described a scientist’s search to find “the map of hidden realms of matter” concealed within crystals of frost. David also thought back to his own alpine childhood, to a day after a storm when he tossed handfuls of snow into the air and watched them fall, just as his father had done many times before. “Something about the lightilluminated snow crystals shimmering against the deep blue sky broke me open,” he wrote in Navigating the Tides of Change. He felt as if the star-like rays drifted both outside and inside of him. “At that moment I was in a state of coherence with myself, with the world, and with the subtle source of the bliss.... The word ‘coherence’ comes from a Latin root meaning, ‘to stick together.’ Its dictionary definition is worth noting: ‘A cleaving together; an agreement of ideas; consistency; to adhere, to be attached physically, or by affection or some other tie.’ Coherence, then, is the cleaving together of the parts into a whole. . . . Underneath the turbulence of our times is an invitation to join in the coherence of our cosmos.”
For modern readers, perhaps it’s a similar message of coherence that emerges most from Ed LaChapelle and Austin Post’s book Glacier Ice and from its picture of the Riesenstein: the wonder of the bodies of ice that shaped the world’s topography as we know it, the awareness of growing absences that haunt our fates as humans on this earth. By the early twenty-first century, Austin Post had taken more than one hundred thousand photos of glaciers. Researchers compared his older images with that of his younger protégé, Cascades pilot and photographer John Scurlock. Ice had shriveled in many regions, leaving swaths of bare rubble against the shadows of trees. Through his own studies of surging and calving glaciers, Austin had helped develop a methodology for understanding the curious behavior of worlds that were now in peril. In a conversation with his friend Kevin Ward, he imagined the lost, cherished ice realms returning long after humans vanish from the earth.
Around the world, rising temperatures were melting bodies of ice on summits. Ridges were disintegrating as the permafrost that bound their rocks together thawed. Some of the peaks above the McCall Glacier had begun to shrink. Mount Hubley, for now, rises to the same height as it did in the 1950s. Its name still offers a testament to the loss of one of Austin’s best friends, a reminder of how people try to fix on a map, and in their memories, all that seems at risk of changing or disappearing with time. But it also recalls the echoes, beneath the surface of paper and layers of snow, of all that abides, immeasurable as grief or love.
During his final years, Austin continued to explore fading worlds of ice and snow by plane, by camera, and on foot. “He never lost his desire to look further into things,” his photo assistant David Hirst told me. Austin’s son Richard recalled that his father was fascinated by Google Earth, though some people saw it as a replacement for the work of aerial photographers like him. In 2003, Austin became absorbed by the idea of solving another geographic mystery—finding the location of the easternmost glacier in the North Cascades. Despite all that had been mapped by air and by satellite, no one, it seemed, knew the answer for sure. “When you get into the realm of these vestigial glaciers, or ones that are almost extinct, they’re not obvious to the unpracticed eye,” John Scurlock explained to me. “They might be covered by talus from cliffs above, or they might be in inaccessible pockets in the mountains that are hidden, that are off the beaten track.” Since small bodies of ice can be snow-covered for much of the year, or found in deep shadow, sometimes it’s not enough to look at images taken from above. “You have to go there and walk around on it,” Scurlock said, “and find out if it has glacial characteristics like ice movement, crevasses, evidence of old moraines.”
