Imaginary peaks, p.28
Imaginary Peaks, page 28
Austin referred to the hypothetical glacier as “Eacas,” for eastern Cascades. When Scurlock took Austin on an aerial survey of the north side of Mount Bigelow, Austin thought he glimpsed hints of something hidden in the rocks. Two years later, at age eighty-three, Austin returned with Scurlock and others to search from the ground. The group hiked six miles through the dry autumn forests of the eastern North Cascades. Yellow larch needles shone like slivers of stained glass against a deep-blue sky. After a night at 6,300 feet, they meandered to the edge of a boulder field. A few rocks tumbled down the scree—signs that remnants of a glacier might be creeping beneath the surface.
Something glittered like a diamond in the precipices above. “Can one of you youngsters get up there?” Austin said. One of his companions, Jim Lane, scrambled higher and found a field of ice, split by a crevasse. He climbed partway down into the chasm. As the walls drew closer, he could see the glint of more ice far below. “We can call it ‘Eacas Glacier’ for sure,” Austin announced. In a photo that John Roper took that day, Austin sits on a boulder next to his son Richard, surrounded by sun-dappled rocks. Austin looks up, a camera around his neck, the start of a wry smile on his face, his silver hair aglow. It’s as if time has vanished. His figure exudes the energy of a twenty-year-old man.
When Scurlock asked Austin if there might be hidden North Cascades ice even farther to the east, Austin suggested somewhere near Remmel Mountain, in the Pasayten Wilderness. But that hike was too far for him to undertake. “I think if Austin were alive,” Scurlock told me, “he would say that the Eacas Glacier is not necessarily the easternmost glacier in the North Cascades, but it’s the easternmost glacier that we’ve found.” Another hidden glacier—if it exists under a field of rubbly talus or in the shadows of a mountain crevice—might well melt away before it is ever mapped.
During the 1980s, Austin started building a house in the shape of a ferryboat on Washington’s Vashon Island. There, he lived with his wife Roberta until 2007, when the aging couple moved into an assisted living home. After other marriages that didn’t last, including one to Dolores LaChapelle’s sister, Austin had found happiness with Roberta, a longtime singer in the Seattle Symphony Chorale. In a memoir written for his sons, Austin explained that he’d fallen in love with the sound of her voice during their first telephone call. The windows of the “Ferry Boat House” looked out on Rainier glaciers that seemed to float above the blue waters of Puget Sound. Each morning, she tenderly braided his long silver hair. According to one friend, he refused to get it cut again after a barber charged him twenty dollars. Despite all the recognition he’d earned for his work, Austin remained a deliberate outsider. During the early 2000s, Austin’s colleagues nominated him for an honorary doctorate at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks. Bradford Washburn and Ed LaChapelle—by then a professor emeritus of geophysics and atmospheric sciences at the University of Washington—were among the many admirers who wrote enthusiastic letters of support. But Austin refused to go to the ceremony in May 2004. “My father dreaded being up on stage in front of people,” Richard recalled. In the end, university officials agreed to travel to Vashon and award Austin the degree at his home, where they insisted that the newly minted Dr. Austin Post at least put on a graduation gown.
The notion of “doctoring,” Austin joked afterward, in the sense of altering realities, seemed “uncomfortably close to home.” Like Harvey Manning, he’d retained a playful approach to cartography, moving landforms and names around on the maps inside his office. Austin also kept writing fiction stories, including one about an expedition outfitter who gets lost with a scientist deep in the Alaskan wild. On the brink of death from hunger and exhaustion, after staggering over avalanche debris and through a dense forest, they stumble upon a recluse’s cabin stocked with food. There, they rest until they’re strong enough to find their way back to their original base camp, where their pilot picks them up. Later, when the outfitter tries to return to replenish the supplies they’d used, he can’t find the place again: the surrounding alpine basin doesn’t exist on the map, and the cabin has vanished amid the endless, shadowed trees. Past explorers, too, had similar experiences, he learns, and he concludes they must have all fallen through a portal in the earth into a “dream world.”
Austin’s USGS colleague Carolyn Driedger remembered that he also told the story of the Riesenstein Hoax repeatedly and that he laughed every time. “He was very proud of it,” she said. “He had no time for anything having to do with pretentiousness. If there were alpine climbers who thought they were going to get credit for some big new climb, he was going to send them on a goose chase.” In our 2011 correspondence, Austin explained with pride that he’d helped make “Kichatna Spires” (rather than “Cathedral Spires”) the official designation for the entire group of mountains—a term that is closer to the original Dena’ina word K’its’atnu. “What I do regret,” he added, “is the name Riesenstein wasn’t retained for that wonderful peak [the tallest point in the original hoax photo]!” Austin’s pleasure faded, though, when he described the real transformations taking place in the Alaska Range: “It’s criminal what has happened to the forests, even the icefields are taking a beating.” By the time a second edition of Glacier Ice appeared in 2000, its observations about the connection between climate and glacier size had become more urgent than ever. In the conclusion, Austin and Ed warned, “This world is a habitable spot in a hostile universe. . . . Much of modern civilization exists by virtue of a delicate balance. . . . Were the polar ice caps to melt, much of the world’s urban area would be flooded by the rising sea.” They urged scientists to continue looking for clues to predict the earth’s possible futures: “The answers to this question are hidden somewhere in the glacier ice.”
AUSTIN, TOO, IS GONE NOW: HIS ASHES WERE SCATTERED FROM A PLANE above his beloved Pyramid Mountain, where as a young boy, he’d first glimpsed the possibility of an ideal life among glaciers. It’s impossible to read his and Ed’s words now without thinking of how little time is left for any of us to find the answers they sought. The landscapes of all these histories and myths are changing beyond recognition. Layer by layer, records of past eons melt. Rockfall turns alpine walls into ghostly clouds of dust. Islands, in an echo of mythic Atlantis, may vanish beneath the waves. Once-imaginary places, such as an ice-free Northwest Passage, are becoming real. Once-real places exist only in imagination. Each year, in late spring, as I head higher up the mountains to look for ice flows still solid enough to climb, snowfields still large enough to ski (or at least to cool the stifling air), I realize how much smaller these countries of winter are growing in space and time. One day, many of the white-and-blue spaces on topographic maps may be gone, and their delicate crystals of frost and wild scrolls of cornices will become as wondrous, but as wholly mythical as the strange beasts on the edges of ancient cartographies.
PART III
THE INNERMOST RANGES
Why do we want to have alternate worlds? It’s a way of making progress. You have to imagine something before you do it.
—Joan Aiken, Locus Magazine
CHAPTER 21
The Afterlife of Hoaxes
BY THE START OF THE twenty-first century, the Riesenstein Hoax had retreated into obscure corners of climbing lore. But the No Name Peak Hoax had an unexpected afterlife. A strange sense of reality clung to the tale: the walls of both the mythical and actual mountains appeared equally mist-wreathed, hazardous, perhaps forever unclimbable. In 1968, Fred Beckey had attempted the east face of Southeast Mox, the No Name Peak route extolled by the imaginary characters. Afterward, he wrote to Harvey with little optimism: “No good—bad rock and limit where cracks go.”
Thirty-seven more years passed before someone managed to complete a first ascent of the real east face. Washington climber Michael Layton became intrigued by the route during a reconnaissance flight with John Scurlock. In the late summer of 2005, he and Erik Wolfe took seven hours to bushwhack the first one and three-quarters miles of the approach. Devil’s club tore at their skin, and slide alder soaked their clothing. Like Thiusoloc and Henry Custer on their 1859 North Cascades expedition, Layton and Wolfe clung to tree roots and balanced on branches to pull themselves uphill. At the base of Southeast Mox, they confronted some 2,500 feet of steepening gneiss. After a bivouac partway up the wall, they teetered across meandering ledges and overhanging stone. Loose rocks whistled through the air. Layton felt like bursting into tears. He knew the holds might vanish ahead, and their gear could rip out if he fell. By the time they reached the top of the East Face, they were out of food and nearly out of water. There was no question of continuing to the apex of the mountain. They left a joker playing card as a sign of their presence, and they began a long series of rappels toward the darkness of the tangled woods.
In the Northwest Mountaineering Journal, Layton reported encountering a button-head bolt on the east face. He assumed it had been left by Paul Williams’s expedition to No Name Peak, as if Harvey’s invented attempt had, in fact, taken place. When I contacted Layton in the summer of 2017, he said he had no idea the original Summit story was a hoax. He wasn’t the only one confused. Other climbers and Cascade chroniclers had made references to the 1959 Williams attempt as if it were simply part of the actual history of the mountain.
As I continued my research, I found more and more coincidental details that seemed to corroborate the No Name Peak account attributed to “Paul Williams.” I started to feel disoriented. When I sent a copy of the May 1960 Summit article to Layton, he responded, “The topo on the hoax looks remarkably similar to the initial portion of our climb (more or less) and their high point is pretty much where we saw the old bolt.” On a 2005 CascadeClimbers.com thread about Southeast Mox, someone else posted, “The Paul Williams mentioned in the article is my father-in-law.” This real Paul Williams, I learned, had been an active Cascades climber around 1959, a founding member of Seattle Mountain Rescue, and an ardent conservationist. He’d once led an Arctic expedition to look for signs of the missing crew of John Franklin’s Northwest Passage expedition. He’d also guided a group of clients who hoped to find traces of Noah’s Ark on Mount Ararat in modern Turkey, near the borders of Iran, Azerbaijan, and Armenia (likely the same peak mentioned in Marco Polo’s tale). Like a character in a Harvey Manning tale, he was a seeker of geographic mysteries and legendary lands.
A thought kept creeping back, as implausible as I knew it was: Could the No Name Peak story have been true after all? Was the actual hoax the notion that it was a hoax? I had plenty of evidence for the plotting of a fake peak. There was Harvey Manning’s letter to Ted Beck outlining his idea for a fictitious climbing area (initially to be called “Crazy Creek Crags”). There was Harvey’s note to his father-in-law admitting that he’d borrowed the name “Paul Williams” for the author of the No Name Peak tale and explaining the ruse (“The mountain is not missing. It’s just misplaced.”). And there was Dale Cole’s earnest recollection of the practical joke, recorded in his interviews with me and in the obituary he wrote about Harvey for The Wild Cascades. Still, that post on CascadeClimbers.com and that bolt on the spire stuck in my mind, like hairline cracks in a giant edifice that threatened to bring the whole structure down.
But when I finally got in touch with Brian, the son of the real climber Paul Williams, he assured me that his father couldn’t have been involved in the No Name Peak story. This Paul Williams wasn’t from Portland, and he had no mountaineering partners with the names of the characters in the Summit article. So, whose traces were found on Southeast Mox, if they weren’t those of any actual person named Paul Williams? Were they from Beckey in 1968? Or from someone else? After I’d emailed many Cascades climbers, Alan Kearney suggested I ask Alex Bertulis, who told me that he and Scott Davis might have left that bolt when they retreated during “inclement weather” in the 1980s. I could almost hear Harvey Manning’s quiet laughter: after all these decades, his hoax had nearly become real.
“So, did I ever feel any remorse about any of this?” Dale said to me as we continued to talk about No Name Peak. “Of course not. In fact, as I look back at that time, it really provides some wonderful memories.” Compared to the pernicious false stories of our current time, Harvey’s 1960s hoaxes have an aura of innocence. The climbers lured to Harvey’s “Great Wall of No Name Peak” had an unforgettable experience of a wild and beautiful mountain. “I don’t think many people get the chance to feel that way about anything,” Layton recalled. He felt fortunate to have been a part of the history of Southeast Mox, to have been immersed in that “excitement of adventure, the beauty of such a remote area and the camaraderie of friendship.”
A year after the 2016 US presidential election, Kevin Young wrote in Bunk: The Rise of Hoaxes, Humbug, Plagiarists, Phonies, Post-Facts, and Fake News, “Today the hoax mostly traffics in pain.” During the Trump era, Americans confronted avalanches of fabricated information designed to undermine the credibility of journalism and the survival of democracy itself. False claims by then-president Donald Trump and others about widespread election fraud became a catalyst for the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol building in Washington, DC. Yet while Trump derided any realities he didn’t like as “fake news” and while right-wing conspiracy theories still surge across the internet, pro-democracy activists have also figured out ways to turn some hoaxes against their perpetrators. In 2017, Trump’s senior counselor Kellyanne Conway cited a nonexistent “massacre” by Iraqi terrorists in Bowling Green, Kentucky, to try to justify a travel ban against immigrants from seven predominantly Muslim countries. People responded with an outpouring of memes, T-shirts, songs, and mock memorials parodying the false story and demonstrating, as folklorist Timothy H. Evans observes, that at times the “lies of those in power could be mocked in a carnivalesque way.” Harvey, whose own satires were partly aimed at the destructive fallacies of dominant groups, would certainly have approved of such ingenious forms of resistance.
In 2017, I’d been surprised that some modern climbers and history writers still thought the No Name Peak story was a genuine, though error-ridden, account of an actual expedition. Now it seems plausible that there are many more Harvey Manning hoaxes tucked within the pages of obscure mountain journals. Given the success of the pranks we know about, why wouldn’t Harvey have been tempted to keep going, changing the hidden messages to suit the issues of each decade and making the riddles more elaborate and harder to solve? Maybe other authors, knowingly or unknowingly, picked up a few of his fabricated details and transformed them into accepted lore in climbing histories and guidebooks—now awaiting some diligent mountaineering detective of the future to uncover the secret fiction.
Among the many boxes of Harvey’s letters, notes, and unpublished manuscripts, I found numerous accounts of hidden ranges that blended reality, fantasy, and dreams. In one fragmentary paragraph, he wrote of a character who “was given a map by a dying prospector and followed it to a cave whose walls and floor and ceiling were glittering crystal quartz veined with eighteencarat gold.” In the 1960 Mountaineer, Harvey had claimed that he himself had made a similar expedition to a “Peak X,” but failed to find the treasure. Was this other story a plan for an unrealized hoax? Or was it Harvey’s way of imagining a different ending, in which a mountain of incalculable desire becomes attainable? In a 1996 Backpacker interview with climbing journalist Mark Jenkins, Harvey described his “favorite dream” as “revisiting a mountain range I first dreamt of 50 years ago and have returned to regularly.” Did the inspiration for this mysterious range, seemingly older than No Name Peak or the Riesenstein, exist as a real place on Earth? Or did it merely arise from a blend of mythologies, adventure stories, and his unconscious mind?
Harvey was no longer around to answer any of these questions. If I wanted to understand more about the meanings behind such peaks, including my own, I’d have to look elsewhere—in the stories of imaginary ranges that continued to spread after his death and in the phantom geographies that still arise today.
THE QUEST FOR FABULOUS MOUNTAINS DIDN’T STOP WITH THE UNDISCOVERY of the Riesenstein. As they had so many times in history, seekers moved on to other places. During the late twentieth century, American mountaineer Galen Rowell became fascinated by the legends that surrounded the elevation of Amye Machen in the eastern Kunlun of Tibet. Decades after Terris Moore’s expedition decided to investigate Minya Konka instead, rumors persisted that Amye Machen might be the mountain taller than Everest.
“No survey [of Amye Machen] had been precise enough to convince geographers,” Rowell noted in the American Alpine Journal, “until a sensational news story appeared to confirm the mountain’s height during World War II. A U.S. pilot . . . reported coming out of the clouds at 30,000 feet . . . only to see a mountain rising above him.” In 1948, Bradford Washburn set out to try to ascertain the truth, accompanied by a former Minya Konka expedition member, Jack Young, and the ballpoint pen magnate Milton Reynolds (who paid for the trip). Their quest ended in infamous absurdity: leaving Washburn and other teammates behind in Beijing, Reynolds attempted an unauthorized flight over Amye Machen, quarreled with Chinese authorities, and then made a dramatic escape from the Shanghai airport in the expedition plane. Later, Reynolds claimed that he’d hurled fistfuls of his sample pens at Chinese guards who tried to stop him. In some versions of the story, the pens were made of gold.
