Here is the amazing conclusion, continuing from Part 3, of the story of the first ascent of the highest mountain in Canada, Mt. Logan.
This simple-sounding feat was excellently described almost thirty years later when Wilfred Noyce was at 21,000 feet on Mount Everest. He wrote:
Heart aches, Lungs pant, The dry air Sorry, scant. Legs lift and why at all. Loose drift Heavy fall. Prod the snow It’s easiest way; A flat step is holiday.
At 4:20 p.m., with the sun glaring from an unclouded sky, all six reached the top. As they tramped slowly onto the summit the first place everybody looked was to the south-east. There the companion dome glittered wickedly two miles away. There was a painful silence as they looked, for what they felt was far too deep for mere curses. The distant mound was obviously higher than the one on which they stood. Hoping to prove that his eyes were wrong, surveyor Lambart pulled with freezing fingers the surveying level from his pack. The obvious was formally confirmed; they still had another mountain to climb. And the gulf between was almost 1,000 feet deep.
MacCarthy, Foster, and Carpe set off directly towards the exasperating summit. Lambart, Read, and Taylor, gambling that this peak was their goal, had left most of their equipment at the base of it. They would have gone back for it anyway, but they particularly wanted the last few willow-wands that were tied to their packs. Half an hour later, they were all together once more in a saddle beneath what they hoped was their final trial, the ultimate apex of Canada.
The pitiful pace slowed even more. In this region of almost perpetual wind, the powdered snow could not stay for long. Brittle, shining ice gleamed in the open, and as they manoeuvred around these patches they had to cut almost two hundred steps in the crusted snow. The slope was frighteningly steep to tackle at this height – in several places it was about sixty degrees. Every movement had to be safeguarded carefullly, by ramming the ice-axe as far down into the snow as possible and then paying the rope out slowly around it. It was Carpe’s job to safeguard the leader, but MacCarthy knew that if he fell he could expect little except psychological help from the rope. Carpe was exhausted, and had to be helped to move on the final stretch. But finally, while MacCarthy was cutting steps like an automaton, with no conscious thought to guide his axe, his head came level with the top of the ridge. A hundred yards away, at the top of a gentle rise, stood the summit.
It was here, so close to victory, that MacCarthy thought for a moment he had gone mad. For days the altitude and hard work had made them all light-headed, with delusions that they were hopping through time and space, like giants in seven-league boots performing prodigious feats. Now into MacCarthy’s tired and disbelieving brain flashed the picture of a giant’s head, framed in a vivid, circular rainbow.
“Now I was possibly seeing the unreal”, he wrote, “perhaps one of nature’s brilliant hoops through which I must jump when legs and feet felt like lead after their long ordeal.” It was a relief to his brain when Carpé, the scientist, said matter-of-factly that it was a Brocken spectre with a halo.” When the sun’s rays coincide with the direction in which the climber is looking, the shadow of his head is sometimes projected onto the outside edge of a cloud to form the spectre. The rainbow halo comes from light hitting the liquid droplets in the air which stay unfrozen even at the temperature of near zero. MacCarthy had never seen either before.
A few more minutes took them to the top, crampons crunching with a squeak into the hard snow of the knife-edged summit ridge. It was 8 p.m. The summit was a thirty-foot pinnacle of ice, just big enough for the six of them to stand on. The sides dropped thousands of feet to remote untrodden glaciers below.
MacCarthy recorded the scene this way: “We veritably seemed to be standing on top of the world, with King Peak and many others that had looked like insurmountable heights now lying below us, and appearing in the vast sea of foam as mere specks of flotsam. This effect, it seemed to me, was out of all proportion to the variation in altitude. Or is it with altitude as with gravitation, radiation and hunger, in proportion to the square of the distance from the object?
“As the most ravenous member of the party, perhaps, described it, here below us was a huge layer cake with its nuts showing through the frosting; a veritable sea of white expanse with myriads of islands, and all thousands of feet below.”
But even as they revelled in the view – and the faculty of observation, curiously, remains virtually undulled as altitude saps the other senses – clouds began bubbling and boiling up in the direction of Mount St. Elias, a cauldron filled with storm and trouble. As they stood numbly on the summit, burying in the snow a brass tube with their names and the date, and munching cheese, chocolate, and dried fruits, they shook hands all round.
“We were foolishly happy in the success of our venture,” said Captain MacCarthy, “and we thought that our troubles were at an end.”
Lambart was the first to leave the summit, with Taylor and Read on his rope. It was almost 8:30 p.m., and as Carpe, Foster, and MacCarthy left a few seconds later it was obvious that they were in for a dangerous race with the weather. In a few short minutes, it was equally obvious that they had lost it. Thick cloud enveloped them, and they had trouble following even the big steps they had hacked out on the way up the final steep slopes. Where the going flattened out between this and the other Double Peak, there were no steps to follow. The sharp crampons had left no trail in the hard crust – and the last of the willow-wands was a mile away, where the supply had run out.
The wind rose, and began to punch the reeling party in shattering gusts that all but knocked them flat. Flying snow in the air blended with the snow on the surface to produce that phenomenon so much feared by Arctic travellers: the “white-out”. In this condition it is impossible to tell direction, or even which way the ground slopes. Now they were wandering aimlessly. Five hours after they left the summit, at 1.30 a.m., they were still at the 19,000-foot level, and hopelessly lost. They had no choice but the one that many experienced climbers would have considered near-certain death – to spend the night huddled in holes in the snow.
Moving like sick, apathetic shadows of the men they had been two weeks before, they began pecking out holes with the narrow points and adzes of their ice-axes. Snow-shoes served, though not too well, as shovels, but the energy that is the primary tool for digging reasonable shelters just was not there. They had reached the penultimate plateau of exhaustion, a plateau sloping gently down towards oblivion, where the body’s strength has gone and only the spur of the mind is left.
This in itself, though usually on a less epic scale, is part of the fascination of mountaineering: the realization that each difficult climb can take you far beyond the physical limits of ordinary life, and that each worth-while success may bring a new boundary of self-realization to cross. It is the dogged crossing of this boundary that gives rise to all the great feats of adventure.
There was little thought of adventure in their minds as they chipped away at their task. There was little, if any, conscious thought that they must do this to survive. The holes they made were so poor and inadequate that if they had been forced to put sled-dogs in them, the climbers would have felt sorry for the dogs. “They were pitiful evidences of the weakened state of our party,” wrote the leader. Carpe still had the will-power to check the temperature: it was -12° F., and dropping quickly. But when the thermometer fell into the snow, he didn’t have the energy to scrabble for it, and it soon vanished in a soft drift. Exhaustion fought with the fear of freezing to death, and won in fitful snatches. But wild attacks of shivering and frightening nightmares woke them time and time again. Much to their surprise, all lived to see the dawn, which was indicated merely by an infinitesimal lightening of the dark shades of gloomy grey. Still they could see nothing in the whirling snow.
Writing of this grim situation, MacCarthy once more outdid himself in understatement. He wrote: “A further period under such trying conditions might have reduced some of our members to a helpless state. So at noon I called all hands and ordered a start with Andy leading.”
Andy Taylor, who lived in the north and was accustomed to the bitter cold of Arctic winter, was probably less affected by the long exposure than any of the others. He was ready to go at once. But the leader and Foster, who was hero-worshipped by the men he had led into dangerous battles, found it was one thing to order – even in a weak and faltering shout – and quite another to get people to obey, even when the order was meant to save their lives. It was another two hours before the rest of the party could be pried from the near-death stupor they had sunk into in the holes that so nearly became their tombs.
The great need now was action – exercise to start the frigid blood pumping through their stiff, sore bodies. But almost as great was the need for caution. One false move in the deceptive, dangerous, flat light could put them over the brink of an ice-cliff. MacCarthy took the leader’s place for descent – at the end. Like the captain of a sinking ship, the leader comes last, to make sure everybody else is safe. He is the anchor man, ready and competent to check any slips that he sees developing among the men on the rope below him. The most skilled man comes down last on the rope, too, because he is the only one who will have to descend without a rope from above.
MacCarthy was barely able to see the others on the rope, and he marvelled, in a detached sort of way, at the exaggerated drunken swaying of his companions. Suddenly, the caution drummed into him by years of imminent danger in the mountains snapped his mind back into focus. A faint black streak, hardly visible, appeared through the mist a few feet to his right. Cautiously he edged nearer to investigate it, and found to his horror a cliff dropping off into the bottomless shroud of space.
“I hastened forward to give Andy warning, but it was too late,” he wrote. “In a moment he disappeared from sight, with the rope left taut in Read’s hands.” MacCarthy hurried up to help Read take the strain on the rope, and moved carefully to the edge of the precipice, afraid of what he might see when he looked down. Thirty feet below, motionless and half buried in the snow, was Taylor. MacCarthy called urgently to him, but he did not move. MacCarthy called again, his voice pitched higher now in desperation. And this time Taylor answered. He was unhurt, but temporarily paralysed by having his breath knocked out as he landed.
A few feet farther along, the cliff curved down to a low point close to the level where Taylor had landed. The five climbers moved along to this, and after Taylor had a few minutes to get his breath back they were able to haul him back to safety.
MacCarthy was so relieved to have escaped disaster that he found the energy to pull Taylor’s leg about it. It was frightfully bad form, he said, for Taylor to have left the other members of his rope without giving them proper warning. It raised a laugh, but as a joke it backfired.
A few minutes later MacCarthy tumbled over an unseen ice-cliff and dropped fifteen feet before Carpe and Foster held him with a ribcrushing check on the rope.
Despite an ordeal that would have destroyed lesser parties, they still pushed slowly on. And finally they had a stroke of luck – the kind that comes only to top-flight men of long experience. Nobody really knew where they were going, but Taylor, with nothing but instinct to guide him in the white-out, kept heading obstinately to where he insisted they would find the last willow-wand. They found it, with Read’s sharp eyes spotting it first. Just the sight of a slender stick they had cut from a wilderness bush was enough to send new strength into their legs, proof enough of the mind’s control of the body’s limits.
MacCarthy summed it up this way: “The reaction was the same as I once felt when struggling in a hopeless surf that rapidly carried me seaward, with combers strangling every effort I made to catch breath. I finally gave up, let go – and my feet touched the bottom. In an instant I had the strength of a giant, and incautiously jumped to my feet, only to have them swept from under me again. But deliverance was there, and I did not say good-bye to this world that day.”
He didn’t say good-bye to the world on this day of trial by ice on the mountain either- in fact he lived to be eighty, and died in Annapolis, Maryland, in 1956. But neither did he say good-bye to the terrors of being lost high on Mount Logan.
Taylor, Read, and Lambart followed the wands to Plateau Camp, the two flimsy tents at 17,800 feet. Taylor would hold onto one wand while Read, at the other end of the rope, would pass by him and look for the next wand, a hundred feet away in the driving blizzard. Then Read would hold on to this one while Taylor passed him.
But MacCarthy, Foster, and Carpe, the most experienced climbers of them all, stopped for a moment to tighten a packstrap. They lost touch with the other rope in a few seconds, became confused by the storm, and headed on, hoping to pick up the willow-wand trail again. They tramped slowly for an hour, and as they went something niggled at the methodical mind of Carpe. At first his weary brain just sensed that something was wrong, although it was too tired to puzzle it out. Suddenly he realized: the rise of the slope was on their right now, instead of on their left as it had been before. They all realized instantly what had happened. In their brief pause the fury of the storm had made them turn completely around and they were now heading back towards the peak – away from safety. With spirits too drained for emotion, they turned around, and plodded back for another hour. By now, however, the grey of night was blending with the whirling clouds, and they were forced to stop until daylight.
It was a night of delirious rambling, of hallucinations and moments of cold sanity when they “knew” they would never escape a second time.
“High cliffs of ice would seem to rise up before us to block our way,” MacCarthy wrote, “and yet we never encountered them. Barns and shelters would suddenly appear that we knew could not exist, for otherwise one’s companions would surely suggest taking refuge in them.”
It was so cold that they abandoned their idea of staying in one place until they could see properly. They trudged on automatically through the night, twice routinely scraping out feeble shelters for naps that never lasted long enough to overcome their shivering.
With dawn, however, came visibility. With it, the pressing problems vanished; they could see their way to Plateau Camp and by 5 a.m. they were wolfing chicken for breakfast after a harrowing thirty-four hours. By 6 a.m. they were asleep. They awoke at 4 p.m., and stayed awake just long enough for another meal; then went back to sleep to build up strength for the trip out. It was no downhill stroll, as they first had to climb to the Camp of Eighteen-Five, a difficult task in their present condition.
Now, with the lash of imminent death no longer curling around their shoulders, reaction to their terrible ordeal began to hit all the climbers. They were up by 6 a.m. on June 26, but even though “mares’ tails” in the sky warned them that more storms were on the way, it took five hours to get ready to move off. Even then, they left the tents, mattresses, clothing, and spare food behind. Taylor’s rope went first, snowshoeing along the line of looming willow-wands. The going was good, rhythm began returning to their weary legs, and spirits improved.
Then they reached a steep, rounded snow dome where the winds had compressed the snow to a hard crust. It was impossible to get up it on cumbersome snow-shoes, so they began to change to their sole-fitting crampons.
As they did so, the weather launched its most vicious attack yet. A hurricane hit them, and the temperature plummeted. The normally simple task of tying the long tapes of the crampons became almost impossible. The strings rapidly became almost unmanageable bars of ice. Bare hands were needed to manipulate them in the freezing wind.
Everybody suffered frost-bite in the fingers as the painful but imperative task of tying the crampons went slowly on. Most of the party had touches of frost-bite in their feet too, and several were temporarily blind from the combination of glare and icy particles hurled horizontally into their faces. The agony of Hurricane Hill was unanimously voted the most terrifying experience so far, even by those who survived the two nights out near the summit.
Somehow they managed to finish the job and push on. By 3 p.m. they were at the site of the Camp of Eighteen-Five, where a small granite rib split the fury of the storm and gave them some shelter. Now the way out was all downhill – and the retreat gave the first signs of turning into a rout. Already they had abandoned two tents at Plateau Camp, and had no safeguard in case of a high-level accident. They struggled on to Windy Camp (16,700 feet), where there was another tent and a cache of supplies. This too they abandoned, with only one thought in their cold-dimmed brains: “Get down before it is too late.” The six strong men could hardly muster the strength to pull the shoe-packs from a corner of the partly-collapsed tent; then on they went
Once more, they were back in thick fog and fast-flying snow; but this time the thin green wands stood out like oak trees. New avalanches of disintegrating ice had blotted out parts of their route through the ice-fall, but as they passed the last unstable pinnacles of ice they could see three tents half-buried in the snow at Col Camp ( 14,500 feet). Getting to them was still a major task, however. Avalanche danger was now extreme, with masses of newly-fallen snow poised to slide. The urge was strong to rush straight down to camp and the safe comfort it represented. Instead, they forced themselves to be slow and desperately careful. An accident here could turn triumph to disaster just as surely as one at the summit 5,000 feet above. And this was the likely place for an accident to happen: most mountaineering accidents happen not in the difficult places where mind and muscle are at top pitch, but on the way down, in the anti-climax after success.
It was 1.30 a.m. when they reached camp, and they stayed thirty-six hours, although the altitude was high for sick, bone-weary men. At this camp, Foster showed the unselfish spirit that had earned him the devotion of his men in the war. While the others lay exhausted in their sleeping-bags, he moved methodically around with the first-aid kit. All Lambart’s toes were badly frozen, and so were several of Carpe’s. The first joints on all MacCarthy’s fingers and thumbs were already turning black. Everybody in the party needed some sort of treatment. Then, when he had fixed up the others as best he could, Billy Foster began to look after the eleven small patches of frost-bite that had nipped his own body.
When the body has taken so much punishment, it is hard for even the most active mind to persuade it to leave any level of comfort, no matter how slight. Even the thought of a well-stocked camp at Cascade, at an elevation where a man would feel like a whole man again, was barely able to move them. When finally they did move, on June 28, they once more abandoned almost everything and pushed on down. Andy Taylor went first. He went unroped, despite the ever-present danger of vanishing into a crevasse, and dragged behind him his pack, wrapped in a canvas sheet. This gouged a deep, smooth trench in the soft snow and made it easier for the others to get down. It was a brave and dangerous performance by Taylor, and the fact that he volunteered to do it at all indicates how tired and sick his companions must have seemed to him.
By 9 p.m. they were back at Quartz Ridge, at the top of the last 1,000-foot snow slope above Cascade advanced base camp. On June 2, they had made this descent in fifteen minutes. Now it took them twelve times as long – three hours. They crawled through the tent-sleeves just after midnight, and MacCarthy noted in his diary: “Tents in bad shape, but I in worse condition.” But no matter how bad it was, they were at least down to 7,800 feet, where men can breathe in comfort, turn over in bed without getting palpitations, and rest without frightening worries about tomorrow.
For two days they rested here while Foster took ceaseless care of the sick. They set off again on July 1. The glaciers were fast losing their deep mantle of winter snow to the summer sun, and the travel was wet and slow. It was dangerous, too, as the constant melting rotted the firm layers of snow that had bridged the deep crevasses on the journey in. So they began to travel at night. At this elevation, the snow still froze at night, strengthening the crevasse bridges, and generally making the surface easier for pulling the two heavy sledges.
Now the worry of high, stormbound camps had gone, and was replaced by a restless drive to get home. Even the discovery that the first big food-cache had been destroyed by bears did not bother them. They rested a few hours near the ruins, and pushed on. On July 4, they stepped off the ice of Chitina Glacier onto vegetation that looked startlingly green and lush to eyes that had seen only ice and snow for forty-four days. Bears had demolished the food-cache here too, but on July 6 they reached the comfort of Hubrick’s Camp.
It had taken tremendous endurance to walk so far on frost-bitten feet, but here Lambart, Carpe, and Read decided their feet were so bad they couldn’t possibly walk any farther. Raw flesh was visible where the dead surface tissues had sloughed off. Yet the base at the village of McCarthy was still eighty miles away.
In desperation, they decided to try to float down the turbulent Chitina River system on home-made rafts. For several days they worked, building two small rafts that were solemnly christened Logan and Loganette. They looked frail, inadequate things to carry six lives through the rapid, twisting channels of the Chitina. Each was made of six small logs, lashed together, with a small platform on which the baggage could be carried high out of the water.
Early on the afternoon of July 11 they set off. Taylor, Read, and Lambart were riding on Logan, and MacCarthy, Carpe, and Foster on Loganette. After a hair-raising ride of more than fifty miles, Taylor’s craft landed that night on a beach at the nearest point to the village of McCarthy. This still left them a thirty-mile walk across rough country to safety. Lambart’s feet were far worse than anybody else’s, yet he managed the trek next day without food and practically unaided.
The three men on Loganette, who had been forced to spend the second night out near the summit, ran out of luck here too. Only eighteen miles from their starting-point, they met disaster, and barely escaped alive. In one particularly rough stretch of river their raft turned completely over, pitching all three into the glacial water. They managed to grab the raft and paddle their way to shore, but all their camping and cooking equipment was lost. There were still seventy miles to walk, and all they had was a few scraps of emergency rations.
On their pain-wracked feet, the seventy miles took them four days. Just as they reached the village on July 15, they met a party led by Taylor that was setting out to search the bars of the Chitina for their bodies.
The details of their tremendous feat thrilled the mountaineering world – and obviously frightened it a little too, for it was twenty-five years before anybody even attempted the mountain again.
Once again, a huge thank-you to Paddy Sherman, the author of this marvelous story, for his permission to re-print it here and share it with all of you.