Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Terray felt a sense of despondency as he headed down. “On this proud and beautiful
mountain,” he later wrote, “we have lived hours of fraternal, warm and exalting no-
bility. Here for a few days we have ceased to be slaves and really been men. It is hard
to return to servitude.”
B
Y
1965, D
ON
J
ENSEN AND
I had begun to think of ourselves as Alaska veterans, even
though we were only twenty-two. Despite our failure on the east ridge of Mount De-
borah the previous summer, we set our sights on an equally difficult objective for our
third expedition. Bradford Washburn had become our mentor. In the inner sanctum of
his office atop the Boston Museum of Science (which Washburn had founded), I spent
long hours leafing through his thirty years' worth of aerial photos of Alaskan moun-
tains.
By February, Don and I had settled on Mount Huntington as our challenge. Terray's
team had beaten us to the first ascent, but in Washburn's pictures we had found a
plausible route on the mountain's west face. It would require landing on the Tokositna
Glacier, where no one had ever been, and it looked harder than anything yet climbed
in Alaska, but we were at the apogee of youthful ambition.
In bad French, I wrote to Jacques Soubis, the author of the article on Huntington's
first ascent that had appeared in
La Montagne et Alpinisme.
He was generous with
advice and encouragement, informing us that Terray's team had considered only the
northwest and east ridges as likely routes on Huntington, but that he would hesitate
to call the west face—however grim it looked—impossible.
On Deborah, Don and I had realized that a two-man party was stretching the odds
too thin in Alaska. For Huntington, we recruited a pair of younger Harvard climbers,
Matt Hale and Ed Bernd. Relatively inexperienced, they seemed daunted by Don's and
my ambition, but they could hardly say no to so heady an invitation.
By that year, Don's and my identification with Terray and Lachenal had become
full-blown. On Huntington, however, it was Terray who seemed an almost tangible
presence. We had all but memorized his article in the
American Alpine Journal.
Over
and over again, Don would quote his favorite line from that account: “It is not the goal
of
grand alpinisme
to face peril, but it is one of the tests one must undergo to deserve
the joy of rising for an instant above the state of crawling grubs.” Like the French, we
built a snow cave for our Base Camp. As the bad weather raged outside, I would cite
another of Terray's lines: “I have read somewhere that in this range the big storms can
last for eight or ten consecutive days.” (On Deborah and McKinley, we had sat out sev-
eral interminable tempests.)
