Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
tain juniors and seniors had come back from summer expeditions to the Coast and
Saint Elias Ranges of Canada, where they had reached the summits of such storied
mountains as Waddington and Logan. Until that moment, the idea that I might ever
emulate Rébuffat or Terray and go to the great ranges had remained an improbable
fantasy.
The summer after my sophomore year, I was invited on my first expedition. That
July, six HMC cronies and I made the first direct ascent of the Wickersham Wall on
Mount McKinley, a 14,000-foot-high precipice of ice and rock that forms the tallest
single mountain face in the Americas. Our adventure was capped by a week-long vigil
at 17,000 feet as we waited out a blizzard so severe that our bush pilot—who had flown
through the storm to see our tracks disappearing into avalanche debris—reported us
missing and feared dead.
On the Wickersham Wall, I cemented a partnership with a classmate named Don
Jensen. Stocky, strong, moody, and painfully sincere, Don had hardened his high
school apprenticeship with three-week solo outings in the Sierra Nevada of his native
California. During our junior year, we met every day in the dining hall and talked ob-
sessively about mountains. Already we were scheming a return to Alaska. On McKin-
ley, we had been tutored by the more experienced men a year or two older than us.
Now Don and I wanted to organize our own expedition, and find a mountain route
even more challenging than the Wickersham Wall.
Sometime in 1963, Don and I came across a book with the awkward title
Conquista-
dors of the Useless.
First published in France two years before (as
Les Conquérants de
l'Inutile
), the 351-page tome had just been translated and published in Great Britain.
(How we found a copy, I have forgotten: perhaps an older bibliophile in the HMC had
sent away for the topic.)
To say that Don and I devoured
Conquistadors
is an understatement. Every page
brimmed with revealed truth—for we were reading the autobiography of Lionel Ter-
ray. At once, the topic replaced both
Annapurna
and
Starlight and Storm
as my favor-
ite work of mountain literature. In blunt, vivid prose, Terray went straight to the heart
of the mystical calling in which Don and I had started to become acolytes. Not for him
the rapturous poesy of Rébuffat, the idealized drama of Herzog. We relished every de-
tail. Even a sentence like, “As I went on, it became more and more difficult to let go
with one hand even for a moment, and the axe was getting in my way,” rang with a
clarion purity. Here was the very stuff of extreme climbing, laid out in all its logistical
and technical minutiae. The topic met the ultimate criterion of adventure writing, for
as Don and I read Terray's pages, our palms grew damp with sweat.
