On High
By Mick Conefrey and Tim Jordan
When gold was discovered in the United States territory of Alaska in the 1870s, the prospectors found that the north and south of the territory were divided by an unbroken range of sharp mountain peaks. On clear days, a colossal dome could be seen rising from the center, white and shining, far higher than anything around it.
Native Alaskans knew it simply as "the big one," and it remained unnamed until 1897. That year prospector William Dickey wrote an account of his Alaska travels for the New York Sun. He told of dangerous river journeys, fierce timber wolves, and monstrous bears that broke windows and climbed into cabins. But most of all he had been impressed by a stupendous mountain he estimated to tower over 20,000 feet, which would make it the highest point in North America.
On an accompanying sketch Dickey labelled the peak "Mt. McKinley." He later admitted that the idea occurred to him on a whim. After two miners on the trail had bored him with arguments about the economic virtues of silver, he decided to retaliate by naming the mountain after U.S. Senator William McKinley, then the leading advocate of the competing gold standard.
Over the next decade and a half, no mountain anywhere had so strange and tangled a history as Mount McKinley. A series of expeditions converged on the mountain after the turn of the century, in attempts to conquer its summit. The first claimants to that crown turned out to be impostors who actually falsified their ascents. It took an eccentric missionary--an immigrant preacher who stated "I would rather climb Mount McKinley than own the richest gold mine in Alaska," a man who gave Latin lessons and administered sacraments as he climbed--to finally find a way up our continent's mightiest mountain.
When the Reverend Hudson Stuck accepted a missionary posting to Alaska in 1904, he packed his climbing equipment and barometric instruments in the knowledge that the country contained "an unclimbed mountain of the first class." In his native England he had hiked the Lake District, and later spent a summer min the Alps. While en route to Alaska he climbed Mount Rainier. Now, after eight years as the Episcopal Church's Archdeacon of the Yukon, he was a hardened wilderness traveller. But there had been few opportunities to indulge his love of high places.
For, in the end, his interest in climbing was exceeded by his passion for missionary work. "I am more interested in men than in mountains," he once said. And no people concerned him more than the Athabascan Indians of Alaska. His was outspokenly devoted to their spiritual and physical welfare, and journeyed long and hard to bring the Gospel to their remote settlements. A visitor described Stuck this way in 1910:
He had grown a beard which changed his personal appearance until he resembled none else so much as the Man...who died on Calvary.... He looked as though the sins of the world rested upon his shoulders and he was forced to carry the burden as his Cross. His voice was kind and sweet, yet so sad, and while his words were words of optimism, they were few and far between....He tells no stories unless they point a moral, or voice an indignity put upon his people.
Yet in 1912, after near misses by other would-be McKinley climbers, it seemed to Stuck as if the mountain was calling to him. He persuaded his bishop to grant him leave to attempt a climb in the following year. He was 49 years old.
Needing strong young comrades, but limited by the expedition's budget of $1,000, Stuck eventually coaxed a local miner to go for nothing. Harry Karstens, known as the "Seventy Mile Kid" for his gold panning along the Seventy Mile River, was 34.A resident of Alaska since he was 19, Karstens was enormously strong and self-reliant, and proved a fortunate choice. The party was completed by Robert Tatum, an acquaintance of Stuck's in training for the priesthood, and Walter Harper, a half-Indian young man whom Stuck was tutoring and had virtually adopted. Both were 21 years old.
The party left Fairbanks in mid March 1913. Stuck had become convinced that the primary difficulties in topping McKinley lay "in its remoteness, its size, the great distances of snow and ice its climbing must include the passage of, the burdens that must be carried over those distances."His solution was to establish numerous high camps, and lay siege to the summit. As for rations, bringing canned food to the mountain was "like bringing coals to Newcastle." They were travelling across some of the best game country in the world. At their base camp, Stuck and his companions killed four caribou and a mountain goat, and boiled the meat down in a 50-pound lard can. By combining the reduced meat with butter, and molding it in their hands, they produced 200 balls of food, which, according to Stuck, they "never failed to enjoy."
They now had unexpected visitors. Although Stuck had carefully prevented news of the expedition from reaching the Fairbanks papers, it was common knowledge at his mission stations and among the Athabascan people. Suddenly a young couple arrived at the high base camp with a baby, having walked 100 miles in the hope of finding the Archdeacon and having him baptize their new child. The ceremony was duly performed, amid the heads and skins of the butchered animals. To Stuck's astonishment, it then transpired that the couple had never been happily on their way. The pastor recorded in his journal:
I was rejoiced at one more of the many instances I could recount of the fidelity of the natives to the teachings of the Church. I wonder how far up the mountain they would have followed us had they found our base camp deserted? Our little party discussed that matter when they were gone. Walter thought they would have followed us to the glacier, but not beyond, but I think they would have gone on until they could go no further, or until their food was entirely consumed.
On April 11 the mountaineers made their way to a point some 20 miles from the summit. For the next three weeks they ferried supplies to their climbing depot at the head of a glacier. The work was "ceaseless grind" and Stuck was amazed by the heat of the sun. The first of May, the Feast of Ascension, was a day of particular "toil and penance"; it seemed impossible that he was panting and sweating while surrounded entirely by ice and snow. Strange, too, was the solitary rabbit that followed them to 10,000 feet of altitude. It gnawed at the willow canes they left to mark their path, and at one point was seen to leap a crevasse.
Two days later they were camped at 11,500 feet, more than halfway up the mountain. The ridge ahead presented an unpleasant surprise: A recent earthquake had rent what was once a smooth path into a jumbled mass. Blocks of ice and rock lay in all manner of positions, with here a pinnacle and there a great gap. Moreover, the floor of the glacier was strewn with enormous icebergs.
Traversing this three-mile ridge now occupied Stuck's party for three long weeks. In order to relay their supplies to higher camps, it was necessary to cut a staircase through the tangle of ice-blocks: "over them, around them, on the sheer sides of them, under them, whatever seemed to our judgment the best way of circumventing each individual block." Karstens led the way, assisted by Harper, while Stuck and Tatum ferried supplies behind them. They were frequently driven down by bad weather, astonished by how quickly it could change. While they waited in their tent on the glacier for storms to pass, sometimes for days, Tatum practiced reciting church liturgies. Stuck worked on a forthcoming book about his travels as a missionary, Ten Thousand Miles with a Dog Sled, and resumed his tutoring of Harper: "An hour or two of history and geography, gave the day variety and occupation. A pupil is a great resource."
But time passed slowly. It was not until May 27 that Karstens reached the unbroken snow above the earthquake cleavage. Stuck no longer believed that climbing McKinley was entirely a matter of logistics and endurance: The shattered ridge added "all the spice of sensation and danger that any man could desire." He was full of praise for his partner's judgment and daring. The four men now moved their camp up Karstens' precarious staircase, to the edge of the "Grand Basin" between McKinley's north and south summits. The worst was now behind them.
They camped at 15,000 feet, and again at 16,500. Altogether they were to make no fewer than five camps in the Grand Basin, the highest at 18,000 feet, to which they relayed more than two weeks of supplies. Stuck explained:
We were at the base of the final peak, prepared to besiege it. If the weather should prove bad we could wait. We could advance our parallels, could put another camp on the ridge at 19,000 feet, and yet another halfway up the dome. If we had to fight our way step by step and could advance but a couple of hundred feet a day, we were still confident that, barring accident or desperate misfortune, we could reach the top.
Though resolute, Stuck was not enjoying himself. The summer he spent in Switzerland had been nothing like this: "To roam over glaciers and scramble up peaks free and untrammeled is mountaineering in the Alps--to toil upward with a 40-pound pack on one's back and the knowledge that tomorrow one must go down for another is mountaineering in Alaska." The thin air was taking a heavy toll on him. Every 20 or 30 paces he was forced to stop by fits of panting that grew more violent the higher they climbed; several times he fell onto the snow, choking, as "everything turned black" before his eyes. At 15,000 feet he had stopped smoking his pipe, but continued to fare worse than his companions, who gradually relieved him of any burden other than a large mercurial barometer. To this Stuck clung tenaciously, afraid that one of the others would break it.
Stuck had forgotten to bring an American flag. He now set Tatum to work looking for red, white, and blue material among their equipment. The result, sewn from two silk handkerchiefs and the cover of a needlework bag, was a dainty miniature of the stars and stripes.
At four o'clock in the morning of June 7, 1913, the group began to climb the final 2,300 feet to the summit. The sky was entirely clear, but a keen north wind was blowing. Stuck wore six pairs of socks inside his moccasins, and still his feet felt "like lumps of iron." On winter trails in the Yukon he had endured lower temperatures, but he was colder now. After a little more than seven hours, the north peak was already below them. Stuck's shortness of breath grew more distressing as they neared the south summit. He wondered if he might be physically unable to do it. At Harper's insistence he finally "surrendered" his mercurial barometer; all he had to do now was carry himself to the top.
With keen excitement we pushed on. Walter, who had been in the lead all day, was the first to scramble up; a native Alaskan, he is the first human being to set foot upon the top of Alaska's greatest mountain, and he had well earned the lifelong distinction. Karstens and Tatum were hard upon his heels, but the last man on the rope, in his enthusiasm and excitement somewhat over-passing his narrow wind margin, had almost to be hauled up the last few feet, and fell unconscious for a moment upon the floor of the little snow basin that occupies the top of the mountain.
As soon as Stuck recovered, he said a brief prayer of thanksgiving. They now set up their scientific instruments--a procedure they had carefully rehearsed lower on the mountain. When the readings were taken, Tatum attached his tiny flag to a tent pole and waved it for a moment--then removed it and handed the pole to Stuck, who lashed on a crosspiece to form "the sign of Our Redemption." Around this the men gathered to say the Te Deum. After 90 minutes on the summit, they began their descent.
Stuck wrote later:
Only those who have for long years cherished a great and almost inordinate desire, and have had that desire gratified to the limit of their expectation, can enter into the deep thankfulness and content that filled the heart upon the descent of this mountain. There was no pride of conquest, no trace of that exultation of victory some enjoy upon the first ascent of a lofty peak, no gloating over good fortune that had hoisted us a few hundred feet higher than others who had struggled and been discomfited. Rather was the feeling that a privileged communion with the high places of the earth had been granted.
The Reverend Hudson Stuck died in 1920 and is buried at the remote Athabascan settlement of Fort Yukon, his mission headquarters a few miles inside the Arctic Circle. His portrait still looks down from the wall of his church.
—Mick Conefrey and Tim Jordan, producers for the British Broadcasting Corporation, are authors of Mountain Men, recently published by Da Capo Press, from which this is excerpted.
