Denali's Howl: The Deadliest Climbing Disaster on America's Wildest Peak (14 page)

To be fair to the Wilcox team, part of the reason they’d taken so long was because they were relaying supplies, necessary when supporting a large team high on the mountain. The MCA team moved fast, intent on reaching the men they believed might be stranded without food and fuel.

“
We were still planning to relay,” Babcock said. “But then the park asked us if we would just go nonstop in hopes of getting up to where someone might be alive.”

To move fast, they had to go light, discarding all unnecessary equipment, including their tents.

“I had been very happy with snow caves and igloos, and everyone had experience over the winter building them. Our tents were quite heavy; we had those big pyramidal tents, so I decided we would go just with entrenching tools and we would take more food and fuel and go on up without stopping, without relaying.”

On the morning of July 26, the short traverse across Parker Pass to the Harper that Snyder and the others had found so treacherous and icy two days earlier was buried under two feet of new snow. “
The going was extremely difficult with deep new snow from 14,500 to 15,000,” Babcock recalled. “Gayle Nienhueser did an excellent job of leading all the way and breaking trail.”

They reached 15,100 feet at 1:30
P
.
M
. and spent the next two hours looking in vain for Don Sheldon’s airdrop after getting bad directions from Eielson.

Later they found one of the packages containing three radios, including one Sheldon was supposed to keep for his own use, precisely on the trail. It had been so hard to find because it was wrapped in a white pillowcase. Babcock’s anger over the incident is reflected in his log entry: “
Never should have done it, wasted hours looking. Sheldon’s reliability highly questionable due to the fact a pillowcase, unwanted drop at 15,100, his uncertainty of exact location of first drop after it could not be found, etc. BILL PISSED OFF!”

Looking back on it, Bill Babcock said he isn’t surprised that communications were fouled up. They were unable to speak directly to Don Sheldon, or to the park for that matter.

“
We had this crazy way of communicating,” he said. “They could hear us in Fairbanks, and Fairbanks could reach Eielson, and Eielson could contact the headquarters. It was a back-and-forth thing; it took forever to communicate.”

After the first foul-up, they asked to have Sheldon drop food and fuel at 17,900. If any of the seven men they still hoped to find were alive, they would need to feed them. Babcock’s concern grew as his party, which included his nineteen-year-old brother, put itself at greater and greater risk, climbing higher without getting the supply drops that had been promised. They carried a fraction of the food and fuel he liked to have at high altitude to facilitate the quick ascent. Not enough to endure another extended storm if they were marooned, and certainly not enough to support survivors.

Even the scheduled radio calls were exhausting. “Today, you can have a conversation in thirty seconds,” Babcock told me. “These conversations would take twenty, thirty, forty-five minutes the way communications were going. Gayle would say something; it would go to Fairbanks, to Eielson, and then to the park headquarters. Then the park would go to Eielson, then to Fairbanks, then to us. It took forever to get anything done, and you’re sitting out there, totally exposed, out of the snow cave. I really think that got to Gayle. He started to get sick; then you get weak, you get dehydrated on top of it. It’s only a matter of time before you’re getting pulmonary or cerebral edema.”

On Thursday, July 27, the summit of Denali stood white against the blue sky for the first time in more than a week. The shroud of clouds and blowing snow that had hidden it were gone and Don Sheldon wasted no time. He was at the mountain at 4:30
A
.
M
., passing over the MCA’s 15,100-foot camp at 4:45, and further angering Bill Babcock when no supplies were dropped.
Sheldon spent two hours searching the upper mountain to 18,000 feet in his Cessna 180 but saw no sign of the missing climbers. Gary Hansen and Paul Crews of the Alaska Rescue Group followed a few hours later in a chartered Cessna 310, flying through Denali Pass several times but spotting only the Western States Expedition on its way to the summit.

The MCA climbers started up the Harper Glacier at 10:00
A
.
M
., and after building an igloo at 16,500 feet, they settled in for another night. Stoves wouldn’t start that night, and the Babcocks weren’t able to cook dinner until 10:00
P
.
M
. It was cold and windy on the Harper Glacier, but the igloo offered warm refuge, free of the rustle and snap of a nylon tent bucking in the wind. Babcock’s journal reads, “
Bill exhausted, shelter constructed fair, Gayle starting with cold, windy otherwise weather good and fair.”

Clear skies and light winds reigned again on July 28, and
the A-67 Expedition spotted Sheldon’s shiny Cessna 180 at 10:00
A
.
M
. and again at 12:30
P
.
M
. searching the upper mountain.

The MCA party left for the Wilcox party’s camp at 17,900 at 10:00 a.m. Ireton and Hackney, both unaffected by the altitude, moved too quickly for Nienhueser, so he tied on to the Babcock brothers’ rope, which moved at a more moderate pace. Each man carried a 70-pound pack filled mostly with food and fuel. It was almost 5:00
P
.
M
. when Ireton spotted a Stubai ice ax, the brand Steve Taylor had carried, lying on top of the hard-packed snow a mile below the 17,900-foot camp.

“
The snow was hard enough; it looked like it had been blown from camp,” Ireton said. “So I picked it up and stuck it in the snow right where I had found it.”

A quarter of a mile on, he and Hackney found John Russell’s bamboo summit pole thrust in the snow, its top festooned with black strips of nylon from the burned tent. “Around that,” Ireton described, “there was a sleeping bag, and over the sleeping bag was an alpine hut red shell. It was just wrapped around and we came up to it and I thought it was just a cache or something so I picked it up and there was nothing inside of it except a pair of wool socks and some down booties.”

Next to the pole, Bill Babcock said, a crevasse yawned black against the bright, white snow. “
We hollered, we looked into it, and it was one of those bottomless things. I certainly wasn’t going to rappel into it. I have no idea what happened, but I would suspect someone is down at the bottom of that thing.”

The worst was yet to be discovered. After several more minutes of trudging up through the wind-crusted snow, the Wilcox team’s 17,900-foot-high Camp VII came into view.

There was no movement, no welcoming calls, and no survivors. Just silence.

Mark McLaughlin’s homemade tent stood oddly taut in the light breeze. Next to it was, as Bill Babcock described in his journal, “
a ghastly sight, a man sitting upright alongside a Logan tent. Face and hands are blue, green, white, frozen yet decomposing.”

Ireton said the frozen man wore orange and his face was covered with snow.

“
He was blown over, but during the storm he was holding the pole,” he said. “The tent had probably ripped apart and the sleeping bag had blown away and he was there holding the pole and he obviously froze to death.”

Gayle Nienhueser did not look closely at the body, though he took a photo of the tent-shrouded figure. The memory still haunts him forty-five years later.

“
I was twenty-six,” Nienhueser says. “I’d never seen a body before. The hand that was exposed was black, and it had frozen and thawed a couple of times. I wasn’t feeling good, and the smell . . .” His voice became choked and tears erupted from his eyes as we spoke. He put his face into his hands, bowed his head forward, and didn’t say anything for more than a minute.

The sight of the corpse was frightening for the climbers, suddenly bringing home the realization that on Denali, death is never far away for the careless and the unlucky. However, the gruesome condition of the climber’s body didn’t mean he had died a painful death. Freezing can be a peaceful and relatively painless way to go.

If there is any real pain, it comes at the beginning, when
the cold begins to penetrate the skin and causes surface capillaries to constrict, shunting blood deeper into the body. Fingers, toes, the tip of the nose, earlobes, and other extremities are sacrificed in order to keep the vital organs warm. As the blood retreats to protect the core, feet and hands begin to ache, and the nose and ears sting. But the pain, rarely overwhelming, soon is eased by numbness settling in where the blood once flowed.

Hypothermia takes over when the body temperature slips below 95 degrees Fahrenheit. With it comes violent shivering as muscles contract involuntarily, trying to generate body heat. When warmth continues to flee, the shivering slows and then stops, leaving the muscles unnaturally tight and making simple tasks like donning a jacket or striking a match difficult. Loss of muscle coordination soon follows and walking becomes problematic.

Hands and feet are soon useless, nose and ears turn white, and lips turn blue, making clear speech impossible.

Feelings of detachment to the rapidly deteriorating situation soon cloud the mind. A lost glove or hat? No worries. A sleeping bag carried away by the wind: vaguely inconvenient.

When the body’s core temperature drops into the 80s, complete apathy comes, and then stupor as the cold
renders brain enzymes less efficient. The consciousness that still clings to the rapidly cooling body grows blissfully unaware of the catastrophic breakdown of physical function. As blood gathers around the organs most vital to life, the kidneys go into overdrive to deal with the excess fluids that have flooded inward. An overpowering need to urinate rises, followed by one last, sweet release and the fleeting feeling of warmth on the skin.

A degree or two lower and the pulse becomes irregular and erratic as chilled nerves lose their ability to carry the signals that cue the heart to beat. When the core temperature reaches 85 degrees, a sudden and inexplicable feeling of heat cascades across the body, so hot that victims often tear their clothes off seeking relief, unintentionally hastening their own end. One theory behind this paradoxical undressing suggests that the surface capillaries that constricted early on to push body heat into the core suddenly dilate, bringing a burning sensation as
blood surges into the nearly frozen flesh. Whether it is the body’s last-ditch effort to warm itself or a sudden failure of the muscles constricting the blood vessels is unknown. Unconsciousness and death usually follow close behind.

Bill Babcock said the grisly discovery was disturbing for the entire team, him included.

“
It was a nightmarish thing to run into,” he said. “We tried to open the zipper on his parka but it was frozen. There was a terrible stench. I’d never seen anything like that before. We dug our snow caves quite a ways away.”

Too traumatized by their discovery, the men avoided the body, not thinking to take more photos that might help identify him later. They reported the dead man and the ruined camp to Eielson, and the rangers asked if the expedition would continue searching, promising to drop radios, 180 man-days of food, sleeping bags, and heavy-duty tents.

Babcock said they’d go for the summit in the morning and search along the way, but as to staying on for an extended search, “
We give negative as we must return to jobs if we make the peak.”

Back in Anchorage, Gary Hansen was hard at work again. With the mountain finally clear for flying, he worked to coordinate the large airdrop that had been promised to Babcock. After confirming that Joe Wilcox had requested it and would cover the cost, Hansen tried to secure the use of an aircraft large enough to drop the load above 18,000 feet on Denali. The Air Force was the obvious choice.

At 3:25
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.
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., he contacted Major Stevens at the RCC and asked if the Air Force could provide the food and supplies and make the drop. Stevens’s response was curt: “
Not likely.”

At 4:30 Stevens called back and asked, “Can this be accomplished commercially?” Hansen responded, “All equipment required not commercially available. Civilian aircraft available but not experienced in making critical air drop such as required here.” Then he added, “Timing most critical.”

Stevens called back fifteen minutes later. The flight was on.

The next morning, at 7:06, a C-130 took off from Elmendorf Air Force Base in Anchorage with a crew of six, accompanied by a combat photographer and two Alaska Rescue Group observers: Gary Hansen and Dave Johnston, one of the men who was part of the Winter Ascent of Denali earlier that year.

The upper mountain was clear and windless, and the bus-size prop plane thundered through Denali Pass ten times, varying its altitude with each passage. Johnston and Hansen rode in the cockpit and peered through the observation windows looking for the missing climbers.

Johnston was probably the most qualified man on the planet to be on the flight searching for the lost men. Just a few months earlier during the Winter Ascent, he himself had survived a similar weeklong storm in Denali Pass by digging a cave and holing up in it for a week with two companions. If anyone knew where to look, he did.