Denali's Howl: The Deadliest Climbing Disaster on America's Wildest Peak (15 page)

But on that day, though the sky was cloudless, the wind calm, and visibility about as good as it gets, they saw no sign of survivors. Johnston said while the military plane was perfect for dropping large amounts of supplies, it proved to be a poor platform for searching the upper mountain. “
It’s not the kind of rig you want to be looking for little dots from,” he said. “Too fast an airplane.”

On one run they dropped radios near a rope team of three men, probably Nienhueser and the Babcock brothers, who were climbing together that day. A few minutes later the plane made a west-to-east run through the pass and dropped 180 man-days of food in the form of forty-six cases of C rations, along with twelve double sleeping bags. On the return east-to-west run, they dropped five Gerry cans of stove fuel and nine two-man tents.

Bill Babcock said their accuracy left something to be desired. “
Well, the plane flew over and dropped everything off the West Buttress, right over the edge—tons of stuff, and it didn’t do us a bit of good.”

High overhead, the plane circled the mountain twice and headed back to Anchorage. So much for the flyover.

The MCA team had risen at 2:30
A
.
M
. after a fitful night, haunted by thoughts of the young man who sat in permanent repose so close by. They were on the way to the summit by 5:30
A
.
M
. Bill Babcock broke trail to Denali Pass, and then Hackney and Ireton, on their own rope, took the lead. Around noon the five men were approaching Archdeacon’s Tower at 19,650 feet. Nienhueser was suffering from a bad headache and Bill Babcock watched him closely, but the weather was holding and they all pushed on. Ireton and Hackney pulled ahead and reached the summit first. They were on the way down the summit ridge at 2:30
P
.
M
. when they passed the other three heading up.

“
By three fifteen we also reach the summit,” Babcock’s journal notes. “Somehow Gayle makes it. Weather definitely closing in so we take a few pictures and depart.”

As Hackney and Ireton waited below, the sound of an aircraft engine filled the sky. It was Don Sheldon,
this time in his Super Cub.
The plane circled the slope below Archdeacon’s Tower, dove at it once, and then flew close to the two climbers and dropped a message.

Scrawled on a piece of brown paper bag was a diagram and a note. Two marks indicated Ireton and Hackney; three others represented the men near the summit. Below a scrawl indicating Archdeacon’s Tower was a note: “I see something red over on the slope.”

Ireton started toward it, far enough to spot the patch of color on the icy slope, but Hackney blew his whistle to call him back, insisting they wait and discuss it with Babcock, the expedition leader.

Babcock could see the signs of an approaching storm and was eager to get back to the safety of their snow caves. He thought investigating the bodies would be too risky and time-consuming. “
I really tried very hard to talk them out of going over there,” he said. “But John was a very conscientious guy. They wanted to go over and check.”

Nienhueser and the Babcock brothers continued on toward camp while Ireton and Hackney went to investigate. Hackney broke through a crevasse bridge as his partner belayed him down the 50-degree slope but continued until he could get a good look at the object. It was another frozen man, this one dressed in a red parka,
orange wind pants, and green overboots.

“
The body was in a sitting position facing downhill with one leg extended and the other leg in a sitting position underneath his body, in a semi-relaxed position,” Hackney said. “I never seen an ice ax or a pack or a sleeping bag, anything. He was just in a very relaxed sitting position, just as if he had died in a very relaxed state.”

Directly below they could see a second figure clad in darker clothes with a sleeping bag wrapped around its shoulders.

Ireton described this encounter. “
He again was in a position where one leg was extended and the other one was put up,” he said. “It wasn’t quite as steep, but he was laying back. And around his body he had what looked like to me, an Eddie Bauer Karakorum [sleeping bag] in a green element cloth cover. And he had it wrapped around the upper part of his body. And I think he had blue wind pants, and I think he had light-colored hair.”

The men were not roped together and neither wore gloves or packs. Both were sitting with one leg tucked underneath and one extended in front, as if bracing themselves. Whether it was against the wind at their backs, or to hold a rope that may have belayed others below them is unknown. There was no rope present when the MCA climbers inspected the bodies and no other gear was found. Below the bodies, the slope descended into a crevasse field, and beyond that lay the Harper Glacier and the Wilcox Expedition’s high camp. In an interview with the Park Service, John Ireton speculated that they were trying to take a shortcut back to camp and concluded, “I don’t recommend anyone use that again.”

After viewing the bodies briefly, Hackney and Ireton continued on, traversing the slope to meet the trail that the other three had taken back to camp. On the way down they inspected a few of the airdrops but left the contents undisturbed. “We looked into the cans and there were radios, but we didn’t think they were of any use to us,” Ireton said. “Because we had found three of the seven bodies and it was pretty much an indication as to what happened to the rest of them.”

The MCA party had done its part in the search; though they’d found only three bodies, they knew there would be no rescue for the lost Wilcox climbers.

Ireton and Hackney reached camp fifteen minutes behind the others, just ahead of the storm that Bill Babcock had seen coming. His journal describes its arrival: “
Mysterious clouds spill over McKinley, streamer indicating high wind velocity, black billowing clouds have reached Denali Pass and winds increase and white out conditions prevail.”

Babcock told me, “
If we had dillydallied a half an hour, we wouldn’t have found our camp. John and Chet, they got back and within a half an hour you couldn’t see a hand in front of your face. A lot of it is just plain, dumb luck.”

By this time, Joe Wilcox had reached Wonder Lake and was safely recuperating with the Merry family. Wayne Merry shared his frustration over the rescue effort and the failure to launch an overflight with Wilcox, and asked him to read and initial a document outlining the rescue as Merry had interpreted it from Wonder Lake.

“
I didn’t have enough knowledge of the inner workings. I had a one-sided view,” Wilcox says. “I saw Wayne Merry’s rescue log; I saw communication problems. I was surprised Wayne wanted me to read it and initial it to say it was accurate, but I did.”

News of the first body reached Wilcox there and the impact of it felt like a sucker punch. The Merrys offered words of comfort, but they couldn’t ease Wilcox’s shock and sadness.

Early the next morning my father relayed a message to Wonder Lake asking Joe Wilcox to come to headquarters. Wilcox made the long drive alone in the Hankmobile, followed by a ranger driving a park vehicle. It was a lonely ride. A month before, the van had rung with the voices of excited young men on their way to the adventure of a lifetime. Now one was confirmed dead and six others lost. The silence must have been deafening. At headquarters, Wilcox met with my father and Chief Ranger Hayes, providing information on camp locations, caches, and various other details that might help with the search effort.

Later, Wilcox joined my father in the superintendent’s office when he called Steve Taylor’s parents. My father told the Taylors the worst news a parent can hear, that their son, the young man who had graduated from college just a month earlier, was dead. Wilcox took the phone and spoke about the climb, trying to answer their questions. Wilcox had mentored Steve Taylor on his first forays into climbing and convinced park rangers to let him climb when they questioned his qualifications. Now he had to try to make sense of the loss to his friend’s parents.

That evening, Joe Wilcox had dinner at our house. He entered the front room and seemed to tower over my dad. He had a dark beard and spoke with a soft, melodic voice, and though he was only twenty-four, he seemed to me to carry himself like a much older man. Mom forbade discussing the accident, to give Mr. Wilcox just a few minutes of peace. I was intensely curious about what had happened but knew to hold my tongue. Though just a child, I could sense the sadness in the room, the somber feeling that had us eating dinner in silence.

After dinner, the old crank phone hanging on the kitchen wall rang short-long-short, the ring sequence that had been assigned to us on the party line that ran through the housing complex.

Dad lifted the earpiece from its cradle and spoke into the microphone extending from the front of the wooden box. He listened momentarily, then hung up and turned to Joe Wilcox.

“
Let’s go. They’ve found two more bodies.”

They jogged across the road and up the short hill to the headquarters. There they listened in as the MCA party described the two bodies found near Archdeacon’s Tower, and the worsening weather. It was becoming clear that the lost men were dead, the window of good weather was closing, and the MCA party was ready to leave.

Reporters already had gotten wind of the developing disaster, and the parents had to be notified. My father and Joe Wilcox stayed late at the headquarters building that night, calling the parents of the lost men. One by one, my father went down the phone list, telling the anguished parents on the other end of the line the words no one wants to hear. After each heart-wrenching conversation, he would hand the phone to Wilcox, who would try his best to console them.

My father told me that it was the longest night of his life.

After the calls, Joe Wilcox paced the building feeling hopeless and useless.

The storm kept the MCA party in their caves for another eighteen hours; when they emerged, it took a half an hour to dig their way out. Around noon on July 30, the wind subsided and they packed and left within forty minutes,
leaving the body where it sat, still clutching the tent pole.

They wasted no time descending and that night settled into their fortified camp at 12,100 feet on Karstens Ridge. With food in their bellies and a secure shelter, spirits were high. Then, during a radio call, my father set Bill Babcock off again.

“
Would you fellows consider going back up?” he asked.

Gayle Nienhueser, back on radio duty, relayed the question to Bill.

“
I think I yelled at Gayle that whoever was asking that, it was the dumbest thing I’d ever heard of. That we were in really critical shape ourselves and needed to get down. That I wouldn’t even think about doing something like that,” he says. “I weighed one hundred and sixty when I got out; I normally weigh two hundred. Jeff was down to about one twenty-five. We’d been in the mountains for five weeks by then. The storm went on for, I don’t know, seven or eight days; it took a lot out of us. It’s a logical thing to ask, it’s
the
logical thing to ask, especially if you have never been up there. Under those conditions, it was all we could do to get ourselves down.”

That evening the Babcocks lay in their snow cave and discussed the seven lost men. They felt both relief and guilt and an inexplicable sense of animosity toward the dead men. As they discussed their feelings, the others weighed in. Bill Babcock wrote this account in his journal:

We had no feeling toward him as we did not know him. I looked at him the first day. He was unreal, frozen, discolored and horribly cracked and swollen. I disliked him particularly on the summit day and had led a route 75 feet W. of where he sat watching us. I felt no compassion until I was at 12,100 and 8,100 where I was greatly disturbed by his plight and the other six, 2 of whom we saw at a distance. At that altitude it is all that one can do to meet his own needs. This poor fellow and his six companions made demands upon me and I resented it. It made me angry with my team, the park, Sheldon, anyone. Jeff discusses this with me and has similar feelings. Gayle says he wished we had dug a hole and buried “him.” Chet said he wanted nothing to do with any of them once he saw that they were dead. John, who is the most compassionate one of our group did the most and he and Chet descended a very steep slope checking the bodies of the two visible climbers below the Archdeacon’s Tower.