But the storm, which grew worse that day, proved to be considerably more severe and of considerably longer duration than the Honeymooners had reckoned. Temperatures at 17,200 feet dropped to minus-fifty, and gale-force winds raked the peak almost without letup for more than a week, driving the wind chill well down into triple digits. Not only was climbing out of the question, so was sleeping; Conrad and Ellie were reduced for the most part to lying in their tent with all their extra clothes on, praying that their shelter didn't blow apart at the seams. (Indeed, shortly before the Honeymooners arrived at 17,200, an Oval Intention-one of the sturdiest tents made-had done just that, exploding in the middle of the night, leaving its three occupants in a very bad way.)
The gale that blasted the upper peak during this storm was terrifying to behold, even from the relative safety of 14,300 feet. Whenever the wind lulled at the lower camp, a much deeper, wilder, wailing roar-like the thunder of a rocket launch-could be heard emanating from the ridge three thousand feet above. At the onset of the storm, most of the twenty or thirty climbers who had been camped at 17,200 immediately bailed out and battled their way back down to 14,300, but not the Honeymooners.
Early in their stay at 17,200, Conrad and Ellie spied the entrance to an ice cave. Thinking it had to offer more secure accommodations than their tent, Ellie went over to investigate. It turned out to be a T-shaped affair, carved deep into the slope, with a fifteen-footlong entrance tunnel that led to a perpendicular main tunnel at least twice that length. It was, without question, infinitely more stormproof than the tent, but the briefest tour of the premises convinced Ellie that she'd rather take her chances out in the maelstrom.
The inside of that cave, she says, "was incredibly grim: really dark and damp, and extremely claustrophobic. The place was a hellhole; it was absolutely hideous. There was no way I was going to move into that thing."
The tunnels were only four feet high, garbage littered the floor, the walls were stained with urine and vomit and God only knew what else. Most disturbing of all, though, were the creatures she found inhabiting that subterranean gloom. "There were seven or eight very strange guys in there," Ellie says. "They'd been in the cave for days, and had long since run out of food. They were just sitting there, shivering with all their extra clothes on in the suffocating air; breathing these thick stove fumes and singing theme songs from TV shows, getting stranger and stranger. I couldn't get out of there fast enough."
The cave men, as it happened, were members of two separate expeditions. One of them-a trio from Flagstaff, Arizona, who called themselves the Crack o'Noon Club-had actually only been in there a day or so. The other, decidedly stranger, group had been in the cave for the better part of a week. It turned out to be none other than Dick Danger and the Throbbing Members.
Dick and the Members-a.k.a. Michael Dagon, Greg Sievers, Jeff Yates, and Stephen "Este" Parker-were four tough, arrogant, in-your-face Alaskans in their late twenties and early thirties. They possessed very little in the way of mountaineering experience, but they had done their homework and were bent on bagging the summit of McKinley at almost any cost. Dagon-Dick Danger himself-had sworn off red meat and alcohol for a year to prepare for the expedition, and had trained and schemed so obsessively that his wife had left him.
The Members, it seems, had arrived at 14,300 on May 9; a day later, Yates came down with pulmonary edema-a mild case, but a gurgling, wheezing, potentially life-threatening case of edema nonetheless. Most climbers would have promptly retreated, but the three healthy Members left Yates to recover for a day at 14,300, carried a cache of food up to 16,000 feet, and then returned to 14,300 for the night. The next morning, having decided that Yates wasn't getting any worse, all four of them headed up onto the knifeedge ridge to establish a high camp in preparation for a summit bid.
When the Members arrived at 17,200 feet on May 13, they took up residence in their tents in a poorly built bunker alongside the sturdier bunkers of a half-dozen other expeditions, including a party of Park Service personnel led by ranger Scott Gill, a group led by a seasoned Alaskan guide named Brian Okonek, and a vacationing SWAT team from the Montreal police force. At the time, the Members figured they had enough food for three days, maybe four if they stretched it. By the eighteenth it was still storming, and the food was almost gone.
To complicate matters, that afternoon ranger Gill received a weather report over the radio predicting that an even nastier storm front-the forecasters were calling it "a major three-day storm"was due to slam into the upper mountain within a matter of hours. When a voice cut in over the radio to ask just how major, the person relaying the forecast replied with a macabre chuckle, "Well, major enough so that when it hits, everyone who's above 15,000 feet is going to die."
"All of a sudden," Yates says, "it was like, `Wow, maybe we'd better be getting out of here.' " He reports that other teams "started booking down from 17,200 right away, but it took us three hours to pack up, and by the time we'd gotten underway the storm was on us for real. Right away we lost the trail in the whiteout. The wind was so bad that someone in the last party to leave camp ahead of us had to abandon his pack to keep going. By the time we were two rope-lengths away it was obvious we weren't going to make it, so we turned around and headed back up to 17,200."
At that point, says Dagon, "We figured we were in deep shit." They re-erected their tents and anchored them to the slope with snow pickets and an elaborate web of climbing rope, but feared that the rising gale would still rip the shelters right off the ridge. It was at that point that Brian Okonek, secure enough in his heavy bunker, told them about the ice cave. He had built it, he said, during a bad storm in 1983, and it saved the lives of eighteen climbers.
The intervening years had plugged Okonek's cave full of drifting snow, and it took the Members, assisted by another expedition called 5150, six hours of cold, hard digging-during which all four Members received frostbitten fingers and toes-to re-excavate it. Once they were all moved in, however, they took a perverse liking to cave life: Despite frostbite and lack of food, they resolved to wait out the storm, no matter how long it took, and go bag the summit.
Life at 14,300 feet, meanwhile, was undeniably better than the wretched existence of those dug in at 17,200, but it was not without its hardships. Trapped in camp but relatively free of the storm that raged above, we residents of 14,300 initially bided our time cheerfully enough-flying kites, skiing the crusty powder on the protected slopes immediately above camp, practicing ice climbing on nearby serac walls. But as the storm dragged on-and food, fuel, and energy began to flag-a collective depression settled over our embattled tent city.
When word came over the radio in the medical tent confirming rumors that five well-liked climbers had been killed in avalanches on the neighboring peaks of Mt. Foraker and Mt. Hunter, the air of gloom deepened further still. People took to staying in their miserable little bunkers day-in and day-out, bickering and shivering inside their tents, emerging only to visit the latrine or shovel out from under the snowdrifts. "It was your idea to come on this fucking expedition," I overheard a climber in a nearby tent whining to his partner, "I told you we should have gone rock climbing in Yosemite!"
As the storm continued, trade in critical supplies became brisk and cutthroat. Expeditions with an abundance of some particularly valuable commodity like toilet paper, cigarettes, Diamox (a medication to prevent altitude sickness), or Tiger's Milk bars found increasingly favorable rates of exchange. I had to trade away an entire half-pound of Tillamook cheese to secure three Diamox tablets. Adrian, who had an enviable hoard of food, was able to ease the interminable boredom by renting a Walkman from a hungry Canadian climber for the ridiculously low rate of one pemmican bar per day.
In the midst of those dark days I began to see Adrian's fiasco the year before in a different, more sympathetic light. I was forced to admit that on this, my first trip to Denali, I too had grossly underestimated the mountain. I had listened to the rangers' warnings; I had heard no less experi
enced an alpinist than Peter Habeler pronounce that McKinley's storms "are some of the worst I have ever experienced"; I knew that when Dougal Haston and Doug Scott had climbed McKinley together just six months after standing upon the summit of Everest, Haston had said they'd been forced to draw ton all our Himalayan experience just to survive." And yet, somehow-like Adrian in 1986-I hadn't really believed any of it. This was reflected in the corners I'd cut: I'd brought along a pitiful ten-year-old sleeping bag and a bargain-basement tent, and had neglected to pack a down jacket, overboots, a snow saw, or any snow pickets. I figured the West Buttress to be a farmer's route; I mean, how challenging could a climb that succumbed to three hundred freds and hackers a year possibly be?
Plenty challenging for the likes of me, it transpired. I was continually miserable, and frequently on the brink of disaster. My tent was starting to shred even in the relative calm at 14,300. The unceasing cold caused my lips and fingers to crack and bleed; my feet were always numb. At night, even wearing every article of clothing I had, it was impossible to stave off violent shivering attacks. Condensed breath would build up an inch of frost on the inside of my tent, creating an ongoing indoor blizzard as the gossamer nylon walls rattled in the wind. Anything not stowed inside my sleeping bag-camera, sunscreen, water bottles, stove-would freeze into a useless, brittle brick. My stove did in fact self-destruct from the cold early in the trip; had a kind soul named Brian Sullivan not taken pity on me and lent me his spare, I would-as Dick Danger so eloquently put it-have been in deep shit.
The storm reached a new level of violence on the morning of May 21. That evening, however-despite a forecast of high winds and heavy snowfall for at least five more days-the sky cleared and the wind quit. By the following morning it was thirty below and a few small lenticular clouds had reappeared over the summit of Foraker, but it was still calm and otherwise clear, so I packed a light rucksack and accepted an invitation to join a strong five-man party led by Tom Hargis-a Himalayan veteran who had made the second ascent of notorious Gasherbrum IV in 1986-to attempt a one-day, six-thousand-foot push for the summit. As I pulled out of camp, Adrian took a look at the sky, let out a cackle, and yelled, "Good luck, dude! You sure going to need it! I think maybe I find you up there later, frozen like fish!"
By the time we reached the start of the knife-edge ridge at 16,200 feet, two hours after setting out, the breeze had risen to twenty knots and clouds were starting to obscure the sun. Upon reaching 17,000 feet, an hour later, we were climbing in a full-blown blizzard, with near-zero visibility and a forty-knot wind that froze exposed flesh in seconds. At that point Hargis, who was in the lead, quietly did an about-face and headed down, and nobody questioned the decision. After surviving the West Ridge of Everest and Gasherbrum IV, Hargis was apparently not interested in buying the farm in pursuit of the Butt.
With the return of the storm on the twenty-second, the Honeymooners finally threw in the towel. That afternoon they stumbled into camp at 14,300 feet, completely whipped but with an astounding bit of news: The strange guys in the cave had made the summit.
One by one, other parties had gradually abandoned their fortified encampments at 17,200, but Dick and the Members had hung tough. Further excavations in their shelter had revealed just enough old cached food-some ancient but edible oatmeal, a little chocolate, a can of tuna and another of kippered herring-to sustain them. When their stove had started to malfunction, they mooched melted snow to drink from their original cavemates, the 5150 expedition.
5150 was a team of four Alaskans who took their name from the state penal code (5150, in copspeak, is the designation for "people of unsound mind"), and their inspiration from regular inhalations of Matanuska Thunderfuck, a legendary strain of Cannabis sativa cultivated in the forty-ninth state. The 5150 crew boasted, in fact, that they had consumed more than a hundred joints of the potent weed between Kahiltna International and 17,200. Even this prodigious chemical fortification, however, was not enough to prevent one member from becoming extremely hypothermic after only a day in the ice cave, so his teammates attempted to revive him by upping his intake further still. "It was kind of pathetic," Mike Dagon says. "They kept telling him, `It's gotten you this far, it can get you the rest of the way, too.' But when the guy still hadn't warmed up after two days in the cave, the 5150 boys decided to make a break for it and bailed out."
The departure of 5150 and their functioning stove might have had dire consequences for the Members, but no sooner had 5150 moved out than the Crack o'Noon Club moved in. The Nooners also proved to have a working cooker, and were no less generous about sharing the water it produced.
"Mornings in the cave," Dagon admits, "were real depressing. I mean, you'd wake up and some guy'd be snoring in your face, there'd be nothing to eat, and all you had to look forward to was another day of staring at each other in an ice hole. But we managed to keep it together pretty well. To kill time we played trivia games, or talked about the food we were going to eat when we got down, and Este taught us the theme songs from shows like `Gilligan's Island' and `I Dream of Jeannie.'
Then, on the evening of May 21, the gale suddenly abated. Dick and the Members were frostbitten, severely dehydrated, weak from hunger, stupid from the altitude, and sick from breathing the carbon monoxide put off by their stove. But they also subscribed to the "no guts, no glory" school of alpinism, and figured the mountain might not see clear skies again for another month. They did their best to ignore their infirmities, and all but Greg Siewers-the only experienced climber among them-mobilized to make an assault on the summit. At 9:30 P.M., in the company of the Crack o'Noon Club, they emerged from their icy burrow and started upward.
The Members moved painfully slowly in the bitter night air, and were soon left behind by the three Crack o'Nooners. At 18,500 feet, just after midnight, one of Dagon's mechanical ascenders broke while he was using it on a short piece of fixed line, and when he took his mitten off to try to fix the ascender, the mitten blew away. A few minutes later, Yates felt a tug on the rope and turned around. "Mike told me his hand was cold," Yates recalls, "and I looked down and saw that it was bare, but Mike didn't seem to realize it. I didn't know how long it had been like that, but I could see he was in trouble and starting to lose it bad. I immediately took his hand and shoved it inside my jacket."
When Dagon's hand had warmed up, a spare mitten was produced, and the Members continued upward until 5::30 A.M., at which time they'd reached the base of the final headwall at 19,000 feet. There, they had to stop again, this time for a full hour, to warm Dagon's hands and feet on Yates's and Parker's bellies. "Este told Mike that he was going seriously hypothermic, that we should go down," says Yates, "but Mike said no way, not when we were that close, and he reached deep and found the strength to keep going up the last thousand feet."
As they made their way up the summit ridge, they could see the graceful spires of Mt. Huntington and the Mooses Tooth poking surrealistically out of a thick layer of clouds blanketing the Ruth Glacier, a distant thirteen thousand feet below. "I knew in an abstract, intellectual sort of way," Yates explains, "that it was a beautiful view, but I couldn't get myself to care about it: I'd been up all night; I felt totally strung out; I was just too tired."
At 9:20 on the morning of May 22, 1987, the Members finally stood on the summit of McKinley. The pinnacle of North America, Mike Dagon reports, consists "of three insignificant bumps on a rounded ridge, with one bump rising a little higher than the others. That's all. It was incredibly anticlimactic; I guess I expected there to be fireworks, and music playing in my head or something, but there wasn't anything like that. As soon as we got there we turned around and started down."
Within minutes after the Members topped out, the layer of clouds they'd first seen hovering over the Ruth had climbed the thirteen thousand feet to summit: the sixteen-hour window of good weather had slammed shut. For the next six hours they fought their way through a whiteout to 17,200. Only a trail of bamboo tomato stakes, stuck into the snow every
rope-length on the way up by the Crack o'Nooners, enabled the Members to make it back to their cave, which they did after eighteen straight hours of climbing. Once in the cave, the Members were pinned down by the weather for two more foodless days, but on May 24 they finally managed to drag themselves down to 14,300, where Rob Roach and Howard Donner attended to their frozen digits in the medical tent for several hours.
By demonstrating what could be achieved with bullheaded determination and a high pain threshold, the Members-one of only a handful of expeditions to make the summit in May-should have inspired the rest of us at 14,300 to suck it in a little harder and take our own best shot at greatness. By then, however, I was running low on Fig Newtons, and had developed a powerful thirst for something with more kick to it than melted snow. On May 26 I packed my tent, locked down my ski bindings, and bid my comrades in arms adieu.
As I shouldered my pack to go, Adrian looked wistfully off to the south toward Talkeetna, and started muttering about how the weather didn't really look like it was going to improve any time soon. "Maybe," he thought out loud, "the best thing is for me to go down like you, climb McKinley next year instead." But a mo ment later he turned his gaze back toward the peak and set his jaw. As I poled off down the glacier, Adrian was still standing there, staring up at the summit slopes, conjuring up images, I have no doubt, of the glories awaiting the first Romanian to climb McKinley.
IT'S ONLY SEPTEMBER, BUT THE WIND SMELLS LIKE WINTER AS IT GUSTS through the narrow streets of Chamonix, France. Each night the snow line, like the hem of a slip, pushes farther down the ample granite hips of Mont Blanc toward the stubble of slate roofs and church steeples on the valley floor. Three weeks ago the sidewalk cafes along the Avenue Michel Croz were choked with vacationers sipping overpriced citron and craning their necks at the famous skyline, two vertical miles above their tables and shimmering like a mirage in the August haze. Now most of those same cafes are empty, the hotels deserted, the recently throbbing bistros quiet as libraries. Wandering Chamonix's streets a few minutes before midnight, I am therefore surprised to see a crowd queued up outside the entrance to Choucas, a nightclub near the center of town. Curious, I fall in at the end of the line.