thør
Karhu-er
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My biggest dislike, is the side zips in the legs, as they are not long enough to easily put on the bibs while wearing a pair of size 12 arctic boots. I've told the manufacturer.
"Because it's there."
- Thread starter Peregrinator
- Start date
My biggest dislike, is the side zips in the legs, as they are not long enough to easily put on the bibs while wearing a pair of size 12 arctic boots. I've told the manufacturer.
Peregrinator
Hooded On A Hill
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There's a few tweaks like that, but overall, I think we agree it's a surprisingly good product.
thør
Karhu-er
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I could see a layer or two of the insulation in an ECWS goretex parka.
Peregrinator
Hooded On A Hill
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Wouldn't surprise me at all. I need to get in touch with that military guy I talked about.
thør
Karhu-er
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I've lost touch with the guy that used to do testing at Ft Greeley. He's retired and out of the system.
Peregrinator
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I still have contact with the Natick guy. I'll track him down soon.
stickwork
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You best call Mass DOC. Natick guy got caught droppin trou for cub scouts at Blue Hill Observatory.
I think it was in the Herald.
thør
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Gotta know when to hold 'em and know when to fold 'em
From today's ADN.com:
"After living for 12 days in a snow cave not much bigger and a whole lot colder than a refrigerator, a party of two hoping to put the first woman atop Mount McKinley in the winter abandoned their climb Thursday.
With their fuel dwindling, the spring equinox fast approaching and the weather still refusing to cooperate, Artur Testov and Christine Feret of Knik are heading down to civilization rather than up to the 20,320-foot summit of North America's tallest peak.
Feret delivered the news late Thursday night in a satellite call to climb coordinator Josef Princiotta of Anchorage.
A break in the weather allowed Testov and Feret to leave their Kahiltna Glacier snow cave at 10,000 feet, where they'd been trapped for almost two weeks by howling winds and whiteouts. They descended to 8,000 feet Thursday and hope to get picked up at the 7,200-foot base camp either today or Sunday.
The summit was at least a couple of days away in the best of conditions, and conditions have been anything but optimal. From the start, the expedition was hindered by low-pressure systems that brought zero visibility, making it impossible to travel in any direction.
And so they made their home in a snow cave too short to stand up in and about as big around as a dining table that seats six, Princiotta said.
Temperatures outside were about minus 25. Temperatures inside were about minus 5, and only because they were burning two to three times more fuel than what climbers on the move need, putting a big dent in their supply.
"As the days went on and on, they really couldn't tolerate another five or eight days at a higher altitude with less fuel," Princiotta said.
And then there was the calendar to consider. A week from today is the spring equinox. If Testov and Feret reached the summit even one day later, it wouldn't count as a winter summit. To qualify as a winter summit on Denali, a climber must reach the top between the Dec. 21 winter solstice and the March 20 vernal equinox.
But the calendar had less to do with the decision to call it quits than the weather and the diminishing fuel supply, Princiotta said.
Darryl Miller, an experienced climber and a former Denali National Park ranger, said the spot where Testov and Feret hunkered down is in a stretch of mountain notorious for relentless winds and zero visibility.
From 7,800 to 11,000 feet, down-glacier winds can blow so much snow that it's often impossible to see the 1-meter bamboo poles, or wands, that mark the West Buttress route, Miller said. The stretch has haunted many expeditions in the past and some guides use compasses in order to navigate it, he said.
"It's just a bad place that can just shut you down," Miller said. "It's inherently bad there."
Time to quit
It wasn't until Wednesday -- Day 11 in the snow cave -- that the weather cleared enough for Talkeetna Air Taxi to fly over the area and spot the couple's icy dwelling.
The next morning Testov -- one of the most experienced winter climbers in Denali history -- decided it was time to surrender.
"Christine wanted to keep going and he wanted to come down," Princiotta said. "That was their argument (Thursday) morning, they told me when they called (Thursday) night after they recovered their cache."
Even though a break in the weather provided enough visibility to begin traveling, Princiotta said conditions remained less than ideal as the pair moved to 8,000 feet, where Testov and Feret had built a snow cave two weeks ago to serve as both shelter and storage.
"They had quite a difficult time finding their snow cave," he said.
Princiotta said the climbers seem no worse for the wear.
"They were eating mashed potatoes, salmon strips, hunter sticks. They had some bologna and boiled it for soup, and they had concentrated citrus drinks," he said.
They reported no injuries and no frostbite. And despite all that time in cramped quarters, they're still talking to each other -- and making plans for another climb.
"They may try again in the summer on the other side, the Wickersham wall," Princiotta said. And they definitely plan to make another stab at a winter ascent, he said.
'Land of the ghost wands'
Only 16 people have stood atop Denali in the winter, including two who died on their way down. Four others on winter expeditions have died before reaching the summit.
McKinley was first scaled in the winter in 1967 by Dave Johnston, Ray Genet and Art Davidson. In 1988, Japan's Naomi Uemura became the first solo climber to reach the summit in winter, but he died on his descent -- and his body is still somewhere on the mountain. A year later, Alaska's Vern Tejas became the first solo climber to return from a winter summit.
In January 1998, Testov -- a Russian-turned-Alaskan -- was part of a two-man team that became the first to reach the top of Denali in the dead of winter. This is Testov's fourth attempt at a winter climb; his only winter summit was the 1998 one.
Miller said the chances of reaching the summit this time would have been much greater if Testov and Feret had made it to 11,000 feet without stopping. But weather stopped them at 10,000 feet, where whiteouts are far more common than 1,000 feet higher.
"You can lose your whole trip there," Miller said. "The real trick is to do a push from 7,800 feet to 11,000 feet, but that's a long day at the office."
Miller said the stretch between 7,800 and 11,000 is so notorious for whiteouts that years ago guides working on the mountain came up with a name for the area.
"When I was first climbing there in the (1980s) and when I was guiding for Genet and (Harry Johnston) in '89, it was typical to have whiteouts there, and you couldn't see the wands," he said. "It was referred to back then as 'the land of the ghost wands.' Some people don't even know that (name), but a lot of older guides do. They know that's not a good place to get caught.""
From today's ADN.com:
"After living for 12 days in a snow cave not much bigger and a whole lot colder than a refrigerator, a party of two hoping to put the first woman atop Mount McKinley in the winter abandoned their climb Thursday.
With their fuel dwindling, the spring equinox fast approaching and the weather still refusing to cooperate, Artur Testov and Christine Feret of Knik are heading down to civilization rather than up to the 20,320-foot summit of North America's tallest peak.
Feret delivered the news late Thursday night in a satellite call to climb coordinator Josef Princiotta of Anchorage.
A break in the weather allowed Testov and Feret to leave their Kahiltna Glacier snow cave at 10,000 feet, where they'd been trapped for almost two weeks by howling winds and whiteouts. They descended to 8,000 feet Thursday and hope to get picked up at the 7,200-foot base camp either today or Sunday.
The summit was at least a couple of days away in the best of conditions, and conditions have been anything but optimal. From the start, the expedition was hindered by low-pressure systems that brought zero visibility, making it impossible to travel in any direction.
And so they made their home in a snow cave too short to stand up in and about as big around as a dining table that seats six, Princiotta said.
Temperatures outside were about minus 25. Temperatures inside were about minus 5, and only because they were burning two to three times more fuel than what climbers on the move need, putting a big dent in their supply.
"As the days went on and on, they really couldn't tolerate another five or eight days at a higher altitude with less fuel," Princiotta said.
And then there was the calendar to consider. A week from today is the spring equinox. If Testov and Feret reached the summit even one day later, it wouldn't count as a winter summit. To qualify as a winter summit on Denali, a climber must reach the top between the Dec. 21 winter solstice and the March 20 vernal equinox.
But the calendar had less to do with the decision to call it quits than the weather and the diminishing fuel supply, Princiotta said.
Darryl Miller, an experienced climber and a former Denali National Park ranger, said the spot where Testov and Feret hunkered down is in a stretch of mountain notorious for relentless winds and zero visibility.
From 7,800 to 11,000 feet, down-glacier winds can blow so much snow that it's often impossible to see the 1-meter bamboo poles, or wands, that mark the West Buttress route, Miller said. The stretch has haunted many expeditions in the past and some guides use compasses in order to navigate it, he said.
"It's just a bad place that can just shut you down," Miller said. "It's inherently bad there."
Time to quit
It wasn't until Wednesday -- Day 11 in the snow cave -- that the weather cleared enough for Talkeetna Air Taxi to fly over the area and spot the couple's icy dwelling.
The next morning Testov -- one of the most experienced winter climbers in Denali history -- decided it was time to surrender.
"Christine wanted to keep going and he wanted to come down," Princiotta said. "That was their argument (Thursday) morning, they told me when they called (Thursday) night after they recovered their cache."
Even though a break in the weather provided enough visibility to begin traveling, Princiotta said conditions remained less than ideal as the pair moved to 8,000 feet, where Testov and Feret had built a snow cave two weeks ago to serve as both shelter and storage.
"They had quite a difficult time finding their snow cave," he said.
Princiotta said the climbers seem no worse for the wear.
"They were eating mashed potatoes, salmon strips, hunter sticks. They had some bologna and boiled it for soup, and they had concentrated citrus drinks," he said.
They reported no injuries and no frostbite. And despite all that time in cramped quarters, they're still talking to each other -- and making plans for another climb.
"They may try again in the summer on the other side, the Wickersham wall," Princiotta said. And they definitely plan to make another stab at a winter ascent, he said.
'Land of the ghost wands'
Only 16 people have stood atop Denali in the winter, including two who died on their way down. Four others on winter expeditions have died before reaching the summit.
McKinley was first scaled in the winter in 1967 by Dave Johnston, Ray Genet and Art Davidson. In 1988, Japan's Naomi Uemura became the first solo climber to reach the summit in winter, but he died on his descent -- and his body is still somewhere on the mountain. A year later, Alaska's Vern Tejas became the first solo climber to return from a winter summit.
In January 1998, Testov -- a Russian-turned-Alaskan -- was part of a two-man team that became the first to reach the top of Denali in the dead of winter. This is Testov's fourth attempt at a winter climb; his only winter summit was the 1998 one.
Miller said the chances of reaching the summit this time would have been much greater if Testov and Feret had made it to 11,000 feet without stopping. But weather stopped them at 10,000 feet, where whiteouts are far more common than 1,000 feet higher.
"You can lose your whole trip there," Miller said. "The real trick is to do a push from 7,800 feet to 11,000 feet, but that's a long day at the office."
Miller said the stretch between 7,800 and 11,000 is so notorious for whiteouts that years ago guides working on the mountain came up with a name for the area.
"When I was first climbing there in the (1980s) and when I was guiding for Genet and (Harry Johnston) in '89, it was typical to have whiteouts there, and you couldn't see the wands," he said. "It was referred to back then as 'the land of the ghost wands.' Some people don't even know that (name), but a lot of older guides do. They know that's not a good place to get caught.""
Peregrinator
Hooded On A Hill
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I'm not sure if it's promising or not, but I like kids who would rather be barefoot. Just make sure he doesn't get frostbite, and encourage him to climb everything in sight.
Thor, 12 days together in a snow cave is quite a test. We need to keep an eye on these two.
trysail
Catch Me Who Can
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"With the possible exception of the peculiarly assonant 'Hillary,' no name is so indelibly associated with the world's highest mountain as that of George Mallory. He is 'Mallory of Everest,' as the title of one of the many biographies has it. Everest is 'Mallory's mountain,' Sir Edmund Hillary once generously said, and few of the thousand-some odd people who have followed Hillary and Tenzing to the top since 1953 would disagree. So strong is the claim that in retrospect the choice of Mallory in 1921 seems inevitable, the necessary prelude to one man's date with destiny. In fact it was surprising in several respects. Mallory had no Himalayan experience whatsoever, and his Alpine record, while perfectly respectable, was hardly remarkable. A competent rather than a brilliant or innovative climber, he had yet to fulfill his mountaineering potential. Moreover, he had a rebellious, countercultural disposition that ill suited the high-Tory style of the expedition. Howard-Bury disliked him, as did Arthur Hinks, the brilliant and formidable secretary of the Royal Geographical Society who was to dominate the proceedings of the Everest Committee for the next twenty years. But Mallory had an undeniable air about him that inspired the Alpine Club's confidence, and whatever his limitations or abilities as a climber, certainly he came to grips with Everest as no other human ever has. He was the central, tragic protagonist of what Younghusband called the 'epic of Everest' and the first ( and still most compelling ) celebrity of Himalayan mountaineering."
-Maurice Isserman and Stewart Weaver
Fallen Giants: A History of Himalayan Mountaineering from the Age of Empire to the Age of Extremes
New Haven, Connecticut 2008.
Isserman and Weaver are history professors (!) at Hamilton College and the University of Rochester, respectively. It's not a subject one would ordinarily expect from a couple of academics but the story and the prose are enjoyable. I like the fact that for a survey this vast, the authors chose to relate the origins and early history of mountaineering; thus, I've been treated to an account of the earliest days, from Paccard and Balmont's first ascent of Mt. Blanc to Whymper to Swiss graveyards filled with the bodies of ardent young Englishmen and on to the geology and topography of the top of the world. As Chamonix and the Alps are some of my old stomping grounds, this section was pleasantly familiar.
Last edited:
Peregrinator
Hooded On A Hill
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That's a great quote, and thanks for the recommendation. I'll have to pick it up. Though my understanding is that Mallory was regarded as a great rock climber, if not a great mountaineer.
Silverlily
Kitty Mama - East Coast
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trysail
Catch Me Who Can
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Every now and then I stumble upon a fact or incident of history that is startling to me for its novelty or my prior ignorance. Such was the case when I discovered in this book that on June 4, 1924 as part of the same fateful expedition that included Mallory and Irvine, Edward Norton and Howard Somervell climbed to 28,126 feet on Everest ( i.e., within 900 feet of the summit ) and survived. In so doing, they established an altitude record that would remain unsurpassed for twenty-nine years.
This, obviously, begs the hopelessly speculative question of whether Mallory and Irvine reached the summit prior to their demise.
In another discovery arising from the book, I encountered a word for which I have made an entry in a separate thread dedicated to and titled Obscure Words:
Peregrinator
Hooded On A Hill
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That is a wonderfully cool website! Deserves its own thread, I think. Good to see you around again, ya predatory sexpot. How have you been?
You and I have a lot in common. What does it mean? I could google, but this is more fun.
One of my faves is "sterquilinian."
trysail
Catch Me Who Can
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Thanks for sterquilinian; it is a useful addition to the quiver.
Not only did bandobast fail to appear in the Oxford Concise, it didn't make it into the main O.E.D. I finally ended up finding it listed in the third volume of the 1987 Supplement to the second edition of the O.E.D.! Even then, it was only listed under one of a number of variant spellings: bundobast. It's etymology is Hindi and its meaning is "An arrangement, organization; preparations."
While here, I'll supply another interesting revelation ( for me ) from the book.
Can you guess what that innovation is called? ( Scroll down for the answer )
Vitale Bramani
"Vibram"
I don't know about you, but I had no idea of this etymology.
Peregrinator
Hooded On A Hill
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Never heard the etymology of Vibram, nope. Good trivia question, that. Reminiscent of designer Adi Dassler's famous shoe label...
Peregrinator
Hooded On A Hill
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This guy makes a rather athletic move on that wall:
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v649/Peregrinator/badass.gif
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v649/Peregrinator/badass.gif
thør
Karhu-er
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100 years ago, today........
"In 1897 Mount McKinley, the highest mountain in Alaska, was named after United States president William McKinley but with the passage of time and in line with the current practice of using native names it is now known as Denali. This is the name officially recognized by the State of Alaska: in the Athabaskan language it means ‘the high one’. Even under good conditions Denali is a serious climb. The North Peak of the mountain reaches to 19,470 feet (5,934m) and is acknowledged to be a more difficult ascent than the higher 20,320 foot (6,194m) South Peak.
In 1906 the explorer Frederick Cook asserted he had climbed the mountain, a claim subsequently disproved. Cook was a bit of a fantasist – he also insisted he was the first to reach the North Pole but an examination of his logbooks showed he did not get within a donkey’s gallop of Latitude 90 North.
In 1909 while the controversy over Cook’s claim still raged local pride, well lubricated by alcohol, was outraged. The mining community, the Sourdoughs, did not believe Cook’s story and determined that if anyone were to climb the mountain a team of prospectors would do it. The prime mover of the expedition was Tom Lloyd, a Welshman and a former sheriff in the state of Utah. He came to Alaska during the Klondike gold rush and settled in the Kantishna Hills north of Mount McKinley as it was then called. According to Lloyd ‘Bill McPhee [the bar owner] and me were talking one day of the possibility of getting to the summit of Mount McKinley and I said I thought if anyone could make the climb there were several pioneers of my acquaintance who could. Bill said he didn’t believe that any living man could make the ascent.’
McPhee ridiculed Lloyd saying that he was too old (he was fifty) and too over weight for such an undertaking to which the miner responded that for two cents he would show it could be done. To call Lloyd’s bluff, McPhee offered to pay $500 to anyone who would climb McKinley. Two other businessmen agreed to put up $500 each and Lloyd accepted the challenge. The Sourdough Expedition was on.
If you are not familiar with the poems of Robert Service or the stories of Jack London you are probably wondering who or what is a Sourdough. During the gold rushes prospectors used dough starters to make leavened bread. These starters were carefully protected and were carried by the miners from claim site to claim site. For the evening meal gold dust pans were swapped for bread pans. It was not unknown for a miner to ensure the viability of the dough by taking his crock of starter to bed with him to keep it warm on chilly frontier nights. The men with the jars of starter were called sourdoughs and eventually the words sourdough and prospector became interchangeable. From California the prospectors followed the gold to the Klondike.
In December 1909 the expedition set out. A seven-man party, later reduced to four, left Fairbanks accompanied by four horses, a mule and a dog team. The final line up consisted of Tom Lloyd, Billy Taylor, Pete Anderson, and Charles McGonagall, all miners from the Kantishna district. The Sourdoughs spent most of February establishing a series of camps in the lowlands and foothills on the north side of McKinley. During the following month they set up their base camp, which they called the Willows Camp, near the mouth of Cache Creek at an elevation of about 2,900 feet (884m). Their objective was the North Peak because the miners hoped that a fourteen-foot spruce pole with a six by twelve foot American flag that they intended to carry up the mountain would be seen from Kantishna and prove that they had made the ascent.
On the 1st March they began probing for a route upwards. Lloyd wrote ‘Anderson and McGonagall examined the glacier today. We called it the Wall Street Glacier being enclosed by exceedingly high walls on each side.’ This glacier is now known as the Muldrow Glacier. Three days later they set up their second camp. They estimated the height to be about nine or ten thousand feet but this is probably an exaggeration. The Sourdoughs went back down the mountain and for several days cut firewood which, along with a wood-burning stove, they hauled up the glacier. Lloyd’s description of the glacier says ‘For the first four or five miles there are no crevasses in sight, as they are full of blown snow, but the next eight miles are terrible for crevasses. You can look down in them for distances stretching from 100 feet to Hades or China. Look down one of them and you will never forget it. Most of them appear bottomless.’ As it was his first time on a high mountain we can permit Lloyd a little hyperbole in his description. The climbers did not use ropes because as Taylor said later ‘We did not need them.’ This was typical of the Sourdoughs’ style. With the exception of the fourteen-foot flagpole, they choose to travel light.
An article in the New York Times gave details of the Sourdoughs’ equipment. Home-made crampons which they called ‘creepers’, snowshoes and long poles fitted with a steel hook at one end and a spike on the other. Their clothing consisted of overalls, long underwear, parkas and mittens. For footwear they had mukluks. The Inuit developed these boots – knee high, dry-tanned with caribou skin uppers and moose hide soles. They carried wooden stakes to mark their trail and poles for crossing crevasses. If confronted by a crevasse too wide to jump they bridged it with the poles, heaped them with snow, which froze creating a bridge over the void. For food the Sourdoughs had beans, flour, bacon, sugar, dried fruit, coffee, butter and caribou meat.
On March 17th, the Sourdoughs set up their third and last camp at the head of the Muldrow Glacier which they estimated to be ‘not less than 15,000 feet.’ Later climbers established the site to be at 11,000 feet. Taking a leaf from the Inuit’s book they spent several days digging a snow tunnel for protection from the elements, ferrying supplies from the lower camps and cutting steps in the ice along the Karstens Ridge. Thanks to the snow tunnel they successfully sat out a spell of stormy weather.
The Sourdoughs made their summit attempt on 1st April but were forced back by bad weather. Two days later they tried again carrying the fourteen-foot spruce pole and food supplies consisting of doughnuts, caribou meat and three thermos flasks of hot drink. The summit party consisting of Taylor, Anderson and McGonagall set out at 3.00 a.m. - a true Alpine start. For some reason or other Lloyd had returned to Willows Camp: he may have been suffering from altitude sickness. Without the protection of a rope the three climbers surmounted the Karstens Ridge, traversed the Harper Glacier and scaled a steep couloir since known as the Sourdough Gully. Not far from the summit McGonagall stopped explaining later, ‘No, I didn’t go clear to the top. Why should I? I’d finished my turn carrying the pole before we got there. Taylor and Pete finished the job. I sat down and rested, then went back to camp.’ As with Lloyd he may have been suffering from altitude sickness. The other two, Taylor and Anderson, climbed on still lugging the flagpole. At 3.25 p.m. on April 3rd, 1910 they were standing on the North Peak. They had made the summit push from 11,000 feet (3352m). Encumbered with the flagpole they climbed more than 8,000 feet (about 2500m) and then returned to their camp site in eighteen hours. An extraordinary feat of mountaineering.
Before descending they set up the spruce pole with the American flag. Taylor said, ’We . . . built a pyramid of [rocks] about fifteen inches high and we dug down into the ice so the pole had a support of thirty inches and was held by four guy lines – just cotton ropes. We fastened the guy lines to little spurs of rock.’
Back in Kantishna the Sourdoughs were welcomed as heroes but soon doubts set in. The world could not accept that four laymen who had never been on a mountain of the size and difficulty of Mount McKinley could have succeeded where experienced climbers had failed. With no concrete proof that they had reached the summit the Sourdoughs and their flagpole was dismissed as just another frontier tall yarn no more credible than the exploits of Baron Munchausen.
When Brown and Parker attempted the climb in 1912 they reported, ‘On our journey up the glacier from below we had begun to study the North Peak. . . . Every rock and snow slope of that approach had come into the field of our powerful binoculars. We not only saw no sign of the flagpole, but it is our concerted opinion that the northern peak is more inaccessible than its higher southern sister.’ That seemed to put paid to the Sourdoughs’ claim to have climbed the mountain but there was more to come.
After years of failed attempts by others to climb Denali an expedition led by Hudson Stuck reached the South Peak in 1913 and on their way to the top the climbers spotted the Sourdoughs’ flagpole. The Sourdoughs were vindicated and given credit for what Stuck called ‘a most extraordinary feat, the writer has no hesitation in claiming, unique in all the annals of mountaineering.’
Stuck’s party was the only expedition to verify the existence of the flagpole. From memory, I recall reading somewhere that the tattered remains of the Sourdoughs’ American flag was subsequently found by a climbing party but I cannot cite a source for this assertion. An expedition, which climbed the North Peak in 1932, found no trace of the pole but considering the climatic conditions on the mountain this is not surprising: only a miracle could have preserved it for a further nineteen years.
Nearly a hundred years have passed since the Sourdoughs climbed the North Peak of Denali and it is still a unique and extraordinary feat — a team of greenhorns with makeshift equipment succeeding where experts failed."
Link
"In 1897 Mount McKinley, the highest mountain in Alaska, was named after United States president William McKinley but with the passage of time and in line with the current practice of using native names it is now known as Denali. This is the name officially recognized by the State of Alaska: in the Athabaskan language it means ‘the high one’. Even under good conditions Denali is a serious climb. The North Peak of the mountain reaches to 19,470 feet (5,934m) and is acknowledged to be a more difficult ascent than the higher 20,320 foot (6,194m) South Peak.
In 1906 the explorer Frederick Cook asserted he had climbed the mountain, a claim subsequently disproved. Cook was a bit of a fantasist – he also insisted he was the first to reach the North Pole but an examination of his logbooks showed he did not get within a donkey’s gallop of Latitude 90 North.
In 1909 while the controversy over Cook’s claim still raged local pride, well lubricated by alcohol, was outraged. The mining community, the Sourdoughs, did not believe Cook’s story and determined that if anyone were to climb the mountain a team of prospectors would do it. The prime mover of the expedition was Tom Lloyd, a Welshman and a former sheriff in the state of Utah. He came to Alaska during the Klondike gold rush and settled in the Kantishna Hills north of Mount McKinley as it was then called. According to Lloyd ‘Bill McPhee [the bar owner] and me were talking one day of the possibility of getting to the summit of Mount McKinley and I said I thought if anyone could make the climb there were several pioneers of my acquaintance who could. Bill said he didn’t believe that any living man could make the ascent.’
McPhee ridiculed Lloyd saying that he was too old (he was fifty) and too over weight for such an undertaking to which the miner responded that for two cents he would show it could be done. To call Lloyd’s bluff, McPhee offered to pay $500 to anyone who would climb McKinley. Two other businessmen agreed to put up $500 each and Lloyd accepted the challenge. The Sourdough Expedition was on.
If you are not familiar with the poems of Robert Service or the stories of Jack London you are probably wondering who or what is a Sourdough. During the gold rushes prospectors used dough starters to make leavened bread. These starters were carefully protected and were carried by the miners from claim site to claim site. For the evening meal gold dust pans were swapped for bread pans. It was not unknown for a miner to ensure the viability of the dough by taking his crock of starter to bed with him to keep it warm on chilly frontier nights. The men with the jars of starter were called sourdoughs and eventually the words sourdough and prospector became interchangeable. From California the prospectors followed the gold to the Klondike.
In December 1909 the expedition set out. A seven-man party, later reduced to four, left Fairbanks accompanied by four horses, a mule and a dog team. The final line up consisted of Tom Lloyd, Billy Taylor, Pete Anderson, and Charles McGonagall, all miners from the Kantishna district. The Sourdoughs spent most of February establishing a series of camps in the lowlands and foothills on the north side of McKinley. During the following month they set up their base camp, which they called the Willows Camp, near the mouth of Cache Creek at an elevation of about 2,900 feet (884m). Their objective was the North Peak because the miners hoped that a fourteen-foot spruce pole with a six by twelve foot American flag that they intended to carry up the mountain would be seen from Kantishna and prove that they had made the ascent.
On the 1st March they began probing for a route upwards. Lloyd wrote ‘Anderson and McGonagall examined the glacier today. We called it the Wall Street Glacier being enclosed by exceedingly high walls on each side.’ This glacier is now known as the Muldrow Glacier. Three days later they set up their second camp. They estimated the height to be about nine or ten thousand feet but this is probably an exaggeration. The Sourdoughs went back down the mountain and for several days cut firewood which, along with a wood-burning stove, they hauled up the glacier. Lloyd’s description of the glacier says ‘For the first four or five miles there are no crevasses in sight, as they are full of blown snow, but the next eight miles are terrible for crevasses. You can look down in them for distances stretching from 100 feet to Hades or China. Look down one of them and you will never forget it. Most of them appear bottomless.’ As it was his first time on a high mountain we can permit Lloyd a little hyperbole in his description. The climbers did not use ropes because as Taylor said later ‘We did not need them.’ This was typical of the Sourdoughs’ style. With the exception of the fourteen-foot flagpole, they choose to travel light.
An article in the New York Times gave details of the Sourdoughs’ equipment. Home-made crampons which they called ‘creepers’, snowshoes and long poles fitted with a steel hook at one end and a spike on the other. Their clothing consisted of overalls, long underwear, parkas and mittens. For footwear they had mukluks. The Inuit developed these boots – knee high, dry-tanned with caribou skin uppers and moose hide soles. They carried wooden stakes to mark their trail and poles for crossing crevasses. If confronted by a crevasse too wide to jump they bridged it with the poles, heaped them with snow, which froze creating a bridge over the void. For food the Sourdoughs had beans, flour, bacon, sugar, dried fruit, coffee, butter and caribou meat.
On March 17th, the Sourdoughs set up their third and last camp at the head of the Muldrow Glacier which they estimated to be ‘not less than 15,000 feet.’ Later climbers established the site to be at 11,000 feet. Taking a leaf from the Inuit’s book they spent several days digging a snow tunnel for protection from the elements, ferrying supplies from the lower camps and cutting steps in the ice along the Karstens Ridge. Thanks to the snow tunnel they successfully sat out a spell of stormy weather.
The Sourdoughs made their summit attempt on 1st April but were forced back by bad weather. Two days later they tried again carrying the fourteen-foot spruce pole and food supplies consisting of doughnuts, caribou meat and three thermos flasks of hot drink. The summit party consisting of Taylor, Anderson and McGonagall set out at 3.00 a.m. - a true Alpine start. For some reason or other Lloyd had returned to Willows Camp: he may have been suffering from altitude sickness. Without the protection of a rope the three climbers surmounted the Karstens Ridge, traversed the Harper Glacier and scaled a steep couloir since known as the Sourdough Gully. Not far from the summit McGonagall stopped explaining later, ‘No, I didn’t go clear to the top. Why should I? I’d finished my turn carrying the pole before we got there. Taylor and Pete finished the job. I sat down and rested, then went back to camp.’ As with Lloyd he may have been suffering from altitude sickness. The other two, Taylor and Anderson, climbed on still lugging the flagpole. At 3.25 p.m. on April 3rd, 1910 they were standing on the North Peak. They had made the summit push from 11,000 feet (3352m). Encumbered with the flagpole they climbed more than 8,000 feet (about 2500m) and then returned to their camp site in eighteen hours. An extraordinary feat of mountaineering.
Before descending they set up the spruce pole with the American flag. Taylor said, ’We . . . built a pyramid of [rocks] about fifteen inches high and we dug down into the ice so the pole had a support of thirty inches and was held by four guy lines – just cotton ropes. We fastened the guy lines to little spurs of rock.’
Back in Kantishna the Sourdoughs were welcomed as heroes but soon doubts set in. The world could not accept that four laymen who had never been on a mountain of the size and difficulty of Mount McKinley could have succeeded where experienced climbers had failed. With no concrete proof that they had reached the summit the Sourdoughs and their flagpole was dismissed as just another frontier tall yarn no more credible than the exploits of Baron Munchausen.
When Brown and Parker attempted the climb in 1912 they reported, ‘On our journey up the glacier from below we had begun to study the North Peak. . . . Every rock and snow slope of that approach had come into the field of our powerful binoculars. We not only saw no sign of the flagpole, but it is our concerted opinion that the northern peak is more inaccessible than its higher southern sister.’ That seemed to put paid to the Sourdoughs’ claim to have climbed the mountain but there was more to come.
After years of failed attempts by others to climb Denali an expedition led by Hudson Stuck reached the South Peak in 1913 and on their way to the top the climbers spotted the Sourdoughs’ flagpole. The Sourdoughs were vindicated and given credit for what Stuck called ‘a most extraordinary feat, the writer has no hesitation in claiming, unique in all the annals of mountaineering.’
Stuck’s party was the only expedition to verify the existence of the flagpole. From memory, I recall reading somewhere that the tattered remains of the Sourdoughs’ American flag was subsequently found by a climbing party but I cannot cite a source for this assertion. An expedition, which climbed the North Peak in 1932, found no trace of the pole but considering the climatic conditions on the mountain this is not surprising: only a miracle could have preserved it for a further nineteen years.
Nearly a hundred years have passed since the Sourdoughs climbed the North Peak of Denali and it is still a unique and extraordinary feat — a team of greenhorns with makeshift equipment succeeding where experts failed."
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Peregrinator
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15 years ago, atmas, HungryJoe and I took four days of rock climbing lessons. It was supposed to be four days in a row, but on Wednesday it was raining and we decided to take a day off and make it up on Friday. We went across the street to get breakfast and there on the TV behind us was the wrecked building and terrorist disaster in OK City.
Byron In Exile
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XXplorher
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I'll do you one better, mate.
Years ago I was watching Letterman (he was great when I was 20, he's still a more engaging conversation than Leno since then). He had Tom Hanks on. I think it was a few years following the fact Hanks is worth watching also. It MIGHT have been an interview following 'Apollo 13'.
There was a lot of talk about 'going to Mars' at that time...
Wait, minor background:
When I was a tot, I had access to NASA pictures cuz I had a step-grandfather handling a minor role in that program. My brother (who ended up working on the Space Shuttle w/Rockwell) and I were nuts for these Voyager pictures coming back. Like... right in tight shots of planets we sort of thought only true in books... not quite real until we'd been there. Had the truth in our hands. Brilliant pictures of certainty... brilliant stuff. Life altering.
A few years later I learned in Physics class how that project worked... that the Voyager I and II were basically fueled by gravitational pull from all the planets it wanted to encounter and the formula time to PERFECTLY slingshot off to the next planet. There wasn't hardly any fuel. It was all about scientifically perfect execution and expectation.
I just thought that... mindblowing. That a human could mathematically predict properly enough to purposely send something off into space that's going to send me beack all this factual data and proof... of... impotance beyond us.
That whole fucking concept, just... that really gets me off.
So anyway... Dave is talking to Tom Hanks (at that point a proper person of consideration when it came to space exploration or earth preservation... humanity, I guess). Dave is questioning Tom why we 'waste' all this fucking money on space exploration. How futile and extraneous it is. They're specifically talking about Mars. All the money it will cost, etc.
And Dave says... 'What is the point, Tom? Why is it neccessary to go there?"
And Tom Hanks takes but a tiny momet to say... and I'll never forget how credible a thing this was to say...
"Because it's next, Dave. It's next."
Nothing made better sense to me than that. We could be in caves, but we're not - because someone said, "Stepping out of the cave is next. Let's step out of the cave.'
And really, let's not just define that idea as universal exploration. Sci-Fi, planetory, etc. Let's try to be less about self-preservation - and more about what's beyond us.
Cuz I'm absolutely fucking certain that's the current problem in our country. We're far too jaded and concerned with ourselves, than we are... what's next.
And the moment, America, stops prioritizing 'What's Next'? Is the moment it's over for us.
Burn out.
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XXplorher
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That's worth a response.
I said a ton of shit there. All of which is worth resonding to.
It won't be... cuz there's really nothing being discussed here. It's just a bunch of political nailing...
Once upon a time... shit made sense.
But that da is gone.
I said a ton of shit there. All of which is worth resonding to.
It won't be... cuz there's really nothing being discussed here. It's just a bunch of political nailing...
Once upon a time... shit made sense.
But that da is gone.
Peregrinator
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I'm sorry I missed your post. This thread sort of pops up once in a while. I forget to check it.
I agree; that's a brilliant response. And he's right.
I also agree with you that we're a little too complacent. The Earth seems really small with GPS and Google Earth and such.
Gotta find the blank spots on the map.
thør
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