IT was at Camp Nine that we finally saw the source of the constant avalanches. For some days we had been hearing their distant rumblings but their view had been hidden by the intervening ridges. Across from us now was a high-hanging glacier fully two miles broad from the suspended edge of which originated the largest avalanches we had ever seen.
Thousands of tons of bluish-white ice would shear away from a height as great. as 16,000 feet. Gaining in size and spectacular beauty, the ice falls would shoot over a vertical cliff of dark gneissic rock and slide out into space half a mile or more before landing with a low-throated roar on the flat of a glacier out of sight below. We estimated that the surface of this glacier was at an elevation of 3,500 feet, which meant that some of the avalanches dropped straight down for two to two and one-half miles. During the several days spent at this camp, we had a ring-side seat to this incessant display of natural forces at work. Even at night, we could hear the reverberating echoes far down-valley.
The greatest release of ice was from sunset to midnight, while the snow avalanches were most frequent during midday. The ice falls had a secondary period of activity in the early hours too, after the morning sun warmed the cliffs and melting began to take place. The lubricating effect of melt-water would facilitate the discharge of more ice blocks from their hanging positions, with the periodicity of fall being most frequent up until about ten o’clock in the morning. Oddly, we found the ice avalanches occurred least frequently in the hottest hours of the afternoon. In the evening, after shadows began to stretch across the range and sunlight no longer touched those clinging heights of ice which faced towards the south, melt-water would again freeze and the resultant expansion in minute cracks and openings of the glacier would cause a renewed period of intense activity. Then, other masses would break and fall away to leave gaping holes in the terminus which ominously capped the rim of black rock cliff.
Fortunately, we were on a ridge so that there was no danger of the ice falls blocking our route ahead. Nothing could reach us from above. There was only the problem of material sliding out from below the track of our route. In this regard, a different pattern of avalanches was found on snow slopes which we traversed. During the warmer summer days, the snow surfaces would ablate. Some of the resultant water evaporated into space but much of it percolated downward through the snow-pack to produce saturated levels of snow on top of. hidden surfaces of underlying ice. This often resulted in a treacherous condition in which whole areas would break loose and slide on the smooth underlayer. In places where a rougher topography controlled, the slopes would become riven with tiny gulleys formed by a multitude of individual currents of moving snow. It was most disconcerting to watch the snow- cover disappear as if it were water pouring over the crest of a cliff.
Because of this, we were more concerned with this type of slide than with the more spectacular but distant ice falls. In the winter and spring, dry snow and wind-slab avalanches would prevail; but at the time of our expedition, wet mid-summer conditions were the rule at all elevations up to 12,000 feet. Although we were fairly safe on the ridge, the tiny snowballs stirred up by our steps would, within a few hundred feet, grow into torrential slides. The roar that echoed from the canyons below would tell us the devastation that our little snowballs had caused.
These saturated slopes were dangerous and wholly unpredictable. If the snow-cover did not actually break loose, the entire mass would often settle with a frightening crunch. On one occasion this happened while six of us, in two ropes of three, were traversing relatively gentle terrain. As we looked up, a few feet beyond eye-level, we could see that a thin line of demarcation had suddenly formed. The snow-pack was poised for flight so we beat a hasty retreat to camp and travelled no more that day.
From experiences such as this, we turned our nights into days and travelled only when the shadows lengthened and the evening cold had refrozen the slopes.
Night travel not only minimised snow avalanches but offered easier going. On a firm, frozen surface, we could move fast, while during sunlight hours the same slope would be softened to such an extent that on occasions we would even sink up to our hips – a condition which not only made progress unsafe but slow and tedious. And so, during the long hours of sub-Arctic twilight, we were able to make our way safely and rapidly along the mute. Night climbing – a technique to be looked upon with disfavour in other circumstances – became at once an expedient and a blessing.
Beyond the technical aspects of the climb, these were the conditions we encountered as we reconnoitered the upper reaches of our peak. Two more days were necessary before the attempt on the summit could be made.
A supporting aircraft came in and dropped supplies at 13,000 feet. The loads were successfully received on a narrow wind-swept ledge less than 50 square yards in area. All, that is, except two large boxes of rations which missed and hurtled down the adjacent 8,000-foot cliff. But in spite of the food loss, Camp Ten was sufficiently well stocked to outlast a week of storm. From this position we moved up to establish our final camp at 15,400 feet. It was by then July 14th.
Despite a high wind and driving clouds of powdered snow, we made an attempt on the remaining 2,400 feet of rock-and-ice ridge the next day. The weather was deteriorating rapidly so when one of us fell through an unseen snow bridge into a crevasse, we decided to retreat to camp and hole in with prayers for clearing skies. There was only enough food left for two days. If conditions grew worse we would certainly have no choice but to turn back The forced rest, however, was welcome since we had been pressing hard in the past few days.
On July 16th, the sea of storm clouds had lowered below the 15,000 foot level and formed a floor for the blue ceiling which fortunately prevailed overhead. This was indeed good luck be- cause it gave us the chance we needed for the final attempt. We started out at 7 a.m., but a few hundred yards from camp, Bill Putnam began having trouble breathing because of a lung wound which he had received during the war. He returned to the high camp tents and remained in his sleeping bag while the rest of us went on.
Ten hours later we were at 17,700 feet. The final 300 feet of the climb offered some of the most difficult ice work in the whole ascent. We had been alternating leads with each of two ropes so that one man wouldn’t take the brunt of chopping steps at this fatiguing altitude. I can remember that Dee Molenaar was first on the rope on a steep ridge that rose to the summit. He was chopping his way laboriously up a long series of ice hummocks that stretched like a castellated ridge to the north. We thought that the summit was at the very end of this series of ice humps some 500 feet farther on and were preparing to shift leads when his sudden yodel from above told us that he had reached the highest mound.
The rest of us dragged ourselves along an extremely narrow ridge that led to the tiny summit plateau about half the size of a tennis court. Nothing was higher. Although eight other expeditions had attempted this peak only one had ever reached this point before. That was in 1897 when the Duke of Abruzzi attained it by .html route from the east.
The temperature read zero in a 40 mile-an-hour wind. Below us lay en echelon ranges of peaks, the higher summits of which probed through the boiling layer of storm clouds which had closed in more tightly during the afternoon, but which fortunately still rested one mile below us. We looked down upon these other summits with that paradoxical feeling of being somewhat of the master of all we saw and yet in the same instant we were completely insignificant. But there wasn’t any time nor was their any comfort in musing on such thoughts. One member of our team had already felt the symptoms of frost-bitten feet.
The boundary between Canada and Alaska passes across the spot where we stood. In classical fashion we hastily took photo- graphs of the American and Canadian flags, each placed on its respective side of this highest point on the international border. Then we adjusted our ropes and started down.
We had reached the summit on an auspicious date. July 16th was the 205th anniversary of the day the Danish sea captain, Vitus Bering, discovered Alaska. As an explorer in the employ of the Russian Czar, he had sighted the icy top of our mountain from 140 miles at sea. It was on that day that he had named this great peak Mt. St. Elias, thus honouring the patron Saint whose feast day this was in the calendar of the Russian Greek Orthodox Church.
We remembered the avalanches and other difficulties of the long climb which had brought us from the terminus of a tide-water glacier on the Alaskan coast 25 miles away to this remote height at 18,008 feet on the edge of an unexplored sector of the Yukon Territory. We were to know again on the descent the misery of back-packing days across the subsidiary ridges and ranges which so far had exacted from us 31 days of mountaineering effort. Had the Saint temporarily relented his petulant moods for only this brief moment? We suspect he had, because in the next few hours, the long-’awaited storm smashed down and continued unrelentingly for the full three weeks of our descent and return to the coast.