THE GRAND BASIN
The reader will perhaps be able to sympathize with the feeling of
elation and confidence which came to us when we had surmounted the
difficulties of the ridge and had arrived at the entrance to the Grand
Basin. We realized that the greater and more arduous part of our task
was done and that the way now lay open before us. For so long a time
this point had been the actual goal of our efforts, for so long a time
we had gazed upward at it with hope deferred, that its final attainment
was accompanied with no small sense of triumph and gratification and
with a great accession of faith that we should reach the top of the
mountain.
[Sidenote: Heat and Cold]
The ice of the glacier that fills the basin was hundreds of feet beneath
us at the pass, but it rises so rapidly that by a short traverse under
the cliffs of the ridge we were able to reach its surface and select a
camping site thereon at about sixteen thousand feet. It was bitterly
cold, with a keen wind that descended in gusts from the heights, and the
slow movement of step-cutting gave the man in the rear no opportunity of
warming up. Toes and fingers grew numb despite multiple socks within
mammoth moccasins and thick gloves within fur mittens.
From this time, during our stay in the Grand Basin and until we had left
it and descended again, the weather progressively cleared and brightened
until all clouds were dispersed. From time to time there were fresh
descents of vapor, and even short snow-storms, but there was no general
enveloping of the mountain again. Cold it was, at times even in the
sunshine, with "a nipping and an eager air," but when the wind ceased it
would grow intensely hot. On the 4th June, at 3 P. M., the thermometer
in the full sunshine rose to 50° F.--the highest temperature recorded on
the whole excursion--and the fatigue of packing in that thin atmosphere
with the sun's rays reflected from ice and snow everywhere was most
exhausting. We were burned as brown as Indians; lips and noses split and
peeled in spite of continual applications of lanoline, but, thanks to
those most beneficent amber snow-glasses, no one of the party had the
slightest trouble with his eyes. At night it was always cold, 10° below
zero being the highest minimum during our stay in the Grand Basin, and
21° below zero the lowest. But we always slept warm; with sheep-skins
and caribou-skins under us, and down quilts and camel's-hair blankets
and a wolf-robe for bedding, the four of us lay in that six-by-seven
tent, in one bed, snug and comfortable. It was disgraceful overcrowding,
but it was warm. The fierce little primus stove, pumped up to its limit
and perfectly consuming its kerosene fuel, shot out its corona of
beautiful blue flame and warmed the tight, tiny tent. The primus stove,
burning seven hours on a quart of coal-oil, is a little giant for heat
generation. If we had had two, so that one could have served for cooking
and one for heating, we should not have suffered from the cold at all,
but as it was, whenever the stew-pot went on the stove, or a pot full of
ice to melt, the heat was immediately absorbed by the vessel and not
distributed through the tent. But another primus stove would have been
another five or six pounds to pack, and we were "heavy" all the time as
it was.
[Illustration: Traverse under the cliffs of the Northeast Ridge to enter
the Grand Basin.]
[Sidenote: The Labor of Packing]
Something has already been said about the fatigue of packing, and one
would not weary the reader with continual reference thereto; yet it is
certain that those who have carried a pack only on the lower levels
cannot conceive how enormously greater the labor is at these heights. As
one rises and the density of the air is diminished, so, it would seem,
the weight of the pack or the effect of the weight of the pack is in the
same ratio increased. We probably moved from three hundred to two
hundred and fifty pounds, decreasing somewhat as food and fuel were
consumed, each time camp was advanced in the Grand Basin. We could have
done with a good deal less as it fell out, but this we did not know, and
we were resolved not to be defeated in our purpose by lack of supplies.
But the packing of these loads, relaying them forward, and all the time
steeply rising, was labor of the most exhausting and fatiguing kind, and
there is no possible way in which it may be avoided in the ascent of
this mountain. To roam over glaciers and scramble up peaks free and
untrammelled is mountaineering in the Alps. Put a forty-pound pack on a
man's back, with the knowledge that to-morrow he must go down for
another, and you have mountaineering in Alaska. In the ascent of this
twenty-thousand-foot mountain every member of the party climbed at least
sixty thousand feet. It is this going down and doing it all over again
that is the heart-breaking part of climbing.
[Illustration: First camp in the Grand Basin--16,000 feet, looking up.]
It was in the Grand Basin that the writer began to be seriously affected
by the altitude, to be disturbed by a shortness of breath that with each
advance grew more distressingly acute. While at rest he was not
troubled; mere existence imposed no unusual burden, but even a slight
exertion would be followed by a spell of panting, and climbing with a
pack was interrupted at every dozen or score of steps by the necessity
of stopping to regain breath. There was no nausea or headache or any
other symptom of "mountain sickness." Indeed, it is hard for us to
understand that affection as many climbers describe it. It has been said
again and again to resemble seasickness in all its symptoms. Now the
writer is of the unfortunate company that are seasick on the slightest
provocation. Even rough water on the wide stretches of the lower Yukon,
when a wind is blowing upstream and the launch is pitching and tossing,
will give him qualms. But no one of the four of us had any such feeling
on the mountain at any time. Shortness of breath we all suffered from,
though none other so acutely as myself. When it was evident that the
progress of the party was hindered by the constant stops on my account,
the contents of my pack were distributed amongst the others and my load
reduced to the mercurial barometer and the instruments, and, later, to
the mercurial barometer alone. It was some mortification not to be able
to do one's share of the packing, but there was no help for it, and the
other shoulders were young and strong and kindly.
[Sidenote: Tobacco]
With some hope of improving his wind, the writer had reduced his smoking
to two pipes a day so soon as the head of the glacier had been reached,
and had abandoned tobacco altogether when camp was first made on the
ridge; but it is questionable if smoking in moderation has much or any
effect. Karstens, who smoked continually, and Walter, who had never
smoked in his life, had the best wind of the party. It is probably much
more a matter of age. Karstens was a man of thirty-two years, and the
two boys were just twenty-one, while the writer approached fifty. None
of us slept as well as usual except Walter--and nothing ever interferes
with his sleep--but, although our slumbers were short and broken, they
seemed to bring recuperation just as though they had been sound. We
arose fresh in the morning though we had slept little and light.
On the 30th May we had made our camp at the Parker Pass; on the 2d June,
the finest and brightest day in three weeks, we moved to our first camp
in the Grand Basin. On the 3d June we moved camp again, out into the
middle of the glacier, at about sixteen thousand five hundred feet.
Here we were at the upper end of one of the flats of the glacier that
fills the Grand Basin, the sérac of another great rise just above us.
The walls of the North Peak grow still more striking and picturesque
here, where they attain their highest elevation. These granite ramparts,
falling three thousand feet sheer, swell out into bellying buttresses
with snow slopes between them as they descend to the glacier floor,
while on top, above the granite, each peak point and crest ridge is
tipped with black shale. How comes that ugly black shale, with the
fragments of which all the lower glacier is strewn, to have such lofty
eminence and granite-guarded distinction, as though it were the most
beautiful or the most valuable thing in the world? The McKinley Fork of
the Kantishna, which drains the Muldrow, is black as ink with it, and
its presence can be detected in the Tanana River itself as far as its
junction with the Yukon. It is largely soluble in water, and where
melting snow drips over it on the glacier walls below were great
splotches, for all the world as though a gigantic ink-pot had been
upset.
[Illustration: Second camp in the Grand Basin--looking down, 16,500
feet.]
[Sidenote: The Flagstaff]
While we sat resting awhile on our way to this camp, gazing at these
pinnacles of the North Peak, we fell to talking about the pioneer
climbers of this mountain who claimed to have set a flagstaff near the
summit of the North Peak--as to which feat a great deal of incredulity
existed in Alaska for several reasons--and we renewed our determination
that, if the weather permitted when we had reached our goal and ascended
the South Peak, we would climb the North Peak also to seek for traces of
this earliest exploit on Denali, which is dealt with at length in
another place in this book. All at once Walter cried out: "I see the
flagstaff!" Eagerly pointing to the rocky prominence nearest the
summit--the summit itself is covered with snow--he added: "I see it
plainly!" Karstens, looking where he pointed, saw it also, and, whipping
out the field-glasses, one by one we all looked, and saw it distinctly
standing out against the sky. With the naked eye I was never able to see
it unmistakably, but through the glasses it stood out, sturdy and
strong, one side covered with crusted snow. We were greatly rejoiced
that we could carry down positive confirmation of this matter. It was no
longer necessary for us to ascend the North Peak.
The upper glacier also bore plain signs of the earthquake that had
shattered the ridge. Huge blocks of ice were strewn upon it, ripped off
the left-hand wall, but it was nowhere crevassed as badly as the lower
glacier, but much more broken up into sérac. Some of the bergs presented
very beautiful sights, wind-carved incrustations of snow in cameo upon
their blue surface giving a suggestion of Wedgwood pottery. All tints
seemed more delicate and beautiful up here than on the lower glacier.
On the 5th June we advanced to about seventeen thousand five hundred
feet right up the middle of the glacier. As we rose that morning slowly
out of the flat in which our tent was pitched and began to climb the
steep sérac, clouds that had been gathering below swept rapidly up into
the Grand Basin, and others swept as rapidly over the summits and down
upon us. In a few moments we were in a dense smother of vapor with
nothing visible a couple of hundred yards away. Then the temperature
dropped, and soon snow was falling which increased to a heavy snow-storm
that raged an hour. We made our camp and ate our lunch, and by that time
the smother of vapor passed, the sun came out hot again, and we were all
simultaneously overtaken with a deep drowsiness and slept. Then out into
the glare again, to go down and bring up the remainder of the stuff, we
went, and that night we were established in our last camp but one. We
had decided to go up at least five hundred feet farther that we might
have the less to climb when we made our final attack upon the peak. So
when we returned with the loads from below we did not stop at camp, but
carried them forward and cached them against to-morrow's final move.
[Illustration: Third camp in the Grand Basin--17,000 feet, showing the
shattering of the glacier walls by the earthquake.
The rocks at the top of the picture are about 19,000 feet high and are
the highest rocks on the south peak of the mountain.]
[Sidenote: Last Camp]
On Friday, the 6th June, we made our last move and pitched our tent in a
flat near the base of the ridge, just below the final rise in the
glacier of the Grand Basin, at about eighteen thousand feet, and we were
able to congratulate one another on making the highest camp ever made in
North America. I set up and read the mercurial barometer, and when
corrected for its own temperature it stood at 15.061. The boiling-point
thermometer registered 180.5, as the point at which water boiled, with
an air temperature of 35°. It took one hour to boil the rice for supper.
The aneroids stood at 14.8 and 14.9, still steadily losing on the
mercurial barometer. I think that a rough altitude gauge could be
calculated from the time rice takes to boil--at least as reliable as an
aneroid barometer. At the Parker Pass it took fifty minutes; here it
took sixty. This is about the height of perpetual snow on the great
Himalayan peaks; but we had been above the perpetual snow-line for
forty-eight days.
We were now within about two thousand five hundred feet of the summit
and had two weeks' full supply of food and fuel, which, at a pinch,
could be stretched to three weeks. Certain things were short: the
chocolate and figs and raisins and salt were low; of the zwieback there
remained but two and one-half packages, reserved against lunch when we
attacked the summit. But the meatballs, the erbswurst, the caribou
jelly, the rice, and the tea--our staples--were abundant for two weeks,
with four gallons of coal-oil and a gallon of alcohol. The end of our
painful transportation hither was accomplished; we were within one day's
climb of the summit with supplies to besiege. If the weather should
prove persistently bad we could wait; we could advance our parallels;
could put another camp on the ridge itself at nineteen thousand feet,
and yet another half-way up the dome. If we had to fight our way step by
step and could advance but a couple of hundred feet a day, we were still
confident that, barring unforeseeable misfortunes, we could reach the
top. But we wanted a clear day on top, that the observations we designed
to make could be made; it would be a poor success that did but set our
feet on the highest point. And we felt sure that, prepared as we were to
wait, the clear day would come.
[Illustration: The North Peak, 20,000 feet high.
Our last camp in the Grand Basin, at 18,000 feet: the highest camp ever
made in North America.]
As so often happens when everything unpropitious is guarded against,
nothing unpropitious occurs. It would have been a wonderful chance,
indeed, if, supplied only for one day, a fine, clear day had come. But
supplied against bad weather for two or three weeks, it was no wonder at
all that the very first day should have presented itself bright and
clear. We had exhausted our bad fortune below; here, at the juncture
above all others at which we should have chosen to enjoy it, we were to
encounter our good fortune.
[Sidenote: Breathlessness]
But here, where all signs seemed to promise success to the expedition,
the author began to have fears of personal failure. The story of Mr.
Fitzgerald's expedition to Aconcagua came to his mind, and he recalled
that, although every other member of the party reached the summit, that
gentleman himself was unable to do so. In the last stage the difficulty
of breathing had increased with fits of smothering, and the medicine
chest held no remedy for blind staggers.