Escape from Lucania Read online

  I harbored, I must confess, a secret agenda. At an even younger age than Brad and Bob on Lucania, my best friend, Don Jensen, and I (we were both twenty) had undergone our own two-man ordeal in the subarctic, a forty-two-day failure on the east ridge of Mount Deborah in Alaska’s Hayes Range, culminating in Don’s sixty-foot fall into a crevasse from which it took half a day to extricate him. That expedition had unfolded as a slowly gathering nightmare, a trial by frustration and distrust. In the miasma of cabin fever our tiny tent produced, I got so edgy that the very sound of Don’s breathing or chewing could drive me crazy. Leery of my impatience, Don retreated into a cocoon of placid silence whose inertia verged on the moribund. The grim journey together nearly cost us our friendship.

  I felt it my duty, as I set to work on the Lucania story, to dig beneath the surface of the interpersonal, to find out just what quarrels and tensions and unspoken doubts must have laced Brad and Bob’s experience on an expedition considerably more perilous than an attempt on Mount Deborah. The two men’s characters, for starters, were so utterly unlike: Brad the headstrong leader, the salty-tongued arbiter of style, quick to anger and unsparing of folly; Bob the peace-at-all-costs go-between, the volunteer for all the dirtiest jobs, magnanimous with others and serene in his own soul.

  So I set out to pry beneath the blithe surface and discover the “real” truth about Lucania. In the end, however, I discovered something else: that as far as I could tell, Brad and Bob belonged to a different subspecies of human beings from myself and all the fellows my age I had climbed with. To enter Bates and Washburn’s Lucania, I had to walk into an unknown land, peopled with beings I had only read about in Icelandic sagas and Greek myths.

  ONE MAROONED

  JUST before noon on June 18, the skies suddenly cleared. In Valdez, a small coastal Alaskan town tucked into a crooked arm of Prince William Sound, Brad Washburn had cooled his heels during the previous week, watching glumly as one day of rain succeeded another. On June 14, a raging southeaster had swept in off the Gulf of Alaska to batter the town. With the storm came a puzzling, unseasonable warmth.

  Brad had rented a ramshackle house in Valdez for five dollars a month, as a place to store the team’s gear and food, and as a base for photographic flights he hoped to make after the expedition. Russell Dow, a protégé of Brad’s who had been a member of his 1933 expedition to Mount Grillon, a 12,726-foot peak in the Fairweather Range, had been hanging out for months in Valdez, preparing the assault on Lucania.

  The other two team members, Bob Bates and Norman Bright, had arrived on board a ship out of Seattle only at 6:00 P.M. the evening before. When June 18 dawned overcast once more, the four men lounged near the wharf, settling in for the indeterminate wait that routinely stalls the fondest plans of aviators in the great North. They were getting ready to eat lunch when the clouds abruptly peeled away, baring a startling expanse of blue stretching from the hills at the town’s back to the steely waters of the fjord before it.

  Cigarette dangling from his lips, wearing dungarees, a flannel shirt, and a black rain hat, Bob Reeve came storming out of his house and told the boys to forget about lunch and load up the plane for the first flight in. Bob and Brad guzzled down an ice cream soda each and headed for the mud flats below Reeve’s house.

  Thirty-five years old that summer of 1937, Reeve was one of the three or four finest bush pilots in the Alaska Territory, a paragon among a legendary fraternity of flyers, a good portion of whom would die in crashes in the remote wilderness. Born in a sleepy Wisconsin town, Reeve was afflicted with a congenital restlessness. He had left home at fifteen and talked his way into the Navy shortly after the United States had entered World War I. In 1926, after dropping out of college, he fetched up in Beaumont, Texas, where a pair of barnstormers with the absurdly appropriate names of Maverick and Hazard taught him to fly—the dream of his life since the age of eight, when he had first read about the Wright brothers.

  Two years later, Reeve was in South America, flying mail along the roadless wastes of the Andean spine. There was no more perilous aviation being pursued anywhere in the world. One of Reeve’s colleagues was Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, who would memorialize the exploits of the South American pilots in Night Flight. Reeve learned his craft by trial and error, in the process setting records for the fastest flight between Santiago and Lima and for the most hours flying mail by any aviator in the world in 1930.

  The next year, Reeve bumped into a pair of miners from Alaska who enthralled him with tales of “hills full of gold” in the Wrangell Mountains. In South America, Reeve had earned and squandered a small fortune. Now, in the summer of 1932, with the Depression in full swing, he arrived in Valdez as a stowaway on a freighter, hiding under a tarpaulin.

  By the next winter, Reeve owned his first airplane—a used Fairchild 51 he bought in Fairbanks. Most of his work came flying freight for miners, whose wildcat prospecting in the Chugach and Wrangell hills bespoke a desperate gamble to escape the poverty that had gripped the nation.

  Intensely competitive, fiercely proud of his skill in the air, Reeve had become by 1937 a chain-smoking aerial entrepreneur whose locutions were sprinkled with many a vivid profanity. Tall, thin, ruggedly handsome, with a sourdough’s squint, he had gained considerable fame from a number of daring flying feats. Reeve’s sense of humor veered between the merely ribald and the downright morbid. Over the door of the small wooden shack that served as his office, he had painted a skull and crossbones, the hand-lettered aperçu, “Opportunity makes damned rascals out of all of us. But opportunity is not knocking here,” and the injunction, “HANDS OFF OUR TOOLS.” The side of the shack bore a curious advertisement for himself: “Always Use Reeve Airways. Slow, Unreliable, Unfair, and Crooked. Scared and Unliscensed [sic]. And Nuts!” The beat-up Model A he drove around Valdez’s few dirt streets bore the emblem “Official Car.”

  Reeve was something of a mechanical genius, attentitively servicing and tinkering with his own planes. Yet paradoxically, he was at the same time a throwback, a seat-of-the-pants aviator. He never learned to fly on instruments, and long after radios became virtually mandatory for pilots in Alaska, Reeve refused to carry one.

  Brad Washburn recalls a characteristic Reeve anecdote from World War II, when the pilot had finally capitulated and succumbed to radio contact. “He was flying freight down the Aleutian chain, to build up the anti-Japanese bases. Although his plane couldn’t carry big loads like some of the others, Bob always got through. One day he was coming into Umnak, a god-forsaken place. He got on the radio and said, ‘Reeve—Umnak’. Umnak radioed back, ‘For God’s sake, Bob, don’t land here, it’s pouring, it’s zero-zero [visibility and ceiling], and it’s blowing like hell.’ Bob answered, ‘I’m already on the runway. I’m trying to find you, for Christ’s sake.’”

  As a pilot, Reeve was also a great innovator, which was the reason Brad had sought him out for Lucania. Following the lead of aviators in the Alps, a few Alaskan pilots had begun to experiment with wooden skis instead of wheels, for winter and glacier flying. Reeve soon cornered the lucrative market flying supplies into mines in the Chugach and Wrangell Mountains, landing on skis at improvised strips near the high diggings. Once spring had melted the snow in Valdez, however, Reeve had to cease his supply flights because he could no longer land in Valdez on skis.

  It was the innovator’s notion that, with the right kind of skis, he might use the coastal mud flats below Valdez’s gravel strip for takeoffs and landings during the warm months. Wooden skis would only rot if left to sit in the tidal muck. So Reeve commandeered a stainless steel bar from a derelict roadhouse and cobbled out of it a pair of metal sheaths to fit over the wooden skis. Then he practiced on the mud flats until he had mastered the slithery game. Because he could land and take off only at low tide, the pilot now carried a tide table with him wherever he went. But now he could haul freight into the Chugach and Wrangell mines year-round.

  By the winter of 1936-1937, Brad, only twenty-six years o
ld, was already the veteran of four expeditions to Alaska and the Yukon. Setting his sights on Lucania, the highest unclimbed mountain in North America, but a dauntingly remote objective, Brad conceived of the idea of flying in to make a landing high on the Walsh Glacier, just south of the sprawling mountain, thereby obviating a grueling approach march through the foothills.

  Brad had heard about Reeve’s virtuoso mud-flats work. In January 1937, the climber wrote the pilot. He outlined his plan for Lucania, then added (a trifle condescendingly), “Although I’ve never met you, I know several of your best friends who believe that you are exactly the fellow who we need to do all of the flying that will be required to assure the success of this little expedition…. We believe that you are plenty experienced to handle this work—and that if we succeed on Lucania, you are certain to get a lot of favorable publicity—both for you as well as for the town of Valdez. We hope that you’ll agree to be our pilot.”

  Reeve wired back a one-sentence answer: “ANYWHERE YOU’LL RIDE, I’LL FLY.”

  Just after 1:00 P.M. on June 18, Reeve, Washburn, and Bates loaded up the Fairchild 51. Normally, after high tide had receded, “Mudville,” as the strip was dubbed, was a slimy miasma into which an intruder sank ankle-deep, but now, with a fierce sun fast drying out the flats, Reeve asked his charges to slosh down the runway in front of his plane. If the flats baked dry, taking off was impossible. Brad later recorded the six-hundred-foot takeoff in his diary: “We just barely made it, our skis just clearing the ditch and tall eel grass at the end of the runway. The plane wobbled a bit; Bob nosed her level to pick up speed, and in a moment we were banking gently out across the bay, climbing toward Thompson Pass. Bob turned around and grinned his wonderful grin from underneath that inseparable rain hat.”

  Already, in May, Reeve had made three landings with Russ Dow on the Walsh Glacier, laying a depot of 2,000 pounds of gear and food in preparation for base camp. On the first flight, Reeve had turned back in the face of violent winds, but on his second try, he had glided to a perfect landing at 8,750 feet. Here, where winter still reigned, the snow was as hard as concrete. Reeve’s landing was the highest yet made in Alaska or Canada, and the highest ski-equipped landing anywhere in the world with a full load of freight.

  In May, the logistics had been altogether different. Reeve had ferried the team’s gear in several flights from Valdez to McCarthy, a gold-rush town in the Wrangell Mountains where, in late spring, there was still plenty of snow on the ground. Then, with Dow in the passenger seat, he had made the three trips back and forth from McCarthy to the Walsh Glacier.

  Now, on June 18, the snow had melted off the McCarthy strip. Reeve had no choice but to take the climbers in on a single round trip from Valdez. Yet such a flight—more than two hundred miles each way in a direct line—was beyond the fuel capacity of his craft. Thus among the baggage the three men had loaded aboard the Fairchild were five-gallon gas cans carrying enough fuel to ensure Reeve’s return. This gambit in turn required that he land somewhere, for once beyond his half-tank turnaround point, the pilot would be forced to put down and refuel. With all Reeve’s mechanical savvy, he had not figured out any way to pour gas into the plane’s tank while it was still in the air.

  Still, given the ease of the May landings and the perfect weather, Reeve was confident as he took off. He would fly Bob and Brad and their personal gear in on the first flight, then return for Russ Dow and Norman Bright, flying them and the rest of the team’s equipment in that same day, if the weather held. Perhaps a month later, after they had climbed Lucania, Reeve would fly the men out by pairs.

  Bob and Brad, in turn, had full confidence in their pilot. As Brad recalls, “Reeve could land on a peanut.” After only thirty minutes in the air, as the Fairchild sped east against a stiff headwind toward the great Copper River, the men saw the first high cirrus clouds and layers of altostratus materializing on the horizon. At 2:45, they passed over McCarthy, the last outpost of civilization. Now Reeve headed up the gorge of the Chitina River, to cover the last eighty air miles before he would land on the Walsh Glacier. His passengers gazed somewhat apprehensively out either window at the terrain beneath them. “The Chitina River is huge and muddy,” wrote Brad later in his diary; “it swings in countless meanders back and forth across its wide, flat-floored valley. On each side rugged rocky mountains walled it in.”

  Twelve years before, arduously relaying depots of supplies, the team that would make the first ascent of Mount Logan had trudged up this difficult gorge. Otherwise, it lay virtually unexplored. It was obvious to the three men in the Fairchild that the Chitina offered not the ghost of a hope of an emergency landing strip.

  The weather was growing steadily worse. “Cumulus clouds hung in pennants behind the peaks,” wrote Brad later. The head of the Chitina Valley was swallowed in a solid gray wall of mist and fog.

  Since he had taken off, Reeve had chain-smoked one cigarette after another. Now his anxiety grew manifest. Sixty-four years later, Brad would recall another tribulation about that flight. “Reeve had worked out a way that he could pee past the stick and out a hole in the floor. The whole damn plane smelled of dried piss.” To add to the discomfort, the flight was a bitterly cold one for the passengers in the back seat, since to aid Brad’s aerial photography Reeve had taken the right-hand door off the plane.

  The Fairchild passed over the snout of the Chitina Glacier and headed up its massive ice stream. Now Reeve beckoned to Brad to lean forward for a consultation. Shouting over the engine, the pilot said, “That cloud bank ahead is too low. We have ten minutes more before we’ll have too little gas to get home. What do you think?”

  “Anywhere you’ll fly, we’ll ride,” Brad answered.

  Yet in his diary the following night, Brad recaptured the savagery of the landscape the men flew over during the next fifteen minutes. “Till my dying day I shall never forget that nauseating desolation of dying masses of ice…. The valley walls on both sides were vertical rock and scree, bare, snowless, and bleak. Potholes full of horrid muddy water filled every depression in the hellish sea of stagnant ice.”

  At 3:40 P.M., well past the turnaround point, the plane reached the lower stretches of the Walsh Glacier. With the eye of a prospector, Reeve gestured toward a hillside off the left wing that looked to him as if it probably bore ore. “Anybody can have that gold mine who wants it!” he shouted.

  The Walsh looked as forbidding as the Chitina. “The ground below,” Brad would write, “was still a chaos of filthy, rotten ice and twisted moraines, gutted and criss-crossed with crevasses.” Concurring with Brad’s unspoken judgment, Reeve called out, “Hell’s asshole, ain’t it?” Then: “We’ll make it!”

  The Fairchild was flying at 9,000 feet. Only a few hundred feet above, a “leaden ceiling of clouds,” in Brad’s phrase, cut off the visible world. The turbulence was extreme, as the small craft bounced and veered against the headwind.

  Just after 4:00 P.M., Reeve shouted, “There she is!” Brad and Bob peered at the white sweep of the glacier ahead, until they too spotted the tiny black dot of the cache Reeve and Dow had established in May. “We’re going to land, boys. Hold on!”

  Reeve cut the engine; the rigging hummed as the plane plummeted toward the snow. Landing in flat light on a featureless glacier is one of the toughest tasks in bush flying. By 1937, pilots had already learned the trick of making a preliminary pass while throwing out a series of dark objects—gunny sacks dyed black, willow boughs—that, lined up where they came to rest on the glacier, gave depth to the illusory perspective. Such a gambit was now a luxury that Reeve could not afford.

  At the last minute, Reeve pulled back on the stick. The plane touched down with a feathery swish. Reeve gunned the engine so the Fairchild could hop over a crevasse that suddenly appeared. In a surprisingly short distance, the plane slowed to a stop. Reeve let the motor die. It was 4:07 P.M.

  Brad hopped out the right door of the plane, and sank thigh-deep into a sea of slush.

&nb
sp; IN his four years of glacier landings, Bob Reeve had never seen the like. During all the seasons Brad and Bob would climb in Alaska, they would never again encounter conditions remotely similar to these. The week of freakish warmth before June 18 had softened up the surface of the Walsh Glacier, which had been so conveniently firm for Reeve’s landings in May. And day after day of rain, at an altitude where in a normal summer only snow fell, had turned the glacier to soup.

  Reeve had come in for the landing at a spot where he calculated his decelerating glide would leave an easy taxi up to the gear cache. Instead, the slush had gripped the Fairchild like wet cement. The plane had come to rest, slumped almost belly-deep in snow, a full three-quarters of a mile below the cache.

  The pilot instantly grasped the implications. On such a surface, it would be a very hard job to get up enough speed to take off.

  As part of his emergency gear, Reeve carried a pair of snowshoes in the Fairchild. Brad strapped these on and started off toward the cache, hoping to retrieve two more pairs of snowshoes and a pair of long bamboo tent poles with which to probe for crevasses. Although he was in prime shape, Brad had spent the winter at sea level: now, floundering in the soggy snow, gasping in the rarefied air at 8,750 feet, he needed twenty-five minutes to cover that three-quarters of a mile. The solo dash was dangerous, too, for he had no idea whether serious crevasses lay athwart his path. (These monstrous cracks, formed by the strain of a glacier’s imperceptible flow downvalley, often form as relatively narrow slits on the surface that bulge to considerable widths twenty or fifty or a hundred feet down. If the crevasse opening shows on the surface, it is a straightforward matter to skirt it. But often the winds drift snow across the slit, gluing a treacherous bridge across the aperture that completely camouflages the gulf beneath. Many an experienced mountaineer has died falling, either roped or unroped, into a hidden crevasse. Traveling unroped on an unknown glacier, as Brad now was forced to do, is usually considered the height of recklessness.)