Mountaineering

But then, with the Donjek not yet in sight, they heard the ominous roar of its flooding current. Over the next two days, there followed one setback after another: the futile attempt to build a driftwood raft; the crossing without crampons of the snout of the Donjek Glacier; the wretched bivouac on the ice under the tent with no pole; the shock of the discovery that the true source of the Donjek was not that glacier, but another one twenty-two impossible miles farther south; the dicey rappel off the carved bollard just to get off the glacial snout.

And then, the nearly hopeless effort to ford the river where it braided into some fifty channels, the last one proving the deepest and most treacherous. With their rope improvised from pack cordage, Bob had staggered into that last channel and lost his footing, only to be held by Brad's stationary belay. But then, as Bob forged on, he had lost his footing again, and the taut rope pulled Brad loose. Both men careened out of control, the muddy flood carrying them around one bend after another. Both men had time to think This is it....

Then, with a genius born of desperation, Bob improvised a technique; he would let the current carry him twenty or thirty yards, then touch bottom with his feet, only to spring upward in a mad leap. Brad caught on and imitated his friend.

At last Bob eddied out on the far shore. Brad, too, crawled up into the bushes. Shivering uncontrollably, the two stripped off all their clothes and pulled their single sleeping bag around them.

Two days later, among the willows and alders, Brad and Bob ran by chance into some Indian horsepackers from the Burwash Landing trading post, out rounding up stray steeds. The men were utterly dumbfounded to discover the climbers - no one in the Yukon suspecting that any human being was abroad in the vast wilderness between Kluane Lake and the Saint Elias Range.

The crossing of the Donjek River was the closest Brad would come to dying in the mountains. For Bob, it was one of the two close calls of his life - the other coming on K2 in 1953. From: The Last of His Kind, by David Roberts

For those who are, like me, fascinated by detailed stories of Arctic survival, Antarctic weather and humankind's stubborn persistence in maintaining research stations at both, along with the indomitable will of strong minds geared to adventure and exploration, this book was yet another treat in armchair adventure.

The writer, an intrepidly successful mountaineer in his own right, has documented in this biography the life of his mentor in the climbing world, the former director of the Boston Science Museum.

Before Bradford Washburn became involved with the Boston museum he was involved with the National Geographic Society, which sponsored several of his mountaineering expeditions and published his descriptions of those expeditions, along with breath-taking mountain photography, another area the man pioneered.

Bradford Washburn, who began his climbing career as a teen in the Alps on family vacations in the 1930s, went on to become the premier mountaineer of his era. He was a true polymath, among other attributes; a geologist, author, photographer, cartographer and mountaineer extraordinaire. He excelled in leading expeditions in the Yukon and Alaska's Saint Elias Range; up to then areas of North America, remote and weather-bound that were largely unexplored territory.

As a surveyor and cartographer he produced maps of then-unknown areas of the Grand Canyon, Mt. McKinley and Mt. Everest; his maps and aerial photographs are still in use today, never having been surpassed.

Exploration of Earth's isolated and forbidding surfaces has become fairly routine now, with wealthy amateurs paying hefty sums for expert mountaineers leading commercial expeditions enabling them to view for themselves stupendous heights of nature. The original explorers, whose exploits this book describes, faced the unknown.

They did it with determination, perseverance and dignity. And many lost their lives in the process.

At last we got a spell of six consecutive days of perfect weather. Pushing as hard as we could, we arrived all four together on the summit at 3:30 a.m. on July 30, 1965. A few hours later, we collapsed in our highest camp, all four crammed into a two-man tent pitched narrow on an ice ledge. We fished out our bottle of "victory brandy" - a pint of blackberry-flavored Hiram Walker. Our first and heartiest toast was to Brad Washburn.

The west face of Huntington remains the finest climb of my life. It would have been a perfect expedition, except that it ended in tragedy. In the middle of the night of July 31, as the youngest member of our team. Ed Bernd, and I descended in semidarkness, we paused to set up a rappel. Suddenly, as soon as he leaned back on the rope, Ed was flying through the air away from me. He never uttered a word.

Somehow the anchor had failed - and to this day, I do not know why. It was obvious, however, that Ed had fallen 4,500 feet to his death. The "perfect expedition" turned into a survival ordeal, as I had to climb without a rope down to the next camp, then wait two days for my other two partners to join me.

Ed had fallen to a glacial basin so inaccessible that we never had a chance to search for his body.