October, 2009

All these are quotes from Galen Rowell: The Art of Adventure.  A must have book for anyone interested in photography and mountaineering.   As usual, the photographs are stunning.

McKinley

Twenty-thousand foot Mt. McKinley is the highest peak in North America, and the Kahiltna Glacier is one of the five major ice rivers that flow down and around its base.  At about 8,000 feet, these glaciers begin to level out and circle the mountain, creating a 90-mile river of ice.  Galen Rowell first saw this glacial beltway during a fly-over in 1972.

Six years later, he joined three other adventurers to circumnavigate McKinley on skis, using this route, which no expedition had ever completed.  The pinoeering three-week trek went relative smoothly, despite a number of falls, one dislocated shoulder, brittle ice, abrupt storms and more than one unexpected avalanche.  On the 19th day of the expedition, the small group discovered faint ski tracks in front of them.  It took them a moment to realize that the tracks were their own.  They had closed the great circle.

After the expedition, Galen and Ned Gillette, the original planner and leader of the McKinley orbit, decided to try the first one-day ascent of McKinley.  The plan was to get up and down the mountain quickly, so they wouldn’t need a lot of gear.  Speed would also help them avoid high-altitude plumonary edema, an acute altitude sickness.  This kind of climbing, on a mountain like McKinley where expeditions are normally three weeks long, is almost superhuman.

On their first attempt, the snow abruptly turned to blue ice at 13,400 feet.  Ned slipped as he was about to switch from skis to crampons.  The two men were roped together, and as Ned fell, he popped Galen off the mountain with him.  Galen tried to break the fall by jamming his ski pole into the ice.  The tip didn’t hold, but the brief lull gave Ned the chance to grab an old polypropylene rope fixed on the mountain by a previous expedition.  Ned’s one-handed grip on the rope stopped their fall less than a yard from a 3,000-foot drop to the glacier below.  Galen landed on top of Ned, and seriously slashed his face on the meta edges of Ned’s skis.  Later the same day, after a 12-mile journey down the mountain and a 180-mile ride to Anchorage, a plastic surgeon stitched Galen’s face back together.  A month after that, Galen and Ned were back on the mountain. This time, they made the summit, becoming the first men to climb McKinley in a single day.

Karakoram

In the late winter of 1980, Galen Rowell, Dan Asay, Ned Gillette and Kim Schmitz set off on a 285-mile ski-traverse across the remote Karakoram Himalaya in northern Pakistan.  Their route followed four of the longest glaciers outside the subpolar regions (Siachen, Baltoro, Biafo and Hispar) through the planet’s highest and most exotic peaks:  K2, Mustagh Tower, Broad Peak Masherbrum, Gasherbrums I-IV, the Ogre, Great Trango Tower and Chogolisa.

As much as the mountains beckoned, the team had no plans to climb them this time out.  Instead, Galen had dreamt up a ski tour that followed a glacial highway through a high, remote and mystical part of the world.  This six-week Karakoram traverse turned out to be his most taxing, most difficult adventure.  During those six weeks, the temperature sometimes dropped to minus 25 degrees F.  Often, the fabulous peaks – and the skiers – were shrouded in clouds.  Still, the expedition crept along on skis, each man bowed under 120 pounds of food, fuel and equipment – everything he could need for the journey.  Supplies that wouldn’t fit on their backs were dragged behind on children’s plastic sleds.  On good snow, they traveled at four miles per hour downhill; on bad snow, clambering amidst meltwater streams, they slowed to four miles a day.  On these days, time and distance became glacial.  Forty-four days after stepping onto the Siachen Glacier, the expeditioners ended their trek at Hunza, having traversed most of Pakistan, east to west from the Indian border almost to Afghanistan.

The adventurers’ re-entry to civilization was muted.  The trauma of moving through the Karakoram, day after day under their own power, had numbed them and drained the color from the experience.  Their capacity for emotional response had shrunk to near zero.  It was not until months later that Galen felt full satisfaction from the most unprecedented adventure of his life.

Fitz Roy

They tried to make it in only a day, but darkness beat the climbers to the top of Fitz Roy by a few hundred feet.  With no tents or sleeping bags, and scarcely room to stand on an ice ledge, Galen Rowell, Michael Graber and David Wilson were forced to stay up all night.  They jogged in place to keep warm on their perilous perch as they waited for dawn’s first light.  The merest breeze chilled them to the bone but their spirits were high:  They were close to the top.  They sang songs to keep from shivering.

“Tonight we will have no sleep, no warmth, no food, and no liquid,” Galen wrote.  “We are lacking those basic aspects of human existence, yet we have come to this by our own choosing; for us it is a privilege to stand the night away near Fitz Roy’s summit in clarity and stillness.”

With first light, the three tired and cold climbers began to move to the top.  Within minutes they were there, warmed by their effort and the sun’s first rays.  From there, they overlooked the sheer spire of Cerro Torre where legendary Italian mountaineer Toni Egger disappeared in an icy storm in 1959.  To the west, they could see the arctic expanse of the Patagonial Icecap stretch for 200 miles.

‘The power of the view from Fitz Roy,” Galen wrote, “comes from within us.  It would not be the same from an airplane, or if we had ridden to the summit in a gondola.  Thought and vision are intertwined … we feel a strong connection between what is before our eyes and the knowledge of our inner selves that we have gained by pushing the outer limits of our endurance.”

More to come.

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