Facing the Extreme: One Woman's Story of True Courage and Death-Defying Survival in the Eye of Mt. McKinley's Worst Storm Ever

PREFACE

In May of 1992, during the worst storm on record to hit Mount McKinley, North America’s highest peak at 20,320 feet, I and nine other teammates found ourselves clinging to the side of the mountain, fighting for survival instead of climbing toward the summit as we had hoped. Our struggle was eventually rewarded with a successful summit bid. Eleven other climber-mountaineers from other teams weren’t so fortunate. They paid the ultimate price for their attempt to summit—death. Inexperience, bad luck, bad weather, their time, and reckless bravado, are phrases that tattoo the memories and tagline the gravestones with more questions than answers. Four years later, same month, virtually the same time frame, disaster hit the mountaineering community again, this time on Everest. Eleven more gravestones, different names but etched with the same phrases (inexperience, bad luck, bad weather, their time, and reckless bravado), offer up what is a growing list of stark reminders to the risks inherent in mountaineering.

Climbing a mountain is always a calculated risk, a puppeteer’s dance between heaven and hell where one false step, one miscalculation, one simple turn of fate, can leave a mountaineer tangled in a broken lifeline and tumbling into an icy coffin. Despite the obvious risks involved and the monumental failures of many, mountains such as McKinley compel the attentions of mountaineers around the world, drawing men and women in continuing record numbers rather like ants to a picnic. Why?

The Athabascan Indians call the continent’s highest peak Denali, meaning the High One (I prefer this name and will use it throughout the book). It has been frequently referred to as the mountain of extremes and, more recently, the mountain of death. Rising above the tundra and piercing the heavens over central Alaska, Denali claims the most spectacular vertical gain of any point on earth. It has been characterized as a wilderness within a wilderness, looming alone amid a threatening and inhospitable landscape. Ice and snow blanket Denali year-round, while seven glaciers, hundreds of feet thick in places, carve immense valleys as they make their inexorable way down the mountain’s sides. As the coldest and one of the most unforgiving places in the Northern Hemisphere, the physical environment of Denali ranks among the harshest on earth.

Because of its sheer mass, Denali begs to be explored, but like the allure of a female black widow to a male, the attraction is both seductive and deadly. High altitude, subarctic latitude, and notoriously severe weather combine to produce a world-class mountaineering challenge demanding fortitude, endurance, and skill. Mountaineers consistently underestimate Denali, and, particularly in ideal conditions, denial and self-deception can lull those who attempt the mountain into a dangerously false sense of security.

On Denali, sudden snowstorms can erupt out of nowhere, even in June, burying camps and trapping climbers in tents for days. Since the mountain itself can disappear behind a veil of clouds, air rescue becomes a chancy proposition. Even in good weather, mountaineers have lost their lives on Denali. Since 1932, when the National Park Service began keeping records, through 1996, eighty-seven climbers have perished in their quest for the summit. They died after being swept away by avalanches or by tumbling off rocky or icy walls. Some simply disappeared, swallowed by one of the many active glaciers that drape the mountain. Thirty-four of those who have died lie buried on the mountain, remembered only by line-item entries in Park Service logs as testament to their icy graves.

The compulsion to climb mountains has no logical explanation. In fact, there isn’t anything that makes sense about mountaineering when taken at face value. Where is the attraction in spending a month of your life struggling to reach the rarefied air and glory of a mountain’s summit, only to spin around abruptly after a mere ten minutes or so to race back to the safety of a lower camp?

Jim Whittaker, the first American to summit Everest, once said that mountaineering is like hitting oneself in the head with a hammer—it only feels good when you stop. Others have referred to climbing successfully as nothing more than one’s measured ability to endure pain. Since Denali, I’ve begun referring to mountaineering as crisis reduced to a mental exercise.

Fortunately, mountaineering is seldom the arduous experience we endured on Denali or the disaster of monumental proportions experienced in 1996 on Everest. If it were, we would have to stop referring to it as a sport and instead dub the pursuit of mountaineering as something similar to a suicide mission. At its best, high-elevation mountaineering offers accomplishment for the sake of growth as well as sport without competition where the concept of winning doesn’t necessarily mean coming in first. The mountain becomes the means to improve the person, which works so long as the person involved doesn’t have deluded ideas about conquering the mountain.

I’m compelled to climb mountains for a number of reasons. As an artist, I climb for the visual feast. Visuals absolutely turn me on—the light, the perspectives, the Jules Verne otherworldliness of the mountainscape, the intensity of the colors, the massive scale, the shadow of the earth cast against its own atmosphere. There is, quite simply, nothing on earth that matches the visuals from a mountain summit and, to me, any hardship or discomfort is well worth the privilege of being there. Of course, friends have taken great delight in pointing out the dichotomy between using my hands for the delicate and precise work as a medical illustrator and using them for the blue-collar, muscle-wrenching work of climbing. While I can’t debate the obvious contrast of efforts between my two passions, they share a similar need for intense concentration and attention to detail—something I absolutely revel in.

I climb because challenging situations thrill me. I delight in finding order in chaos—perhaps the result of being the oldest of six children. I’ve been told I’m a type A personality gone wild. I’m most at ease in a situation that demands my complete focus and forces me to push my limits. For some reason, the harder things become, the more I like doing them—perhaps a dysfunctional soul is requisite to being a successful mountaineer?

I climb, too, because I truly love being in the vertical environment—I’m at home there, totally at ease—and because the high alpine world is a source of endless fascination that energizes and makes me feel more alive than at any other time in my life. I dream about mountaineering. It’s in my blood and I dread the thought of a day when I might be physically unable to do it.

Mountaineering is a white-hot imperative—that single interest in life that motivates me in everything else that I do. On a mountain, I find that I am able to peel away the camouflage under which all humans hide and experience existence in a pure state, stripped to the bare essentials—life in the raw with its flaws and beating heart exposed for all to see. It is this baring of one’s soul that leads to personal awareness and the feeling that one is truly alive. What is also fascinating to me is being a part of the natural process of evolution that all teams go through when under stress. Strength or weakness in a team is derived directly from human ability to deal with fear and challenges, and builds character as a result. Members of every climbing team I’ve ever been on have managed to gel only as each person managed to understand and accept idiosyncratic behavior in others. Personalities are neither bad nor good when on the mountain, although from the outside looking in, as you the reader are now, that can be hard to see. The challenge of learning to work together is a challenge as great as climbing the summit itself.

As for dealing with the risks, I simply never think that I’m risking my life when I head off on a climb, and I refuse to operate from that perspective. Even on Denali, where the very weight of the mountain’s force had crushed the last breath out of so many other climbers before, I didn’t set out with the thought that I was risking my life. I am more afraid of not living than I am of dying. My goal was to experience what Dick Bass had described to me years earlier as the most spectacular of the Seven Summits. The Seven Summits represent the highest point on each of the seven continents and a lofty goal millionaire Bass popularized in his quest to be the first to climb them all. The Seven Summits are Mount Kosciusko in Australia (7,316 feet); Mount Aconcagua in South America (22,834 feet); Mount Kilimanjaro in Africa (19,340 feet); Denali in North America (20,320 feet); Mount Elbrus in Europe (18,482 feet); Mount Vinson in Antarctica (16,864 feet); and Mount Everest in Asia (29,028 feet). Before Denali, I had climbed Elbrus, Kilimanjaro, and Aconcagua. For many, Denali is more than just another box to tick off on the Seven Summit checklist. It is a coveted jewel that sparkles in the eyes of mountaineers who would ascend to the lofty heights of world-class mountaineering. Those who make it revel in the throne rooms of the mountain gods. Those who don’t, either keep trying until they succeed or end their attempt by choice or force. I had been dreaming of Denali’s summit for years.

For most of my mountaineering life, the mountains have been good to me. Yes, I acknowledge that climbing in a world of fire and ice is a carefully choreographed dance in a hostile environment, one I’ve always had tremendous respect for—certainly more so after my experience on Denali. But, without actually experiencing what I went through on the mountain in May 1992, I could never have imagined or even appreciated the magnitude of the forces of life and death that swirl within the mountain zone.

When the climb up Denali began to turn deadly, it might seem surprising to others to hear that I was able to numb myself to the icy tendrils of terror that threatened to choke the life from any unwary soul. Probably this was because the experience was not a fast, intense, adrenaline rush. Instead, my teammates and I were forced to live with a closeness of death for so many days that death itself became familiar, almost comfortable. My experience on Denali bestowed on me a familiarity with death. I knew its face, its habits, its haunts. With that knowledge comes an incredible sense of freedom (though not recklessness) that now allows me to move through many aspects of life, including my continued pursuit of mountains, unencumbered. Living with death has taught me to stay in the moment, fully focused and aware, without fear of the future—to me, a far more enriching approach to life.

A friend once told me that the only people who ever reach the top of any mountain, metaphorical or real, are those who have experienced intense pain. Everyone has tasted life’s hard blows at some point in time. How those blows are dealt with determines whether or not the experience becomes constructive or destructive. The more I climbed real mountains, I discovered that I had allowed past blows—unresolved issues in my life—to fester as pent-up anger. I learned to harness this anger as energy, energy that drove me to great heights, literally. After Denali, I realized I had no more anger left. This mountain took it all from me—Denali was bigger than any anger I could possibly harbor.

Is the struggle and the risk of death worth those ten minutes on the summit? If you take those ten minutes alone and strip away all else, probably not.

To paraphrase T. S. Eliot, no matter how much time I spend exploring faraway places, the result will be to end up where I started, at the beginning, seeing my life with new understanding. That, for me, sums up the worth of the pursuit of rarefied air and mountain summits. As hard as the experience gets, it’s never just the summit. It’s each step along the way and the sights seen and the lessons learned that make the ten minutes on the summit so special. Yet even without the summit, other, internal summits are climbed, so in many ways, mountaineering is, for me, more about the journey than anything else. This meaning is perfectly described by a Zen saying: The journey is the end.

Though I didn’t know it on May 1, 1992, the greatest journey of my life was about to begin. If Denali had a doorman, he might well say, Welcome to Denali, where your nightmares and dreams commingle in an often confused sense of reality.

1: ON THE ROAD TO DENALI

It is hard to celebrate life when one is surrounded by death, imprisoned by a raging storm on the side of a mountain that some assert is the most dangerous summit in the world. I had intended the climb to be a forty-fifth birthday present, but this was no gift. I was an unwilling participant in my worst nightmare. A member of a nearby climbing team went outside simply to dig out his tent and when he returned and took a sip of hot cocoa, his teeth cracked. Even unexposed skin was turning yellow-and-black—freezing, dying. The wind roaring down the mountain and thundering by our tents sounded like passing freight trains, the avalanches like bombs. The ground shook from the ferocity of it all. I had to wear earplugs just to muffle the noise. Body bags stacked around the medical tent became final resting places for those who were now beyond help. I’d look at one and wonder: Why not me? Why not all of us? Living and dying had been reduced to a simple game of roulette that played on with no end in sight.

If I only knew then what I know now …

*   *   *

I looked ridiculous! A passing hiker, wearing a small fanny pack and dressed in shorts, a T-shirt, and lightweight hiking shoes, managed to nod a greeting despite his obvious inclination to stare at the strange, six-foot-tall, blue-eyed blonde who strode by—running tights, sweatshirt, bandanna, dark glasses, an expedition pack loaded until the seams strained, ski poles, and giant plastic expedition boots with heavy socks stretched to mid-calf. I had to agree that it was a ridiculous getup for a dayhike in Reno, Nevada’s, 70-degree weather with not a single snowflake in sight. In two days I would board a flight from Reno to Seattle and then on to Anchorage where I would meet up with my teammates for the first time. Barring bad weather or any other unforeseen challenges, in three days I would be sitting in a camp alongside a makeshift glacial airstrip at Kahiltna Base at 7,200 feet—13,120 feet below the summit of my dreams. Today, however, I walked. One final training hike along familiar Sierra paths with my dog, Peso. At least he never cared how strange I appeared. Of course, that was probably due in large part to Peso’s own unique visual