Unsoeld William Francis - Fatal mountaineer: the high-altitude life and death of Willi Unsoeld, American Himalayan legend

On March 4, 1979, a man descending Washington's Mount Rainier was swept away in an avalanche. A young woman, coming behind him on a rope, also was carried down a steep slope beneath a pass called Cadaver Gap.

It was snowing hard. Visibility was low, and strong winds scoured the incline. In the last twenty-four hours three feet of new snow had accumulated on the mountain's southern side. The barometer reading was quite low. The weather did not look like improving.

In an avalanche, snow, no matter how powdery, turns into a substance that resembles wet cement. And as soon as movement ceases, it sets up hard. Thus the standard advice on how to behave in an avalancheto swim with it, make a breathing space around your headoften comes to nothing. Everything happens with appalling force and someone buried just under the surface may be fatally entombed.

As it happened, the man descending first on the rope that day, a fifty-two-year-old college professor named Willi Unsoeld, was buried not too far under, but far enough so that his arms and legs were immobilized. His throat and nostrils filled with snow, and the pack on his back pinned him down. The slide that carried him and Janie Diepenbrock, the young woman, away did not crush their bones, but neither did it let them move. It simply held them and then it was all over.

Unsoeld was leading twenty-one people off the mountain, students of his at Evergreen, a state college in Washington. They had experienced Mount Rainier in some of its more elemental moods, huddling in snow caves for two nights and waiting out storms in nylon tents, which burst their seams from accumulated snow. After seven days it could be said that the group had shown a lot of spunk just getting up as high as it had, with some members climbing within fifteen hundred feet of the 14,411-foot summit. Most of them had had a good time. They were enrolled in an outdoor-education program at Evergreen, thus were self-selected for grit and adventure-hunger.

To climb Rainier in winter is always the real deal, but Willi Unsoeld was famous as a purveyor of the genuine article in the outdoors. Throw in no line, catch no fish was his philosophy, and his own life was a testament to the transfiguring influence of mortal risk. Fifteen years before, he had been America's strongest Himalayan climber. He would always be remembered for the 1963 first ascent of Everest's West Ridge, with Tom Hornbein, one of the most audacious high-altitude climbs in history. Usually the strongest, most forward-thinking member of any group going for a great summit, Unsoeld was also a plain wonderful guy, terrific company in a tent during a five-day blow. He was that modern rarity, a philosophy professor who had a philosophy. He was thoughtful and intuitive about other people. Among mountaineers he was legendary, and within his enormous circle of acquaintance deeply beloved.

At age fifty-two, with both hips recently replaced by orthopedic surgery, most of his toes missing due to frostbite suffered on that Everest climb, he was hardly a world-class specimen anymore. Still, you could do worse than to find yourself in a blizzard with Willi Unsoeld. He had climbed Rainier some two hundred times. After years as a professional guide there and in the Tetons, his mountain sense was highly developed, to say the least. At Cadaver Gap Unsoeld made a typically ballsy, yet calculated, move: with members of his party exhausted and borderline hypothermic, he chose the route of descent that, while marginally more dangerous, promised to bring them to safety quickest. (They were within a few hundred yards of a mountain hut.) He led off in the howling stinging whiteness, with Diepenbrock and two others behind him on a rope; but a snow slab, three feet thick and hundreds of yards square, sheared off under them and rudely decided the outcome of the day.