Patrick Dean - A Window to Heaven: The Daring First Ascent of Denali: Americas Wildest Peak

To

Susan

And to

Honey & Dino

T hroughout this book, the letters, diaries, and other correspondence from Hudson Stuck and other main players are quoted verbatim. All spelling errors and grammar inconsistencies are consistent with the original source. The title of this book, A Window to Heaven, is a play on the quote from Robert Tatum, uttered upon reaching the summit of Denali, which he described as a window of heaven.

H udson Stuck could barely breathe. A tough and experienced outdoorsman who had spent the last decade dogsledding and tramping across Alaska and the Yukon, Stuck nevertheless gasped in the high, thin air 20,000 feet above sea level.

He and his three companions stood just below the summit ridge of Denali, the highest peak in North America, on a clear, windy, 4-below day. Stuck wore six pairs of socks inside his leather moccasins, with iron ice-creepers or crampons attached to the bottom. Immense lynx-fur-lined mitts covered inner Scotch-wool gloves, and his torso was layered beneath a fur-hooded Alaskan parka. Yet, Stuck wrote, until high noon feet were like lumps of iron.

Behind them stretched what Stuck called the dim blue lowlands of the future Denali National Park, with threads of stream and patches of lake that still carry ice along their banks. A few smaller peaks squatted off to the northeast. In every other direction, the immensity of the mountain they perched on blocked their views of Mount Foraker and the other peaks in the Alaska Range. Above them, just a few hundred more yards of climbing and the prizeto be the first humans to set foot atop Denaliwould be theirs.

It was June 7th, 1913. They were Stuck, Episcopal Archdeacon of Alaska and the Yukon, the oldest of the group at nearly fifty years old, short and wiry, his neatly-trimmed beard the only one among the four; Walter Harper, the youngest at age twenty, half Alaskan Native, fit and confident; Harry Karstens, thirty-four, calmly competent from his years in the Alaskan backcountry; and Robert Tatum, twenty-one, the greenest member of the team. They had launched this expedition eight weeks earlier, enduring bitter cold, severe altitude, and the loss of key supplies to a camp fire.

The team had arrived at their last camp, just below 18,000 feet, the night before. Awakening to a brilliant, bitterly cold morning, the party had reached the summit slope after eight grueling hours, with Harper in the lead. Surrounded by nothing but snow and ice, their toes and fingers numb, they approached the final ridge to the summit.

Though all the men were unable to fully take in airit was curious to see every mans mouth open for breathing, Stuck would later writeit was hardest for him. Everything kept turning black for Stuck as he choked and gasped, almost unable to get any breath at all. The missionarys load had already been reduced; the other members had divided up the contents of his pack, leaving him only the bulky mercurial barometer he had stubbornly carried up the mountain to make scientific observations on the summit. Now he struggled even under the barometers weight. Finally, Harper, the youngest and strongest member of the expedition on this day, doubled back to where Stuck knelt in the snow, took the barometer and hoisted it onto his back.

Harpers presence on the mountain was important to Stuck for more than just his youthful vigor and physical strength. Since coming to Alaska in 1904 to become Archdeacon of Alaska and the Yukon, Stuck had become a fervent champion of the rights of the Native people. In the Alaska of this era, a raucous and deeply unsettled meeting point between traditional Native ways and the modern white culturea center of feverish trade and feverish vice, in Stucks wordsStuck spent most of his time ministering to the Athabascan peoples in his region. He bore no illusions that their lives would be improved by the onslaught of Western ways.

Harper, who was half Athabascan and half Irish, represented Stucks aspirations for the Natives of the Far North. Walters father, Arthur Harper, a distant figure in his life, was a pioneer in the history of white Alaska, the first to imagine gold in the Yukon, where he met Walters mother. Walter was raised by his mother in an Athabascan village and at sixteen met Stuck at the mission school in Tenana.

Robert Tatum was a Tennessean who had come to Alaska to study for Holy Orders in the Episcopal Church. He had proved himself the previous winter by joining a heroic relief effort, helping deliver by dogsled desperately-needed supplies to two women missionaries down the dangerous ice of the frozen Tanana River. His experience with surveying tools and other scientific instruments and his willingness to serve as the cook for the expedition, along with what Stuck termed his consistent courtesy and considerateness, made Tatum a very pleasant comrade.

Harry Karstens had been in Alaska for almost two decades, and learned its often-harsh lessons first-hand. He had earned the right to be considered a Sourdougha term derived from prospectors habit of carrying a starter of sourdough bread in a pouch around their neck, later expanded to describe those whod been in the Far North long enough to prove themselves. He had made his reputation in the backcountry since the Klondike Gold Rush of 1897, making his reputation on the mail routes, prospectors streams, and hunting expeditions of early-1900s Alaska. Stuck explicitly relied on Karstens for his outdoor skills and experience, as well as his toughness.

Karstens, on the other hand, had less sympathy than Harper for Stucks difficulties. To Karstens, a hardened miner and backwoodsman, Stucks insistence on spending time with the books and writing materials he brought to Denalinot to mention the burden that carrying such extra weight imposed on everyoneamounted to little more than lying in the tent. Karstenss antagonism toward Stuck, which increased with each step up the mountain, was fated to flare into far worse.

For his part, Stuck had always admired Karstens, describing him as strong, competent, and resourceful, the true leader of the expedition in the face of difficulty and danger. He would never understand his former partners antagonism in the wake of the expeditions success and fame. But for now, Stuck and the others had to put all animosities aside, and focus on putting one foot in front of the other, slowly and deliberately gasping, and grasping, for the summit.

How did an Episcopal Archdeacon, well into middle age by the standards of the time, come to find himself in the freezing final summit push on the highest, coldest peak on the continent? The answer lay in two equally potent forces, woven into his being. Just as strong as Hudson Stucks belief in doing goodI am sorry for a life in which there is no usefulness to others, he once wrotewas his love of wild places. He had grown up reading the exploits of the polar explorers, thanks to the library of a relative lost at sea. As a youth Hudson Stuck had explored the mountains of his native England, including the Lake District peaks Scafell Pike (the highest mountain in England, at 3200 feet), Skiddaw, and Helvellyn. Although they werent much more than scrambles, much less technical climbs, they gave the youthful Stuck a glimpse of what could be found in the worlds high, wild places.