Denali's Howl

March 17, 2014
Everest gets the publicity, but Alaska’s Mount McKinley—also known as Denali—can be equally nasty, writes Hall, former publisher of Alaska Magazine, in this exciting account of a 1967 climbing debacle. McKinley’s arctic location guarantees year-round snow, frequent avalanches, unpredictable storms, and winds well over 100 m.p.h. Joe Wilcox, a Utah college student with modest mountaineering experience, gathered 12 fellow climbers with varying degrees of skill and little money; they drove the Alaska Highway to Denali Park. Despite nearly 24 hours of daylight, it was an exhausting climb requiring repeated trips to stock seven camps while trying to safely navigate dangerous crevices, avalanches, and blizzards. Hall recounts their mistakes and in-group bickering, but adds that these were not exceptional. What they lacked was luck, a factor essential to any successful mountaineering endeavor. After one team reached the top, a brutal, week-long, once-in-a-century storm caught and killed seven others as they prepared to ascend. Matters might have ended differently, but Hall is less interested in affixing blame than telling the story. It was not Krakauer’s Into Thin Air (1997) but Maurice Herzog’s Annapurna (1952) that launched the genre of mountaineering expeditions that end in disaster, and Hall delivers his own skillful, heartrending contribution.

June 1, 2014
A vivid revisitation of a historic Alaskan mountain climbing expedition.In 1967, when Hall, former editor and publisher of Alaska magazine, was 5, his father, the superintendent at Mount McKinley National Park, took him along after being dispatched to the mountain (known to locals as "Denali") to rescue climbers swept up in whiteout blizzard conditions at the summit. The author's memory of that event proved enduring enough for him to spend seven years skillfully gathering documentation and verbatim testimonials of the event in which hypothermia claimed the lives of seven brave mountaineers. Brigham Young University student Joe Wilcox, a novice climber with prodigious ambitions, enlisted a group of adventurers of varying experience levels to accompany him on a whirlwind ascent of Mount McKinley. Hall intricately describes their epic trek from its beginnings along the Alaska Highway through seven sequentially numbered campsites along the mountainside, where grievances were aired and dissolved as the group bonded while carefully acclimatizing themselves to avoid oxygen-deficiency-inducing hypoxia. With only a two-day weather forecast, a small, agreed-upon combination of both groups successfully reached Denali's summit. However, an unprecedented combination of storm fronts in the wake of the second team's ascent would strand them on the summit approach. Hall delivers this tragic event through his recounting of recorded radio conversations, journal entries and pages of grisly detail. Amplifying the narrative is an opening section of statistical data on the extreme nature of Denali's "remote and exotic" terrain, its frosty and unpredictable atmospheric conditions, and other expeditions that have attempted to scale its towering 20,320-foot peak.A dramatic and respectful homage to 12 intrepid mountaineers who sought to master not only the tallest mountain in North America, but "arguably the biggest mountain on the planet."

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April 1, 2014

In 1967, seven climbers died on Denali, the Alaskan peak also known as Mount McKinley, after being caught near the summit by a ferocious storm. Hall (former editor, Alaska magazine), whose father was park superintendent at Mount McKinley National Park at the time, presents a detailed examination of the events surrounding this tragedy. He ably combines information from expedition journals, National Park Service logs, letters, and interviews to clearly re-create the last weeks of the doomed climbers, the fraught days after their disappearance, and the resultant grief and turmoil. The outcomes of mountaineering tragedies are often ongoing controversies leading to varied opinions of who is to blame; this book is no exception. While Hall's competent narrative provides a reasonably well-balanced discussion of the continuing debate surrounding the tragedy, James Tabor's Forever on the Mountain was more critical of the National Park Service, while expedition leader Joe Wilcox's memoir White Wind wholly blamed the weather. VERDICT Owing to its confusingly large cast of characters, relatively unrelieved grimness, and heavy use of archival sources, this work is best suited to dedicated fans of climbing rather than recreational adventure readers.--Ingrid Levin, Salve Regina Univ. Lib., Newport, RI

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