Wait Is Worth It : After Riding Out Storms That Led to 11 Deaths, a Group of Climbers Reach the Summit of Mt. McKinley

Art Grimes expected bad weather when he went to Alaska to climb Mt. McKinley early in May. Grimes, 37, a salesman from Dana Point, has been mountaineering since he was a teen-ager and was well aware of McKinley’s reputation as a bad-weather mountain.

“We were all prepared for a couple of storm days, and we knew it would be cold,” he said.

Sure enough, within days of his expedition’s start for McKinley’s 20,320-foot summit, the highest point on the continent, the first snowstorm hit. The group spent three days waiting out the driving winds and snow before climbing up to the advance base camp at 14,000 feet.

Then, the weather really turned bad.

Even McKinley veterans and area residents call the snowstorms that lashed the mountain last month the most extreme weather they have ever seen there. Accidents killed 11 climbers within 2 1/2 weeks, making this the deadliest season in the history of McKinley mountaineering at about the halfway point. Fourteen other climbers have been pulled off the mountain in dramatic helicopter rescue operations.

Grimes’ expedition of eight climbers and two guides, organized by the Rainier Mountaineering Guide Service of Washington, were trapped in their tents at McKinley’s advance base camp for 11 days, waiting out the massive Bering Sea snowstorms that just wouldn’t lift.

Winds roared at more than 100 m.p.h. and air temperatures fell to 27 below zero at the base camp, really just a wide, flat spot relatively clear of avalanche danger.

“I don’t think we were really mentally prepared, totally, for what we ran into up there,” Grimes said.

Ruth Anne Kocour, 45, a medical illustrator formerly of Manhattan Beach and now living in Reno, was the only woman on the expedition.

“I wore earplugs, not only because of the wind but because of the avalanches in the distance,” she said. “They sounded like bombs going off. The whole place sounded

like a combat zone.”

Whereas some expeditions on McKinley were not equipped to wait out the storm, the Rainier Mountaineering group carried enough food for 21 days, so they hunkered down and waited. They built four-foot thick ice walls to protect their tents from the winds and periodically dug their tents out from the accumulating snow.

“We were never bored, because it was a full-time job just staying warm and staying alive,” said Kocour, a veteran of several international climbs.

She said they played cards, slept and read books.

Sharing a tent with Grimes, who said that he put himself through college doing exhibition climbing on the Matterhorn at Disneyland, were Robby Robertson, 41, a San Diego computer consultant, and Bob Stevens, 36, a restaurateur from Turlock, Calif.

“It got to the point where we were cutting books in half so that somebody could read the first half while we were reading the second half,” Stevens said.

They used a chart and official weather reports to calculate that the wind-chill factor at the base camp was 150 degrees below zero.

Kocour said: “It was like being in a science-fiction movie. No special effects I’ve ever seen came close to what it was like to be in the eye of that storm.”

Once, she said, she went outside, walked a few steps, then turned and saw that the winds had stripped the snow from around her footprints, leaving them elevated.

“If wind got inside your goggles and your eyes teared, they could literally freeze shut,” she said. “At one point, I went to unzip my tent and my skin stuck to the zipper, like when you touch the element in a freezer.”

Kocour said a man from another expedition went outside to dig out his tent, then went back in and drank some hot chocolate. His teeth cracked.

One night, Kocour was careless and slept with the bottoms of her feet touching the tent wall. Although she was protected by a down sleeping bag, wool socks and down booties, she suffered minor frostbite on her feet. She also suffered frostbite on her lips and nose, but there was no serious damage.

Those with the Rainier Mountaineering expedition had uniform praise for their guides, McKinley veteran Robert Link and his assistant, Win Whittaker, son of climbing legend Lou Whittaker.

“I was aware that this was not a good storm to be caught in, but I never believed we were going to die,” Kocour said. “I felt that every time Robert Link made a decision, it was the right decision. I felt totally comfortable knowing I was with him, and Win Whittaker also.”

Grimes agreed, saying Link is one of the best mountaineering guides in the world.

The worst tension on the trip occurred when two of the group’s climbers decided they wanted to go down, rather than stay and wait for the storms to lift. One called it a near mutiny.

“It was tough,” Grimes said, “There were a couple of people in our group who wanted to go back down. The storm had gotten bad, and they said, ‘If it’s going to stay like this, I don’t want to stay here.’

“Robert Link sat down and talked to them and said, ‘It’s going to get better.’ We all came out of it in very good shape, and I attribute a lot of that to the direction we got from our guides.”

While they were waiting out the storm, though, others were dying all around them.

First, two Italian mountaineers were killed, apparently in a fall. Then a Swiss climber died of what was diagnosed as an acute altitude-related illness.

“He was eating and drinking and was just fine, and 10 minutes later he collapsed and died,” said eyewitness John Roskelley, a renowned climber who was among the first Americans to climb K2, the world’s second-highest peak, in the Himalayas.

A few days after the Swiss climber’s death, a climber from a Korean expedition was blown off a ridge, jerking his two partners, to whom he was roped, over the side. All three died in the fall.

Kocour said: “The Korean team was one day ahead of us. When we got to 14,000 feet, they took off up the mountain into an intensifying storm, as if they were unaware of it. All of us were shocked that they were going up.”

The next day, widely known American climber Mugs Stump plunged to his death when an ice bridge collapsed under him while he was checking out a deep crevasse. A week later, four climbers from Quebec died when they plummeted 3,000 feet off of a ridge. Many of the deaths occurred in the same area of the mountain, near the west buttress.

Roskelley and his partner, Jim Wickwire, had gone to Mt. McKinley in early May to climb a route they had never tried and ended up stuck at the advance base camp at the same time as the Rainier Mountaineering group. While there, they were called upon to aid in rescue operations.

“They needed some extra people, so Jim Wickwire and I volunteered to help them out,” Roskelley said.

“We went up to 15,500 feet in a major storm, along with the rangers, and pulled two Koreans out of a deep crevasse that had collapsed underneath them. One was buried in snow to his waist, and the other was on his back and pretty much buried in snow and unable to move. One of the rangers and I went down into the crevasse and dug them out, and then Wickwire and three other people hoisted them out with a sled.”

The injured mountaineers were flown by helicopter to a hospital in Talkeetna, and both survived.

“McKinley is a pretty dangerous mountain,” Roskelley said. “It’s not difficult to climb, but you have ice falls, avalanches, crevasses and you can get pinned down in a storm. Then you can run out of food and have to descend when you’re weak.”

Good mountain sense becomes critically important, Roskelley said, adding that most of the climbers who were killed last month violated basic mountaineering principles. Some were roped together but failed to belay properly--the practice of securing ropes to the mountain with specially designed gear.

“People were killed because they didn’t belay,” he said. “That’s standard mountaineering practice, to belay in a risky area. I’m one of the more experienced climbers up there, and it didn’t bother me to belay. And I’m still around.”

On May 22, the storm finally began to lift and the dogged Ranier Mountaineering expedition, still determined to reach the summit, did a scouting climb to check the weather. They found it still to be unstable and were forced to retreat to the advance base camp. The next day, the weather cleared enough for them to climb the next stage, carrying their gear to the 17,000-foot level. Once there, they set to work sawing ice blocks for new ice walls to protect them from the still-fierce wind and cold.

At 1:30 the next morning, they zipped up their heaviest clothing, including several layers of long underwear, pile, down and Gore Tex, and began the 3,000-foot climb toward the McKinley summit.

“As the day progressed, the weather continued to improve,” Kocour said. “It was just like magic.

“When we got halfway up to the summit, the temperatures were still freezing, but it was really quite nice, compared to what we had already experienced. By the time we reached the summit, we had calm winds and perfectly clear weather.

“I was absolutely thrilled. It was really spectacular, by far the most beautiful of any of the peaks I’ve climbed. It was worth it all.”

Grimes agreed.

“When we got to the summit, I was just elated,” he said. “I just wanted to cry, and I think I saw a couple of other people in the group who looked like they were crying. It was really an overwhelming experience.”

The expedition then went down to where it camped the previous night and, after a meal and a few hours’ sleep, began the grueling descent back down the steep headwall to the 14,000-foot level. The next day the climbers trekked the entire 14 miles and 7,000 feet down to the base camp on the Kahiltna Glacier.

“The reason we pushed it so hard that last day was that we had heard on the radio that there was another storm front moving in, and we were running out of food,” Kocour said. “When we arrived at the Kahiltna base camp, we could see the next storm on the horizon.”

Kocour said that their bush pilots were excited to see the group.

“They had flown us in, and they knew how long we had been on the mountain,” she said. “So far, they had been hauling bodies and flying out people who had retreated. They were really relieved to see some living people who had also managed to summit and had no disasters.”

Grimes, who carried the food bag down, looked inside during a stop on the way to the Kahiltna Glacier.

“All we had left were four cans of tuna, a bag of Ramen noodles and a bag of Cheerios,” he said.

Several in the expedition said that they might return to climb McKinley again, but Kocour said that she wants to try climbing in other parts of the world.

“McKinley is gorgeous, but I don’t know that I would want to do it a second time,” she said.

“The experience hasn’t discouraged me from mountaineering. Actually I’d be interested in taking away the lessons I learned and applying them to other mountains. I had hoped to learn these kinds of things from McKinley, and I definitely got more than my money’s worth.”