To Some, the Height of Lunacy

TALKEETNA, Alaska —  He was a Ukrainian nuclear physicist and an accomplished mountaineer with half a dozen of Russia’s highest peaks behind him. But there weren’t many heights to scale in Sweetwater, Texas, where Victor Pomerantsev ended up after the Soviet collapse.

“My spirit was hungry for a white, big mountain,” said Pomerantsev, who gathered his aging gear and headed for Alaska.

Ten days into his solo assault on Mt. McKinley, a formidable buttress of granite, snow and ice at the very top of North America, a pair of Colorado forest rangers stuck in a snowstorm at 16,200 feet spied the 54-year-old scientist--or rather, an ear and a stubbled cheek poking out of an icy drift.

Pomerantsev, half-frozen but conscious, had only a lightweight cotton sleeping bag and nylon hiking boots. He had no ice ax and little food. His cheap tent had collapsed around him.

For six days, they nursed him in one of their own sleeping bags, waiting for help. When the National Park Service refused to send a rescue team up the hazardous slope, they led him back down themselves, to a base camp where a helicopter plucked him off to a hospital.

Pomerantsev lost parts of nine fingers to frostbite. The park service spent $10,000 on the tail end of the rescue. And one of Pomerantsev’s benefactors, Colorado state forest supervisor John Grieve, wrote the summation of his own expedition in his journal. “Defeat.”

To the inevitable question--should Pomerantsev have been allowed to launch an adventure that endangered himself, his fellow climbers and cost the federal government thousands of dollars--Grieve is noncommittal. “On the one hand, I would agree that there should be some regulation,” he said. “On the other hand, everybody has a right to be an idiot.”

Mt. McKinley, once a frigid outpost whose remoteness and physical hostility left it unknown to more than a handful, now stands at the heart of a tourist boom that has transformed interior Alaska and the wilderness of Denali National Park. The growing popularity of guided climbing expeditions--the same phenomenon that has sent flocks of untested mountaineers to the slopes of Mt. Everest and other big peaks--has in the last decade turned one of the world’s most malevolent mountains into an annual springtime traffic jam.

$80,000 Spent Rescuing Expeditions

“Twenty years ago, we couldn’t find 50 mountain climbers in the world who wanted to climb McKinley. . . . Now, we’re looking at a stable population of 1,200 climbers a year,” said J. D. Swed, the district ranger who heads the park service’s bustling new mountaineering center here.

By mid-May, when the season hits its peak, there may be 600 climbers scaling the mountain, the majority plying the most direct route up McKinley’s West Buttress. Last year, aspiring summiteers left behind an estimated six to 10 tons of human waste and several thousand pounds more of trash. The government spent more than $80,000 rescuing troubled expeditions--a relatively cheap year in an era when the rescue budget has on occasion approached half-a-million dollars.

“It’s about like an L.A. freeway,” joked John Garamendi, the deputy Interior secretary who flew over McKinley’s major climbing routes last month to examine park service policies on the mountain and in the 6-million-acre Denali National Park.

Officials say they may at some point have to impose limits on the number of climbers who attempt McKinley, and on the noisy bush planes that unload climbers onto the mountain’s lower glacier at 7,200 feet. Some of the remote countryside around McKinley now sees 50 to 70 overflights a day.

“Especially in the core part of the day, it’s a continuous drone,” said Stephen Martin, Denali’s superintendent. “We haven’t yet established any limits, but everybody knows that’s what’s coming next.”

McKinley and the hundreds of miles of glaciers, flowered tundra and boreal forests that surround it--one of the most pristine and stunning landscapes in the world--are bracing under a surge of visitors of all types, not just climbers.

Some Want to See Grizzly or Dall Sheep

Tourism has tripled since 1980, now averaging about 350,000 visitors a year, and is expected to double again over the next eight years--nearly all of them arriving during a three-month window of summer, and all of them limited to the single, 90-mile road that traverses the park.

Everyone comes with a goal. Some hope to see a grizzly or a Dall sheep. Some hope to walk on tundra untouched by human feet. But all hope for a glimpse, if it is one of the average 127 days a year when the sky hoists up its blanket of clouds, of the mountain.

McKinley is North America’s Everest, and in many ways just as formidable. At 20,320 feet, it is several thousand feet lower, yet in its ascent from the glacial valley floor below, it is the tallest mountain on Earth.

It is nearly 2,400 miles further north than its Himalayan counterpart, and often colder. Temperatures can plunge to 50 degrees below zero. And winds, which have been known to hit 100 mph, can blow a climber and his tent right off a slope.

Significantly, McKinley is the only one of the world’s major climbing peaks without a source of cheap labor to help haul supplies. There are no sherpas in Alaska. What goes up, goes up on the climber’s back, usually 90 pounds or more.

The West Buttress ascent, chosen by 90% of prospective climbers, is a long, steep climb requiring relatively little technical expertise. The problem, experts say, is that the mountain’s reputation for technical simplicity has attracted climbers not aware of the other part of the equation: that surmounting McKinley is an exercise in survival in one of the most hostile environments on the planet.

One in 200 climbers who attempt McKinley die trying. Only about 50% make it to the top.

Pomerantsev was somebody who, looking back on it, never should have stepped off the plane.

He “was a real classic story of someone who is not prepared, who got around the system,” said Roger Robinson, one of the senior park rangers on McKinley. “He ended up getting up on the mountain with a week’s worth of food. He thought he could get up the mountain and back [an expedition that normally requires three weeks] in five days.

“He had a $100 backpack tent you could buy at K Mart. He had a cotton sleeping bag like you’d use car camping. He had regular hiking boots. And he was soloing, so this made it even worse.”

Pomerantsev blames it on the storm that trapped him high on the mountain. “My mistake was I waited the storm inside the tent, and I was sleeping. So I was not ready for fighting the frost,” he said. “The storm . . . collapsed my tent, and during eight hours I was outside, I fought for my life.”

McKinley, he says now, “was my Colossus.”

Fortunately for Pomerantsev, the park service had at its disposal the light-frame Lama helicopter, which is capable of recovering stranded climbers at otherwise unreachable elevations. The Lama set a North American record in 1991, when it fetched a stranded Polish climber from just below McKinley’s summit at 19,900 feet.

In 1992, the year McKinley claimed 11 lives, the Lama barely saw its hangar, cruising up and down the mountain in a series of disasters brought on by severe storms, overconfident climbers and simple bad luck.

But McKinley veterans say that the Alaska Range is mostly a lesson in self-reliance. More often than not, there is no helicopter, there is no ranger, there is simply a climber and his will to live.

Colby Coombs, a McKinley climbing guide, was making a recreational ascent up adjacent Mt. Foraker with two friends, both veteran climbers, during the deadly year of 1992. The same storms that brutalized McKinley left the trio climbing a steep ice cliff, the snow blowing so hard the climbers couldn’t see each other.

Coombs could feel the taut rope hitched to his friend above him, feel slight tugs on the rope encircling the friend below. It was when the tautness on the rope above him suddenly loosened that Coombs knew something was wrong. It only took a second for the alarm to cross his brain before he felt himself overcome by falling snow and ice and he was pulled off the mountain, bouncing and hurtling into a jagged abyss.

When he woke up, perhaps six hours later, he was hanging on the end of his rope, with a broken shoulder, a broken ankle and his neck broken in two places. A full 1,200 feet up was the spot on the ice face where he had last lodged his ice screw.

“I was just hanging there. My mittens were gone, my helmet was broken, I was a mess,” Coombs recounts. “I saw Tom and he was just hanging there. There was a huge blood drip on the ice 60 feet long, and the snow was stuck on his face. I knew he was dead. In some ways, it made it easier. It was just this body, it wasn’t Tom anymore.”

It took a full day for Coombs to make his way down to where his other friend hung suspended from the rope, also dead. Coombs steeled himself and lifted the tent and camp stove out of the climber’s pack, without which he knew he would never survive.

In one of the most incredible tales of mountaineering in the Alaska Range, Coombs said he put his weight on his broken bones and made his way down the mountain--six days of sheer determination, uninterrupted by sleep, which would not come with the pain.

He spent three months in a wheelchair, but climbed McKinley again before the year was out.

Coombs is convinced that climbing McKinley is more about first-class winter camping skills than technical proficiency. And those are the skills that many come to Alaska without.

The growth of the guiding industry has attracted large numbers of new climbers who believe they can rely on their expedition leaders to get them to the top, McKinley veterans say.

“Our clientele has decreased in caliber noticeably in the last 10 years, and people climb for a lot of different reasons now. It’s almost a big-game hunter kind of approach . . . a trophy-on-the-wall kind of thing,” said Chip Farout, a professional guide who has climbed McKinley nine times.

Tough Routes Can Cost Up to $10,000

For $2,800 to $3,500, you can buy a professional guide’s experience for mounting the West Buttress ascent; more difficult routes can cost up to $10,000.

“I had a father and son,” Farout said. “The father was a multimillionaire. They were neat folks, but they were kind of out of touch with what was going on.” The pair chose to join an expedition up the West Rib--a remote route from which climbers cannot escape for an easy descent down the West Buttress before reaching 16,000 feet.

“One day, it was a real brutal day. I never saw ice so hard. It was starting to storm, and we still had to dig a camp out on a steep ridge. So physically, psychically, it was a huge drain,” Farout recalled. “The way I think about it, you start the trip with a whole onion. As the trip goes on, you peel the layers off. That guy, you could tell he lost a lot of layers that day. It wasn’t like a business deal that went bad or a woman who said no. . . . I remember him looking at me and saying, ‘I never imagined it could be like this.’

“We used every crumb of food, every drop of fuel, to get over the hump at 16,000 feet and back down. And when we got back down, I don’t think they even changed their clothes. They hired a van and they were gone.”

“There’s a number of climbers that attempt the mountain that never really understand the risk . . . there’s a greater likelihood of failure than of success,” said Daryl Miller, the senior mountaineering ranger at McKinley.

Coombs says his biggest obstacle is not the mountain but “dealing with other people on the mountain: the increase in human waste problems, accidents, air traffic, noise.”

“You go up to the fixed lines and sit down and watch people go up and down,” Farout said. “They get tangled up, people tripping, falling, stumbling over each other, people screaming, crying. It’s like a subway station.”

To help assure that climbers are ready, the park service has launched a program requiring registration 60 days in advance, with detailed briefings at the mountaineering center. Climbers also must pay a $150 fee toward the cost of education and the posting of high-altitude rangers at McKinley’s 14,200-foot base camp.

Park service officials are careful to emphasize the fee is not a rescue fee. The issue of bailing out faltering climbers remains problematic. After the 11 deaths in 1992, “the cry was, why aren’t we charging for search and rescue for people that are taking risks?” said Swed, the district ranger. “We basically found out there’s no easy solution.”

The park service spends an estimated $3 million a year bailing out lost hikers, troubled boaters and swimmers nationwide. Mountaineers rank fourth. Why, park service officials say, should they be the only ones to pay?

It is a debate that ranges across the country, as rescue agencies ponder who should foot the bill for a lost hiker or a capsized boater at a time when helicopter fees alone can approach $1,000 an hour.

In Montana, a federal magistrate last week ordered parachutist James Kauffman to pay nearly $9,000 toward the costs for rescuing him when he parachuted off the summit of Mt. Siyeh in Glacier National Park. Kauffman, of Marion, Mont., hit the rock face of the mountain and hung suspended on a 3,000-foot cliff for several hours before park rangers rescued him.

Program Seeks to Instill Responsibility

In Europe, alpine jurisdictions have required climbers to post bonds, an option Denali officials fear could elicit summons for a helicopter every time, as Swed puts it, a climber got blisters or found himself late for a business meeting.

“What we’re trying to do is instill some kind of back-country program that would make people more responsible, and make better decisions, and not need rescue to begin with,” he said. The education program and rescue helicopters cost the park service an estimated $607 per climber, part of which is recouped by the climbing fee.

“We don’t have the authority to keep them off the mountain,” said park service spokesman John Quinley. But in the advance briefings, he said, “we can make it awfully uncomfortable for them sitting in the ranger station. You know: ‘Could you print the name of your next of kin a little more legibly?’ ”