Guidebook XV—Rewind the Climb

[American Alpine Club]

The snowy fortress of Mt. Logan massif had opened its door after weeks of siege. It was June 23, 1925, when Allen Carpé and five others stood atop the highest peak in Canada for the first time, the sheer pinnacle of the summit plunging down sharply to the Seward Glacier below.
To Carpé, in the thin air, it felt like every moment was twice lived.
And in the media storm and flurry of drama that followed, he would be called upon to set the record straight—and relive those moments yet another time.
At first glance, the 100-year-old story of the first ascent of Mt. Logan might have a familiar outline—a band of men push up and up to ascend to the great heights, facing great hardship along the way. In the classic telling, we follow the expedition leader Albert MacCarthy as he spends weeks caching supplies in the dead of winter, utilizing sleds pulled by snowshoe-clad horses, and higher up on the mountain, cunning dog teams that fight whenever left alone.
In the classic telling, we follow MacCarthy, American Alpine Club representative Allen Carpé, American Norman Read, Colonel Foster, and the others on the expedition as they ferry their own gear back and forth between each subsequent camp, the measure of days the number of heavy loads these men have carried to the next advanced base camp, or their proximity to frostbite. With teeth on edge, we’d read of 11 journeys through a precarious icefall as they consolidated their camp above 10,000 feet, transporting nearly a ton of equipment and food.
Once high on the massif, we’d delight in the cunning trick, attributed to MacCarthy, of planting 600 bare willow branches in the blowing snow every hundred feet, to prevent against getting lost in the whiteout. Such trail maintenance would ultimately save lives and precious time, but still couldn’t prevent one rope team from losing their way during a storm that chased them down from the summit. Those men spent 42 hours without shelter in the freezing, grainy snowbanks, only realizing their mistake when they found themselves walking in circles, back on the summit plateau, the slopes ominously appearing at unexpected angles.
The theme of that story is loneliness, drudgery, and the sheer force of will needed against the worst conditions that such an icy world could offer.
Reflecting on these themes, Carpé writes in his own telling of the ascent, published in 1933 in the American Alpine Journal: “I think it was during these days that the awful loneliness of these great ranges was first borne in upon me with something of the force of a personal experience. Until we turned the corner into the Ogilvie glacier, we could look back down the valley and sense the presence of the lower hills and of living things. Now as we worked in toward the savage cliffs of Logan we entered a new world of appalling grandeur, and our little band seemed insignificant and very much alone. We had no support behind us, no organization of supply, no linkage at all with the outer world. We were on our own.”
That telling is perhaps best left to those who experienced it. But a 100-year distance can sharpen the focus of our lens on something else—the mundane letters and newspaper stories that came afterward, that can so easily be forgotten as part of the story, and that might tell us a little something different about the legacy our climbing ancestors have left us.
There are, of course, the historical accounts—a hundred pages dedicated to the planning of the ascent, scientific studies accomplished during the expedition, and the story of the climb itself, all included in the Canadian Alpine Journal. Because the AAC was not yet publishing the American Alpine Journal (it would do so for the first time in 1929), the American account of the ascent was published in the Appalachian Mountain Club’s journal. The American public, too, was in awe, with repeated articles appearing in the New York Times, the Boston Transcript, and others.
But a flurry of letters from September 1925, dashed off in angry haste with cross-outs and misspellings, reveal a gap in the telling. The writer, expedition member Norman Read, repeatedly argues to his friend and reader, Allen Carpé, that the representations of the expedition in the media are “positively disgusting in its sensationalism and its falsity.” He asks Carpé to write the story the right way—to tell it in a manner ‘worthy of the fraternity of mountaineering.’ The letters are a source of 100-year-old gossip—they tell of ...

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Guidebook XV—Rewind the Climb — American Alpine Club

A World of Appalling Grandeur The First Ascent of Mt. Logan By Hannah Provost with support from the AAC Library Photos from the Allen Carpé Collection in the AAC Library The snowy fortress of Mt. Logan massif had opened its door after weeks of siege. It was June 23, 1925, when Allen Carpé an

American Alpine Club (americanalpineclub.org)