True North Page 14

  Among the news brought by Windward was that of a new farthest-north record. In the international race to the Pole, such records made front pages everywhere, as one explorer after another returned from the north and made his claim to fame, however fleeting it proved to be. Each advance was the one to beat, and today’s record soon became tomorrow’s footnote. Captain Umberto Cagni, of the duke of the Abruzzi’s expedition, now claimed the farthest-north record: 86 degrees, 34 minutes. Bettering Nansen’s previous record by some twenty miles, Cagni had gone 137 miles farther than Peary.

  “Next time I’ll smash that all to bits,” Peary told Henson.

  “Next time!”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  ROOF OF THE CONTINENT

  WHENEVER HE RETURNED from his latest far-flung adventure, Cook reopened his medical practice on Bushwick Avenue. In spite of his long absences, many former patients drifted back, and new ones sought him out, drawn in part by the publicity generated by his travels and writings.

  At age thirty-six, Cook fell in love again. Her name was Marie Fidele Hunt, a voluptuous twenty-four-year-old brunette with a roundish face and deep-set brown eyes. She had recently been widowed by the death of her husband, Willis Hunt, a prosperous homeopath from Camden, New Jersey. She was left with a four-year-old daughter, Ruth, and some financial resources. Marie had shown up on Bushwick Avenue to visit friends—the family of a physician, Dr. Robert Davidson, whom Cook also knew. The Davidsons lived a few doors down from Cook, and it was in their parlor during an evening social—as the Davidsons’ daughter, Lotta, played the piano—that Marie and Frederick first met. A romantic at heart, Marie long remembered the piece being played, Schumann’s sweet and moving “Träumerei,” as the “most beautiful thing that has ever been written.” In the presence of the well-known but modest doctor and explorer, Marie felt “hypnotized.” She and her daughter soon packed up and departed Camden, moving in with her sister’s family in Brooklyn. Smitten by the charms of this warm, vivacious young woman who made no secret of her interest in him, Cook became a regular caller.

  Marie and Frederick were married at New York Avenue Methodist Episcopal Church on June 10, 1902, Cook’s thirty-seventh birthday. After a short honeymoon in Saratoga Springs, they settled into an elegant home they purchased together across the street from Cook’s longtime residence. The three-story stone mansion at 670 Bushwick Avenue had room aplenty for the young family (Cook adopted Marie’s daughter, Ruth) as well as a study and a surgery, for which Cook acquired the latest equipment, including one of the city’s first X-ray machines used in private practice. He replaced his horse and buggy with one of the first four-cylinder, air-cooled Franklin automobiles to be built, beginning what turned out to be a lifelong love of motoring. Cook soon had a reputation for speeding, because he was often seen driving in excess of ten miles per hour and taking corners precariously on two bicycle-style wheels as he hurried to appointments.*

  That same summer in faraway Alaska, a U.S. Geological Survey team headed by Alfred Brooks, the government’s top geologist in the region, was exploring an unknown area around Mount McKinley. Several months later, Cook read a National Geographic article about their experiences. The highest mountain peak in North America had been discovered only six years earlier, in 1896, by a gold prospector, W. A. Dickey, who named it in honor of President William McKinley. Its height was estimated to be twenty thousand feet, although the summit had not yet been scaled. The government surveyors, who had reached the twenty-five-mile-wide base of the mountain, discussed a number of possible approaches to the summit. McKinley was set in the rugged Alaskan Range, surrounded by numerous peaks that exceeded thirteen thousand feet and hundreds of miles of some of the wildest country in the world—which explains why the mountain had not been spotted earlier. In the article, Brooks suggested that anyone attempting to scale McKinley should have “long training in frontier life and exploratory work.” Believing that he qualified, Cook, growing restless again, began to formulate a plan for how the great mountain might be conquered. He eagerly discussed his ideas with Marie, whose enthusiasm and support for her husband’s life as an explorer would never wane.

  Cook made the decision to devote himself “for a time” to mountaineering. One motive, clearly, was to not leave his new bride for the years that polar endeavors often required; an assault on a mountain, successful or not, was done in a single season. Also, he had come to consider polar exploration and mountaineering “twin efforts which bring about a somewhat similar train of joys and sorrows.” He believed that the mountain climber and Arctic explorer “in their exploits run to kindred attainments.”

  While overseas in 1900 to receive the Belgian government’s award for his service to the Belgica expedition, Cook had met one of the most famous mountaineers of the era, Edward Whymper, who in 1865 had become the first to scale the Matterhorn. The expedition cost the lives of four of Whymper’s companions during the descent, considered the most dangerous phase of any climb. The old Englishman, who in his historic climb had beaten a group of Italian climbers to the top by just three days, sought to interest Cook in mountaineering, convinced that his polar expertise would serve him well. The two explorers shared their wide-ranging experiences, discussing various methods and equipment for traversing snow and ice.

  Cook searched for ways to combine his own polar techniques with those of the emerging sport (among Americans) of alpine climbing, in which no relays of supplies or advance lines are put up and everything is carried on the climber’s back. His experiments in the Antarctic with Amundsen, using lightweight sledges and tents, had convinced him of the importance of traveling fast and light. At approximately 63 degrees north, McKinley was the most Arctic of the world’s tallest mountains; scaling it would require crossing the largest glaciers outside of Greenland and the Antarctic, then climbing steep slopes packed with perpetual snow and ice while avoiding cliffs and avalanches.

  With the mountain set in such difficult, isolated terrain, transporting men and supplies would be an arduous task. Cook anticipated carrying supplies on horseback as far as possible, but once the terrain became too treacherous—and certainly once the climb started—there would be no beasts of burden to carry the load. If the climbers were to reach the summit, they could not be weighted down with blankets, heavy tents, canned foods, and other supplies.

  Cook visited a Manhattan sporting goods store and ordered a custom tent of his own design from proprietor David T. Abercrombie. Shaped like an octagonal pyramid and made of exceptionally light Shantung silk, it was unlike any tent Abercrombie had ever made. Weighing only three pounds, it could be folded up and put into a good-sized pocket. The tent required no pole and could be supported by the handles of ice axes.

  Cook also had in mind a new kind of sleeping bag for use on the climb, one that would not be dead weight when not in use. He worked with Marie, a capable seamstress, and they came up with a novel design: three robes that could be buttoned together along the edge to make a bag. The eider duck skin robes—lined in camel’s hair—could be used as ponchos separately or together. The climbers ended up carrying no other coats or jackets, since the sleeping robes provided all the protection and warmth they needed.

  Marie asked to join the expedition, making it clear she wished to accompany her husband on adventures just as Josephine Peary had done. Cook was not sure about including his wife on the climb, but he was delighted to take her to Alaska, even though the region was still so untamed as to be without railroad service.

  In May 1903, they closed up their Bushwick home, placed Ruth with relatives, and took the Northwestern Limited to the Pacific Northwest, where the expedition was assembling. Other members of the team were to include Columbia student Ralph Shainwald von Ahlefeldt, twenty-one, the bespectacled and urbane son of a wealthy paint manufacturer and a veteran of one Arctic expedition; Robert Dunn, twenty-six, a Harvard graduate who had made two trips to the Klondike; Fred Printz,
a tobacco-chewing Montana horse packer who had been employed by the government survey team that explored part of the McKinley region; and two jack-of-all-trades, Walter Miller and Jack Carroll, to assist with the horses and supplies. Shainwald and Dunn had made substantial contributions to help defray expenses; the balance of the funding came from the Cooks and an advance from Harper’s Monthly for a series of articles to be written by Cook about the expedition.

  In Seattle, they spent several days selecting and buying food and supplies, and fifteen horses were purchased from a Yakima Indian. For the overland journey to the base of the mountain, Cook planned to bring along flour, sugar, bacon, coffee, and other supplies favored by prospectors, including kerosene for fuel. The climbing party, however, would travel much lighter—more like an Arctic expedition—with pemmican, biscuits, condensed milk, tea, and alcohol fuel to melt snow for water. Each man would carry a forty-pound rucksack with provisions for ten days, an alpine ax, and a new rope made of horsehair, which Cook considered an improvement over the silk rope of alpine climbers that when wet became heavy and slippery.

  They boarded an Alaskan coastal steamer, Santa Ana, and cast off the first week of June, taking the ship’s regularly scheduled route north through the Puget Sound. After several stops to drop off cargo, Santa Ana left the placid inland waters and entered the Gulf of Alaska.

  Mount Fairweather soon rose on the northeastern horizon, then Mount St. Elias and Mount Logan—towering over nineteen thousand feet, the second highest peak in North America. They put in at Valdez, a newly incorporated city nestled at the foot of the Chugach Mountains that had become a debarkation point and supply center for the Klondike goldfields. Although the recipient of three hundred inches of snow annually, Valdez had an ice-free port that remained open year-round.

  One cloudless dawn as they steamed up the gulf, McKinley came into view. From a distance of 250 miles, it appeared to Cook to be a “mere tooth of ice biting the arctic skies.” Some 100 miles farther north, the steamer pulled into Tyonek, a row of log huts and Alaska Commercial Company warehouses set on a sand spit. The backwater settlement consisted of twenty Indian families and a handful of white residents. Santa Ana anchored half a mile offshore.

  They soon began pushing the horses over the side. The current was so strong that the horses nearly exhausted themselves before scenting land and swimming for it. Once ashore, they trotted to the nearest field and grazed contentedly.

  The Cooks had journeyed five thousand miles to get here, and yet the enormous task of reaching the base of McKinley was still ahead of them. Realizing this, Frederick and Marie had a serious talk about the anticipated hardships of the overland trip to come. She decided against going any farther. Rather than stay in desolate Tyonek, she elected to return on the Santa Ana to Valdez and “limit her exploring ventures to [that] more congenial coast.”

  The Indian ponies turned out to be only half broken, and most had never carried a load. Two days of training were required before the frisky animals submitted to their occupation as packhorses, each loaded with 150 pounds of supplies.

  On June 25, the expedition party, composed of “the wildest kind of dreamers,” moved out for the mountain that even from a distance of more than a hundred miles appeared mysterious and “kept one’s attention pointed.”

  They hauled with them a small boat. When they reached the Skwentna River, they crossed over and split the party. Cook and Miller headed upriver in the boat with some of the supplies, while the rest of the party, including some Indian helpers hired at Tyonek, led the horses through forests and marshes.

  Cook soon ran into trouble with the boat, which went high and dry on a vast mud flat. Fearing that a rising tide would fill up and swamp the boat before it could rise from the sticky clay, he and Miller devised a way to raise the boat atop planks. They spent a fretful night, but in the morning the tide came and easily floated the boat. Then they had the opposite problem: for a long stretch, the water became too swift for paddling and too deep for using poles.

  They poled and towed, rowed and pushed, averaging twelve miles a day.

  On July 8, Cook and his companion pitched camp on a small island below a canyon that had been designated as the rendezvous point. There was no sign of the packtrain, even though the boat trip had taken several days longer than planned. Later that day, however, they heard voices and soon spotted the rest of the party bringing the horses along the riverbank.

  The weather was oppressively hot and humid; it had rained nonstop since they left Tyonek, and everyone was soaked to the skin. Mosquitoes, out in great numbers, added to their miseries, and men and horses began to show signs of strain. Some of the men quarreled. The writer, Dunn, who had a sarcastic streak, was often the instigator; Cook finally chastised him for talking “too much and all the time too loud.”

  As character flaws emerged under pressure, Cook said little but remained the leader by example, often assigning himself the most difficult and dangerous tasks. Dunn, in his writings, did not spare Cook the criticism he leveled at all the other members of the party—“[Cook’s] ways and person irritated me,” including, it seemed, his refusal to use tobacco, “and that makes me uncomfortable.” Even so, Dunn later wrote of Cook, “I think he would face death and disaster without a word. . . .*

  After a night’s rest, the party again split up and proceeded another twenty miles. The Indians, anxious to return to their coastal fishing grounds, were sent back with enough supplies to sustain them on their return journey.

  More rain, heavy underbrush, rapid streams, and steep slopes slowed them down. The horses suffered bruised and lacerated legs from the brush. Worried about the wear and tear on the animals, Printz suggested a full day’s rest, and Cook agreed. For the next week, they worked the horses only three hours a day until they recovered.

  From two thousand feet, they began a steady climb and soon passed the tree line. On the open ground, longer marches were possible. Just above three thousand feet, they reached the first glacial shelf, where they found abundant caribou, moose, and mountain sheep, which they hunted successfully without interrupting their forward progress.

  On August 11, they reached the top of a bluff as the sun was setting. The view was of a “great waving sea of evergreen forests” behind them and of the “unknown world [of] glacial rivers . . . and big mountains” in front of them. They also got their first unobstructed view of the top of McKinley, with the upper four thousand feet visible. McKinley’s steep contour, “shingled by plates of ice,” revealed a surprise: a double system of peaks (northern and southern), which they had not seen from earlier sightings and which had not been previously reported. Of the awe-inspiring view, Cook wrote, “Here was the roof of the continent; the prize of our conquest, seemingly within grasp.” With much enthusiasm in the air, they pitched camp and prepared a hot meal.

  Three more days of travel took them to within fifteen miles of McKinley’s crest, where they camped. A violent storm struck, forcing them to take cover inside their tents. Before dawn, they were lying in pools of chilly water from a rapidly rising stream and had to break camp in the dark and move to higher ground. Come daylight, their position looked favorable for an assault on McKinley from the southwest.

  As they approached, Cook considered several possible routes to the summit. The northeast side showed a long ridge with a gradual ascent, but had several miniature peaks that seemed to block the way. The western face presented its own obstacle: above twelve thousand feet, it appeared to be a solid cliff of pinkish granite, so steep that snow did not collect on its surface. The southwest approach looked the most promising, although it was interrupted by a spur that would have to be avoided.

  Cook had planned to reach the base of McKinley by the first of August, but owing to unpredictable weather and terrain, and because the horses had to rest even when the men were fit for more travel, they were three weeks behind schedule. The climbing season wou
ld soon be ending, giving way to winter. Temperatures had dropped to forty-five degrees, and rainstorms were blowing down the mountain, swelling the countless glacial streams and making crossings more difficult.

  They had taken fifty-four days to cover a “tortuous course of five hundred miles through swamps and forest, over glacial streams, up and down mountain sides, through a trackless country.” They were at last in position. Before beginning the climb, however, everyone agreed on the wisdom of resting for two days and undertaking final preparations, which included baking a batch of hardtack biscuits for the climb.

  They broke camp with the five strongest horses carrying supplies and climbed into a high valley, where they waited out a sudden downpour, then pushed over a series of jagged moraines to the top of a glacier. Their first extended trek over ice proved difficult for the horses. That night, they pitched camp at seventy-three hundred feet.

  Much snow fell during the night. Leaving the horses and supplies behind with one man, the rest of the party proceeded up the mountain another thousand feet until stopped by a chasm of cliffs that dropped two thousand feet.*

  When the party reassembled, some members left with the horses to return to a lower camp, while others remained on the glacier with Cook, who was intent on searching the area for another route upward. In this he was unsuccessful and finally had to accept “defeat for our first attempt” and head back down.

  The entire group circled twenty-five miles around the base of McKinley to approach from the west. Separating from the supply party at a lower elevation, a climbing team crossed a glacier through bright sunlight that would have blinded them had it not been for the smoke-colored goggles of Cook’s design. At eight thousand feet, they broke above the cloud cover and “burst into the arctic world, with all its glory of glitter and frost.”

  Cook led the way through deep snow to nine thousand feet, where they pitched camp. The temperature had abruptly dropped to ten degrees below freezing. In the tent, they turned their robes into sleeping bags, lit the alcohol lamp, made tea, and ate pemmican, as outside a great wind rushed across the glacier. Throughout the night, they could hear the explosive crackling of avalanches breaking loose all around.