The Adventurer's Son Read online

  With my good grades and strong interest in adventure sports, my parents and neighbors encouraged me to apply to Princeton and Dartmouth. But I couldn’t. Three summer trips to Alaska had—as Henry Gannett of Harriman’s 1899 Alaska Expedition warned—dulled my “capacity for enjoyment by seeing the finest first.” There was only one place for me.

  To my parents’ likely dismay, although they never tried to dissuade me, I applied to a distant college with the Alaska Range’s sheer Mount Huntington on its catalog cover—UAF, the University of Alaska Fairbanks—to study science, pursue adventure, and once again do whatever I wanted.

  Heading north at sixteen, I was too naïve to appreciate the prestige that an Ivy League education would bring. But even now, writing this as an old man near sixty, none of my regrets center on moving to Alaska then.

  Chapter 2

  10,910

  10,910, east face.

  Courtesy of Clif Moore

  By the time I arrived on UAF’s campus as a college freshman in fall 1977, I considered myself a climber, giving up money, relationships, and social prestige for the thrill of steep terrain. And although not yet an “alpinist,” a mountaineer who chooses only direct routes up pointy peaks, I wanted to be one. Starting in high school, that desire would form the backbone of my Alaskan dream for nearly a decade.

  Seeking out other climbers, I soon found their cultural center at the Sandvik House, the middle apartment of a three-plex, four blocks from UAF. Climbing the stairs to an open door, I walked into a full-tilt Sandvik party. The Allman Brothers blared on the stereo. Marijuana smoke filled the air. Tapestries hung on the living room walls. Students, vets, and locals sprawled across beanbags or stood huddled together, drinking beer, smoking dope, telling stories, lies, secrets, and jokes. Topographic maps of the central Alaska Range—the local Hayes Range—plastered one side of the hallway leading to the bedrooms. A row of pot plants in five-gallon buckets lined the other. Grow lights made map reading easy. The pot made it fun.

  The partygoers were a who’s who of Fairbanks climbing. In the living room, a Harpo Marx look-alike held court. Carl Tobin, then twenty-three, with a sharp wit and a boldness unmatched in Alaska, was both popular and central to Fairbanks’s new alpinism. Three months later, he would make the first ascent of frozen Bridal Veil Falls, a 600-foot waterfall outside Valdez that was more sustained than any ice climb Alaskans had previously attempted.

  By February 1978, another UAF student and I had practiced enough on local waterfalls that we attempted Bridal Veil ourselves. Well after dark, we finished the longest, hardest climb either of us had ever done. A week later, following a slideshow on campus, Tobin hailed me: “Hey, I heard you climbed Bridal Veil.” He grinned and I nodded back, starstruck but pleased that he knew who I was and what we had done.

  Less than a month later, a group of experienced ski-mountaineers invited me on a ten-day trip into the Alaska Range’s Great Gorge of the Ruth Glacier. Flying out of Talkeetna, a skiplane delivered us to the base of Denali. We climbed a minor peak, then skied sixty miles to the highway over sparkling glaciers beneath towering walls. Even though I was by far the worst skier in the group, that ski tour remains one of the few experiences of my life that surpassed all my expectations: simultaneously far more intimidating and alluring than I could have ever imagined. It was my first mountain wilderness expedition. I wanted more challenges like that to both dwarf and empower me.

  The technical skills from climbing ice combined with the survival skills of mountain travel provided me with the ingredients to climb alpinist lines and the confidence to lead others on Alaskan adventures. During the summer between my freshman and sophomore years, my high school friend Savvy Sanders joined me for three weeks in the Great Gorge. The year after that, I organized a month-long expedition to the Arrigetch Peaks in the Brooks Range, a trip that taught me painful lessons in group dynamics.

  Viewed in photos from books and magazines, the Arrigetch mesmerized me with their geometric summits in a wilderness setting. I spent the winter planning our trip and imagining the routes, especially the most dramatic spire, Shot Tower. I invited Savvy, who convinced Dieter to go. In turn, Dieter enlisted his climbing partner Mike Bearzi, at twenty-five an adult by comparison; both my friends were twenty and I eighteen. After school was out, I hitchhiked to Yosemite to meet Dieter and climb with him for a few weeks.

  Dieter and I never got along well, not in Virginia, not in Yosemite, and certainly not in the Arrigetch. Knee-deep in a Yosemite Valley stream, he was nearly washed off the edge of a 600-foot waterfall before I pulled him to safety. Dieter claimed that I had saved his life but he seemed ungrateful for that help while in the Arrigetch, where our Nietzschean power struggle felt straight from Lord of the Flies.

  During our August in the Arrigetch, it rained most days. The unclimbable weather kept us tent-bound, where we read books, smoked dope, played vindictive games of hearts, and made sure the Cadbury bars were evenly split. Stronger, smarter, funnier, a better climber, and there with his close friends, Dieter soon made all the decisions and criticized any of mine. My dream expedition had morphed into little more than a glorified camping trip with someone who wouldn’t speak to me without a sharp word. I had learned that if a relationship is weak to begin with—like mine had been with Dieter—then it will only get worse when stressed. Most important, companions matter more than goals and objectives.

  Besides my desire to be an alpinist, I saw myself as a field scientist one day and declared wildlife management my major at UAF. My dad had encouraged me to take a math class every semester in college. He knew that mathematics, the lingua franca of science, would allow me to change subjects later on. Wildlife’s curriculum had no room for math but it did require ecology, the science of organisms and their environment. An ecology course at UAF put a name to my lifelong interest in nature and defined my future career.

  The science of ecology had been mathematicized in the seventies by the late Princeton University ecologist Robert MacArthur. MacArthur’s ecology was informed by his M.S. in mathematics and Ph.D. in biology. Finding ecology allowed me to flourish academically. It offered a science for quantitative naturalists like me, so I switched majors to biology and took every ecology class that UAF offered, adding mathematics as a second major.

  Working toward degrees in biology and math left me “a mathematician who wanted to be a biologist” in the view of the biology department. In contrast, faculty in math gave me access to paper-grading jobs that honed useful quantitative skills. With each succeeding math class, the technical papers published in The American Naturalist and Theoretical Population Biology grew ever more accessible to me. And with each succeeding mountain adventure, Alaska’s wilderness did, too.

  IN FEBRUARY 1980, I was flummoxed to find Carl Tobin grinning at my cabin door. He came in, kicked off his boots, pulled a couple of beers from his pack, and showed me a photo of a slender white peak atop a sweeping blue-ice wall. It looked like Mount Huntington’s cute little sister.

  “What a peak,” I gushed. “What is it?”

  “The east face of Ten Nine Ten,” Carl said. A 10,910-foot-high tetrahedron, the mountain is known to Fairbanks climbers simply by its digits. “What do you think? Want to climb it?”

  Although I’d made a few glacier ski trips, rock-climbed in the Arrigetch, and ice-climbed in Valdez, I was still just a pimply-faced teen, bruised from what felt like a failed expedition the year before. “Well . . . um.” I gulped. “How?”

  “Right here.” His finger traced directly up the center of the icy blue face, through a rock band, to the airy summit—a true alpinist’s line.

  The best climber in Fairbanks was asking me to climb the kind of route I’d dreamed of climbing since I was fifteen. But like a shy high school nerd invited to the Sadie Hawkins dance by the captain of the cheerleading squad, I couldn’t say yes.

  “Pretty sweet, huh?” he coaxed.

  “Oh, man. I’d love to,” I said, “but,” remembering Dieter,
“I don’t think I’m ready for that.”

  “You climbed Shot Tower. And the ice won’t be any harder than Bridal Veil.”

  Grateful for his confidence, but aware of my job and school, I asked, “How long would it take?”

  “The climb? If conditions are good, a day up and a day down. The whole trip? Two weeks. Fly in and ski out.” He grinned. “Think about it.”

  Within a week I had tracked Carl down to tell him yes. Less easy was approaching my boss, who had been an Alaskan climber, too. He once told me, “All my partners either died or quit climbing.” Asked if I could go to the Hayes Range for two weeks, he responded, “Yeah, you can go, but you won’t have a job when you get back.”

  I made my choice and sharpened my tools, shopped for food, and trained at the gym over the weeks that followed. From the gymnasium balcony, a pretty, blond girl watched Carl, me, and other gym rats climb hand-over-hand up twenty-five-foot ropes dangling from the ceiling. She looked young and petite, with a broad smile and high cheekbones below almond-shaped eyes. She must be here to see Tobin with his shirt off, I thought.

  A week later, Carl and I flew into the Hayes Range. My share of the charter cost my last paycheck. The pilot dropped us off directly below Ten Nine Ten. Its 3,000-foot face looked short, easy, almost disappointing in the trick of perspective known as foreshortening. Years later Carl would tell me, “If it wasn’t for foreshortening, nothing would ever get climbed.”

  In the morning, surrounded by steep, glacier-draped mountains, we headed up. Midway on the route, Carl led through near-vertical granite mixed with ice. He pounded in a warthog—an ice piton that looks like Macbeth’s dagger—for protection. Following him, my crampons screeched like fingernails on a chalkboard. I stopped to wrench the warthog out of the crack for use higher up. “Leave it in!” Carl called down, “We gotta keep moving!” With cold toes and only halfway up the climb, I happily left the ’hog skewered in an ice-choked crack, unclipped the carabiner and sling, and hurried on. Pitch after pitch of ice led to the final headwall as the weather slipped into storm.

  The increasing snowfall stopped us on a small arête where we would dig in for the night. Carl shoveled a shallow snow cave that sheltered us above the waist only. We crawled into our bivy sacks, sleeping fitfully and cramped, our feet dangling over the edge. Spindrift powdered our faces till dawn. Although I was miserable, it was precisely the experience I’d hoped for—Alaskan alpinism.

  The storm passed, leaving the morning clear and cold. On the windless summit, we took in the view while Carl melted snow on our stove for hot cocoa. After my fear of failure, success tasted especially sweet, but we still needed to get down. We descended a sharp ridge back to camp, then packed up and skied out a series of glaciers to the road, elated with our ascent of the virgin face. Carl had won a local prize in Ten Nine Ten, picking a plum with an inexperienced, teenage kid.

  I felt special to climb the route with Carl. But one night, years later at a Sandvik party, he admitted, “I would have climbed Ten Nine Ten with anyone.” Seeing my face fall, he added quickly, “But I’m glad I did it with you.” Carl valued his partners’ feelings as much as he valued their belays and we would make many adventures together. Intense outdoor experiences either strengthen or extinguish bonds between partners.

  Back in Fairbanks after our climb of Ten Nine Ten, we quickly sobered up from the alpine high. Two friends, a popular couple, had been involved in a tragic fall down a local mountain. Peter McKeith, a UAF graduate student, was the president of the Alaska Alpine Club. His girlfriend was the strongest female climber in Fairbanks. With three broken limbs and trapped between crevasses, she overnighted in her backpack’s built-in bivy sack and survived. Peter didn’t.

  Every adventure community feels elation and sorrow. But for me, springtime’s sunshine amplified my elation, burned off much of the sorrow, and prompted me to approach for the first time the pretty eighteen-year old freshman who’d watched us climb ropes in the gym: Peggy Mayne.

  Chapter 3

  Peggy Mayne

  Peggy, Brooks Range, July 1986.

  Courtesy of the author

  Bathed in sunlight the day after classes ended, Peggy Mayne stood at the top of the UAF library stairs. It was warm—a beautiful spring day. We had never met, but we both had anticipated this moment. Peggy, a friend named Eleanor had recently informed me, had been eyeing me all winter. “But,” Eleanor went on, “she’s not your type, Roman.”

  Seeing Peggy standing there, I thought, Let me be the judge of that.

  Success on Ten Nine Ten had emboldened me to speak to her, although forty years later we still disagree about who said hi first. Slim in white painter overalls, she wore her long blond hair straight and loose down her back. Her smile sparkled bright as the May sunshine. When her blue eyes spotted in green met mine, we felt a mutual attraction that was immediate, physical, and uninhibited.

  I asked her out on a date to a campus play that night. While I was sitting next to her, any little touch of our elbows or knees so electrified me that I could hardly follow the plot. Afterward, we walked and talked well past midnight, when the sun dips briefly only to rise shortly after. While Peggy Mayne wasn’t interested in climbing, she certainly seemed interested in me.

  The week following semester’s end, we spent every day together. We walked through the woods behind the university. We cycled Fairbanks’s dusty bike paths. And we hung out at her sister and brother-in-law’s place three blocks from campus. In Maureen and Steve’s small house Peggy cut my hair. The intimacy thrilled me as she pushed her taut little body against mine to trim my shoulder-length mane to the collar.

  Like me, Peggy liked to talk. We talked while we walked. We talked while we bicycled side by side (neither of us had a car). And as weeks turned to months and we found ourselves in bed, we talked there, too.

  Peggy’s nature rubbed off on my dirt-bag climber cheapness. She taught me to share, to consider others, to be responsible for myself. Then, as now, she lives her every breath by the Golden Rule. She also shows no mercy when she’s unhappy with my behavior.

  As the youngest of ten children—five boys and five girls—who grew up under an abusive father, she has always shown remarkable insight and empathy. It’s as if her whole nervous system focuses outward, collecting data on others, observing and responding to them. She sees things I don’t even know exist in people, judging them on character, not accomplishments.

  That summer, I left for Colorado to climb, then for Virginia to work. Peggy left for a salmon cannery on the Alaska Peninsula. We kept in touch with handwritten letters. Her words told cannery stories about characters, comedy, and conflicts. She also asked about me.

  “I miss you. I miss your eyes, your voice, the feel of your skin,” I wrote back, looking forward to picking up where we had left off.

  The following winter, I moved into a dry, one-room log cabin without electricity and heated by a small wood stove. It was a few miles from campus, off the cross-country ski trails near the top of Miller Hill. Without a car, we spent many winter nights on campus, crowded together in Peggy’s dorm room bed when subzero temperatures kept me from my commute. Our heads on her pillow, we would sometimes whisper about children and family.

  “I want to have seven kids with no TV in the house,” Peggy told me, our bodies touching, “and have them when we’re young, so we can be young with them, too.”

  “I don’t know about seven!” I replied. “I want to travel the world with my kids, sharing its wild places, its cultures, its tropical mountains and subtropical beaches.”

  With her small frame and smile that can light up a room, Peggy has always been every child’s favorite adult. She seemed ideally suited for her chosen college major of elementary education. She was playful and sensitive with her niece and I could see that she’d make an attentive and loving mother.

  In May and September of 1981, before and after her summer cannery employment, we made overnight trips to the distant Delta Mountain
s in the eastern Alaska Range and the nearby Granite Tors, a low tundra plateau studded with craggy towers. Peggy had never camped off the road, climbed a rock, hiked a mountain. I enjoyed sharing these easy experiences with her. For gnarly adventure there was always ice climbing with Carl.

  School took up my time with biology labs and math homework. Like most college students, I had little clue how a career might look after graduation, although my adviser encouraged academia as a goal: a professor, perhaps. Earning a Ph.D. fell somewhere along a vague timeline to “be a scientist.” Until then, climbing would take precedence over everything—except Peggy Mayne.

  THROUGH THE EARLY eighties, a climbing-related accident took the life of a good Fairbanks climber every year. But that didn’t slow me down. By 1982, the Alaskan alpine style of climbing—like skiing a hundred miles to climb a steep new route—had emerged as my forte. Although summits still seduced me with the promise of alpine intensity, combining them with the wilderness below the peaks increasingly appealed to me. The landscapes in the foreground were so much richer in colorful experiences: animals and plants, rivers and forests, sounds and smells. The rock, snow, and ice of alpine routes were monochromatic. Climbing from river bottom to mountain top integrated all of wild Alaska in a satisfying tapestry of nature.

  Out of food during a storm in March of 1981, three of us retreated from a stern face on a peak called Ninety-four Forty-eight. Waiting in the tent, I was restless and suggested that we ski across the tundra plains to the highway to salvage our trip. Neither tentmate was interested. I left for the road anyway, without a map, tent, or partner. It took fifty-five hours to cover the fifty-five miles along a route paralleling the glaciers that Carl and I had skied the previous year after Ten Nine Ten. Alone on the tundra I wondered: Which way is faster? Perhaps a race could tell.