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This is not a very well known mountaineering book, probably because of its age and not its content, but it's a fantastic read that I found impossible to put down. Others have covered the details so I'll skip that.
They pushed ahead and left the corpse to be frozen and transported when the expedition ended. When the weather finally clears and a rescue is underway the climbers are irritated, yes that's what he wrote, IRRITATED that people would risk their own lives to effectuate a rescue of these hapless nomads.I would pass on this book. Why in winter. All they could see after a hard won summit were the far off lights from Anchorage. Minus 148 is a narrative/memoir/journal of the first winter climb of Denali, the preferred Native American name of Mt.
Rah.Predictably, the weather turns ugly, and by Alaska winter standards that's saying something. Yawn.It is a tale of bush pilots, of climbing glaciers, of fierce winter storms and of a harrowing effort to survive. The summit team gets stranded for a week by a blizzard and seeks refuge in a snow cave. There are many other better mountaineering books out there. The author did preempt the death by carefully detailing the historical recklessness of the dead climber (Jacques Batkin). Bravo.The rest of the book is just a detailed narrative of the effort to push to the summit of Denali and the subsequent need for rescue.
McKinley, the highest peak in North America (McKinley never even saw the mountain and it was a typical political naming. However, the climb begins with death. They did make it to the top, in darkness. Call it Denali). They did have a lengthy discussion about it. But, that won't stop the team.
Because no one had ever done it before. Early in the expedition a member descends into a crevasse while trekking unroped on the Kahiltna glacier, he would not survive.
Book was good but text was missing from maybe 20 pages of the last chapter.
Donavan's book is certainly a great read. This is a mountain that can be every bit as evil and unforgiving as the nastiest Himalayian peak, the weather and the relief are actully in most cases at least equal. For any armchair expeditioner -- such as myself -- the literature on McKinley is essential.
The author was on the expedition which this book is about, and it was a bold one to say the least; the first winter ascent of Mt Mckinley. Granted Art wrote this in 1969 at which time he'd sworn off expeditions -- largely as a result of holing up in snow cave in a hurricane at 18,000 plus feet for 8 days - so the books that I'm used to reading from adventure writers simply feel more modern. I am not going to rehash the plot here, I'm sure others have done so and you can get that in some capacity from many sources.
Regardless of this I would highly reccomend this read, and I would also pair it with Forever on the Mountain by James Tabor; about the Wilcox expedition on the same mountain a mere 3-4 months after the first winter ascent (which ended up changing the rules for how Mountains would be climbed in general - not from the mountaineering standpoint, but rather from the standpoint of how gov't officials approved and approached expeditions). I bought the paperback reprint, but if I had a do-over I'd look for an early edition as I suppose they must be out there. He does a great job inviting us onto Mt McKinley (it was not Denali in 1967, at least not in the public mind) and this is a quick and pleasing read.
However he does not interweave as deftly the history and personal story lines that have taken the genre to new places in the past decade or so.
Rescue 489 sounds like one of the 17th Troop Carrier Squadron's aircraft. When the team was assured that there would be "no cost," things did change.
I watched as the helicopter lifted off, and it had to dive down toward the base of the mountain to get into more dense air, and to gain associated lift. :-) On the rescue that I'm describing, perhaps the one covered in this book, the Army Huey helicopter had difficulty landing at such a high elevation, and carrying out such a load.
I'm not sure, but I may have been one of the pilots on the C-130 that helped to coordinate the rescue of the team off of Mt. The aircraft commander and I are discussing this particular rescue as "I speak." As I recall, the person from the expedition that was talking to me was very very reluctant to leave the climb, finally asking what it would cost.
On the way back to the airport, we slowed the C-130 down, and lowered the flaps, so the Huey helicopters could fly on each wing tip. McKinley.
And, I recall dropping (parachuting) a couple of radios on the emergency frequency to a climbing team that we helped rescue.
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