At 3 am on 7 June 1913, four men crawled from a makeshift tent. For weeks they had struggled to haul equipmentto a snowy col, far above central Alaska鈥檚 muskeg plains. Now, suffering from altitude sickness and indigestion from an ill-advised experiment with home-made noodles, they faced one more challenge: a final push to the summit known to the native Americans as Denali 鈥� 鈥淭he Great One鈥�. A brisk wind made for a cold so penetratingthatthe leader, a missionary whose duties included winter-longjoumeys by dogsled at temperatures down to -55 掳C, felthisfeetgonumbthrough six pairs of socks. But the men pressed on. Twelve hours later, with no prior mountaineering experience and improvised equipment, they laid claim to North America鈥檚 loftiest peak.
NO ONE knows when Hudson Stuck first set eyes on Mount McKinley. Undoubtedly it was sometime in 1904, when he came to Alaska as the Episcopalian church鈥檚 Archdeacon of the Yukon and Tanana Valleys and the Arctic Regions to the North of the Same 鈥� a title nearly as expansive as the region it described.
A transplanted Englishman, Stuck was first and foremost a man of the cloth. He was also a man with immense respect for a native culture that knew how to thrive in the harsh northern climate. He mastered dog-sled driving and winter camping to make the rounds of villages and mining camps as far north as the Arctic Ocean. But always he thought of the mountain whose native name, Denali, he championed long and hard to restore. 鈥淗ow my heart burns within me whenever I get view of this great monarch of the North!鈥� he wrote in his first book, Ten Thousand Miles with a Dog Sled. 鈥淚 would far rather climb that mountain than own the richest gold mine in Alaska.鈥�
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Stuck read mountaineering journals, obtained a state-of-the-art ice axe, and dreamed of climbing the peak. By 1913 it was now or never. He was approaching his 50th birthday, and in 1912 an expedition by Belmore Browne and Herschel Parker had got within 100 metres of the summit.
Stuck had three advantages over most of his predecessors. Unlike Parker and Browne, who approached the mountain from the south, he knew the best route was from the north, where there were no large foothills or raging rivers. He wasn鈥檛 afraid of cold, and he was an expert at freighting supplies.
But his greatest asset was a frontiersman鈥檚 ability to improvise. When a silk tent he had ordered a year in advance failed to turn up, he had a replacement made locally. When ice axes shipped from New York proved to be 鈥渞idiculous gold-painted toys鈥�, he took his own to a machine shop and asked for a copy. So too with crampons, which no dealer in New York could supply. Even the flag planted on the summit was handmade.
On the mountain, Stuck carried on improvising. At 2700 metres the kerosene stove flared up and set the silk tent alight. He made a new one from sled covers. Later a cleaning needle broke off in the stove鈥檚 fuel jet. Removing the jet to extract the needle required a special wrench, which he discovered to his horror he had left behind. One of Stuck鈥檚 companions painstakingly carved a suitable tool from a wooden pipe-cleaning spoon.
Another key to Stuck鈥檚 success was his attitude, which was diametrically opposed to today鈥檚 鈥渆xtreme-sports鈥� mentality. Stormbound under conditions that have cost modern climbers their toes or worse, he and his party passed the time discussing everything from history and theology to physics, classical literature and river-boat design. Having lived for years in the far north, the men presumed the weather was out to kill them and toted a three-week supply of food and fuel to their high camp.
Stuck鈥檚 expedition was not entirely without drama. The most serious hazard the climbers faced was a ridge they expected to be their highway to the upper mountain. Parker and Browne had described it as a 鈥渟teep but practicable snow slope鈥�. But in the interim there had been an earthquake. Now the ridge was shattered into sawtooth ice blocks. For three weeks Stuck鈥檚 party hacked steps and hauled supplies. In one spot they found a block of ice as big as a two-storey house and so precariously balanced that a couple of whacks with an ice axe sent it tumbling into the valley far below.
Of course, having gone to the trouble of lugging all those supplies up the mountain, the expedition encountered perfect weather. The only real problem was the altitude. When Stuck finally reached the summit his first act was to collapse, gasping. His next was to assemble the group for a prayer of gratitude. Then he set up a small tent for his instruments and proceeded to take measurements. Only when he had completed them did he stop to admire the view.
Although Denali was known as the highest peak in North America, no one knew exactly how high it was. To answer that question Stuck had hauled several pieces of equipment up the mountain, serving as his own porter until the final push, when he decided that reaching the summit was more important than his middle-aged pride and relinquished the burden to a younger companion.
Previous estimates of the mountain鈥檚 height had been made by triangulation from known elevations. The problem was that no one knew exactly how much light bent in the high atmosphere, which meant that the measured angles were wrong by small but unknown amounts. One of Stuck鈥檚 tools was a pocket altimeter. Invented for use by the British army, it used a mechanical scale to convert minute expansions and contractions of a sealed air chamber into 25-foot increments of altitude. Stuck found it useful at low altitudes, but halfway up the mountain it became clear that the scale was wrong. At the summit, the 鈥渕endacious little instrument鈥� was 鈥渃onfidently鈥� reading 23,300 feet, a number Stuck knew to be wildly out.
In the era before GPS, the best altitude measurements came from measuring air pressure with a mercury barometer, from which Stuck obtained a reading of 13.617 inches of mercury. To account for changing weather fronts, he had asked friends to take daily readings at Fort Gibbon on the Yukon river for later comparison with his expedition readings. Stuck even knew he must take into account the effects of temperature and latitude, which have a marked effect on air pressure.
Unfortunately, as Stuck lamented in his book The Ascent of Denali: 鈥淭he tables accessible to the writer do not work out their calculations beyond eighteen thousand feet, and he confesses himself too long unused to mathematical labors of any kind for the task of extending them.鈥�
鈥淲hen he finally reached the summit, he assembled the group for a prayer of gratitude鈥�
He turned the task over to C. E. Giffin, a topographer with the US Geological Survey. Giffin obligingly crunched the numbers for him, determining that Denali was 20,674 feet above Fort Gibbon, or 21,008 feet above sea level. But Giffin was suspicious of that number, so he repeated the calculation using barometric pressure in the coastal town of Valdez as his baseline. That gave him an elevation of 20,384 feet, remarkably close to today鈥檚 value of 20,320 feet (6194 metres). Giffin suggested that the people at Fort Gibbon may have muffed their readings, but Stuck saw no reason to fault his friends. He must have had private misgivings though, because he split the difference and suggested an altitude of 20,700 feet.
Ecstatic from their success, the climbers abandoned their usual caution on the dangerous descent of the shattered ridge. Luckily nothing untoward happened until they reached the base of the mountain. There, the McKinley river sprawled across a 2-kilometre-wide valley in waist-deep channels, 鈥渋nky鈥� and 鈥渄isagreeable鈥�. On the approach, before the summer thaw, the river had posed little problem. This time one man was swept off his feet. Luckily the party had enough strong arms to pull him out of the freezing current, and the wetted climber took 鈥渘o harm whatsoever鈥� other than having no remaining dry clothes and being 鈥渧ery gritty in underwear鈥�.
It is part of the expedition鈥檚 triumph that this little bit of chafing was the only injury Stuck reported for the entire three-month trip.
