Chasing Denali by Jonathan Waterman

Author:Jonathan Waterman
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781493035205
Publisher: Lyons Press
Published: 2018-10-04T16:00:00+00:00

In 1910, Parker gave a New York Explorer’s Club lecture that gently debunked Cook—a gentleman from the same city—by calling his Denali fraudulence “a glorious failure.” Earlier in the year, he commented about the rougher-edged Alaskan miner Lloyd. “From what I read of Lloyd’s account,” Parker told an Alaskan reporter, “it’s just as probable that Lloyd reached the summit as that Cook reached the pole.”

Browne had chimed in to the same reporter that the saloonkeeper and gambler, McPhee, had backed Lloyd. McPhee, according to Browne, had told Lloyd to come back with either the peak or the story. “Why,” Browne said, “everyone knows that Lloyd had been dead broke for a year, waiting for someone to grubstake him. All those fellows have dog teams, so the trip probably stood them only a couple hundred dollars.” (Browne’s trip—from the east coast, to the Alaska seashore, thence ninety miles upriver in a modern speedboat—cost ten times as much.) Parker concluded to this reporter that it was an “absolute impossibility” to carry a “16-foot” flagpole to the summit of Mt. McKinley. When the perennial gamblers of Fairbanks heard this, Griffin and the embezzling founder of Fairbanks, E.T. Barnett, offered a $100,000 bet that Lloyd did make it to the summit. To prove it, the gamblers said, Lloyd would guide the professor back up the mountain.

But this “bespectacled highbrow” hardly needed Lloyd’s help. Parker and Browne knew the mountain better than any Sourdough and were already planning a rematch. This time, they planned to climb Lloyd’s northern route. They were as interested in disproving Cook as the Sourdoughs were—even though their duplicated photograph of the doctor’s photograph from atop “fake peak,” surrounded by higher mountains, should’ve been the final nail in his coffin.

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