Imaginary Peaks: The Riesenstein Hoax and Other Mountain Dreams by Katie Ives

Author:Katie Ives [Ives, Katie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: history, Expeditions & Discoveries, Sports & Recreation, Mountaineering, Social Science, Folklore & Mythology
ISBN: 9781594859816
Google: EQ88EAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Mountaineers Books
Published: 2021-10-01T23:43:14.708776+00:00

HARVEY MANNING PONDERED THE RIVALRY OF PEARY AND COOK AGAIN and again in his writings. Parts of the story overlapped with his own childhood. As a boy, Harvey had mowed the lawn of a neighbor, Joe Quigley, a famous prospector, who showed him a sample of Alaskan wire gold and told him a story about sitting in a bar in Fairbanks with other miners when the Sourdoughs hatched their plan to prove Cook wrong. When Harvey’s uncle asked Joe why he didn’t join them, Joe responded, “Wasn’t drunk enough.”

In many ways, Harvey’s hoaxes were the opposite of Cook’s. Instead of claiming a false record, Harvey’s imaginary climbers told stories in which they failed to reach their ultimate goals. They tempted their readers to try to make the first ascents themselves. These narratives fit Harvey’s aim of pointing out the absurdity and inappropriateness of climbing mountains for personal glory in the first place. Yet Harvey also wondered why so many people believed Peary’s word instead of Cook’s, when it was possible that both men might be hoaxers. “The 1906 Cook climb is not accepted because the Establishment (Peary-National Geographic Society-U.S. Navy-Brad Washburn) ganged up on Outsider Cook,” Harvey decided.

There was much about Cook’s life to make him a sympathetic character in Harvey’s mind. Like Harvey, Cook had struggled to find a place for himself in a world of adventurers from more privileged backgrounds. Both men’s writings, true or false, testify to an opulent imagination and a keen ability to create detailed fantasy worlds. By the 1960s, as biographer Robert M. Bryce has pointed out, Cook had become a kind of “antiestablishment” hero (or antihero) in the minds of readers skeptical of all authorities. Cook’s own words, taken out of context, could provide an attractive defense for future hoaxers: “The world has important use for dreamers, even if they fail.”

Over the decades after Cook’s tale, Denali seemed to transform from the otherworldly mountain of his writings into a commercial playground. “What made Denali not merely a super-Blanc but a whole other species,” Harvey wrote in “Mount Everest and Me,” “was the sledging over the snows to the start of the climb and the fording of thawed-out and meltwater-raging rivers on the way back. The airplane cut it down to size, a wilderness grizzly shrunk to a playroom teddy.” Whether or not Cook summited, the landscapes of his epic adventures were vanishing into thin air as surely as the snows of Fake Peak. Harvey could only gaze backward in time through books at a lost world that receded ever farther from his grasp—except, that is, when he re-created it by doctoring the maps.

Other aspects of Cook and Peary’s rivalry fascinated Harvey as well. The North Pole was a kind of ultra-imaginary place, as Bryce has observed, “a point with no dimensions . . . where every direction is south.” Time seems unhinged by twenty-four-hour summer light. The very idea of claiming a specific point on this terrain is meaningless. Nothing permanent exists within its shifting heaps and ridges of ice.

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