Escape from Lucania by David Roberts

Author:David Roberts
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2002-12-16T16:00:00+00:00

FIVE DONJEK

AT Walter Wood’s demolished cache, Brad and Bob were nearing the eastern edge of the collection of aerial photos Brad and Russ Dow had shot in 1935 and 1936. The only map the men possessed rendered the terrain ahead of them a blank (see photo insert). Their knowledge of the lowlands stretching between them and Burwash Landing was based, then, almost entirely on the experience of Wood’s 1935 expedition. Their predecessor had published photo-illustrated articles about the first ascent of Mount Steele in both Life magazine and The American Alpine Journal, and Brad and Bob had consulted him about logistics.

Despite the shock of recovering only a small jar of peanut butter from Wood’s cache, Brad, the eternal optimist, wrote in his diary that night, “Walter’s horses came up to his base camp; so I imagine our major troubles are over at last.” What Brad neglected to mention was an ominous detail. The main obstacle for Wood’s team on its approach to Mount Steele had been the Donjek River, a major tributary of the Yukon that flowed from south to north directly across their path. Wood’s party had ridden their horses across the Donjek. On the way back out in August, some of the horses had nearly drowned. As Brad and Bob knew well, even the clumsiest horse was a better match for a flooding river than the nimblest man on foot.

The pair had already hiked for ten hours on July 12 before stumbling upon the ruined cache. As if to nip in the bud any plunge in morale their sorry discovery might occasion, they pushed on for another two miles before camping. Brad’s diary entry that evening bore only on the positive: “[W]e have a beautiful, almost flat meadow of grass and flowers under the tent…. There are plenty of [Dall] sheep, marmots, and birds, and we have seen several bear-tracks but no bear. It is wonderful to hear the birds twitter … and realize there is still something alive besides ourselves. How funny it will be to see and hear other people!” The Dall sheep, viewed no doubt from a great distance, might have made a tempting target for Bob’s revolver, but among all the wild animals in the Far North, these sure-footed ruminants are the hardest to approach.

It took a while for the novelty of not having to ferry loads across each hard-won stretch of ground to wear off. As Brad wrote that evening, “It’s grand to move camp ahead with us as a unit wherever we go, and to realize that each step forward means a step closer to Burwash…. To bed on a carpet of flowers—quite a contrast to last night!”

The men’s delight in green grass and birdsong and running water and shirtsleeve temperatures was intense. (After spending weeks on high glaciers, climbers in the great ranges are often reduced to tears on regaining the lowlands.) Yet underlying that delight, like the ground bass in a baroque chaconne, was a steady current of anxiety. Reminiscing today, Bob will not quite admit that he felt fear on July 12: “Concern is maybe the better word.

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