So the upper glacier separates the two great peaks of the mountain and discharges at right angles into the lower glacier. And the walls of the lower glacier sweep around and rise to form the walls of the upper glacier, and ultimately the summits of the mountain. To reach the peaks one must first reach the upper glacier, and the southern or left-hand wall of the lower glacier, where it breaks down into the ridge that encloses the head of the glacier, is the only possible means by which the upper basin may be reached. This ridge, then, called by Parker and Browne the Northeast Ridge (and we have kept that designation, though with some doubt as to its correctness), presented itself as the next stage in our climb.
Last Year’s Earthquake
Now just before leaving Fairbanks we had received a copy of a magazine containing the account of the Parker-Browne climb, and in that narrative Mr. Browne speaks of this Northeast Ridge as “a steep but practicable snow slope,” and prints a photograph which shows it as such. To our surprise, when we first reached the head of the glacier, the ridge offered no resemblance whatever to the description or the photograph. The upper one-third of it was indeed as described, but at that point there was a sudden sharp cleavage, and all below was a jumbled mass of blocks of ice and rock in all manner of positions, with here a pinnacle and there a great gap. Moreover, the floor of the glacier at its head was strewn with enormous icebergs that we could not understand at all. All at once the explanation came to us—“the earthquake”! The Parker-Browne party had reported an earthquake which shook the whole base of the mountain on 6th July, 1912, two days after they had come down, and, as was learned later, the seismographic instruments at Washington recorded it as the most severe shock since the San Francisco disturbance of 1906. There could be no doubt that the earthquake had disrupted this ridge. The huge bergs all around us were not the normal discharge of hanging glaciers as we had at first wonderingly supposed; they were the incrustation of ages, maybe, ripped off the rocks and hurled down from the ridge by this convulsion. It was as though, as soon as the Parker-Browne party reached the foot of the mountain, the ladder by which they had ascended and descended was broken up.
The Northeast Ridge shattered by the earthquake in July, 1912.
The earthquake cleavage is plainly shown half-way down the ridge in the background. The Browne Tower is the uppermost point in the picture. The Parker Pass is along its base.
What a wonderful providential escape these three men, Parker, Browne, and La Voy had! They reached a spot within three or four hundred feet of the top of the mountain, struggling gallantly against a blizzard, but were compelled at last to beat a retreat. Again from their seventeen-thousand-foot camp they essayed it, only to be enshrouded and defeated by dense mist. They would have waited in their camp for fair weather had they been provided with food, but their stomachs would not retain the canned pemmican they had carried laboriously aloft, and they were compelled to give up the attempt and descend. So down to the foot of the mountain they went, and immediately they reached their base camp this awful earthquake shattered the ridge and showered down bergs on both the upper and lower glaciers. Had their food served they had certainly remained above, and had they remained above their bodies would be there now. Even could they have escaped the avalanching icebergs they could never have descended that ridge after the earthquake. They would either have been overwhelmed and crushed to death instantly or have perished by starvation. One cannot conceive grander burial than that which lofty mountains bend and crack and shatter to make, or a nobler tomb than the great upper basin of Denali; but life is sweet and all men are loath to leave it, and certainly never men who cling to life had more cause to be thankful.
The difficulty of our task was very greatly increased; that was plain at a glance. This ridge, that the pioneer climbers of 1910 went up at one march with climbing-irons strapped beneath their moccasins, carrying nothing but their flagpole, that the Parker-Browne party surmounted in a few days, relaying their camping stuff and supplies, was to occupy us for three weeks while we hewed a staircase three miles long in the shattered ice.
Glacier Movement
It was the realization of the earthquake and of what it had done that convinced us that this Muldrow Glacier has a very slow rate of movement. The great blocks of ice hurled down from above lay apparently just where they had fallen almost a year before. At the points of sharp descent, at the turns in its course, at the points where tributary glaciers were received, the movement is somewhat more rapid. We saw some crevasses upon our descent that were not in existence when we went up. But for the whole stretch of it we were satisfied that a very few feet a year would cover its movement. No doubt all the glaciers on this side of the range are much more sluggish than on the other side, where the great precipitation of snow takes place.