Free Denali's Howl: The Deadliest Climbing Disaster on America's Wildest Peak by Andy Hall Page B

betrayed an ignorance of the power of Denali’s storms, and left themselves vulnerable.
    In the years since,snow saws and steel spades became mandatory equipment for Denali guides. Steel spades enable climbers to dig snow caves in the hard snow commonly found on the mountain’s upper reaches. A snow cave can be dug with ice axes, but it is a dangerously slow process. Snow saws remain the only tools that work for cutting snow blocks for shelter building.
    As is true for any group working together in a stressful environment, conflicts occurred, enemies were made, and friendships were forged. One conflict that has been overstated in various accounts of the story is the one between the original Wilcox team and the Colorado group. Interviews with Paul Schlichter and Howard Snyder in 2013 revealed that in spite of the commonly held belief that the Colorado men sequestered themselves from the others, they understood themselves to be part of the Wilcox Expedition.
    “I didn’t see us as very separate at all,” Schlichter said. “We had our own tent, our own meals, a cooking tent, and everything like that, so in that sense we were separate. But in terms of climbing, of the ropes that we were on, it was pretty well mixed around.”
    “We were three guys from Colorado who weren’t an expedition. We were part of the Wilcox Expedition,” Snyder said. He thought the Wilcox Expedition argument-prone, but Schlichter didn’t find the group’s behavior that unusual.
    “Well, you take twelve people, put them on a mountain like that with the weather, the fatigue, all the things that go on,” Paul Schlichter said, “you’re going to have some bickering back and forth, but I don’t think there were any major deals.” Throughout those first weeks Wilcox held regular meetings that sometimes led to heated arguments.
    “We had a couple of meetings where people aired out their grievances,” said Wilcox. “There would be a discussion, not every day but at least every other day, on how things were going. Not on how to climb; the route, the camps . . . that was all worked out in advance.” Still, some decisions fell to Wilcox alone. “I had the last word. But if all were opposed to something, there was no sense in doing it.” Wilcox led by example, serving on both advance and relay teams, and with the exception of weather delays, the party advanced up the mountain at a moderate but consistent pace without prodding from the leader.
    Joe Wilcox’s leadership style sounds loose compared to most modern climbs in which a professional guide has the final word on all decisions—from where to camp to what to eat to evaluating a climber’s fitness. Climbers can be sent back to Base Camp—with the assistance of a guide—for any number of reasons, including illness, attitude, and climbing in an unsafe manner. Professional guides are legally responsible for the well-being of their clients, who, even on Denali, are often novices who would not know what to do without a guide.
    Wilcox, however, was not guiding the expedition; he was climbing an unfamiliar mountain with peers, some of whom were older and more experienced than he was.
    “It’s not like a military organization, where you’ve got the chain of command, or the corporate environment, where you have managers and subordinates,” recalls Schlichter, a former Air Force cadet who would go on to see action in Vietnam. “It was a bunch of fairly young guys getting together to go for a climb, and there’s a limit to how much control you have over the people who are up there.”

CHAPTER 5
FROM A CREVASSE TO BROTHERHOOD
    B eyond Camp II, the Muldrow Glacier becomes heavily crevassed. The way through it exposes climbers to the danger of unseen crevasses or that of avalanches, and sometimes to both at the same time. They must negotiate two icefalls and a particularly treacherous feature called the Hill of Cracks. Here the glacier bulges as it passes over an unseen mass, creating