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Updated: June 15, 2025
If the writer had to ascend this mountain again he would intrust himself to Karstens and Walter rather than to any Swiss guides he has known, for ice and snow in Alaska are not quite the same as ice and snow in the Alps or the Canadian Rockies. The loose snow was shovelled away and the steps dug in the hard snow beneath, and the creepers upon our feet gave good grip in it.
Late in the evening of the 27th May, looking up the ridge upon our return from relaying a load to the cache, we saw Karstens and Walter standing, clear-cut, against the sky, upon the surface of the unbroken snow above the earthquake cleavage. Tatum and I gave a great shout of joy, and, far above as they were, they heard us and waved their response.
Regarded in its whole extent, it is one of the capital features of the mountain. It is seen to the left in the picture opposite page 26, where Karstens stands alone. At this point of its course it soars to its greatest elevation, five or six thousand feet above the glacier floor; it is seen again in the middle distance of the picture opposite page 164.
Three of the four of us were unwell all night. The digestion is certainly more delicate and more easily disturbed at great altitudes than at the lower levels. While Karstens and Tatum were tossing uneasily in the bedclothes, the writer sat up with a blanket round his shoulders, crouching over the primus stove, with the thermometer at -21° F. outdoors.
Day by day Karstens and Walter would go up and resume the finding and making of a way, and Tatum and the writer would relay the stuff from the camp to a cache, some five hundred feet above, and thence to another. The grand objective point toward which the advance party was working was the earthquake cleavage a clean, sharp cut in the ice and snow of fifty feet in height.
It was of light, dry birch and, though six feet in length, so slender that we think it may weather many a gale. And Walter thrust it into the snow so firmly at a blow that it could not be withdrawn again. Then we gathered about it and said the Te Deum. This picture was snapped three times instead of once. Karstens' fingers were freezing and the bulb-release was broken.
Every mind was occupied with Johnny. We were two weeks overstayed of the time we had told him to expect our return, and we knew not what might have happened to the boy. The four of us on one rope, Karstens leading and Walter at the gee-pole, we went down the first sharp descents of the glaciers without much trouble, the new, soft snow making a good brake for the sled.
There seemed no reason why Karstens and Walter in particular should not go another ten thousand feet, were there a mountain in the world ten thousand feet higher than Denali, but the writer knows that he himself could not have gone much higher. Belmore Browne's book, "The Conquest of Mt. McKinley," does not, in the writer's opinion, represent the real course taken by Professor Parker, Mr.
But it is here proposed to substitute Harry Karstens's name for points-of-the-compass designations, and call the ridge, part of which the earthquake shattered, the dividing ridge between the two arms of the Muldrow Glacier, soaring tremendously and impressively with ice-incrusted cliffs in its lower course, the Karstens Ridge.
Karstens beat his feet so violently and so continually against the hard snow to restore the circulation that two of his toe-nails sloughed off afterward. By eleven o'clock we had been climbing for six hours and were well around the peak, advancing toward the horseshoe ridge, but even then there were grave doubts if we should succeed in reaching it that day, it was so cold.
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