Clamberers

In a certain type of successful small boy there is observed a spirit that cannot brook the presence of a tall tree in front or back yard until he has shinned to its topmost crotch. Among grown men, the same intolerance is manifest where parties of them scramble for the pinnacles of high mountains.

Last week, doughty Canadian and U. S. clamberers under the leadership of Captain A. H. McCarthy, British-Columbian rancher, returned from a successful clamber to the pinnacle of Mount Logan (in the southwestern corner of the Province of Yukon, Canada).

They climbed the steep ascent of Logan, triumphant over gravity, Zero (4DEG to 32DEG below), tempests, blizzards, "monstrous ice-cliffs and blocks of fantastic shapes with overhanging masses." Scaling one peak only to find one 600 ft. higher looming beside them, they toiled 1,000 feet down, then hacked footholds up to the true peak. They stood for an hour on a ledge, a yard wide, looking off over a billowing sea of clouds punctured by glacier-streaming peaks. They saw their own shadows moving in a rainbow 19,800* ft. above the sea-floors of the world.

Having taken photographs and observations, they clambered down, sore beset by icy hurricanes that seemed blasts of spite from the great peak. Second highest/- on the continent, it had never before been scaled.

Digging into the snow by night, mushing painfully on "moderately" frostbitten feet by day, the clamberers wended down as they had wended up, through their advance camp on a ridge at 18,500 ft. down to a bivouac in Windy Camp, on down through the frosted portcullis of McCarthy Gap to the foot of King Col Massif, to Cascade (Alaska), to Ogilvie Glacier, to Walsh, to Chitina (where bears had robbed their food caches), to Trail End, to Kubrick.

Tired and sore of foot, they there constructed rafts of logs, planks, boxes, and essayed to float down the Chitina River to McCarthy. This feat one raft accomplished without let or hindrance from rock or snag. The other, skippered by Explorer McCarthy, capsized in boiling rapids, left its passengers a 70-mile trudge.

* The height of Mt. Logan as previously ascertained by distant measurement: 19,539 ft.

/- Mt. McKinley, highest protuberance upon the North American continent (20,300 ft.), was ascended in 1912 by Hudson Stuck, then Archdeacon of Alaska.