"The Great One"

"To the south face of Mount McKinley!'

With a clank of beer mugs, the four mountaineers tossed off a heady toast one night last summer and then sat down to plan their assault. They had picked a formidable foe: the continent's highest mountain, 20,320 ft. of rock, ice and swirling snow that Alaskan Indians call "the Great One." McKinley had been climbed 13 times since 1913, but never by the precipitous southern route, a feat considered the greatest pioneering climb remaining in North America.

Leader of the four was blond, slight Jake Breitenbach, 24, a guide at Wyoming's Petzoldt-Exum School of American Mountaineering. Like Jake, the others were young, but experienced beyond their years in their perilous art: Ski Instructors Pete Sinclair, 23, and Barry Corbet, 22; Math Teacher Bill Buckingham, 22, a member of the American Alpine Club.

Built-in Disposal. Last month, landed by a bush pilot on a glacier at 7,000 ft., the four began their long push--the kind of adventure that pales a plains dweller. At 12,500 ft., they labored nine hours to hack 7-by-7-ft. platform from a 45DEG ice slope, wryly called it Concentration Camp, complete, as one climber noted, "with a handy garbage disposal -- a 1,600-ft. drop." Ahead lay two deadly perils: a pair of giant, swelling domes of blue ice that left them as exposed to the fickle Alaskan weather as flies on a wall. Some 1,700 ft. of rope hammered into the ice took them across in safety. Then came Camp Paradise, the first piece of flat slope they had seen in several thousand feet; Camp Fatigue, when at 15,000 ft. the altitude started to hit them; Balcony Camp, up another 1,800 ft. and just big enough for their tent with a 7,000-ft. drop below. The weather started to worsen, and they decided on a gamble: a dash to the top, even though it was 3,500 ft. away.

Their dash made them look more like drunks in a conga line. In the thin air, no one could lurch more than 15 steps without rest. The final 400 ft. were up a near-vertical snow wall; somehow they made it, and there was the slender bamboo pole that had been planted on the summit in 1947 by Bradford Washburn, a mountain-climbing geographer. Three men burst into tears. "Do you realize," gasped Buckingham, "do you realize what we've done? Four hackers--we've made a great ascent, maybe the greatest outside of South America in the world."

Instinct Alone. It was not over. The weather, good for twelve days, burst with a snowstorm. All landmarks disappeared; at one point they were near panic at the thought of starvation when someone spotted the blade of an ice ax that Jake had whimsically stuck beside a food cache, a needle point of steel gleaming in an ocean of snow. On instinct alone, Buckingham found the snow corridor that threaded through a region splintered by crevasses. And finally back down to 7,000 ft., they were plucked from McKinley's flank by their pilot.

Why had they done it? Last week, resting in Anchorage, the four were almost too busy planning new assaults to answer. Said Sinclair: "We usually just joke, 'to get away from tidal waves.' You can't describe climbing to people. They don't have anything to compare it with."

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