Men Against the Mountain

In the mute, snow-shouldered peaks of Mount McKinley, the continent's highest mountain, four climbers pecked perilously downward from the 20,320-ft. summit in the white cold of an Alaskan night. Bound to one another by lengths of rope and sinews of courage, they edged along toward the 18,200-ft. level on the sharp west buttress--and then one slipped. As the first fell, and then the second, the third and the fourth, one of them swung his ax into the stubborn ice, but it did not hold. The four fell about 400 ft. and then rolled to a stop, huddled in pain.

From below, at 17,000 ft., a member of a second descending party--four men and a woman--turned and saw the fall. Three of them, one a physician, crawled back to help the stricken team, while Mrs. Helga Bading remained with Paul Crews and a two-way portable radio. Soon, monitors at a radio shop in Anchorage, 140 miles away, heard Crews's call for help: all four in the upper party were injured --broken limbs, head injuries, frostbite--and now Mrs. Bading herself, a slight (95 lbs., 4 ft. 11 in.) woman, was sick from lack of oxygen. Before Crews finished radioing his report, one of the greatest rescue operations of Alaskan history was under way. For four grueling days, mountain climbers struggled toward the peak, and daredevil airmen dropped supplies and ferried rescuers, winged among deadly granite walls.

On the Glacier. While Air Force planes dropped stoves, oxygen, tents, rope and food, military helicopters tried to land on the upper slopes, turned back again and again because of gusty winds. From Talkeetna came Don Sheldon, 37, one of Alaska's great bush pilots. Airlifting rescuers, Sheldon shuttled dozens of men to a base camp at 10,200 ft., where they began their careful climb. When Crews reported that Mrs. Bading's condition was worsening, Sheldon gunned his Piper Super Cub to an uphill landing on a glacier at 14,500 ft., waited as Crews and another member of his party stumbled down to the plane and then whisked the woman to safety. In another small plane, Anchorage Contractor William Stevenson, accompanied by an Army observer, tried to drop radio batteries to the injured climbers, stalled in a turn, flew straight into the side of the mountain. Both were killed.

Now another pilot tried to reach the upper camp. Link Luckett, 32, made a test run in a helicopter with a maximum altitude of 15,000 ft. Returning to the 10,200-ft. camp, he stripped his plane of a door, a 28-lb. battery, a 12-lb. radio and some cushions, so that his lightened plane could accommodate a passenger. He popped an oxygen tube into his mouth and took off. Ten minutes later he landed on the upper slope at 17,200 ft., scooped up a seriously injured John Day, 51, ferried him down to the 10,200-ft. station, where Bush Pilot Sheldon was waiting to take Day to the hospital.

Walled In. Early the next morning, Link Luckett returned to pick up another injured climber, but this time he became confused by darting light and shadow, landed on a steep slope. He took off again, landed on a cornice 200 ft. from the camp, but the snow was too soft. Luckett raised off again, plucked Climber Peter Schoening off the snow, deposited him into Don Sheldon's waiting plane below. In all, Luckett made five landings on the upper slope. "You just don't make trips like that for money," he said later. "It was hairy." By week's end two high-altitude (30,000 ft.), turbine-powered Air Force choppers arrived from Reno, Nev., but by that time, seasonal turbulence and storm clouds began to form. As the weather closed in, a ten-man rescue party reached the remaining six members of the stranded company, and they all began the painful descent to the 10,200-ft. base, where the Air Force had dropped a twelve-day supply of food and equipment. In the storm, the rescued and their striving saviors waited, walled in by the white, the cold and the merciless wind in the forbidding heart of the forbidding mountain.

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