WYOMING: Man on a Monument

In northeast Wyoming, near Sundance, one day last week, Parachutist George Hopkins leaped out of an airplane to win a $50 bet. The problem was to collect. For George Hopkins landed, as the bet prescribed, on Devil’s Tower. A lava blister, formed by an eruption 20,000,000 years ago, Devil’s Tower is a gigantic rock stump rising 1,200 feet into the sky. Teddy Roosevelt made it the country’s first national monument. Its weathered sides are fluted, nearly vertical, practically unscalable.

While a crowd held its breath and stared, Hopkins tried to lower himself on a length of rope which had been dropped to him from an airplane. When his foot slipped, he clambered fearfully back. The rope was too short, anyhow. National Park Service officials, who had been sending instructions via plane, ordered him to stay where he was, wait until they could think of something. Hopkins resigned himself to spending the night there. Park Service mountain climbers tried to get up, failed. Planes dropped food, blankets, wood for a fire, whiskey, a megaphone, which Hopkins used to screech out a request for some funny papers.

Several days went by. Officials considered using helicopters, blimps. The climbers had another try. failed. Said one official sourly: “We hate to jeopardize the lives of our men for a stunt that someone thought was smart.”

From New York Jack Durrance* and Merrill McLane, ace Dartmouth College mountain climbers, started for Wyoming by airplane. Durrance said that he had scaled the Tower in 1936, thought he could do it again. With Paul Petzoldt, a veteran of Himalayan climbs, and five other men, Durrance and McLane inched their way up the Tower’s sides, driving iron spikes (“pitons”) into its hard, sheer sides to make a ladder. They reached the summit, roped little George Hopkins into the middle of their column, and carefully edged their way back down again. Safe on the ground, Hopkins drew a grateful breath, departed to collect his bet.

*Brother of famed Olympics Skier Dick Durrance.