Books: Ordeal in the Sky

THE BUTCHER: THE ASCENT OF YERUPAJA (213 pp.)—John Sack—Rinehart

“First climb Kanchenjunga,” runs a well-known mountaineering challenge, “then Yerupaja.” Since no one has ever scaled Himalayan Kanchenjunga (though eight men have died trying), anybody in his right mind might conclude that Peruvian Yerupaja (“The Butcher”) is strictly for the birds.

Six young U.S. hotspurs therefore decided to climb it. In 1950, for their summer vacation, they tossed away reason with their razors and hauled off to Peru as casually as if one of the highest unsealed peaks in the hemisphere were no more than a library ladder. What happened to them is described in The Butcher, by John Sack, news editor of the Harvard Crimson at the time, who tagged along as the expedition historian. “What started out as great fun,” he truly relates, “turned into great adventure.”

Into the Clouds. On July 4, Yerupaja looked down from its eminence of 21,769 ft. upon the 13,400-ft. base camp of six young climbers who had never tackled anything so big in their lives. Jim Maxwell, George Bell, Austen Riggs and Graham Matthews had met at Harvard. The two others, Dave Harrah and Chuck Crush, were Stanford men.

The six had scarcely got used to the altitude and the cold when three of them came down with severe pains and fever, perhaps from food poisoning. Nevertheless, successive camps were established at 15,200 ft., at 16,100 and, though the sick men were still wobbly, at 18,800. Finally, from a two-man camp at 20,600 ft., Dave

Harrah and Jim Maxwell pushed on alone.

On July 31, their friends below saw them disappear into the clouds that hid the sky-cutting edge of The Butcher.

Fifty-four anxious hours later, the rest of the party, toiling upward to what they feared would at best be rescue and at worst disaster, heard a voice, “pain-racked and almost sobbing,” faintly calling “Help! Help! Help!”

Frozen Feet. It was Dave Harrah’s voice, and it had a tale to tell. Dave and Jim had reached the summit by traversing an 18-in. snow rib that ran for about 300 ft. Coming back, they had stopped a moment—letting the rope that bound them together go slack—for Jim to snap a shot of the summit.

At exactly that moment, “rather quietly and without warning, a thousand tons of cornice and Dave Harrah dropped from view.”

Dave, a philosophy major, now says he thought ruefully as he fell of the Greek concept of hubris—the Icarus complex that drives men to overweening aspirations. Being a practical physicist, Jim sank his ax handle in the solid snow and held on for dear life.

The jerk of the 120-ft. nylon rope brought Dave up short, painfully bruising and wrenching his ribs, and dragged Jim, ax and all, to within a foot of the brink. An hour later, Dave dragged himself back up. He and Jim found a cave in a crevasse and spent the night there. The feet of both were frostbitten, Dave’s so badly that when he rapped them with his knuckles “the sound was hollow and wooden.”

Next morning a snow bridge over a crevasse collapsed silently just as Jim’s foot left it, and not long afterwards Jim plunged 40 ft. down an ice slope. By the time the rescue party heard Dave’s cry, both men were almost hysterical with exhaustion. Dave was hurried to a Lima hospital, where all his toes had to be amputated; Jim lost parts of three toes.

And were they downhearted? Not a bit of it. As soon as his feet had healed, Jim Maxwell went climbing in New Hampshire; Dave ordered a pair of custom boots, laid in a fresh supply of hubris, and set out to climb the Selkirks in British Columbia.