The first ascent of Denali

Hudson Stuck · 1913 CE · Earth

The first ascent of Denali — Hudson Stuck · 1913 CE · Earth — Recorded expedition route · schematic map

Reach the true summit of Denali by the Muldrow glacier and the north-east ridge, and settle the claims of Cook and the Sourdoughs.

Historical context

Denali had been claimed twice before 1913. Frederick Cook said he had reached the top in 1906; his companion Edward Barrill swore an affidavit against the story, and Stuck judged that no one who had stood on the summit could believe Cook's account. In 1910 the Sourdough miners of the Kantishna had climbed the lower North Peak and planted a spruce pole there, a feat much doubted in Alaska. Hudson Stuck, the Episcopal Archdeacon of the Yukon, who travelled fifteen hundred to two thousand miles a winter by dog team, put together a party of four with the Fairbanks dog driver and boatman Harry Karstens, the twenty-one-year-old Koyukon Athabascan Walter Harper and Robert Tatum, a postulant for holy orders at the Nenana mission, and left Nenana by sled on 17 March 1913. They reached the higher South Peak on 7 June.

The voyage, step by step

  1. St Patrick's Day at Nenana

    17 March 1913

    On 17 March 1913 six persons, two sleds and fourteen dogs set out from the mission at Nenana across country to the Kantishna: Hudson Stuck, Harry Karstens, Walter Harper, Robert Tatum, and the mission boys Johnny and Esaias. The first day covers about thirty miles, across the flats of the Tanana valley to the banks of the Nenana River.

  2. The Kantishna mining camps

    21 March 1913

    Up the Toklat and its Clearwater fork the party reaches Eureka, in the heart of the Kantishna gold country, at noon on Friday 21 March, Good Friday, and lies over Easter at Glacier City, where Stuck conducts what he called the first public worship ever held in the camp. Ten miles more bring them to Diamond City on the Bearpaw, fifty miles from the base of Denali, where their cache of food is waiting.

  3. Base camp on Cache Creek

    10 April 1913

    After relaying a ton and a half of supplies some fifty miles across country, the party enters the range by Cache Creek and on 10 April makes base camp at its forks, about four thousand feet up, where a few scrubby willows grow on bare, snowy hills. Karstens kills a caribou, Walter a mountain sheep and Esaias three caribou, and on 15 April Esaias goes back to Nenana with one dog team. Johnny stays to keep the camp and tend the dogs.

  4. Fire on the Muldrow

    May 1913

    Karstens and Stuck first look down on the Muldrow glacier on 11 April from McPhee Pass, and for weeks men and dogs relay the loads up its crevassed miles, sounding every step with a pole and staking the trail with willow shoots. At the head of the glacier, at a cache laid where the last glacier camp was to stand, a match carelessly thrown away after a pipe sets the silk tents covering it alight and burns all the sugar, all the powdered milk, the baking powder, the prunes, raisins and dried apples, most of the tobacco, a case of pilot bread, a sack of woollen socks and gloves and a sack of films.

  5. A staircase three miles long

    May 1913

    The north-east ridge, which the pioneers of 1910 had gone up in one march and the Parker-Browne party of 1912 in a few days, has been shattered by an earthquake into a chaos of ice blocks. Karstens, with Walter, leads three weeks of work hewing a staircase three miles long; on 25 May the party moves to a camp on the ridge about 13,000 feet up, and late on 27 May Tatum and Stuck see Karstens and Walter standing against the sky above the earthquake cleavage.

  6. The Grand Basin and the flagstaff

    6 June 1913

    On 2 June they move into the Grand Basin at about 16,000 feet, on 3 June to 16,500, on 5 June to about 17,500, and on 6 June make their last camp at about 18,000 feet, the highest camp yet made in North America, they told one another. On the way to the 16,500-foot camp Walter cries out that he can see the flagstaff on the North Peak, and through the field glasses they all see the Sourdoughs' pole standing against the sky.

  7. Walter Harper first on the top

    7 June 1913

    Roused at 3 in the morning on 7 June 1913, by the party's watches, in a keen north wind at four below zero Fahrenheit, they climb with Walter in the lead all day, feet like lumps of iron until noon. At 1:30 in the afternoon Walter Harper, in Stuck's words a native Alaskan and the first human being to set foot upon the top of Alaska's great mountain, scrambles onto the summit. Stuck, last on the rope, is nearly hauled up the final feet and falls unconscious for a moment in the little snow basin of the top.

  8. Down to the parishes

    7 June 1913

    They leave the summit at 3:02 in the afternoon, by the party's watches, unable to believe they have been an hour and a half on top, and reach the 18,000-foot camp about 5, a weary but happy crew. Stuck writes in his diary that night that he remembers no day in his life so full of toil, distress and exhaustion, and yet so full of happiness.

Outcome

The South Peak at 1:30 p.m. by the party's watches on 7 June 1913, Walter Harper first on top; the Sourdoughs' pole seen on the North Peak, a Te Deum said round a birch cross, and a barometric height Stuck offered as roundly 20,700 feet, against 20,310 feet, about 6,190 metres, in the survey of 2015.

Hudson Stuck

The Episcopal Archdeacon of the Yukon, who organised the first ascent of Denali in 1913, insisted that the mountain keep its native name, and whose party's first man on top was a young Koyukon Athabascan, Walter Harper.

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