Hallelujah, I'm a Fool
The adventurer's antidote to quiet desperation requires a suitably insane plan, a little crazy abandon, and a flair for making—or stumbling into—your own dumb luck

By Mark Jenkins

It had been pouring for days. Months, years. Along the coast we tromped through walls of dark rain. At timberline we clambered up through swaths of sleet. On the glacier we pushed into whiteouts of confetti. It's what we'd been told to expect.

We kept our heads down and our hoods up, and water skimmed off our noses.

Then one evening the weather broke. We'd pitched our tent in the vastness of Franklin Glacier and were brewing tea when the hands of the sky began tearing the clouds apart. Just as the light began to fade, we saw the mountain for the first time. It emerged from the mist like a sinister castle: jagged black ridges and deeply crevassed ice swooping up to a stone tower plated with snow. The summit was a horned menace sheathed in ice. We passed the monocular back and forth in silence.

I pulled out my copy of the 1934 Canadian Alpine Journal and read out loud: "'An incredible nightmarish thing that must be seen to be believed.'"

My partner John Harlin squinted through the spyglass and nodded gravely.

We'd been pumping ourselves up for this mountain for two months. Its magnetism had sucked us in like metal filings. Tempests that dumped ten feet of snow in one night, octopuslike glaciers, an unknown, unclimbed wall—the more daunting the tales, the more inspired we became. Which is the way it always is when you've spent too much time indoors.

Every year for the past seven, John and I had promised each other we'd do an expedition together—and every year everything got in the way. Career worries, wives or mothers, kids or dogs, misguided goals, bad schedules, broken fences. Adulthood is an insidious process of accretion. If you're not watchful, you begin to grow a shell, a carapace that you are expected to carry lightly: the rigid, high-stress hull of safety, security, status, status quo. The thicker, the better, right up until it crushes you. On the inside, whether you can still feel it or not, your soul is trying to claw its way out.

I was beginning to fear for John, and lately, for myself. The integument of everyday life seemed to have begun to harden. We were both working too much. John was struggling to keep a small magazine alive; I was battling to finish a book that had lost its bearings. We'd call each other at midnight, still in our offices—appalling for a couple of dirtbag climbing bums who once lived out of a VW van, seldom showered, and survived on half-price tins of sardines. John, in particular, had spent so much time trying to build a business that he was in danger of becoming one more Cubicle Man, ass-wedged between a green screen and four white walls.

Late one night, John started whispering darkly about how much he'd given up, how he'd "sacrificed years."

It was time to escape.

I'd been studying the climbing history of one of Canada's most mythical mountains: Waddington. At 13,186 feet, it's the highest peak in the Coast Range of British Columbia, and it has a splendidly nasty reputation. It is remote and rarely climbed. Storms last two or three or four weeks. After reading every account of every expedition that had been to the mountain, I'd discovered a secret: The south face was still unclimbed. I couldn't believe it.

To make sure, I called Don Serl, a veteran of more than 30 expeditions into the Coast Range, at his home in Vancouver. He laughed at my dilettantism. "That's the route Wiessner and House used on the first ascent in 1936," he said.

Fritz Wiessner, a grizzled, square-headed German expatriate, and William Pendleton House, a lanky Yale alum, were legendary early hardmen. (In 1937 they made the first ascent of Devil's Tower.) Their route up Waddington had been repeated only a few times in the last half-century.

I told Serl that I had reviewed the topo maps and that it looked like Wiessner and House had climbed the southwest face, not the south face.

Serl went silent.

"There was a man named Alec Dalgleish who died trying the south face in 1934," I said. "He slipped and the rope sliced and he fell a thousand feet, but...I think the south face is still a virgin."

Suddenly Serl seemed to realize I'd done my homework, and he became cagey. "Welp, you'll just have to find out for yerself," he said. The fact that he wouldn't discuss the matter further was a dead giveaway. The true south face of Waddington was unclimbed, and he knew it. He just didn't want some cowboys riding in and rustling it from the Canadians.

I e-mailed John: "OK, this is it. You and me. Waddington. Unclimbed route. May."

John wrote back immediately, excited, desirous of details, but still stuck on work, family, his busy life. I left the same message on his phone machine: "You and me. Waddington. Unclimbed route. May."

The bush plane bounced through dark clouds and hooked around knots of lightning before belly-flopping into an abandoned logging camp near the head of Knight Inlet. We jumped out, dragged off our packs, and stood there in the rain while the pilot spun 180 and skipped off into the clouds.

The minute John had said yes, he'd upped the ante: "One condition: We do it the hard way—from the ocean." This was typical John Harlin. As far as we could discover, no one had climbed Waddington after marching in from the sea in years—perhaps decades.

Our plans were adolescent in their simplicity: walk up an old logging road, hop onto the glacier, and ski to the mountain, a 30-mile trip we figured would take three days. We'd hiked a good two miles—or maybe it was only 200 yards—before the plan fell apart.

One of the many problems with the indoor life is that it turns you soft as butter. Going from sea to summit meant we had to pack everything from sneakers to skis, plus twice the usual allotment of food and fuel. Our packs weighed a hundred pounds even before they became drenched. Wobbling into the rainforest, we looked like a couple of old bowlegged dogs shouldering their doghouses.

Another problem with living indoors is that you start to think that all the secondhand cyber-info you're faithfully slurping up has some validity. Don't kid yourself. Empiricism is the path to knowledge, or at least a life.

Our maps claimed that there was a logging road. There was no logging road. Of course there was no logging road. The valley had been logged a generation ago, and it had been raining ever since. Slide alder had rethatched the geography. With each step the skis strapped to our packs snagged on limbs and our feet disappeared in mud. The only effective technique for making forward progress was to bellow obscenities and thrash like epileptics.

We took the first game trail going our way. That it was obviously a bear trail didn't bother us until we came across a large steaming pile of droppings. Thereafter we peeked around every bush. Soon enough, there he was, squatting on the trail, very large and very black. We stared at him and he stared at us. Then he rolled his huge head and popped his jaw, and we unfastened our hipbelts and eyed the trees. Satisfied that we now knew whose kingdom we were trespassing through, he lumbered away.

That was day one. We'd managed five miles.

Day two. More thrashing and cursing.

Day three. More thrashing and cursing, until we were forced to ford the Franklin River to gain Franklin Glacier. We searched for the broadest, shallowest, least ferocious sweep of bone-numbing glacier water. After we found a suitable 100-yard-wide spot, John stripped and plunged into the hip-high water, involuntarily gasping, while I belayed from shore. Once across, he roped me over. Our toes and legs and nuts having lost consciousness, we stumbled around collecting driftwood, built a proper Boy Scout bonfire (one cup stove fuel, two cups pack trash, one cord wood) and proceeded to roast ourselves.

When blood had oozed back into our limbs, we set up camp and then returned to the fire, curling around the flames on the warm river rocks as naturally as our distant forebears.

"Mark, you feel it?" In the firelight, John's eyes gleamed like a wolf's.

Something was happening to us. It was what we'd come for. We were being immersed back into the physical life. It was almost as if all the rain, the frigid river, the wilderness itself were an acid dissolving the shell of urban existence.

I threw back my head and howled.

What all grubby anthropologists worth their weight in bones should know, and all rat-tailed philosophers, sociologists, and shrinks have yet to figure out, is that humans evolved as hardy outdoor animals. Two million years of running naked across the veld hardwired us for life in the wilderness. Keep humans inside a cage, physical or psychological, and like every other creature on this good earth we become flaccid, febrile, and feckless.

The next morning we climbed into the mouth of Franklin Glacier. Before us lay wildly tilted ramps of blue ice loaded with gargantuan boulders teetering at the angle of repose. It was a minefield. We moved as swiftly as possible, weaving up through perilous seracs and around towering tombstones. We heard explosions behind us and in front of us and kept moving, each step made quickly yet delicately for fear of setting off a trip wire. We stayed well apart. There was no point in roping up. If something happened we couldn't help each other. It took us two hours to race through the icefall. On the other side, we threw up the tent and camped.

That icefall was the Rubicon. It's odd, but often when you get through something inordinately difficult or dangerous, it doesn't weaken you; it makes you stronger and bolder. We had passed into the heart of the mountains. We were starting to trust our instincts again, to lope, to believe our bodies would do what we willed them to do.

For the next two days we skied and climbed through one icefall after another, carefully picking our routes. We were quietly exultant. We laughed easily. The wild man that lurks within every human was beginning to stretch. Hibernation was over. Our faces refurred, our bodies smelled of sweat, and anything, no matter how mad, began to seem possible. When the clouds momentarily parted and we got our first frightful glimpse of the mountain, we girded ourselves in our dreams and woke ready.

On the afternoon of the sixth day we axed out a platform at the base of what we were now calling the Dalgleish Face. We had been humping hard for nearly a week. We needed several more days of bad weather to rest, but we set the alarm for two in the morning. We thought we'd pop our heads out, confirm it was still snowing, go back to sleep.

But there were stars! A blazing black-blue sky full. We fired up the stove, swilled hot chocolate, and were cramponing up the unknown, moonlit face by four. Using headlamps, we tiptoed over a thin snow bridge that hung over a deep, dark crevasse, shot straight up to a small hollow below a rock buttress, danced around two more barely visible crevasses, and then moved diagonally up into a steep, twisting couloir that disappeared above us, cleaving the wall. We'd agreed that I would lead the ice, John the rock, so I took the pointy end.

The snow was high-angle but of perfect consistency—the kind climbers call Styrofoam. Each swing with an ax and kick with a crampon gave an audible, reassuring thud. There were occasional bands of ice, but they were short and fun, and several hidden crevasses that sent a shot of adrenaline through me when a foot plunged into space. Once John was hit by a spindrift avalanche funneling down the couloir that almost tore him off the face, but he recovered, choking and spitting. We simul-climbed the first 2,000 feet in such rapid, implacable synchronicity that we surprised ourselves. It was a riot.

For the final thousand feet, the couloir narrowed and steepened into a series of ice steps and mixed climbing. John belayed, I led. It was not overly technical, but speed was critical. Both of us felt the tug of hope and passion as if there was already a rope above us, pulling us up. I placed one ice screw at the base of each section of steep ice, and then climbed—stemming and reaching with my metal claws—without putting in more protection until I'd run out all the rope. Pitch after pitch disappeared below our feet.

John and I topped the south face of Mount Waddington at two in the afternoon, flush with triumph, hugging each other, shouting into the wind—but the summit, a 1,000-foot blade of black, icy rock, still loomed above us. The weather had turned again. It was snowing and blowing. Without stopping for food or water, we set off up the shoulder of snow toward the tower.

We were kicking steps and swinging tools, the stone tower just above us, when we heard it, and felt it—a deep, stomach-shuddering thunder. It's all over: That was my first and only thought. The glacier was calving, and we would be ripped from the face, tangled in our ropes, and torn limb from limb in the tumbling ice.

But the snow beneath our crampons wasn't moving. I searched for the collapsing glacier. Nothing. Clenching both ice axes, I twisted around, and couldn't believe my eyes.

John spun about, saw it, and instinctively hunched against the mountain.

A massive airplane, a hideous green four-prop bomber, was diving straight at us. It was incomprehensible: two tiny men clinging to the side of a forgotten mountain in the middle of nowhere with a World War II kamikaze thundering in. The bomber was so vast that its wings seemed to darken the sky. At the last possible moment, it pulled up and arced away. Mute with disbelief, we watched the plane rumble out toward the horizon, its size and sound diminishing. Then it hooked back.

In seconds it was bearing down on us again. It made no sense. Maybe somewhere in these remote mountains we had slipped through a crack in time. Maybe this was Austria, 1944. Maybe the glacier had calved and we were both already dead and just having one last absurd dream.

Then all was slo-mo. The plane was milliseconds from slamming into us on the face of the mountain when it reared up and we were staring at its belly and the hatch was open and a bomb was dropping out. Trailing a red streamer, the payload slammed into the bergschrund below the tower just above our heads and...nothing. No flash, no explosion, nada.

The plane disappeared. Even its thunder vanished, as if the bomber had been sucked into a cosmic hole.

What could we do? We climbed right up to the bomb. It was buried in the snow. John pulled on the red streamer and out came a plastic cylinder the size of a fire extinguisher.

"Bubble-wrap?" John was incredulous.

"Well, open it!"

John tore at it with his ice ax and then crowed like a madman as he plucked out a bottle of Captain Morgan's rum. Wrapped snugly around the bottle was a magazine—Penthouse, "Special Edition: Girls of the World"—with a note: "To Jim and the boys. Good luck!"

Jim? The boys? Who cared? We had their booze, women, and song. With a 3,000-foot drop beneath us, we cracked open the bottle, ogled the pictures, and whooped it up. Eventually we craned back and peered up at our mountain.

It was 3:30. Our original turnaround time had been three.

John took one last slug and grinned just like the pirate on the label.

"How 'bout five?"

"Five it is."

He handed me the bottle and started climbing.

It meant we might have to bivy high on the face. We had no tent, no sleeping bag, no bivy sack. If necessary, we'd hack a hole in the wall, rope ourselves in, hope we were still functional when the sun came up.

John took two falls trying to gain the tower from the thin bergschrund. He was scared, but when he finally got up on the rock, he climbed as if he wasn't. Such is the sangfroid that only comes with putting yourself up against something you're not sure you can do. It was steep and technical, every move definitive. Slowly, carefully, hammering in too few pitons, he ran out a rope-length. He brought me up and then ran out another hundred feet, stopping in an exposed notch.

I put up the next pitch, moving as fast as possible through an ice-rimed overhang. Then he led a pitch, ice axes flashing in the evening whirl of sun and snow. Then I led a pitch.

Then it was five.

Much is made of turnaround times in mountaineering. People die when they break the rules. People die when they go too far. It's all true, but it's only half the story. No maxim applies to every situation. Only fools and cowards follow every rule. Chaos is occasionally the best choice.

The sun was sinking, the wind was screeching, the temperature was dropping like a shotgunned sparrow, and the summit was still above us. We would soon be benighted. Our fingertips were dead, our faces were frozen into masks, our bodies were shivering.

And you have to know your limits. Another honored cliché, but the only way you know is to go, and go, until you fail. Which is something you'll never do in ordinary life, because you never have to. Juvenile as it may sound, the only way to know your limits is to forget them. Yes, you can die...

But sometimes you live! Sometimes you get a sign from heaven. Sometimes your most transcendent hours come through acts of foolishness.

It was 5:30 when we finished off the sheer steeple of Waddington. The pinnacle was so sharp that only one of us could stand on top at a time. For just a moment—the moment that is all and everything—the world fell away.

John and I were lucky, I know. very lucky. For a few days we traded the constant weight of responsibility for the angelic lightness of hubris. Next time? I don't know.

On the summit we opted not to bivy for fear of freezing to death and instead rapped the whole south face in the dark in a storm. We used up every piece of gear and were about to begin lopping off sections of rope to use as slings when we finally reached our tent. It was one in the morning.

It would take us another five days to get out, but first we spent 24 hours sleeping with the pinups and drinking Jim and the boys' rum. We didn't find out to whom we owed the pleasure until the flight out, when our bush pilot told us that we must have been mistaken for a Canadian military team attempting Waddington along the tried-and-true western route, and that the airdrop had been intended for them.

On a ferry sliding back into Vancouver, we told our story to a fellow passenger, a good-old-boy Canuck who seemed pleased to hear the tale. "By God," he declared, "you did it the cowboy way." So of course, that's exactly what we named our route up the south face.