Book Review: ‘Denali’s Howl’ by Andy Hall

In the summer of 1967, a 12-man expedition led by a 24-year-old student at Utah’s Brigham Young University attempted to climb 20,320-foot Denali—as Alaska’s Mount McKinley is known to virtually everyone closely associated with it. The tragedy that followed still ranks as the worst, and most controversial, incident in Denali history.

Denali, in the south-central part of the state, is one of the most enormous mountains on earth, an icy, glacier-clad behemoth whose northern aspect rears 18,000 feet from tundra to lofty summit. The mountain stands at a nexus of storms that careen up the Aleutian chain or sweep in from the Bering or Beaufort seas and thus brew some of the harshest conditions on earth. It’s the highest peak in North America and, from base to top, is taller than any Himalayan giant, including Everest.

Expedition leader Joe Wilcox and three others reached the summit on July 15, 1967. Three days later, five other members of the expedition made it to the top, led by Jerry Clark, an experienced 31-year-old mountaineer. Minutes later, a surprise convergence of weather systems slammed Denali. Hurricane-force winds, frigid temperatures and whiteout conditions enveloped the mountain. Clark’s group and two other members of the expedition at or above high camp were never seen alive again. Joe Wilcox and the other previously successful men (along with one other who hadn’t tried for the top) remained at a camp lower on the mountain, pinned in by the storm, which raged for a week. They were unable to do anything for the missing men, and eventually the storm drove them down. Ten days later, another climbing party discovered three of the seven bodies but precious little evidence with which to reconstruct the final hours of the doomed men.

Over the past half-century much ink has been expended rehashing the details of the ill-fated Wilcox expedition and trying to assign culpability. Two books were written by expedition participants. “In the Hall of the Mountain King” (1973) was written by Howard Snyder, one of three Coloradans who had been forced to join Mr. Wilcox’s team because the broken wrist of their fourth man pushed their numbers below the minimum required for a team by National Park Service regulations. He harshly judged Mr. Wilcox’s leadership and the competence of the team he had assembled. Eight years later, Mr. Wilcox countered with “White Winds” (1981). Seeking shelter from a tempest high on Denali, he wrote, “was like trying to hide in the cracks of a sidewalk.”

More recently, journalist James Tabor penned “Forever on the Mountain: The Truth Behind One of Mountaineering’s Most Controversial and Mysterious Disasters” (2007), in which he assigned much of the blame for the high death toll to the National Park Service’s failure to orchestrate a proper rescue. Andy Hall’s motivation to write “Denali’s Howl: The Deadliest Climbing Disaster on America’s Wildest Peak” probably lurks within Mr. Tabor’s work; although Mr. Hall was only 5 years old when the tragedy unfolded, his father was George Hall, the superintendent of Denali National Park and a target of Mr. Tabor’s pointed criticism.

In “Denali’s Howl,” Mr. Hall contends—convincingly—that nothing the Park Service, Air Force or any other rescue group could have done would have saved the stricken climbers. His fast-paced narrative contends that the expedition made the “staggering mistake” of not bringing a full complement of snow shovels and snow saws up the mountain—the only tools with which they could have efficiently constructed igloos and snow caves. In another “blunder,” the top men found themselves with “barely half” the number of required “wands,” the thin four-foot poles—like tomato stakes—that climbers stick into the snow every 50 or 100 feet to mark their line of ascent as a safeguard against losing the return route in whiteout conditions. Both oversights, seemingly minor, may have played critical roles in the fatalities.

Although Mr. Tabor’s “Forever on the Mountain” does a superior job drawing the individual characters, his account is wildly overwritten, and he favors a few individuals while casting the rest in the worst possible light. He also takes great pains to re-create what he thinks happened to Jerry Clark’s group, even going so far as to re-create their dialogue. “Denali’s Howl” is much less sensationalized, and the stronger for it. Needing to illustrate the plight of the seven lost men, but unwilling to follow Mr. Tabor into reconstructive fantasy, Mr. Hall draws a parallel to an experience endured by Denali guide Blaine Smith in 1997.

That May, a surprise storm caught Mr. Smith and four others just after they had tagged Denali’s summit—conditions similar to those that undid the Wilcox expedition. Within minutes, Mr. Smith’s team was paralyzed above 19,000 feet, unable to descend, locked in a life-or-death struggle with frigid winds raging up to 80 miles per hour. Through the course of a 12-hour ordeal, they nearly froze to death. Fortunately, the storm broke. As related by the author, Mr. Smith’s plain-stated narration is positively harrowing, and he is easy to believe when he says: “If it had lasted a few more hours we would have died.” It’s hard to imagine Jerry Clark and his companions lasting much longer against a more ferocious storm.

The only thing actually known about what happened to Jerry Clark’s group, after its last radio call, is the locations of three bodies. Everything else is pure speculation. To this day we have no idea how long the men survived in the storm. It could have been a few days; it might have been mere hours. In either case, it’s hard to imagine what the Park Service could have done for them, trapped by one of the worst Denali storms ever recorded. The Park Service’s disorganized rescue efforts might not have amounted to much, and its post-fiasco investigation certainly left much to be desired; but the Park Service can’t be fairly blamed for the casualties. “Even today,” says one modern meteorologist that Mr. Hall quotes in his book, “if a storm of this magnitude hit, there’d be little we could do to save anyone unfortunate enough to be clinging to the side of Denali.”

Mountaineering is a game of consequence and immense personal independence, a combination that most climbers find to be among its greatest attractions. Ultimate responsibility rests with the climbers. As it should.

—Mr. Crouch is the author of “China’s Wings: War, Intrigue, Romance, and Adventure in the Middle Kingdom During the Golden Age of Flight.”