Four climbers stepped off the Alaska Railroad at Curry, about twenty miles north of Talkeetna, on April 17, 1954. Shouldering huge packs, the foursome crossed the frozen Susitna River, snowshoed up a tall hill, and paused to admire the view from the top. Fifty miles away, Denali sat nearly 20,000 feet above them, shimmering over frozen riverbeds and snow-covered tundra. The unclimbed, five-mile-long rampart of the South Buttress angled toward the summit.
In 1954, Denali had been climbed fewer than ten times, and its south and east flanks remained completely virgin. The modern era was around the corner — ski planes had begun landing on the Kahiltna Glacier — but the peak was still very much an explorer’s proposition. It would take the 1954 party nearly two weeks just to reach basecamp, and once they started climbing the South Buttress, disintegrating icefalls and swollen rivers behind them meant they would have to complete the first traverse of North America’s highest peak just to get home.
This foursome was not composed of globetrotting alpine superstars but rather a group of Alaskan friends, equipped with Army surplus clothing and tents sewn by their leader Elton Thayer’s wife, who also prepared their food in her kitchen. Thayer, age twenty-seven, worked as a ranger at Mount McKinley National Park. For the South Buttress expedition he recruited George Argus, age twenty-five, an instructor at the Army’s Arctic Indoctrination School; Les Viereck, age twenty-four, a lanky graduate student also serving in the Army; and Morton “Woody” Wood, age thirty, a veteran of the Army’s 10th Mountain Division who ran Camp Denali, a guest-cabin establishment below the mountain’s northern slopes. Thayer had made the first ascents of King Peak in the Yukon in 1952 and Mount Hess in the Alaska Range in 1951, and Wood had climbed Mont Blanc and attempted Denali from the north in 1947.