The descent went smoothly at first. They zigzagged down the Harper Glacier and onto Karstens Ridge, and by the end of the day they were below 13,000 feet. With about a foot of loose snow over hard ice, the footing was treacherous and they moved carefully as they neared their intended campsite. Three climbers belayed each time the fourth moved, but solid anchors were nearly impossible to find. Two of the men’s ice axes were cracked from general wear and bound together with tape.
As the ridge steepened at an area called the Coxcomb, they descended below the crest on the northwest side. Thayer was last on the rope. The others were watching as their leader stumbled and began to slide; he was wearing soft mukluks and his crampons may have shifted on his feet. Instantly, they all leaned on their axes, pushing the dull spikes into the ice, but as the rope came taut each man was plucked from his precarious stance and all four cartwheeled down the steep slope, bouncing off ice blocks and pitching over short serac walls.
“It was like [taking] a bad spill while skiing in powder snow except that it seemed to last for an eternity,” Wood recalled in the AAJ. “I remember once falling free in the air for at least a second or two and then landing on my pack in deep snow ... More sliding, rolling, and another long free fall — then suddenly silence except for the gentle hiss of the snow that was still in motion all around me.”
Argus was jerked away from the wall, his feet kicking in the air. He tried to shed his pack as he fell, hoping to avoid breaking his arms in the straps. He had one arm free when he slammed into an ice block and blacked out.
Wood could not believe he was unharmed when he came to a halt. They had fallen at least 800 feet and come to a stop only when Viereck wedged in a crevasse and the rope halted the rest of them. They were strewn across the steep slope only a few yards above a 400-foot cliff, just to one side of the massive Harper Icefall. Wood saw Argus sitting below him, then looked up and saw Thayer dangling off a fifteen-foot-high serac from the rope tied around his waist. Wood desperately struggled to untie the knot around his chest and then stood up. Viereck had extracted himself from the crevasse and was standing forty feet above him. The two men quickly established an ice-axe belay, lowered Thayer from the serac, and rushed to help him. But it was too late. He had broken his back in the fall, probably when he slammed to a stop in mid-air.