Argus was badly injured. Most of his front teeth were gone and his right hip was dislocated. Ligaments and tendons in both legs were torn. He could hear Wood and Viereck talking, and then Wood was by his side.
“Where’s Elton?” Argus asked his friend.
“He’s dead,” Wood said.
Gently as he could, Wood moved Argus onto an air mattress and slid him to a level spot where they could pitch their three-man tent. Gear was strewn everywhere, and Wood and Viereck — who seemed dazed and complained of pain in his chest — climbed slowly up and down the slope to recover what equipment they could. Wood gave Argus some codeine tablets for his pain, and then, while Argus dozed, Wood and Viereck buried Thayer. Finally they all moved into the tent and cooked a meal on their battered stove.
The three men spent six nights in the camp, hoping Argus would improve enough to move down the mountain. Each day, Argus was a bit stronger, but his teammates soon realized that walking — even crawling — was out of the question. Wood and Viereck stamped SOS messages in the snow, hoping Ginny Wood might fly past in search of them. But the clock was ticking. Nearly every day a little snow fell, and the climbers knew a big storm might erase them from the exposed avalanche slope. Finally, they decided to move.
On May 22, Wood and Viereck began kicking a path in the snow toward the flat glacier about 1000 feet below them. They wondered how they’d ever get their friend down one seemingly impassible stretch of icy steps and crevasses, but they had little choice. “We got ourselves into this mess, and it’s up to us to find a way out of it,” thought Wood.
They wrapped Argus in the tent, put him on top of two air mattresses, padded him with their extra clothes, knotted loops of rope around him, and tied their climbing rope to the loops. Before they left, Wood marked Thayer’s grave by nailing the wreckage of his packboard to the serac where Thayer had fallen. Then, with one man pulling the litter and the other behind to steady the ropes, they began sledging Argus down the snowy trough they had dug, carefully lowering him over ice steps and along the lips of crevasses. After sixteen hours of work, with a sense of enormous relief, they reached the Muldrow Glacier, out of range of the looming seracs. They dragged Argus to the middle of the glacier and pitched their tent.
The next morning at six a.m. they heard a plane flying overhead. Wood leapt out of the tent with the remains of his broken signaling mirror. Ginny Wood flew overhead just as her husband reached some sunlight and flashed a reflection onto the plane. But his wife didn’t see the signal — she was intent on searching the south side of the peak, and fresh snow had buried their tracks.
“George,” Wood said to Argus. “We’re out of options. Les and I have got to go get help.”
The two uninjured men placed most of their food and their single remaining quart of fuel within easy reach of their friend. They sliced open an empty one-gallon gas can to use as a bedpan. They figured Argus could make the fuel last a week.
Wood and Viereck took only a little oatmeal, some chocolate bars, and five small pieces of energy-packed Logan bread. They faced a trek of roughly thirty miles to the road at Wonder Lake. Before they left, around noon on May 23, Argus asked the two men to send a wire to his mother saying that they had made the summit and that “everything was fine.”

The Muldrow was heavily crevassed, and the two men felt horribly exposed as they snowshoed through the maze of slots. If either man fell into a crevasse, the other might not be able to pull him out and both they and their friend Argus might die as a result. Wood remembers the mountain looming behind them as “a physical force that drove us to keep going.”
With skilled route finding, aided by Wood’s previous trip up the mountain, they made it to McGonagall Pass, the exit from the Muldrow Glacier, by 3:30 a.m., after fifteen hard hours of tense walking. They expected to find food cached at the pass by previous expeditions, but nothing was there. They dozed for four hours, ate one Logan biscuit apiece, and then began hiking down Cache Creek toward the road. They walked all that day and through the next night, crossing twenty miles of tundra, and forded the McKinley River at 4:30 a.m. on May 25 to reach a cabin that Thayer, following an old Alaskan tradition, had stocked with food the year before. Wood and Viereck cooked breakfast and slept another two hours. Then they began walking toward the road at Wonder Lake.
As they crested the last hill, the two were stunned to see no tracks on the road. It was still closed by the winter snows. They had been marching for two days straight, and now they faced an ordeal they of which they hadn’t dreamed — another eighty-six miles of walking to reach the open road. It would be at least four more days before they could start a rescue for their injured partner. How much longer could Argus hold out?

At that moment, George Argus may have been the most isolated human being in North America. With the road to Wonder Lake still closed, he lay at least fifty miles and 10,000 vertical feet from the nearest car as the crow flies. No one was attempting the Muldrow Glacier route that season. Argus’ fate lay completely with his two friends.
Two days before, as Wood and Viereck walked away from his tent, Argus listened to the scuffle of their steps fade and felt his spirits sink. “Woody!” he yelled out of the tent that afternoon, forgetting that his friend had already gone. “Woody!” His voice was swallowed up in the vast stillness of the glacial basin. Argus had some morphine, but the pain in his legs didn’t seem too bad and he didn’t want to risk a drug-induced stupor, so he limited himself to an occasional codeine tablet. He knew he had to keep eating despite the pain in his five remaining front teeth, which had been smashed backward in the fall. He ate two small meals a day, killing time with the careful preparation of his oatmeal and powdered egg. He melted a bit of chocolate in his powdered milk each night, hoping the treat would help him sleep.
As the days dragged on, Argus wondered if he could fashion some sort of crutch in case his friends didn’t return. He briefly tried crawling, but the pain in his hip was too great. Unable to move outside the tent, he spent hours reading a book of Mark Twain short stories, lingering over each page.. Clamorous ice avalanches pounded the walls above him. He couldn’t see them because the opening in his tent pointed down the glacier, but he could feel powder snow drift over the tent after a big avalanche. Falling snow gradually collapsed the foot of his tent and began to soak his sleeping bag. On the night of May 25, he struggled to stay awake and wiggle his wet toes to keep them warm. He spent much of the following day in an exhausting and painful struggle to change his boots and socks, replacing them with Inuit mukluks that had sealskin uppers and walrus-skin bottoms. His toes had some minor frostbite, but for the moment they were out of serious danger.
That morning, Argus heard planes fly overhead several times, and his hopes rose. He felt sure his friends must have reached the road and that a rescue was on its way.

Wearily, Wood and Viereck left Wonder Lake and started
hiking again. Their feet and bodies ached — they had hiked and climbed some 130 miles since leaving the Alaska Railroad nearly forty days earlier. They had one more chance to avoid walking all the way to the open road. A solitary old prospector lived at Kantishna, about five miles away, and he had a radio. When they reached the Kantishna cabin, Wood quickly asked the miner, “Can we use your radio?”
“Nope,” the man said. “Batteries are dead.”