As the two dejected climbers tried to rally their strength to walk another eighty miles, they suddenly heard voices outside. Bursting out of the door of the cabin, they saw two men hallooing to them across a river; the men, park rangers, had shoveled through drift after drift to open the road for the season. The climbers piled into the rangers’ Dodge Power Wagon, and by 10:30 p.m. they were at the park headquarters.
That night, an eight-man rescue team was organized, led by Dr. John McCall, a geology professor at the University of Alaska who
had climbed Denali six years earlier. A rescue was under way, but Argus was not yet out of
danger. These days, given a bit of fair weather, a helicopter rescue at 11,000 feet on the Muldrow would be a snap; helicopters have picked up climbers above 19,000 feet on Denali. But in 1954 such rescues had not yet been attempted on the mountain. The Army’s Sikorsky H-5 “Dragonfly” helicopter (famed for behind-the-lines rescues in the Korean War) had a rated ceiling of about 10,000 feet.
On May 26, the rescue team choppered to about 5500 feet on the Muldrow. They would have to travel about fifteen miles up the glacier to reach Argus’s 11,000-foot camp and somehow, if he was still alive, transport the injured man back down to the landing site. Planes dropped supplies and an aluminum sled for carrying Argus. Two feet of new snow slowed the rescuers’ progress, however, and buried some of the airdropped supplies. The rescue effort prompted dire headlines in the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner: “Snow falling; Searchers Losing Trail to Climber; Thermometer Drops to 10 Above Zero at Level Where Helpless Man Awaits Rescuers; Situation Getting Critical.” By radio, the team requested that Wood return to the mountain to help find the way, but he couldn’t join them, as the helicopter could not fly in the snowstorm.
Rescuers spotted Argus’ tent from the air but saw no sign of movement. Nevertheless, they remained hopeful because Argus appeared to have knocked fresh snow off the tent walls. From his lonely bed on the glacier, Argus heard the planes overhead and knew a rescue must be getting closer, but he fretted impatiently as the days passed.
The rescuers needed five days to find a safe trail up the Muldrow. Late in the afternoon of May 30, one week after Wood and Viereck left him, Argus thought he heard voices outside his snowbound tent. He shouted but heard no reply. After a long moment, he heard voices again and struggled to heave his shoulders and head outside the tent.
A figure approached and yelled, “Are
you OK?”
“Sure I am,” Argus replied, and offered to fix his rescuers a cup of tea.
Alone for seven nights, Argus had conserved his food and his single quart of fuel so well that he had supplies for at least four more days. The rescuers found his remaining food arranged in neat rows, with daily rations where he could easily reach them. His tent reeked. He had been in the same clothes for six weeks and hadn’t been out of his sleeping bag in a week. “When we looked into the tent, we gritted our teeth,” McCall later told reporters.
To the rescuers, Argus seemed in fine spirits, and McCall remarked, “No normal man could have gone through what he did. He’s a very exceptional person.” For his part, Argus says fifty years later, “I think a lot of ‘normal’ people could have done what I did — it’s just that few of us are tested.”