The ordeal wasn’t quite over. The exhausted rescuers, fueled by airdropped benzedrine tablets, dragged Argus in the sled down the trail they had marked through the Muldrow’s crevasse fields. Argus, a budding naturalist, insisted they bring along a few sacks of rocks he had collected from the mountain. After a thirty-five-hour push, they reached the landing site, where, after 44 days on the mountain, the last member of the South Buttress team was airlifted to safety. As he flew toward the hospital aboard a series of transport planes, Argus kept mumbling, “Oh, it’s good to get off that mountain.” At a hospital in Anchorage, surgeons went to work on his damaged jaw, dislocated hip and severed patellar tendon.
Wood wrote in the AAJ, “I would never encourage anyone to climb the mountain by [the South Buttress], as it is not, in my opinion, either safe or practical.” But, as Andy Selters writes in the new Ways to the Sky history of North American mountaineering, “Since then, advances in snow and ice climbing, and especially the ski-plane option of beginning and ending this route at the Kahiltna Glacier, have made this arguably the finest moderate route to the top of the continent.
“These companions had enjoyed a tremendous adventure far from the eye of civilization,” Selters concludes. “But the loss of their friend Thayer eclipsed their gusto for the first traverse of Denali and one of the greatest expeditions of the decade, and the three survivors never did another major climb.”
After months in a cast, George Argus recovered from his injuries, earned a Ph.D. from Harvard, and is now researcher emeritus of the Canadian Museum of Nature. Though his knees give him some trouble, he still enjoys folk dancing. Woody Wood and his wife, Ginny, established Camp Denali near Wonder Lake in the early 1950s; they later divorced and Woody moved to Seattle, where he worked as a high school language teacher until retirement. Les Viereck, also retired, was a forest-ecology researcher affiliated with the Institute of Northern Forestry and the University of Alaska; he earned fame during the Cold War for risking his career to help derail a federal proposal called Project Chariot, which aimed to blast new harbors in the Alaskan coastline with nuclear bombs. In June of this year, Wood, Argus, Viereck, Ginny Wood, and Bernice Thayer, Elton’s wife, met at Camp Denali to mark the 50th anniversary of the South Buttress expedition and to remember Elton Thayer.
Thayer was memorialized on the mountain he loved with the renaming of Great Traleika Cirque, the huge bowl on the east side of Denali where he and his friends camped just before they reached the summit, assuming all their troubles soon would be over. High and remote, Thayer Basin greets the dawn with a splendor few people ever witness.
Dougald MacDonald, author of Longs Peak: The Story of Colorado’s Favorite Fourteener, has twice climbed to 19,500 feet on Denali, but not reached the summit.
