Winning and Losing in the Revelations

The first ascent of Mt. Mausolus

Biting cold numbs my face, but between deep breaths I hardly notice. The last stretch of rope feeds through my belay device as Scotty crests the final snow pyramid of Mt. Mausolus. Beyond him, a fiery sun sinks behind the erratic spine of the Revelations. The air is deathly still. The western sky burns in a spectrum of oranges and pinks. “We did it, Seth,” I whisper. “We did it.”

Until our ascent, Mt. Mausolus stood as one of Alaska’s proudest unclimbed summits, tucked away in the Revelation Mountains, a range few climbers even know exists. At the southwesternmost rampart of the Alaska Range, the Revelations are a forbidding, untamed wilderness. While the summit altitudes are modest—just over 9,000 feet—the peaks’ sheer rise and mass inspire awe. Numerous mountains have mile-high walls. Towering, craggy monoliths are separated by torrential, glacierfed rivers and boulder-choked valleys. Only a few peaks have seen second ascents.

I first learned of the Revelations during a shivering winter bivy halfway up Mt. Yukla in the Chugach Mountains, near my home in Anchorage. My partner passed on rumors of an entire range that had seen only a handful of explorers. It seemed impossible that such a place still existed. As his 21-year-old protégé, I fantasized about one day leaving my mark among such mysterious Alaskan mountains.

The Revelations were first explored in 1967 by a team led by David Roberts. The pioneering trip included fellow Harvard Mountaineering Club members George and Rick Millikan, Matt Hale, and Ned Fetcher, as well as Art Davidson, who was still recovering from frostbite after making the first winter ascent of Denali. Studying the maps, they noted an alluring 9,200-foot peak at the head of the Revelation Glacier, whose ridges spread “just like the wings of an angel.” This peak became the object of their obsession. The team made six serious attempts on the south ridge of “the Angel,” but atrocious bouts of wind and freezing rain drove them to the verge of hypothermia, defeating their efforts again and again.

As their 52-day trip neared its end, the team had made several signifi cant first ascents, but had given up on the Angel. Then, one of the last days dawned beautifully—the best weather of the trip. Hale and Roberts headed up the Angel to remove some fi nal scraps of gear. Reaching their high point in record time, they could not resist moving a little higher. Unprepared for a safe summit bid, however, and with anguishing reluctance, they turned around early in the afternoon.

From the mid-1960s to the late 1970s, Roberts was involved in more than a dozen major first ascents in Alaska, including the Southeast Buttress of Mt. Dickey, the Wickersham Wall on Denali, and the Harvard Route on Mt. Huntington. After those climbs, one might assume that the Revelations would pale in comparison. Yet, in his under-acclaimed book On the Ridge Between Life and Death, Roberts devotes nearly an entire chapter to the range, and confesses that, “Of all the regrets I have about my years in the mountains, in terms of sheer, simple ‘what-might-have-been’… letting the Angel slip through our fingers when we were within 700 feet of the summit on a perfect day still stings the sharpest.”

My own obsession in the Revelations can be traced to Roberts’ single mention of one peak in his 1968 American Alpine Journal entry: “And from the plane we had glimpsed the hopeless labyrinth of Mt. Mausolus (9,170 feet), perhaps the toughest climb in the range.”

When I met Seth Holden in 2004, he held near-legendary status among our group of friends. He had done weeklong ski traverses and had climbed volcanoes in South America, Yosemite big walls, and alpine routes in Chamonix and the Ruth Gorge, among other exploits. I finally mustered up the courage to invite him on a climb of North Suicide in the Chugach. It was a standard winter peak-bagging trip for him, but a testpiece for me at the time. Other than a failed attempt on the Moose’s Tooth, Seth and I did little serious climbing together over the next few years, but I constantly gauged my increasing skills next to his. As my infatuation with the Revelations grew, I knew that Seth was just the kind of partner I would need.

Hundreds of hours of research uncovered only vague information on the Revelations’ climbing history. I found that Mausolus had been attempted once from the east in June 1998 by James Funsten, Scott Rourke, and Mike Wood. They were shut down several hundred feet from the top by avalanches that almost cost them their lives. A single photograph taken by a local pilot profiled the peak’s 4,500-foot west face, a convoluted maze of discontinuous couloirs, arching granite spines, and precarious hanging glaciers. A stunning vein of ice traced an almost perfectly straight line from base to summit, a direttissima that inspired me from the moment I first saw it.