Imaginary peaks, p.1
Imaginary Peaks, page 1
ADVENTURE/GEOGRAPHY/HISTORY
IN 1962 THE EDITORS OF SUMMIT MAGAZINE received a submission about first ascents in an unknown mountain range in British Columbia. Accompanied by a photo of granite walls that stretched like gothic spires into the sky, the article explained that the climbing party had failed to reach the main summit. The magazine’s editors, apparently unaware that they had fallen victim to a clever ruse, added the enticing question, Who will be the first to climb it?
Renowned Alpinist magazine editor Katie Ives investigates this adventure-literary mystery, known as the Riesenstein Hoax, within the larger context of mountaineering history and the allure of unmapped regions. Delving into the literature of exploration, Ives follows ancient routes across Asia, historical expeditions in the Alps, and disputed climbs on the slopes of the Alaska Range. She details how conservationist Harvey Manning, along with his co-conspirators, photographer Austin Post and glaciologist Ed LaChapelle, conceived the Riesenstein joke, and places their plot in a continuum that includes the legendary Diamond Mountain, James Hilton’s Shangri-La, and a mythical mountain taller than Everest.
The idea of lost lands appeals to our basic human desire to venture beyond the attainable, a shared yearning to escape the humdrum reality of everyday life. Deeply immersive and vividly recounted, Imaginary Peaks explores our fascination with wild places, the attraction of blank spaces on the map, and the power of imagination.
IMAGINARY PEAKS
IMAGINARY PEAKS
THE RIESENSTEIN HOAX AND OTHER MOUNTAIN DREAMS
KATIE IVES
MOUNTAINEERS BOOKS is dedicated to the exploration, preservation, and enjoyment of outdoor and wilderness areas.
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Copyright © 2021 by Katie Ives
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Copyeditor: Laura Lancaster
Design and layout: Jen Grable
Cover photograph: The “No Name Peak” map first appeared in Summit magazine, May 1960.
Frontispiece: Recreation of original “Riesenstein” route overlay by Jen Grable.
Underlying Austin Post photo © Geophysical Institute, University of Alaska Fairbanks.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is on file for this title at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021018191 (print) and https://lccn.loc.gov/2021018192 (ebook).
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Printed on 100% recycled and FSC-certified materials
ISBN (hardcover): 978-1-68051-541-1
ISBN (paperback): 978-1-59485-980-9
ISBN (ebook): 978-1-59485-981-6
FOR MY GRANDFATHER
ROBERT JAMES CALDWELL (1913–2015)
WHO HOPED THAT I WOULD ONE DAY WRITE A BOOK
CONTENTS
Author’s Note
A Quest for the Riesenstein
PART I: ARCHAEOLOGIES OF IMAGINARY PEAKS
CHAPTER 1On the Earth, but Not of the Earth
CHAPTER 2A Golden Age of Imaginary Voyages
CHAPTER 3Killing and Preserving Dragons
CHAPTER 4Mountains of Diamonds and New El Dorados
CHAPTER 5The Fall of Sanctuaries
CHAPTER 6Revolts Against a Disenchanted World
PART II: ANSWERS STILL HIDDEN IN THE ICE
CHAPTER 7Recollections of Long-Vanished Uplands
CHAPTER 8Go and Look Behind the Ranges
CHAPTER 9The Ticking of Doomsday Clocks
CHAPTER 10The Ascent of the Peak Formerly Known as North Star
CHAPTER 11Private Mountains Free of Public Logic
CHAPTER 12The Ascent of No Name Peak
CHAPTER 13The Door in the Cliff
CHAPTER 14The Land of Beyond
CHAPTER 15The Ascent of Fake Peak
CHAPTER 16The Search for a Transcendent Quest
CHAPTER 17Imagination Is No Match for Reality
CHAPTER 18The Secret Passage
CHAPTER 19The Exploration of No Place
CHAPTER 20What Lay Over the Horizon
PART III: THE INNERMOST RANGES
CHAPTER 21The Afterlife of Hoaxes
CHAPTER 22Not to Escape the World, but to Enter It More Deeply
CHAPTER 23Selective Availability
CHAPTER 24The Return to Marmot Pass
Acknowledgments
Notes
Selected Bibliography
AUTHOR’S NOTE
“TO A LARGE EXTENT,” AMERICAN geographer Roderick Peattie wrote in 1936, “a mountain is a mountain because of the part it plays in the popular imagination.” While the term imaginary is part of the title of my book, its common definition doesn’t capture the nuances of all the ways that mountains intersect with human minds. In addition to referring to nonexistent places, I’ve used the word more loosely, at times, to suggest layers of dreams that drape like second summits over actual formations of ice, stone, snow, and earth. In some cases, peaks considered to be fables by one group of people may be realities within other cultures, and I am not denying their existence.
Mountains reflect shifting cartographies of myth and meaning in regions and societies around the world. The more I researched, the more I realized how legends cling to the smallest knolls, and how invisible topographies of mirages, dreams, stories, and erasures underlie nearly every square of every map—their prominences arising even in areas where only lowlands are clearly visible. To tell a complete history of quests for imaginary, sacred, or mythic peaks—or of cartographic errors and exploration hoaxes—would be to retell the history of all geography and all humanity. Thus, to keep this book from swelling to dozens of volumes, while I’ve included some discussions of other traditions for comparison or contrast, I’ve focused on recounting a fraction of the stories that most likely influenced, consciously or unconsciously, the participants in the Riesenstein Hoax of 1962. In most instances, I selected examples of alpine legends because references to them appeared in my protagonists’ recollections or because these tales had a direct or an indirect relevance to places and ideas that played a significant role in the history of this hoax.
This book does not, therefore, claim to be a thorough examination of the countless myths surrounding all real or unreal mountains. For more comprehensive accounts of legendary summits worldwide, there are many great sources, some of which can be found in my bibliography. For a broader introduction to the history of speculative cartography, I suggest readers turn to Edward Brooke-Hitching’s The Phantom Atlas: The Greatest Myths, Lies and Blunders on Maps. For a detailed discussion of the evolution of hoaxes in the United States, I also recommend Kevin Young’s brilliant account Bunk: The Rise of Hoaxes, Humbug, Plagiarists, Phonies, Post-Facts, and Fake News. And Ed Douglas’s 2020 book, Himalaya: A Human History goes far more in depth into the origins and impacts of the story of Shangri-La than I have space to in this narrative.
Similarly, while I’ve included a few scenes from the past adventures of the protagonists as background for their involvement in the history—particularly Harvey Manning—I concentrated on experiences that related most clearly to the Riesenstein and other imaginary mountains. The full complexity of Manning’s career as a writer and environmentalist, and his impact on the Northwest conservation movement, would make a worthy subject for another book by another author. So, too, would the lives of other figures who have only cameo appearances here.
By 2011, when I began studying the Riesenstein Hoax, several of the main people involved in the incident had died. I pieced together their experiences as best I could—based on interviews with their colleagues, family, and friends, as well as on their articles, books, letters, and other writings. There may be crucial scraps of paper tucked away in boxes that I missed or manuscripts lying in attics, file cabinets, or storage closets not yet found. Answers to lingering mysteries may await a future researcher.
Other participants were still living at the time of my work, and they devoted hours to sharing their stories with me. Some of these people—including Fred Beckey, Jean Crenshaw, Dee Molenaar, Helen Kilness, Austin Post, and George Whitmore—passed away before I finished the book. I am grateful to them for their assistance, and in their absence, I’ve tried to preserve their perspectives according to my notes, interview transcripts, personal memories, and archival research. Any errors in fact or interpretation are, of course, my own.
This book became, in many ways, a quarantine project. Portions of it had previously appeared in related articles that I’d written for Alpinist since 2011. I completed much of the final research and writing during an extended leave of absence from my job in 2020, while sheltering in place. As a result, I was unable to travel to some of the areas I’d hoped to see firsthand, and I depended on the generosity of librarians and colleagues to scan lengthy documents from archives that I couldn’t visit in person. I also relied on climbers and their families who sent copies of copious letters, journals, and manuscripts and who agreed to long interviews by phone (see the acknowledgments at the end of the book). Prior to the global pandemic, in late summer 2019, I managed to retrace several of Harvey Manning’s wanderings in the Olympic Mountains and the Cascade Range and to read through many of his manuscripts preserved in the Special Collections of the University of Washington Libraries and in The Mountaineers Archive. I attempted to follow his cadence of thought along marked and unmarked paths, through the dim green light of Northwest forests, across wildflower meadows and rocky summits, and over hundreds of typewritten and handwritten pages. I hope that a few echoes of his footfalls may be found in the pages of this book.
The North American scenes take place on traditional lands of Indigenous people, including, but not limited to, Massachusett, Abenaki, Natick, Ts’msyen, Núu-agha-tʉvʉ-pʉ, Lillooet, Diné, Mandan, Ĩyãћé Nakoda, Blackfoot Confederacy, Tsuut’ina, Beaver, Cree, Ojibway, Secwépemc, Métis, Zuni, Nimiipuu, Stó:lō, Puyallup, Quinault, Skokomish, Duwamish, Suquamish, Nisqually, Snoqualmie, Chehalis, Cowlitz, Muckleshoot, S’Klallam, Snohomish, Stillaguamish, Upper Skagit, Sauk-Suiattle, Swinomish, Samish, Nooksack, Lummi, Nlaka’pamux, the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation, Syilx Okanagan, Dena’ina, Upper Kuskokwim, Koyukon, Tanacross, Lower Tanana, Upper Tanana, Deg Hit’an, Alutiiq, Gwich’in, Iñupiat, Ahtna, and Inuit groups. Their stewardship and stories of mountains long predate any ascents, real or imagined, by nineteenth-, twentieth-, and twenty-first–century climbers featured here.
A QUEST FOR THE RIESENSTEIN
IN JUNE 1962, READERS OF Summit magazine opened its pages to an intriguing photo of a seemingly unknown range. The mountains in the black-and-white image were unlike any that most American climbers had ever seen before. Sheer rock cliffs rose to intricate ridges and spires, stacked one above the other, thousands of feet high, like the ramparts of an extraterrestrial city.
White light poured through roiling clouds, flashing off patches of ice and snow and burnishing the rock to silver. Cracks splintered up flying buttresses of stone, hinting, to a climber’s eye, of pathways to crenellated skylines. Glimpses of hanging glaciers and dark shadows suggested a landscape that was cold, remote, and stormy—a stark contrast to the sun-drenched Yosemite Valley where Californian climbers had begun to confront steep, giant walls only a few years before. Yet this unfamiliar range, with its aura of old, forgotten dreams, seemed just at the edge of the possible.
Despite the surreal appearance of the mountains, the photo caption located them in an accessible, though isolated, place: “The unclimbed summit of ‘Riensenstein [sic],’ approximately 8,100 feet, near Prince Rupert in British Columbia. It can be reached in two days by bushwhacking up the Klawatti River. Who will be the first to climb it?”
The picture was accompanied by an unattributed article about three intrepid Austrians—Machler, Bisserlich, and Kronofer—who thrashed through ancient forests as they followed the Nass River to its confluence with the Klawatti and then pressed on, ever deeper, into an unmapped wild. Atop a high col, the three men gazed at a vast glacier that flowed toward the Skeena River. Overhead, the fortress walls of the unfamiliar peaks must have blocked out the sky.
The narrator summarized their subsequent adventures in a short note. But the photo had already stirred readers’ imaginations, and mountaineers were easily tempted to fill in gaps in the terse prose with their own daydreams. For their first climb (marked as route “4” on the photo), the Austrians scampered to the top of the nearest low peak, its small turrets half-hidden by the larger spires. From this summit, they would have stared, mesmerized and bewildered, at the views. Countless potential routes must have unfolded around them, a dense maze guarded by mysterious citadels of rock, ice, and snow.
Their next objective (route “3”) was more ambitious: an attempt on what appeared to be the apex of the range. They crept into the shade of an immense, dark wall below an ice-capped tower. A hanging glacier loomed high above. Avalanches burst from its edges and exploded down the cliff. Afraid to venture farther, the Austrians turned back.
In search of a safer option, the trio teetered up a broken ridgeline toward the top of another dome (route “1”). Twice, they found the terrain too difficult to ascend with just their hands and feet, so they tugged on gear they’d jammed into fissures in the rock. At last, they attained the threshold where the white of the summit snows blurred into the white of the clouded sky.
Back down on the glacier, the emboldened group plotted another attempt on the crest of the tallest peak (route “2”). As the Austrians traversed a swath of pleated stone, clouds enveloped them. They huddled on a rocky perch for what was probably a miserable night of wind and snow, before deciding to retreat.
The blizzard must have lasted a long while, since the story picked up a month later when the Austrians crossed the avalanche hazard zone again to try to climb the ice-capped tower (route “3”). More clouds blew in as they reached a glistening rock face. About 150 to 200 feet high, this cliff seemed to be the last serious obstacle between the three men and the apex of the range. Bisserlich attempted to clamber over it, only to fall and rip out two of the pitons he’d pounded into a crack. Caught by the rope, he suffered only minor injuries. Discouraged, the climbers headed down for the final time while the sky darkened with storm.
It was the end of the expedition. The Austrians had ascended two of the smaller peaks, but failed to summit the highest, most coveted one. Nonetheless, they believed that someone could get up that last wall by drilling bolts into the rock. Traced across the photo, a series of white dotted lines, with wide spaces between them, showed that the Austrians’ ascents and attempts had covered only a fragment of the possible pathways up this vertical labyrinth.
On another page, a sketched map included hatch marks that suggested the sharp summits, striped blobs that designated four unnamed glaciers, and arrows that indicated the Klawatti and Skeena Rivers. The words “Unexplored Area” were scrawled across the top left corner of the page. During a century when airplanes flew around the globe, these mysterious spires had somehow remained unnoticed—a blank on modern maps.
Savvy readers soon discerned that the strange name, “Riensenstein,” must be a misspelling of Riesenstein, the German word for “giant stone,” as it appeared, written out correctly, on the map. But where were these marvelous colossal rock walls?
Fred Beckey was among the many climbers who studied the Summit article carefully. An avid collector of first ascents, he seemed to have traveled—or so his fans supposed—to every group of peaks in North America. His name almost invariably turned up in stories of new climbs in the wildest places. Though he meticulously researched his own accounts of mountaineering history, Beckey himself was becoming half-myth in the minds of his fans: a larger-than-life figure said to roam North America on an endless road trip, speeding down highways and dirt roads in a pink Thunderbird and sending up clouds of dust. He allegedly carried a notorious “black book” with to-do lists of secret peaks. Several of his friends denied the book existed, but for those who believed, it was an encyclopedia of hidden, desirable places.
If there ever was a black book, however, the Riesenstein wasn’t in it. As Beckey examined the Summit photo, he started to suspect something fishy. He didn’t recall anything quite like it from his own trips to British Columbia. Such unusual peaks, he determined, were more likely to be found in less explored, icy regions of Alaska. For the moment, though, he put his curiosity aside. He was already busy plotting trips to legions of mountains.
Other readers of Summit, entranced by the Riesenstein, pored over Canadian maps in an effort to locate the range. Eventually, they all realized that no such peaks existed in British Columbia. Although the Nass and Skeena Rivers flowed through the province, “Klawatti” was the name of a glacier in northern Washington State—not a river. And “Riesenstein” was a cluster of boulders near the castle towers of Heidelberg, Germany. The entire article was a hoax!
In the 1966 issue of the American Alpine Journal, New York climbers Al DeMaria and Pete Geiser recalled: “Obviously, Summit had fallen victim to someone’s sense of humor. Yet there were the pictures; palpable mountains—they must have some existence. But where? Chamonix? Africa? Asia? The moon? . . . The ‘Riesenstein’ appeared doomed to join the ranks of other mythical and fabulous regions like Shangri-La and the Seven Cities of Cíbola.”
