LOCALadk Magazine

Winter 2020 LOCALadk Magazine 21 LOCALadk The application to join Ray Genet's expedition and attempt the climb up Denali to 20,308 feet above sea level called for rigorous physical fitness and gear for subarctic conditions. Wayne Failing knew from reading that they would go into the oxygen-deprivation zone that afflicts the wear y with head- aches, nausea and disorientation, and in worst cases death, up terrain where a wrong step could mean hurtling off an icy ridge or into a glacier's deep crevasse. It was 1974, early in the era of commercial expeditions, one planned to last three weeks, and they would climb without any bottled oxygen. A plumber's son from Utica, a city in the central lowlands of upstate New York, Failing had no real mountaineering ex- perience when he grabbed a brochure about it in a sporting goods store. He was 21 years old, weighed about 135 pounds, maintained a pack-a-day cigarette habit, had never set foot on a glacier, spent any time at high altitude —nothing be- yond the hike up mile-high Mount Marcy in New York's Ad- irondacks, one-fourth the height of McKinley. He'd attended community college and was working for his father. But he'd read the mountaineering classic "Freedom of the Hills" and the later book about the first harrowing winter ascent of North America's tallest mountain. Organizers didn't actually require all climbers to have high-altitude experience. But the National Park Ser vice, which reviewed applications, specified that no more than 25 percent of any party on that West Buttress route, despite being considered less technical than other routes, could be relatively inexperienced in mountaineering. "I lied my way onto the trip," Failing said, acknowledging it was the books that inspired him to tr y. On his application he claimed having climbed 14,410 -foot Mount Rainier in Wash- ington and a couple others. He was looking for somewhere to prove himself. He had the $100 deposit and would have the $800 bal- ance that included small-plane flights — from the frontier village of Talkeetna and back to the climb's start more than 7,000 feet up on the Kahiltna Glacier in the Alaska Range. He had $500 for the roundtrip airline flight from New York to Anchorage, his first time on a plane. He bought gear from Eastern Mountain Sports in New Hampshire, took lessons on using it, and practiced from a tree using jumars, the clamps for ascending fixed ropes, and on ice how to stop himself from sliding down a frigid cliff using the sharp point of his new wood-handle mountaineering axe. His belated training included a solo winter trip up 6,288-foot Mount Washington in New Hampshire, the highest peak of the Northeastern U.S. He got caught in a storm that threatened to blow him off. The axe proved useful there. "I now find myself flying over the northern section of Brit- ish Columbia," Failing wrote the following year, in the open- ing of his expedition journal. It was late spring down below. "The whole series of events leading up to my present situa- tion seems ver y unreal and distant right now." They would haul heavy backpacks of gear and supplies

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