LOCALadk Magazine

22 Winter 2020 LOCALadk Magazine LOCALadk over deep snow and ice, like beasts of burden, to caches up the mountainside, endure blinding storms and fierce winds, face falls threatening tragedies and endure both blazing sun- shine and temperatures that dropped once to 50 degrees be- low zero. Some would quit early. Others wouldn't make it all the way. Some did, and didn't come down intact. "At some point when you're growing up, you want to show people what you're made of, test yourself. What can you do? " Failing said. "I looked for the most difficult thing I could think of without going to war. And this was it." The attempt on McKinley (called Denali then by natives, and decades later by nearly ever yone else, meaning high one) would be the hardest thing. Ray Genet founded what some credit as McKinley's first commercial guide ser vice. The Swiss native had been in the storied group who made the first winter ascent of the sum- mit in 1967 in an outing that killed one mountaineer, who fell unroped into a crevasse, and nearly finished all the others in a blinding storm near the top. He would lead the upcoming expedition of clients and assistant guides scheduled to start in May 1975. The clients in each of three groups he organized would see him only occasionally. According to the Western Journal of Medicine, from 1903 through 1976, nearly 2,600 climbers would attempt McKinley or nearby Mount Foraker, its 17,400 -foot sister peak in Denali National Park, numbers that began swelling with commercial expeditions in the '70s. Altogether over that period 31 climb- ers died, mostly from falls but also from exposure, cerebral and high-altitude edema, mountain sickness and avalanche. Over the next three decades, another 65 Denali climbers would die. A later study noted that most were killed while descending. Geoff Bleakley, who joined that Alaska expedition, was raised on an Arizona ranch and by his account had done a lot of climbing previously. He met Failing and a few others who arrived early in Talkeetna before they were flown out to the glacier. He and his wife had left St. Louis in spring the year before, took a train to Missoula, Montana, then hitchhiked to Fairbanks. He worked the winter for a freight company there and got to know other climbers, who introduced him to Gen- et. He arranged to go on the McKinley trip as a client. "Geoff looked like a hippie," Failing recalled. "I fit right in. The guys I didn't fit in with looked like militar y types. And the jock types. Just not my direction, anyway." He and Bleakley shared a tent for two weeks on the ap- proach and climb up the mountain — along with a male guide and a female climber who got romantically involved. "I think sixteen people started. A couple or three dropped out at the first camp. Three or four got as far as Denali Pass and that was it for them. They shot their load," Bleakley said. "The rest of us went to the summit on a couple of different ropes . . . . The rope Wayne was on was traveling faster than the rope I was on." Failing, three other climbers and two guides made their summit bid on two ropes tied together. It was a second at- tempt. The first was thwarted by a brewing storm the day before. A photograph showed him and guide Jim Hale sitting atop the mountain smiling, Failing's beard is just a faint wisp. From the peak, he saw the Earth as a globe, something round, a sphere falling off in ever y direction. "That's one of the most incredible things," he recalled. " When I got to the summit, that's when I decided I was going Wayne Failing

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