LOCALadk Magazine

LOCALadk 45 While at MIT, he accompanied the Harvard Mountaineering Club on expeditions to Alas- ka and the Canadian Rockies. In the summer of 1952, he and three other club members drove an old hearse to McKinley Park. They had a deal that if Bernays could keep the ve- hicle running, he could keep it. Bernays won the car and took part in the first ascents of 11,900 -foot Mount Brooks (located east of Denali), 12,123-foot Mount Mather, and some smaller peaks. The hearse came in handy the next year, too, when Bernays and two Harvard students drove north from Jasper, Alberta, with aspirations to climb 12,972-foot Mount Robson, the highest peak in the Canadian Rockies. They succeeded in following, more or less, the original route pioneered by the celebrated alpinist Conrad Kain in 1913. The American Alpine Journal published an ac- count of their expedition written by Dmitri Nabokov, the son of the Russian-American novelist, whose many books include Loli- ta and Pale Fire. Not surprisingly, Dmitri's prose delights as well as describes. After summiting late in the after- noon, the party had a bite to eat and took photos before beginning the arduous and perilous descent. Fortunately, they had heeded Bernays's suggestion to cache sleep- ing bags on the ridge, for they were still on the mountain as "the last rose tints of sun- light" reflected off a nearby peak. Nabokov recalls this moment: "The satisfaction of our suc cess and the magnificent, almost palpable, beauty of this twilight spectacle made us forget for a moment the two vital questions before us. The first, i.e., where to spend the night, was quickly solved for us, as it immediately became dark and cold. Finding a reasonably convenient crevasse, we settled down to a cool but not uncom- fortable night." They reached camp at noon the next day, "exceedingly hungry and tired, but nevertheless the happiest of men." Dmitri Nabokov went on to become an opera singer, amateur race-car driver, and transla- tor of his father's works. He wrote under a pen name he never revealed. He also continued to climb moun- tains. The third member of the Robson party was Craig Merrihue, a physicist who grew up in Schenectady. In 1965, Merrihue and an ice-climbing partner were killed in a long fall in New Hampshire's Pinnacle Gully. After graduating from MIT in 1955, Bernays took part in the first ascent of the Central Tower of the Howser Massif in the Bugaboos of British Columbia. One of his partners was Jim McCarthy, a rock-climbing legend from the Gunks in downstate New York. The two had climbed in the Gunks the previous year, putting up a route called Co-op, one of dozens of McCarthy creations on his beloved cliffs. In an article in the American Alpine Journal, Bernays cred- its McCarthy with leading the crux pitch on Central Tower, a difficult and rotten chimney near the summit. "One hour and nine pitons later, all of which adhered more by faith than by friction, his triumphant whoop of relief announced that he had surmounted the step," Bernays wrote. Bernays made other climbs in Canada, but in later years, he set his sights on South America. In the 1960s, he went on three expeditions to the Cordille-

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