86 Michael Wejchert 87 Even when the skies were clear, he found little relief. The endless his remote expeditions as mortal salvos against an implacable, destruc- summer light burned him. At night, as the sun made its maddening tive force. Over time, his alpine philosophy became increasingly intense, roundabout, he’d crawl into his sleeping bag, hungry and exhausted. reaching a level of fanaticism that still confounds many other climbers. He counted calories incessantly, aware of Hudson’s regimented airdrop Looking back at Hunter, Johnny told Randall that he was disappointed schedule. At one point, he wailed over the radio: Could Hudson drop by survival: “Living through it would mean that nature wasn’t as raw as some ointment off? Waterman explained that he’d contracted crabs from everybody wanted to believe it was, that man was far superior to the Arc- a prostitute before flying in, and the itching was driving him crazy. On tic. Living through it would mean that Mt. Hunter wasn’t the mountain another occasion, he performed a perfect handspring on a tiny snow I thought it was. It was a lot less.” ledge as the horrified Hudson buzzed by. Waterman named some of the Two years after Waterman’s epic, Randall, Peter Metcalf and Pete gendarmes and features of the Southeast Spur as signs, perhaps, of his Athans launched onto the Southeast Spur carrying just six days of food. growing paranoia: First Judge, Second Judge, Third Judge. There, they found a horrifying reality of wild storms, fragile cornices With its matter-of-fact tone, Waterman’s 1979 American Alpine and overhanging rock. Their second ascent turned into a thirteen-day Journal article downplays the dangers: “I was attempting to cross a place battle, leaving them frostbitten, emaciated and exhausted. “Mt. Hunter,” near the knife-edge when a twelve-foot section of cornice broke under- Metcalf wrote in an essay for an anthology, Contact, “was one of those neath me, giving me a 40-foot leader fall. I was surprised to be held by experiences that I would trade nothing in my life not to have had, and my belay system.” Six days later, he tumbled and recovered again. On I would trade nothing in my life to repeat.” They struggled to compre- the summit plateau, after surviving on reduced rations for weeks, Water- hend how their predecessor had ascended each aspect multiple times. man received the last of Hudson’s airdrops. Above the gothic peaks and “There is no question that John was going crazy, that he had intended fluted ridgelines of the Alaska Range, the apex of Hunter rose, suddenly to die on Hunter, and wanted to,” Metcalf emailed me last year. “[The attainable. Waterman hesitated. He hadn’t considered success. Southeast Spur] will never be repeated [as a solo], and for good rea- “I thought that I would never make it to the other side of the climb, son…. [Waterman’s climb] required nearly a half year of being out there, that I would die, probably, in some really meaningless place,” he later in the unknown, totally committed, in a manner that most people will told Glenn Randall. never understand or appreciate.” From the summit, In the spring of 1981, Waterman announced his intent to make a “Living through it would Waterman stared out first ascent of a line on the east side of Denali. Wearing little more than at what seemed like a snowmobile suit, he skied alone into the vast, crevassed icefields of the mean that nature wasn’t a diminished land- central Alaska Range. He was never heard from again. His tale often has scape. He turned and two effects on people. One response is shock—and a swift denounce- as raw as everyone wanted began his laborious ment of him as crazy. Another is a romanticization of his death as if it descent over the other were the end to a Shakespearian tragedy: a mad hero traipsing out of to believe it was....” side of the mountain, the world with the same mystery that had surrounded his climbs. Either —Johnny Waterman down the West Ridge, way, we’ve held on to the story: numerous books and articles immor- in frigid silence. talize the Waterman family. Today, as climbing news edges ever closer toward the sanitized and the mainstream, accounts of Johnny’s short life Waterman’s first ascent of the Southeast Spur—the first traverse might seem to recall a vanishing era when mountain literature hummed of Mt. Hunter—was the most macabre, theatrical bit of climbing any- with mythical, countercultural misfits. Yet we still face the questions one would ever conjure, the longest anyone had endured isolation on that he sought to answer in alpinism. Many of us still try to walk that such a cold, difficult mountain. To linger on this route might seem narrow line between fear and grace, darkness and light, as stoutly as an absurdity, a perversion. But Johnny Waterman had steeled himself we’re able. And we can’t help wondering what happens when someone since adolescence, and this was his third trip to Hunter. His father, Guy lets himself plummet headlong over the side. Waterman, had become, through similar self-subjugation, a renowned outdoorsman. Guy had even attempted the north face of Hunter with Thirty-three years later, on the mountain Waterman chose as his his wife, Laura, in 1971. As Chip Brown, Guy’s biographer explains, tomb, Dana Drummond, Freddie Wilkinson and I are escaping the both father and son shared a consuming passion for the wild, though thick grey snow of Alaskan foul weather. Freddie had originally proposed their visions of it diverged. Guy often seemed to view nature as an a sixty-mile traverse along the skyline ridges of Foraker and Denali, a Eden, as if his hiking and climbing were an extension of his gardening, plan that seems Waterman-like in its scope and oddity. Instead, we’ve conservation work and homesteading—part of his striving for a well- resorted to a bailout ski tour toward the Wonder Lake Campground. balanced life. He spent much of his time in the White Mountains of Two days earlier, we left Kahiltna Base Camp as flurries crossed Denali New Hampshire, where the alpine tundra and granite cliffs resemble the and clouds rolled against the sun. Now we’re losing altitude, skiing and moors and crags of Scotland and the Lake District. Echoing the British hiking, traversing snowy ridges and wide tundra, padding onto desolate Romantics, he wrote of hills as sanctuaries to exalt the human spirit, plateaus. The sky must be the same one Waterman saw: soft, slow, end- of winter storms as a means to purify one’s mind. Johnny interpreted less. The world is hideously quiet. I can’t remember what the time is, and [Previous Spread] Johnny Waterman on his first ascent of the Southeast Spur of Mt. Hunter Powter described Waterman’s deliberately slow climb: “It was the only way, he be- (Begguya, 14,573'), Alaska. For 145 days, alone, he ferried himself and his supplies across lieved, to measure himself and to get the true measure of the mountain.” l [Facing Page] a phantasmagoria of ice, storm and snow. In Strange and Dangerous Dreams, Geoff Waterman with Mad Magazine, likely in the early 1970s. John Waterman collection (both) 88 crux roof until another teenage prodigy, Howie Davis, whispered among hushed onlookers: “Go, John.” With his big glasses and miniature stature, Waterman might seem an odd fit in today’s pantheon of savvy, airbrushed athletes, but he had an intense, unrelenting will. At age sixteen, he climbed the West Buttress of Denali. At seventeen, he made his first attempt on Hunter. By twenty, he’d climbed new ridgelines on both Huntington and Hunter. Before he turned twenty-one, he’d also made difficult ascents in the Selkirks and Canadian Rockies. Dean Rau, one of his partners, wrote in the 1974 AAJ, “Johnny Waterman is an outstanding climber on all media but on the mixed ground of Alaska’s difficult mountains, his climbing becomes superb. He has enormous drive and ambition as well.” The struggle for perfection was a Waterman trait. Their brilliance contrasted starkly with the pattern of similar deaths that haunted the family. It began in 1973 when Johnny’s older brother, Bill, disappeared in the wilds of Alaska. And it ended in 2000, when his father walked alone up Mt. Lafayette in New Hampshire and let the winter’s cold claim him. Of Guy’s three sons, only the youngest, Jim, is still alive. The fates of the others seem entirely removed from their early days of tramp- ing together through the thick brush of the Presidential Range with their beloved dog, Ralph, or rising to catch the first light on the pale quartzite cliffs of Near Trapps. In November 2014, Laura Waterman, John’s stepmother, greets me with a hug and a smile. She is small but radiant. Wearing an old wool sweater, she serves me homemade soup and carrots from her garden. She it hardly matters. Sometimes, pink clouds reveal a bit of sun, but for the lives in East Corinth, Vermont, one of those white-steepled villages cast most part, the flat light rots the glaciers and the grey rock of the moraine. about the woods of Northern New England. It’s a two-hour drive from I zigzag through nightmarish, isothermic snow. Each time I hear the my home in North Conway across meandering roadways. On this late- whump beneath my skis, I’m afraid of releasing a slide on my compan- autumn day, the wind whisked dead leaves around my car.