Clinging to a cliff in the middle of a snowstorm is an educational experience: It's amazing how attentive you can be when a false step might be fatal. I discovered this 13,160 feet up on Wyoming's Grand Teton, where my climbing guide, Rod Newcomb, and I were perched on a granite ledge in a tight notch called the Upper Saddle. Rod was rapidly expanding my vocabulary of extreme weather terms—"graupel," for the sharp, tiny pellets of snow whipping into our eyes; "rime ice," for the treacherous invisible layer forming on the rocks beneath our feet; "ground shocks," for the near-lethal jolts of electricity that can surge through the mountain after lightning strikes. Since this was my first ever technical climb, I nodded solemnly like an acolyte before a Buddhist monk. I figured this was important stuff—particularly the part about lightning charging through the boulder I was leaning against.
"You might want to move away from that," Rod suggested. "I've had more nasty shocks up here than I care to remember."
With over 400 Grand Teton ascents under his harness, Rod, a 73-year-old climbing legend with Exum Mountain Guides, spoke with the voice of experience. I shuffled to the edge of the precipice, thankful that a billowing fog concealed the 2,000-foot drop just inches from my toes. The good news, Rod went on, was that there was not a breath of wind. The temperature might be well below freezing, but on the Grand it usually blew a gale at this altitude.
"If there was any breeze right now," he said, "we'd be in pretty bad shape."
I kept my opinion about our shape to myself and fixed my eyes on the swirling clouds below. As if on cue, they parted and the Grand's Western Spur momentarily emerged from the fog, stretching out like the spine of some prehistoric creature. Wiping the graupel from my eyes, I reminded myself that I was participating in a great tradition: America's national parks were created so that people like me could get into situations like this.
It's easy to think of our national parks as tame and sanitized places, full of cheery rangers, interpretive trails, and fifties-style cafeterias selling dubious burgers. But step a few yards from the neatly marked paths and you'll quickly realize how wild they are. Nowhere is this dichotomy more extreme than in Wyoming's Grand Teton National Park. Some 2.5 million people drive through each year, and most do little more than pull over to take an Ansel Adams-esque snapshot of the Tetons, which rise above the Snake River like a frozen, jagged tidal wave. Only a tiny fraction of visitors leave their cars behind and set off on foot, weaving daylong or weeklong hikes on the park's miles of backcountry trails. For this reason the landscape—a collage of glacial lakes and raw alpine wilderness—has hardly changed since the first intrepid fur trappers, the French voyageurs, stumbled upon the Snake River Valley in the late 18th century.
The real depth of this historical continuity struck me by chance, when I came across a dog-eared copy of a 19th-century magazine, Scribner's Monthly, in a New York bookstore. It was a firsthand account from the summer of 1872, when a group of American climbing novices took on the then unclimbed Grand Teton and—apparently—conquered it in a harrowing one-day ascent. Scribner's was the Adventure of the Gilded Age, and the gripping tale included vivid engravings of climbers dangling from precipices. The team was made up of the first geological surveyors ever to pass through Jackson Hole, and the two who claimed to have reached the summit sounded like extras from a Deadwood episode: The article's author was 40-year-old Nathaniel P. Langford, who had campaigned against outlaws in Montana and was the first (unpaid) superintendent of the new Yellowstone National Park; Captain James Stevenson, 31, was a decorated Civil War hero who had lived for years with the Blackfoot and Dakota Indians.
Reading about their ascent opened a window into a unique moment in park history. At precisely the same time—the summer of 1872—John Wesley Powell was descending the boat-swallowing rapids of the Grand Canyon's Colorado River, while over in Yosemite the wild-haired nature lover John Muir was scrambling up sheer cliffs with nothing but a few bits of stale bread in his pockets. It was part of an intense burst of interest in the West after the Civil War, and I began to think of those pioneers as the first American "adventure travelers." These characters had no specialized knowledge or training; they were simply inspired outdoorsmen who decided to plunge headfirst into the unknown, improvising and honing their skills along the way. Sure, things went awry—Powell's boats overturned; Muir was nearly brained in a number of falls; and one of the climbers on the Grand, Sidford Hamp, slid down an ice chute and nearly died—but they all made it through in the end. The backdrops for many of their journeys would eventually be designated national parks, and every summer like-minded adventurers head to them, inspired by the same freewheeling spirit as their historic counterparts.
Chief among these attractions is summiting the 13,770-foot Grand Teton, which has become a grail for first-time climbers: A couple of Jackson guide services give novices a two-day crash course in technical rock climbing, then escort them on a punishing overnight assault. About a thousand neophytes sign up annually—and despite much gnashing of teeth, blistering of feet, and tearing of palms, most of them make it. "Any fit person can manage it today," says Al Read, former president of Exum Mountain Guides."You just have to be in good aerobic shape."
I fall vaguely into that category, and soon enough I was in Jackson Hole prepping for the ascent. After two days of training (Multi-Pitch Mountaineering I and II), I had learned a lot about what it takes to make a successful summit bid and even more about the 1872 climb. For 26 years Langford and Stevenson's claim to have conquered the Grand held strong, until an amateur Wyoming climber named Billy Owen denounced them as shameless liars. In 1898 Owen made it to the top with three friends—and had a newfangled Kodak camera with him to prove it. This group found no sign of the 1872 climbers, and many features of Langford's Scribner's article seemed confused at best. Owen called it fraud, provoking a series of vicious exchanges in the top outdoor magazines of the day. He kept pressing his case until 1927, when the Wyoming state legislature passed a unique resolution declaring that Owen had indeed been the first to the top.
You'd think that would have ended the controversy, but mountaineers aren't keen on having their disputes settled for them by politicians, least of all out West. Today beer-fueled debates still tear through the bars of Jackson. In 1977 a bronze plaque that was placed on the Grand's summit to commemorate Billy Owen's ascent was stolen, evidently by a Langford fan, and in a 1992 book, The Grand Controversy, Owen's claim was condemned as "one of the most . . . masterful scams in mountaineering history" by local historian Lorraine Bonney. As for me, I couldn't help thinking that Langford and Stevenson had somehow been cheated—there is a definite romantic appeal to thinking that the plucky pair had made it to the top—but whenever I tried to follow the arguments over their account, I got lost in a morass of route details. Clearly I could never form an opinion on the story until I went up there myself.
On the approach to the Grand, it didn't take long to feel like I was plunging back into frontier-era wilds—about five minutes, in fact, as I hit the steep Garnet Canyon Trail from Lupine Meadows, about 7.5 miles from the peak, and the ponderosa pine forest closed around me. Four hours later, I was rock-hopping above tree line, following Rod past cliffs and glaciers tinged with pink algae. (The French trappers' name for the mountains, Les Tétons, or "breasts," was a bit fanciful, Langford wrote in his Scribner's article; up close, they looked more like "shark's teeth.") By late afternoon, when we reached the Lower Saddle, a notch at 11,600-feet where Exum erects its summer base camp, I had to admire the gall of the 1872 group all over again. On that July 29th, the group had set off at 4:30 a.m. and trudged up here from the Teton's utterly isolated Idaho side in hobnailed boots, with a few bacon sandwiches in their rucksacks; their only equipment was their metal-tipped walking sticks and a single length of rope. Ten of the initial 14 fell by the wayside, with only four continuing beyond the Lower Saddle.
In Jackson, admirers of Langford believe that features from his Scribner's story can be identified on today's most popular route, which to the chagrin of his fans is called the Owen-Spalding. The next morning, Rod and I would follow in their footsteps as closely as we could.
"The O-S is quite straightforward," Rod remarked, peering at the horizon. "So long as you don't get weather." Luckily, it was a perfect summer's evening: We watched the stars appear on a purple sky.
Around midnight, I was awakened by thunder. Soon lightning was flashing so frequently it lit my tent like a strobe. When I shined my headlamp outside the tent flap, the reflection momentarily blinded me. Snow. Three inches of it. On August 25.
Well, I thought, I'd wanted a taste of real wilderness; now the Grand was putting on a show. By 3:30 a.m., the mood among my fellow climbers was somber as we wolfed down organic muesli. The snow had stopped, so the cautious consensus of the guides was that we should still attempt the summit and be back before afternoon. Rod and I were the last to leave camp, at 5 a.m. In the darkness I watched the climbers' headlamps zigzag up the mountain like some mysterious pagan procession.
Thanks to the ice, progress was slow for everyone; I felt a heightened sense of awe that Langford and his friends had made it up here at all. In the milky light of 8 a.m., we had reached the Upper Saddle, the start of the technical climb. Things weren't looking promising: There was a bottleneck of climbers, and the bad weather was returning. This had always been the make-or-break point of the route. Most historians agree that the 1872 climbers had reached it; the controversy hinges on the final, tricky ascent, which only two of the four, Langford and Stevenson, attempted.
As for Rod and me, the Upper Saddle was the ideal place to hunker down under our flapping Gore-Tex hoods and discuss the finer points of graupel, rime ice, and ground shocks. Then, around 10 a.m., the weather mysteriously eased."Feel like giving the summit a shot?" Rod asked laconically. I could have quoted Langford: "We had periled life and limb to little purpose, if the small matter of five hundred feet was to prevent the accomplishment of our task."
A few minutes later, I was roped up to Rod and tackling a section fondly named the Crawl. It's a narrow precipice above a murderous drop (the sort of thing climbers like to call "good exposure"), and you cross it, as the name suggests, on hands and knees. There followed one acrobatic rock climbing maneuver after another: a stomach-churning squirm around a bald cliff-face called the Belly-Roll, then a shimmy up a pair of grooves in the mountainside called chimneys. Sucking down lungfuls of thin, frozen air, gazing down through a momentary gap in the clouds to the plains 7,000 feet below, I tried to make mental notes on the obstacles to help me decipher the Scribner's story later. After an hour the climb became easier, and we were scrambling up broken rocks and slabs of wet granite. Although my limbs were aching and there were still some tricky moves ahead, victory suddenly seemed possible.
At high noon, hyperventilating only mildly, I lurched onto the summit itself. The view is normally celestial—Langford raved that the surrounding peaks were "like an ocean frozen when the storm is at its height"—but ice was falling again, and the blurred snapshots I took could have been staged in a sauna. No matter. There was a rush of triumph as I bounded across the boulders of the peak. Scouring the rugged spot, I tried to picture the 1872 climbers up here. The trouble was, they hadn't left a cairn or marker—it was not de rigueur back then—and Langford's description of the summit in Scribner's is vague; he called it a "bald, denuded head." But they had taken a reading with an aneroid barometer, which accurately measured the Grand's height to within 63 feet.
"Well, if Langford and Stevenson did get up here," Rod said, in his understated way, "they also had to get back down again, which is at least as difficult."
I soon took his point. Today guides bypass the most dangerous and time-consuming part of the descent with a white-knuckle hundred-foot rappel, almost all of it dangling in open space. With the equipment they had, the 1872 climbers would have had no such luxury. Still, they apparently staggered exhausted back into their camp to great hurrahs claiming victory at around 10:30 p.m. (This detail of timing is what many anti-Langfordites in Jackson consider suspicious, since the route down from the peak would have been agonizingly slow—especially in the dark). A few days later, they were soaking in the natural hot pools of Yellowstone National Park.
As for Rod and me, we made it back to the trailhead at 9 p.m., then silently drove in darkness to Exum HQ. By the time we parted ways, we'd been going 14 hours nonstop. I was shattered. Rod, the septuagenarian, looked like he could do it again.
The next morning, in the spirit of Langford and Stevenson's postclimb soak, I hobbled into my hotel's Jacuzzi for some R & R. As I thought back on the climb, my mind did not return to the summit but to something called the Enclosure. An ancient ring of carefully arranged granite stones at 13,600 feet on the Grand's Western Spur, the Enclosure was presumably a site for Shoshone vision quests, though no one knows for certain. Rod and I had detoured to see it, following the details Langford laid out in his Scribner's article. As I stood there gawking at this mountaintop Stonehenge, it occurred to me: If the Shoshone could climb all the way up here and move massive rocks, and if novices like Langford, Stevenson, and me could end up here on force of will alone, why couldn't the 1872 pair have summited? Inspiration has pushed many to wilder heights.
Admittedly, this hopeful view is not held by the Owenite climbing majority, but two months later, I was chatting with the official historian from Yellowstone National Park, Lee Whittlesey. He mentioned that he was in negotiations to purchase Langford's original 1872 diary from the family, an as yet unpublished record of the summit bid, believed to be brimming with new details. Lee had been able to read parts of it, and he assured me that this "unfiltered account of the climb" would prove beyond doubt that the pair really had conquered the Grand. So the battle rages on.