1956 Riverside Press. Book is in excellent condition with slight wear. DJ is in very good shape with a few tears closed with archival acid free tissue and some chipping along edges. Protected in removable mylar cover. No markings. Ships in a box.
The Conquest of Mount McKinley
BELMORE BROWNE
This volume, which is being reissued for the first time since its publication in 1913, is not only a classic in the annals of mountaineering but a vivid document of the development of this continent. In 1912, when Belmore Browne and two others finally reached the uppermost slope of Mount McKinley, Alaska was a wilderness peopled only by prospectors and hunters. The biggest town on the Cook Inlet boasted a few warehouses flanked by grass- thatched Russian (Aleut) cabins along the beach. Anchorage did not exist.
These were the days before modern equipment, scientific foods, and airlifts made of mountaineering a profession rather than an adventure. And it was as adventurers that Browne, Frederick Cook, and their companions set out by pack horse in 1906 to cross the marshy lowlands and glacial streams that led to the Alaskan Range. The mosquitoes and lack of feed killed off the horses, while savage ridges and deep valleys kept the mountaineers far from their goal. It was as a disappointed but determined man that Browne returned to New York in the fall to find Cook claiming that he and his party had separately reached the summit of North America's highest mountain.
The 1910 expedition was partly motivated by the desire to disprove Cook's claim, and in the account one reads the bitterness of the controversy and the depth of feeling aroused in everyone concerned with American explorations. Though Browne and Professor Parker again failed to conquer McKinley, they reached the point at which Cook had turned back, and were able to prove by photographs that it was 20 miles away from the real "top of the continent."
The reconnaissance work of 1910 proved that McKinley would have to be approached from the north, and it was with renewed hopes that Browne and Professor Parker set out in the winter of 1912. The second half of the book deals with this extraordinarily long and difficult adventure, which started inauspiciously in Seward with the discovery that a gold rush was on and prospectors had taken most of the sled dogs Browne had planned to use in crossing the Kenai Peninsula and Alaskan Range.
The account of mushing through the snow-silent wilderness behind a team of Huskies, of urging the dogs over high mountain passes, of transporting such equipment as a stove, canvas tents, and heavy fur sleeping bags is one that will make many modern Americans think again about their hardy ancestors. And the descriptions of hunting caribou, mountain sheep, arctic hares, and ptarmigan on the grassy slopes above base camp will recall old dreams of the land of plenty.
This is a book about independence, fortitude, and initiative, and it is a book about the wilderness that has been loved by all Americans even as they conquered it. It is difficult to believe that this was written only 40 years ago, for there is hardly a corner of the continent in which such experiences can be had today, but Belmore Browne tells his story with such feeling, with such modesty and humor that it comes alive again in reading.
Jacket photograph courtesy of Bradford Washburn