[Stevens, Leonard A., “The
Boys on the Cliff,” Reader’s Digest, August 1961 (79:112-17)]
Every summer, increasing millions take to the outdoors—many of them unprepared to cope with nature’s forces. To all, this story of two amateur mountain climbers stands as a warning.
By Leonard A. Stevens
LATE
ON the fourth Sunday of August 1959, Mr. and Mrs. John Stowe, tourists
from Milwaukee, drove hurriedly up to the office of New Hampshire’s Lafayette
Campground. Through their son’s powerful
telescope the Stowes had seen two young men signaling for help from high up on
the Cannon Mountain cliff.
The distant
figures, only specks against the mile-wide mountain wall, were seated on a
narrow rock shelf about 500 feet up the cliff, waving a small white flag.
The campground manager telephoned the base station of the passenger cable car, the Aerial Tramway, which ascends Cannon Mountain’s less precarious slopes a mile north of the cliff. The Tramway’s head guide, Austin Macaulay, immediately drove to a point where he could scan the precipice.
The cliff, part of which forms a natural stone face called the Old Man of the Mountain, is a treacherous place for the inexperienced. It rises more than a quarter of a mile above the floor of Franconia Notch, a spectacular V-shaped valley. Its sheer, soaring heights make the cliff one of the nation’s most inviting rock climbs. But the mountain’s stone is rotten and loose. Boulders frequently drop off the cliff; they have formed a steep, perilous field of rock, known as a talus slope, which stretches down into the forest above the Notch’s highway. The Appalachian Mountain Club considers the Cannon cliff much too dangerous for amateur climbers.
Macaulay spent nearly ten minutes scanning the vast perpendicular acreage, but saw no one. That did not surprise him. Anyone capable of climbing this precipice would presumably have notified some local official—a basic safety rule of mountaineering. Macaulay returned to the Tramway. There, by an ironic twist of fate, Newton Avery, the assistant manager, had just learned that a family had walked down from the cable-car summit station to the cliff’s rim and waved something white at sight-seers below. Deciding that it was this family the Stowes had seen, the Tramway officials went home.
The Stowes, meanwhile, had returned to the Notch road and focused their telescope upon the two figures on the cliff. Shouting and waving, the family indicated that help was on the way. Faint answering yells showed that they were understood.
“The boys were so happy to know that they had been discovered,” said Mrs. Stowe. “They ate a candy bar and talked and laughed.”
But the sun set, chilling shadows darkened the mountainside and no help arrived. Distant shouts from the cliff were interpreted as: “Hurry! We’re getting cold.” The large lens showed that the two youths wore only T-shirts and light khaki pants. John Stowe went back to the campground to check on the delay.
Avery had barely arrived home when, at 6:45 p.m., a telephone call came that two young men were again being reported on the cliff. It was no false alarm! Avery raced back in his car to alert a rescue party. Before long, police and other officials began arriving on the valley road. Through a loudspeaker the two on the darkening mountain were assured that help was on the way.
Who were these boys? There was one clue: a Connecticut-licensed 1957 Chevrolet parked below the Old Man of the Mountain. State police, checking the registration number, found that the car belonged to Alfred Whipple of Ledyard, Conn. When police phoned him he said that his son, Alfred, Jr., 20, and a neighbor, Sidney Crouch, Jr., 21, had driven to New Hampshire to go mountain climbing. In a few minutes the two fathers were speeding north in Crouch’s car.
Back in the Notch, darkness had come now, and a spotlight’s long bright shaft pinpointed the trapped climbers. It was clear they could be reached only by expert rock climbers, but in the notch that evening none were available. Nevertheless, about 8:30, four men carrying blankets, rations and a walkie-talkie radio headed up over the loose precarious fallen rock on the talus slope. Perhaps clothing and supplies could be hoisted by the boys with their own ropes. Reaching the base of the cliff, the men found that a great overhanging ledge some 300 feet above prevented them from seeing or hearing the boys. There was no way to get supplies to them. The bad news was radioed back to the road.
It was well after midnight before John C. Perry of Sherborn, Mass., chairman of the Appalachian Mountain Club’s rock-climbing committee, was reached by phone. Hurriedly he started rounding up a group of the country’s top experts, and headed toward Cannon. Meanwhile, those assembled in the Notch were increasingly fearful. Moisture-laden clouds were gathering. The temperature was creeping down through the 40’s.
Somewhat before dawn, the fathers arrived in the Notch. Their sons, it was learned, were both college students. A couple of weeks before, the two had hiked up New Hampshire’s Mt. Washington, apparently their only mountain experience. But young Whipple, a football player and top student, had been reading all he could find about mountaineering.
The early light of day showed that the Notch had been roofed over with solid gray clouds which slowly dropped below the cliff’s rim. Shortly after 6 a.m. seven expert rock climbers arrived. After hurriedly marking out an ascent route, they put on yellow helmets as partial protection against falling rock, packed a portable radio, food, clothing, ropes and other climbing equipment, and started for the cliff. Crouch and Whipple still responded to calls, but soon they disappeared in the blanket of clouds that dropped quickly to the valley floor. A steady torrential rain began, and gusts of wind sometimes hit 50 miles per hour. The temperature was 38 degrees. It was the worst day of the 1959 summer.
The climbers spent about 90 minutes ascending the wet, slippery talus slope. Faces and helmets dripping with rainwater, they organized themselves into three roped-together groups. The first “rope,” three men with John E. Taylor of Princeton, Mass., leading, would try reaching the trapped youths with warm clothing and food. They would then radio down for whatever might be needed to get the youths off the cliff. The second, two-man rope, David Sanderson of Portsmouth, N.H., leading would follow closely to provide support. The third rope would bring supplies radioed for by the first rope.*
[*Besides Perry, Taylor and Sanderson, the rescue climbers included: Lyle M. Richardson, Jr., of Wrentham, Mass.; Spencer M. Wright of North Swansey, N.H.; Irving Meredith, Jr., of Littleton, Mass.; Robert L. Collin of Brookline, Mass.]
As Taylor started up, the cliff was awash with speeding rivers and waterfalls whipped at right angles by heavy gusts. Boulders fell frequently as the rain and wind ate at the precipice. Once the descending rock sounded like an oncoming freight train, reminding the climbers that, a few years before, a tremendous section of the mountain, perhaps 200 feet wide, had dropped away from nearby cliffs. Slowly the first rope moved up the mountain wall. Each handhold, each step had to be carefully tested on the slippery, lichen-covered rock.
The second rope soon jointed the ascent. The two groups, struggling upward inch by inch, spent the entire morning ascending little more than half the distance to the stranded young men. There the wet, exhausted climbers stopped under the huge overhang and rested briefly.
“In the next few minutes,” reported Taylor later in Appalachia, the A.M.C.’s publication, “I moved out from under the overhang along a sloping ledge right into the fury of the wind and rain. The wind was so strong that I gasped for breath. The needed foothold was covered with lichen and so slippery that my foot kept coming off whenever I put my weight on it. I began to lose my nerve.”
But after studying the vertical rock ahead, Taylor made a successful head-on assault which allowed him and his group to surmount the overhang. Soon thereafter, the base party saw the second rope disappear around the projecting obstacle, too.
At about 1 p.m. Taylor called out to the youths, through he still couldn’t see them. He heard a voice overhead, strange, hoarse, a continuing call with little meaning. He remembers it as an “imploring” sound.
Taylor picked his way upward, every move now fully testing his ebbing strength. With only seven or eight yards to go, he was too exhausted to make a last rough ascent, on which Crouch and Whipple had somehow licked the day before—only to find themselves on a tiny ledge from which they could move neither up nor down. While Taylor rested a moment, he called out again. One lad answered in a hoarse, unintelligible voice; he seemed not to understand that someone was just below him.
Taylor then tried a new, roundabout route. It required almost an hour and placed him about 25 feet to one side and slightly above Whipple and Crouch. But the few remaining feet were a Waterloo. Taylor, now completely exhausted, lacked the strength to execute a difficult maneuver on a rope that would swing him over to the youths.
Fortunately, the second rope now arrived. Sanderson was shocked when he saw the two young men ahead. “Behind the veil of mist,” he reported, “they were gray silhouettes among the gray rocks. Their heads bobbed up and down, but I heard no voices.”
Talking over the lead position, Sanderson followed Taylor’s last attempted route. He did well until suddenly his feet slipped, and down the precipice he tumbled. With him on the line was Spencer M. Wright. Wright braced himself, and caught Sanderson’s weight on the rope, which was threaded through a piton in the cliff. Though suspended freely on the face on the mountain for a moment, Sanderson worked himself back onto the rock, and again headed for the boys.
To lick the last difficult stretch, Sanderson allowed himself to swing across the cliff on his rope like a pendulum. This brought him to a rock buttress and a comparatively easy, six-foot climb to the stranded young men. It was well past 3 p.m.
Neither Crouch nor Whipple was aware that their 24-hour wait for help was over. Propped against the cliff, they were senseless. They had bound themselves together with a rope, which they had then tied to an old piton driven into the rocks by some climber in the past. Their ledge was less than 18 inches wide and three feet long.
Sanderson prepared to lower them to a larger ledge. But, at that moment, Crouch gasped a few times and died. Sanderson quickly tied a rope onto Whipple, and eased the moaning lad down the cliff. Whipple’s unseeing eyes stared at the rescuers, who wrapped him in sweaters and a poncho. But as they moved him to a more secure position, he, too, became still, and was soon dead.
The climbers’ water-soaked radio had failed, and they had to carry the tragic word down the mountain. Depressed, unimaginably cold and tired from eight hours on the wet, windy cliff, they felt their senses of time and judgment slipping away, exposing them to foolhardy risks. “We were really fighting for our own lives,” said Taylor.
The following day six climbers brought the bodies of Crouch and Whipple down from the cliff.
The two young men had died of “exposure to nonfreezing cold.” How they had reached the scene of their deaths remains a mystery. But once there, they had been trapped by fear, and their body temperatures had been fatally reduced by the Notch’s 38-degree wind and rain. Yet—the appalling fact to consider—experienced mountaineers believe it is entirely possible that either one’s life might have been saved if he had carried a sweater up the cliff.
What can be learned from this tragedy? Whipple and Crouch were not rash, foolhardy boys; both were known as sensible and levelheaded. But, in their enthusiasm, they forgot that nature can be grim and harsh as well as beautiful and adventurous. Their pathetic ending dramatically emphasizes that beginners entering the forests and mountains must be armed with prudence and a healthy respect for the inherent dangers.
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