Note: Brad and Barbara Washburn were interviewed by Doug Mayer and Rebecca Oreskes in 2001 for the ongoing "Mountain Voices" series of essays in AMC's long-running mountaineering journal Appalachia. In this interview, Brad Washburn reflects on his early climbing in the White Mountains and the Alps, his pioneering photography, meeting his wife Barbara, and mapping the Presidentials.
An ongoing exhibit of Brad Washburn's photography can be seen at Thayer Hall at AMC's Highland Center. AMC re-released three of Brad's early climbing books in 2004 as Washburn: Extraordinary Adventures of a Young Mountaineer. AMC Outdoors featured Brad's mountain photography as a cover story in March 2004.
Appalachia, December 2001
By Doug Mayer and Rebecca Oreskes
Brad and Barbara Washburn are two of America's most renowned explorers. They pioneered the now-standard route up Mount McKinley, mapped the Grand Canyon, McKinley, Mount Washington, and Everest, and captured some of the most stunning mountain photographs ever taken. Bradford Washburn Mountain Photography was recently awarded the photo-images award at the 2000 Banff Mountain Book Festival. Two books published this year, The Accidental Adventurer, Barbara's memoir of her historic climb of McKinley, and Exploring the Unknown, Brad's diaries from his Alaska/Yukon expeditions (both reviewed in this issue of Appalachia), offer personal glimpses into some of their remarkable accomplishments.
And that was in their free time. The parents of three children, they also led very busy personal and professional lives at home in Massachusetts. Brad was the founding director of the Museum of Science in Boston, and Barbara worked as a homemaker and as a teacher of remedial reading.
In the years since they met and married, the White Mountains have served as Brad and Barbara's home range. They photographed the Presidentials in winter 1938, charted the depths of Squam Lake, and mapped the Presidentials during the 1980s.
Given Brad's profession, it would be reasonable to assume that the Washburns view the mountains through the clinical lens of the scientist. But their appreciation for the windswept heights is deeper and more subjective than that. "Both Barbara and I agree about this," said Brad. "Your memories of these peaks are not about climbing. Mountains are friendship. Mountains are people."
Pointing Uphill
Brad: My cousin Sherman Hall took me up Mount Washington, via Tuckerman Ravine, in July or August 1921. That was my first White Mountain climb. The French Alps is where I really got started climbing, though. I made a trip to the Alps in 1926 with money my uncle had left my brother and me when he died. It helped pay for college expenses and also paid for guiding on our trips to Europe.
When I got back in 1926, having climbed Mont Blanc and the Matterhorn, I wanted to make some money. I began to add lecture income. I also wrote two articles, "A Boy on the Matterhorn" and "A Boy on Mont Blanc," for a magazine called A Youth's Companion. George Putnam read those articles, got a hold of me, and published them as Among the Alps with Bradford.
We also produced a little guide, The Trails and Peaks of the Presidential Range of the White Mountains, which came out in 1926. At the time there wasn't any guide to just the Presidential Range. The trouble with the AMC guide, to this day, is that you have to buy something that covers everything, not just the Presidential Range. And, then, Bradford on Mount Washington came out in the fall of '27.
Barbara: My first hike was with a friend who took me up to Mount Chocorua. It was long before I knew Brad. I did what any young girl does: Her boyfriend wants to climb somewhere, and you go along. And he ran. He wanted to go up fast, so by the time I got to the top of that mountain, I never wanted to see another mountain! When I finally did climb Mount McKinley, I got a call on the telephone one day. All I could hear was this loud, grumpy voice saying, "He must have carried you up!" I recognized the voice. He must have seen it in the paper.
Getting Together
Barbara: How I met Brad is very interesting. He was already a fairly famous explorer. I was working at Harvard in the biology labs, and I had a lovely job working with graduate students. One day the mailman came into my office and wanted me to go over and have an interview with Brad, who had just been made director of the Museum of Science. He was looking for a good administrative secretary and had told the mailman, "When you're wandering around the buildings at Harvard, if you see a good likely candidate, let me know."
I said, "My God! I don't want to work in a stuffy old museum! And I certainly don't want to work for a crazy mountain climber!"
I wasn't impressed. I had no intention of taking the job. Brad gave me two weeks to think it over. He called me up every single day. At the end of about ten days, I said to my father, "If that guy is so persuasive that he calls me up every day, it might be kind of an interesting job. That museum might go places." So, I took the job.
We had no personal relationship at all until he proposed. In those days, you wouldn't think of going out with your boss. I was on my way to New York for a date. The janitor at the museum, who was on his way to do the projection for Brad's lecture in Hartford, suggested, "Why don't you come to Brad's lecture." I said, "I can't do that. I'd die if he saw me. I'd be so embarrassed." But I went, and snuck into a corner of the back row. I wasn't going to even speak to him. Brad spotted me as soon as the lecture was over. He popped off of the platform and came running toward me. And I thought, "Well, at least he's not going to say, 'What are you doing here?'"
Brad: I said, "What the hell are you doing here?!"
Barbara: But he said it in a tone of voice that made me think he was glad I was there. He asked me how I was getting to New York. I said I was taking the next train down. And he said, "Well, do you have a berth? I have a berth. I'll give you my lower berth."
Of course, today, we'd have gotten into the same berth, I think! I was very shy. I got into bed and the whole thing was kind of embarrassing, with your boss sleeping above you! Just as I was about to turn out the lights, this hand came down the side, literally down the wall, and I thought, my God! What am I supposed to do? If I shake hands with him, he'll think I'm very bold. If I don't, he'll be mad at me. So, I just gave it a little squeeze and said good night.
In the morning when we got up, he said, "I want you to come and have breakfast with me and Lowell Thomas." I said, "Don't be silly! Lowell Thomas doesn't want to see me!" But I went.
Brad: Six months later, Lowell Thomas told me, "I went home and told my wife you were engaged." Of course, neither of us had said anything. I asked him how he reached that conclusion. He said, "I saw it in both of your eyes."
Barbara: When my boyfriend took me to the four o'clock train back home, there was Brad at the train. My boyfriend later became an admiral in the Navy. He told me many years later, "I knew when I saw Washburn there that my goose was cooked!"
That was in January. We got engaged in February. At that point, I had worked for him for eleven months. We had very few dates. I don't think he had even met my family. We'd had dinner together, and he sat in my living room and proposed. We've now been married more than sixty years.
Early Climbs
Brad: There are an awful lot of people who didn't think I did any work at all. They all thought I had millions of dollars and could dash off to a mountain! We didn't have millions of bucks. I was getting three thousand a year running the Museum of Science, and I had three kids and a wife.
Barbara: And I didn't have a washing machine. I was washing the diapers by hand!
Brad: I had to lecture or write in order to keep above the turf and run the museum. I found out that was the way to make the extra money that was needed to make these treks.
The deal I made when I was asked to be director of the museum was that I would have at least one month a year in which I would make trips, because my lectures produced 50 percent of my income. Of course, it's true—I loved it. I wanted to do it.
The first trip we all got paid for was a flight over Mount McKinley in 1936, for National Geographic. They put up $1,000. We made the first photographic flights over McKinley. I got Pan American to do the flying for us for nothing. The money was used on film, processing, and travel to Alaska. I gave back a thirty-buck unused balance at the end of the job.
In comparison, we had a $150,000 budget for the flights over Mount Everest. National Geographic put up half the money, and the museum loaned us the other half. I had to raise the money to slowly pay the museum back. We came in $7,200 below budget on that project. I sent the chairman of the Geographic Society, Mel Paine, a letter with a check for $3,600.77. He said it was the first time he could recollect that any National Geographic expedition had gone through below budget, except for my flights over McKinley in 1936. He was "enclosing herewith the overpayment." It was a one-cent stamp, cut in half!
In 1937 and '38 we did a series of aerial flights over the Whites. It was just something to do. I used money that I got from lecturing to pay for it. It didn't cost much—$35 an hour to fly in those days. I flew with Wiley Apte of North Conway in his airplane. You very rarely see snow like that nowadays, and I got some wonderful pictures.
Barbara: You know, we never really had vacations, because every summer Brad had a project. And he has had one every summer since we've been married! We were never just going off and sitting on a beach and doing nothing. I think we'd have been bored! I wasn't just climbing mountains all those years. I also had my own little career. When our last kid was in high school, I just decided this is the time when you do your own thing. So I took a course and started teaching. I taught remedial reading for twenty years at Shady Hill School in Cambridge.
First Ascent of Mount Bertha
Brad: The first ascent of Mount Bertha in Alaska's Coast Range gave Barbara a wonderful introduction to the challenge and beauty of a relatively small, unclimbed peak located not too far from civilization—only a hundred miles west of Juneau.
We had a neat group of young people with us: Tom Winship, captain of that year's Harvard ski team, and later distinguished editor of The Boston Globe; Mal Miller, who has distinguished himself as a professor of glaciology; and Lowell Thomas Jr., who later became lieutenant governor of Alaska.
Barbara: Lowell was only 16. His father asked us to take him, because I think his father thought that Brad was taking me, so it couldn't be that hard. I really just followed along. I had never done anything like that before. We were just married, and this was sort of our honeymoon.
That was the first ascent of Mount Bertha. I'm strong, but I didn't know anything about handling a rope. Brad showed me as we went along. When we got partway up, he said, "Now you've got to tie this rope around you, and you've got to pendulum across this space." I could see that he didn't want to kill me in the first month of marriage, so I just did what I was told, and I kept going. That's how I got to the top.
But not all of us went with the first assault team. We stayed behind at about 8,000 feet for five days because of the weather. Every morning I would say a little prayer. When the weather got good, I wasn't sure I wanted to go to the top. I wasn't sure I could do it.
I really didn't feel very well, but I survived. I put some pilot crackers in my pocket to get me going on the summit day. When we got back down the mountains and were waiting for the boat to come in, I was still doing poorly. Brad said, "I think I better get her to the doctor in Juneau for a check." Well, the doctor came out of the office in front of all these people and he said, "Hell, Brad! There's nothing wrong with this girl. She's just pregnant!"
That night, we had a little farewell party with all of us. Tommy Winship looked at me and he said, "Barbara! You couldn't be pregnant! I was sleeping beside you all the time!"
Brad: We not only summited Mount Bertha but also made the first crossing of the Brady ice field to reach the bottom of Bertha.
Everyone asks us who Mount Bertha was named for. Lengthy research finally yielded the unexpected fact that in the early 1900s Bertha, as a young prostitute in Skagway, had given great happiness to the surveyors of the International Boundary Commission!
First Ascent of McKinley's West Buttress
Barbara: When people make a fuss about me climbing Mount McKinley, inwardly I suppose I'm happy I did it and was the first woman to do it. But that wasn't my goal in life.
We did McKinley's North Peak too. I didn't set out to do it, but Brad said, "Everybody get up! It's a beautiful day! We're going up the North Peak!" So we all did it. It was cloudless and absolutely windless all day long.
You know, when a girl soloed it a few years ago, I got a telephone call. I was doing the breakfast dishes and wasn't thinking about Mount McKinley at all. The phone rang, and this guy said, "I'm a journalist from Anchorage, Alaska, and I want to ask you a question. A girl has just soloed McKinley. Do you have any comment? And all I could think of was, "Oh, the poor thing! She missed all the fun!"
The fun for me was sitting around in the tent with the stove going and discussing some philosophical subject. For example, I was in an igloo on McKinley for ten days when Brad was up at 18,000 feet. We were stuck in a storm. I was sitting around with two guys I didn't know—they weren't very attractive either—so, we did a lot of talking! I was discussing mixed marriages with a guy who was married to a black girl. I tell you, that set some sparks off, because the other guy with us was very conservative! That's my strongest memory. My job was to keep the peace!
Having a lady along also made the men a little more gentlemanly. One night the boys were sitting around the tent, up high, and they were beginning to swear. You know, I had a brother, and I didn't mind. But Ranger Grant Pearson didn't like them being at all crude in front of me. He banged on the table, and he said, "Boys! We have a lady in our midst. I will not have you talking that way in front of Barbara!" They almost died.
You can't get big-headed about these accomplishments. I was an old-fashioned girl. To me it meant always sleeping with my husband. I mean, the modern girl climbers, I don't know what they're like. They're certainly different from me. I couldn't do any of those things that the modern girls do.
Mapping the Presidentials
Brad: Back in the early 1980s, Allen Smith, who was then president of the Mount Washington Observatory, called me up. He had seen a relief map we had done of the Grand Canyon, and he wanted to make one of Mount Washington. I said, there's no way you can make a decent relief map of that damn place without having a good map, because a relief map is based on a very good map. So I said, "Hell, let's start!"
Barbara: Allen Smith helped us a lot, [along] with his wife and kids. We also had innumerable volunteers who helped us.
Brad: We used to say that doing the map of the Presidentials was much harder to do than mapping Mount Everest because we had to walk all the trails and measure them with 100-foot tapes. On top of it all, the laser wouldn't show through the trees, and so we had to do it only in the fall when the leaves were gone. A lot of those trails, you see, were just like tunnels.
But Casey Hodgdon and I worked out a tricky system to mark them. The rivers are all very accurately marked. And if the trail was anywhere near a river—and a lot of them are—we would go to a point where we could see a wiggle in the river so we knew where in the hell we were. Then we would measure 300 or maybe 600 feet with a long tape down the trail. And then Casey and I would take turns bushwhacking through to the river. It might be 50 feet, 250 feet, or 500 feet sometimes, all at right angles to the trail. We'd measure in like that, measure back, and we'd know where we were.
Once we were mapping the Rocky Branch Trail, way the hell off the trail in awful brush. I tripped and went flat on my face. I couldn't figure out what had hooked my foot. It was a wire. We left the tape there and walked along the wire a hundred yards, and here was a huge lumbering camp with a stove that had ten places to put the pots on it and a 36-inch saw lying there, all rusted. They'd had a railroad in there. It was fascinating.
On the map of the Presidential Range, there were about 200 miles of trails that all had to be taped. That's quite a lot of area with a 100-foot tape. It was a lot like starting in the dark in New York and measuring 200 miles in a tunnel, and then emerging in Boston. We had to use a compass, and we had to do a lot of drawing.
We got a tricky system you could use on Boott Spur, Glen Boulder Trail, or on Lion Head, anywhere where you could see opposite the trail. Barbara and I would take the tram up Wildcat and go along the ridge to where the trail breaks out of the timber. Then we would set up our theodolite and the laser machine. We'd made a site on the summit to give us the zero point, and that gave us a line, and angle, to every point we measured. Casey, Barbara, and I would have walked down that trail the week before, stopping at points along the trail where you could see across to Wildcat. We would take little pieces of aluminum, many of which are still on the trees—it's a hell of a job to take them off—and we nailed them to the tree. We'd letter them A, B, C, D, E, F, and so forth.
Casey would get to one of these points, and he'd have an orange target. We'd pick it up through the theodolite, which had an 80-power telescope. Casey had a signaling mirror that was blindingly bright. You could pick it up instantly. We literally peppered those trails with control points. Then we just had to map it in between those points. We used that system all over the place.
Barbara: One day I had come up on the Cog Railway. I went out and stood out at Goofer Point. I was frozen stiff up there! Brad was down at a survey station at the base of the railway. We were trying to measure angles, and it went on and on and on. Then Guy Gosselin called up and said, "Brad's going to meet you somewhere when you come down." And I said, "You tell him I'm getting a divorce tomorrow, and I'm not going to meet him!"
I didn't get a divorce—I didn't know how to! But I was mad. He kept saying, "Do it again, do it again. Move it this way and that way," in order to get the exact angle and laser distance. We never thought of quitting, although there was one time when I was writing down all the angles and doing the trigonometry, when I suddenly realized I could sabotage the whole project if I gave them the wrong number! There were a couple of times when I felt like doing that! But, I thought, "Oh, no! Wouldn't that be awful!"
Brad: That night we were measuring the angle and laser distance from the observatory tower to the top of Mount Madison. We were measuring just that one angle and had to get it exactly right. Then we'd go back and measure other angles from the tower. These angles were very fussy, and they were done with great, great precision. We had no time schedule at all. We just finished it when we finished it. And so, we finally did a very precise job. And it took us pretty close to ten years.
The reason that it took so long is because we were very, very fussy about the trails. Also, we couldn't take our vertical photographs at one time. To get the trails above treeline, we had to take pictures of the whole area after all the snow was gone, which means August. We returned late in the fall, before the snow arrived, but with all the leaves now off, so we could see the ground on which the contours had been made. Everest was mapped with one set of photos, the Grand Canyon was one set, but we had to have two completely separate sets of vertical photographs for the Presidentials map.
This was a very good project on which to have a lot of people helping you. It made it a more special project. We had scores of people involved in it: Alan Smith, Hersh Cross from Randolph, a profusion of friends, boys from Milton, foreign students visiting from Spain. People liked to help out because you were doing something when you got to the top, instead of just looking at the view. And I think they all liked it.
We got to see a lot of places. I think the place I've enjoyed most in the last few years is the Great Gulf. You meet almost nobody down in there, and to me Spaulding Lake is a marvelous spot. You know, Casey made an interesting comment I've never heard anybody make: Spaulding Lake is higher than the top of Mount Moriah!
Population Explosion
Brad: To get philosophical, I think the biggest problem that we've got in the world today is overpopulation. Nobody has got the guts to face up to it. I think that the people on it will eventually destroy our world. [They're] going to destroy nature, at least. Men are going to destroy each other, because people don't want to realize what really is going on. It's so dreadful that they don't care. They want to say, "Let's keep on going and hope it won't happen."
That's what's happening with the White Mountains. It's just more and more and more people. It's going to get steadily worse, because we just keep ignoring the population situation. And as it gets worse, more people are going to want to do these things.
I've watched this at Squam Lake. Everybody's moving in. Every time some wealthy person who owns twenty acres dies, the kids divide it up, and all of a sudden, you've got four cottages where you had one. It's slowly and inevitably destroying the lake.
The trails are getting chewed up. I think one of the worst things that ever happened on those trails is allowing people to go there with rubber-cleated boots, because that's what takes the trails apart. Sneakers do not do that.
Back in 1925, I went across the Presidentials with Tom Rogers and David Crocker. We did the Webster Cliff Trail, went across the range to Mount Washington and the Northern Peaks, and down to Madison Hut. It took us three days. We had no reservations anywhere. We stayed at Lakes of the Clouds; we stayed at Madison. Now you have to reserve in December if you want to stay there in July! All I can say is, you've got to have some regulation, or in a relatively small number of years we're going to be in big trouble.
I have some good statistics on McKinley. Barbara and I were the first two people ever to meet anybody else trying to climb McKinley at the same time we were: Friday the 13th of June, 1947. We were coming down Karstens Ridge, and three University of Alaska boys were coming up. Last summer, there were 1,111 people trying to climb Mount McKinley.
Another thing that's causing all this trouble is our guidebooks, including the AMC guides. I've said that one of the things that have done a lot to destroy these places is the books that people like Ansel Adams and Elliot Porter and I, on McKinley, have written. People want to go there to see that wonderful country. And all of a sudden you realize that you're sort of committing suicide.
Savoring Past, Present, and Future
Brad: A few years ago, we had four separate expeditions doing work on Mount Everest. Two of them were working on this GPS [Global Positioning System] stuff, taking measurements of snow depth on the top of Everest. The Chinese said there's only a meter of snow. I'm actually positive there's at least 15 feet and maybe more than that. And, we measured the movement of the ice in the Khumbu Ice Fall. It turns out, it's moving about 3 to 4 feet per day.
We did some very fancy surveying on Everest. We had to have a lot of little holes drilled into the limestone, on top of the mountain. We'd drill a hole, bang in an expansion bolt, then screw in the global satellite markers. We found that Everest is going steadily up.
The guys who worked on these projects said to me that it made it much more fun for them when they were climbing Everest to do something when they got there, instead of just getting to the top, turning around, and coming back down. Everybody likes to do something, rather than just climb to the top.
I enjoyed what I did on Everest very, very much, because I was dealing entirely with very bright, very competent young people. And they were doing what I really wished I could do myself. And I would like to have done it myself, but I couldn't. After all, I'm over 90 years old!
This year, we've been invited to fly to and land at the North Pole. And, in mid-July, we'll go back to Alaska to attend the fiftieth anniversary celebration of my first ascent of Mount McKinley by the West Buttress Route, to take place in Talkeetna on July 10. Since then, close to 20,000 people have followed that route successfully to McKinley's summit.
Ninety percent of my memories of my climbs are of people who were on the trip. Guys like Casey Hodgdon. Certainly my most vivid and pleasant memories are of climbing with Barbara and Casey. Period.
Editor's Note: In the print version of Appalachia, this is the seventh in a series of profiles of people whose lives have been centered in mountains. Gathered and transcribed by Randolph, N.H., resident Doug Mayer and Milan, N.H., resident Rebecca Oreskes, these profiles seek the spirit of those with a passion for high country. Mayer and Oreskes are committed to presenting each Mountain Voice in the speaker's own words. They welcome suggestions for future profiles, which can be offered by writing to: The Editor, Appalachia, 5 Joy Street, Boston, MA 02108.
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