AMC Outdoors, July/August 2007
Phase One – Baily’s Beads
Just before a total eclipse, the slender, unobscured crescent of the sun’s disk appears momentarily like a row of bright spots resembling a string of beads. The phenomenon is thought to be an effect of inequalities of the moon’s edge.
1925-1956
As a young boy, Bill was given the support and space to make his own discoveries. Moving from New York to Wellesley Hills, Mass., he lived in a development affectionately called “Nilesville.” A narrow world within the wider one. He grew up privileged, never exposed to shallowness or false individuals or discord. He began what would become a lifelong obsession tinkering with things, starting with his chemistry set, then plane blueprints. He learned patience by waiting for the glue and lacquer to dry on the airplane models he built. He blew up the kitchen with homemade gunpowder. He watched construction workers. “We were endlessly fascinated by their work…especially with the processes, the equipment and, above all, the machinery.” Bill took his first fall at a jobsite, plummeting 12 feet onto bricks after trying to balance on a roof gutter. He also experienced his first brush with death in Nilesville, hyperventilating while another boy squeezed his chest until he fainted. “Without realizing it at the time,” Bill says, “we were learning how it all goes together; how the world works.”
Drafted into the Second World War at 18, Bill enlisted in the Air Force with fantasies of flying. But during his exams he failed the depth perception test. Determined, he went home and built a test model, practicing moving the strings to the correct spots with his dad’s help. He passed the exam on his second try and, with his mechanical mind, went on to fly B-29s in the war. Afterwards, he attended Cornell University and received a degree in mechanical engineering, just as his father and grandfather had done before him. He took a job as an industrial engineer in New York and continued building and tinkering—furniture, curtains, stained glass windows, telescopes, everything he could get his hands on and wrap his mind around.
In 1956 he met a climber at a cocktail party who introduced him to the sport. He was fascinated. It sounded like a new way of tinkering, only with your own weight and gear rather than tools and wood. He followed the climber’s instructions and went to an AMC beginner climber course at the Gunks that September. He continued to climb throughout the fall and spring. And in the following summer, with his own bright spots bursting around the edges, he decided he was ready to climb in the Tetons.
“At Camp and Trail on Canal Street the week before I left, feeling very much the mountaineer I had not yet become,” Bill writes in his memoirs, “I purchased my first rope, carabiners, and some soft iron pitons. It excited me to heft and to coil and recoil the new laid rope. I felt on the verge of an experience I could not have imagined even one year earlier.” With the naïve assumed knowledge of a young climber, Bill headed out west in August in a used Rambler station wagon. With great excitement, he drove through Red Rocks, around Steamboat Springs, crossed the Yampa, and arrived in Ogden, Utah. Then he took a bus to Wyoming and on to Jenny Lake in Grand Teton National Park. In darkness, he set up his two-man army surplus tent and went to bed dreaming of his upcoming climbs.
The next day, he bought Leigh Ortenburger’s Teton Mountaineering Guidebook and posted a notice for a partner on the ranger station bulletin board. “Tink” Thompson, a Yale graduate, answered his call and proposed climbing the East Ridge route—the highest peak in the range. Tink had some Teton experience, and Bill had none (he told Tink otherwise). The two climbed to Disappointment Peak on the first day but never made it up the East Ridge due to thunderstorms. Irishman Phil Gibbons, a physics professor, became Bill’s second partner. Convincing Phil that he knew of a great route, they set out with the same plan as before with Tink. After spending a night in a mosquito-infested cave, they set off, reaching the precipice on the Second Tower at 2:30 p.m. It was late, but too ambitious and naïve to have planned a turnaround time, they kept going and soon got caught in another storm. When they carried on, they traversed through steep snow wearing only thin shorts. Phil shivered uncontrollably. They reached the summit at 13,770 feet around 5:30 p.m., took a few photos, and headed down in the fading light as fast as they could.
On the rappel down, Phil taught Bill how to glissade. But he lost his control after a few feet and failed to self-arrest. He rocketed past Phil at 30 miles-per-hour, over snow, dirt, pebbles, and rocks for nearly 120 feet before the rope caught him and he stopped. He was shaken, but not seriously hurt. The rest of the walk down was in darkness. When they finally reached Amphitheater Lake, they had been moving for more than 17 hours. The following night, Bill watched a comet cross the night sky and drove into Jackson for dinner. He remembers the feeling: “In some sense at least, I had become a mountaineer.”
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