Denali's Howl by
Andy Hall is on a June 1967 climbing disaster in Alaska that claimed the lives of seven people on Denali, the highest mountain in North America. The book written in 2014 is subtitled
The Deadliest Climbing Disaster on America's Wildest Peak and Hall a journalist who at the time of the tragedy was living in Denali National Park, the five-year-old son of the park superintendent.
The seven who died were part of the Wilcox Expedition, a twelve man group cobbled together and led by Joe Wilcox. There were some shortfalls in teamwork between the men and poor decisions made in terms of gear brought, but the disaster caused more than anything else by a once in a lifetime blizzard. Four in the party went up to the summit one day and returned back down to the remaining eight. Then one person decided to descend without a summit bid, and the seven men who would perish headed up. There was only primitive weather forecasting available in 1967 and what the men faced was a confluence of meteorological events, described by Hall as one of the most violent storms ever recorded on the mountain. He recounts a 1997 storm that people barely survived, with that storm lasting twelve hours rather than the seven days of the 1967 storm, with winds likely half the strength of those 30 years earlier.
Hall provides interesting content about rescue operations on the mountain and the attempt to save the men, but the storm was bad that by the time rescue operations launched, the men almost certainly were dead. The five survivors barely made it down and a rescue party only found three bodies on the mountain, two of them fairly close together. The story that Hall tells was of a dangerous undertaking combined with a once in a lifetime storm.
