The Last Secrets by John Buchan

The ascent of Ruwenzori unriddled the mystery of equatorial snows. There now remained the question of great peaks in the extreme North, where the mountaineering problems must obviously be very different from those found at a similar altitude in the temperate zones. Something had been done to solve the problem by the ascent of Mount St. Elias, in Alaska, on July 31, 1897. But Mount St. Elias was only just over 18,000 feet, and it was peculiarly accessible, for it lies close to the coast, on the borders of British and American territory. The eyes of explorers began to turn towards Mount McKinley, the highest peak in North America, which reached a height of 20,300 feet. Its latitude was 63° N., and so within 250 miles of the Arctic Circle. The nearest salt water, Cook Inlet, was 140 miles from the southern face as the crow flies. It was therefore almost unreachable, lying as it did in the midst of an unexplored wilderness and surrounded by a mighty glacier system.

On the south these glaciers were drained by the Susitna River, with its tributaries the Yentna and the Chulitna, and on its northern face by the affluents of the Yukon. If the traveller attempted to reach it in summer he might find a difficult waterway up to the beginning of the glaciers, but then he had thirty miles of ice to cross before he reached the base, and over these he must transport everything on his back. In winter the journey might be made by dogs, but winter in those latitudes was scarcely the time to travel. Moreover, Mount McKinley, unlike the other great peaks in the world, rose from a low elevation. In the case of the South American and Himalayan peaks climbing does not begin until an altitude of at least 10,000 feet has been reached, and their line of perpetual snow is very high. It is possible, for example, to cover the 22,860 feet of Aconcagua without ever touching snow. But in Mount McKinley the snow-line was not much more than 2,500 feet, and there was something like 15,000 feet of climbing. Again, its position so far north did not permit the snows to melt properly in the summer, or to grow hard and pack. Its snowfall was so great that the snow never got into the condition which eases the path of the mountaineer. Finally -- and this applied especially to a winter journey -- it was situated in a land of desperate storms. The severest weather conditions ever recorded by the American Meteorological Bureau occurred at Mount Washington, which is only 6,000 feet above the sea, where the temperature was 40 degrees below zero and the wind 180 miles an hour. What might the climber expect 20,000 feet up in the sky, with nothing between him and the North Pole?