How Did I Get Myself Into This?

"You only had to show him a thing once," said Whittaker later. "We did not have to tell him not to lean in toward the mountain, the chief problem with novice climbers. He kept perpendicular, kept his feet under him. Coming down around an exposed corner with a 6,000-foot drop immediately below him, he used a set line fixed to ice axes the way it should be used—as a hand line. Skiing has made him accustomed to steep snow—it doesn't scare him. And his boating experience has taught him how to handle rope."

"He's pretty tough. If there had been a weak member in the party we would have been in trouble," said Prather, who slipped into hidden crevasses three times. Kennedy slipped once, with a startled "oof!" into the bottleneck of a curving crevasse that may have been hundreds of feet deep. He caught himself with his arms about chest-deep and scrambled out with a belay from above.

At one point in Wednesday's 4�-hour climb to the summit, Kennedy halted, assuming that there was no way up a 45� rock wall ahead. He was astonished a moment later to see Whittaker's long, lean legs moving steadily upward. "You can't climb that!" Kennedy called. He discovered that with a firm belay you can climb anyplace you can get a toehold.

But his ropemates' chief problem was Kennedy's inclination to overlap, to push out ahead of the lead man on his rope. "He was wound up pretty tight, too eager," said Whittaker, who discovered that the best way to hold Kennedy in the center of the rope was to set a faster pace than normal.

Whittaker, having no desire to be the first man in history to take a U.S. Senator up a mountain and not bring him down, had judiciously added special safeguards to the usual first-aid and emergency gear in his guide's pack: an Arctic sleeping bag good for 30� below zero in which to shroud an injured man, and a pulmonary-edema kit in case Kennedy suffered an unfavorable reaction to high altitudes. But all he really needed was a small Band-Aid, for Kennedy's only injury was a slight blister on one heel.

Beautiful is a poor word for the first—and, most likely, the last—mountain to be climbed by Bob Kennedy. It is not a tough enough word, or grand enough, for Mount Kennedy is magnificent, with everything that a good peak should have. Corniced on its windblown summit, it has bergschrunds, gaping crevasses, avalanches pouring down glacial sidewalls, wind-packed deep powder, rock-hard glacial ice, terraced rock, ice wall breaks and a snowy wind plume boiling up over its ridges. The mountain proved both higher and tougher than anticipated—not the "easy peak" envisioned back in Washington.

"The final sharp ridge looked a lot like Everest," said Whittaker. "While we were on it Bob wanted to look down the face on the left, thousands of feet of sheer drop. It was the kind of spot that sometimes freezes experienced climbers. He leaned on his ice ax and looked over for a while. If he felt any fear, he kept it to himself."

The climbers spent an hour and a half on the summit, arrived back at base camp just before darkness and were flown down to Whitehorse the next morning. When Kennedy stepped out of the RCAF helicopter he looked bushed. The familiar expressive face, sad and wise like that of a city child who has gained too much knowledge too young, was gaunt, sunburned, bearded and dirty. He expressed his gratitude to the Canadian people, but he "reserved opinion" on the subject of climbing large mountains.

"I'd never go back up there again," he said. "I understand why climbers like it. They are a special breed of men. I'm mindful of the story General Maxwell Taylor tells of reviewing paratroopers during World War II. Each man in turn said that he had become a paratrooper because he liked to jump. Finally Taylor told them, I don't like to jump, but I like to be with people who like to jump.' Well, I like to be with people who like to climb. But I don't want to climb again. It's not exactly a pleasant experience. I kept thinking, 'How did I get myself into this?' "

A bath, a shave and a meal later, ex-mountaineer Kennedy was showing the giddy signs of postclimb euphoria that are so familiar to climbers. Delaying his departure five hours, he set forth on a tour of Whitehorse. He shook hands at RCMP headquarters—all the Mounties had stayed in town as a "protective measure" instead of leaving for their bush posts—and visited a high school. He poked into Sam McGee's 1899 cabin, viewed an early steam locomotive of the White Pass and Yukon Route railway and slopped through thick gumbo around the Yukon River sternwheelers Klondike, Whitehorse, Casca and Loon, which are rotting in the mud.