By Chip Brown
Charles S. Houston, who died at 96 this fall, was one of the legendary mountaineers of the 20th century, more famous for the summits he didn’t reach than the ones he did. In 1953, following his brush with death after his second attempt on K2, Houston tackled the question of “Why climb?” “It is the chance to be briefly free of the small concerns of our common lives, to strip off the nonessentials, to come down to the core of life itself,” he wrote. “Food, shelter, friends — these are the essentials, these plus faith and purpose and a deep and unrelenting determination.”
This was the essence of Houston himself, his drive, his humanism, his reservoir of optimism and resilience. When he quit Himalayan climbing at age 40, he turned his energy to the study of the effects of altitude and became the dean of mountain medicine. For 12 years he led the High Altitude Physiology Study on Mount Logan, the highest peak in Canada. I was one of eight guinea pigs recruited for the HAPS season in 1975. We were based at a camp on the wild shores of Kluane Lake in the Yukon Territory.
One day toward the end, some of us took off for a scramble up Sheep Mountain overlooking Kluane Lake. We climbed for hours. We saw blond grizzlies and the transcendent light of the St. Elias ice fields. Then we undid our hours of climbing in 60 joyful minutes of descending on a voluptuously soft and untracked scree slope. At the bottom we flung ourselves into the icy lake. When Charlie drove up, I asked him where he’d go if he had no data to glean, no reports to write. “I’d go that way,” he said, gesturing not to the south and west, where the great peaks and all but impassable ice fields of the St. Elias Range lie, but to the north — to the green, round-shouldered wilderness of the Kluane Range. “You could walk for days. There’s nothing back there. God’s country.” He was 62 that summer. The glorious ordeals of his youth in the extreme parts of the world were done, but not what he once called “the lure of unknown regions beyond the rim of experience.”
—
This article originally appeared in the December/January 2009 issue of Men’s Journal.
Print this article
June 22nd, 2010 at 3:33 pm
A total trail blazer and will be missed. Forgive me, I forget the name off hand of the blind fellow that is climbing and making a big name on the speaking circuit right now, anyone can supply that for me? Anyway, these folks are truly inspiring.
[Reply]