January 1925, Longs Peak. Agnes Vaille and the Swiss alpinist Walter Kiener set out for a winter climb of the East Face after three failed tries the year before. Boone tells what the mountain did to the climbers and to those who went up after them. A solemn tale of nerve and cost.
If a friend ever telephones you in November to borrow an ice axe, ask what for. Carl Blaurock asked. It was nineteen twenty-four, and the friend was Agnes Vaille of Denver, a strong, experienced climber, who wanted Longs Peak by the East Face, in winter, with a Swiss alpinist named Walter Kiener. They'd already tried it that October. Blaurock told her how fast the storms come up. "I think we can do it," she said. They tried in November. They tried in December. Folks have argued ever since over which of the two pushed it, and I'll let that lie. On Sunday the eleventh of January, nineteen twenty-five, they left Timberline Cabin about nine in the morning, in mild weather. High on the peak the wind came up and the cold fell far below zero. All that day and all that night they climbed, and about four on Monday morning they stood on top, the first to do it by that route in winter. Going down, she fell more than a hundred and fifty feet. She got a short way farther and could not go on. Kiener put her beside a big rock, out of the worst of the wind, and went for help, badly frostbitten himself. He reached the cabin, and he turned straight around and started back up with the rescuers, into the storm. One of them was Herbert Sortland, caretaker at Longs Peak Inn. About a mile along he could go no farther. He turned back for the Inn and never reached it. He stumbled into a ravine, the snow covered him, and they didn't find him until late spring. Kiener and one other man got to her that afternoon. She had got up. She had gone on alone, about a hundred feet, and fallen forward on her face. Near midnight Superintendent Roger Toll came in to the Inn on foot. Snow had stopped his car, and he and Edmund Rogers had walked the last four miles. The word had reached the Inn minutes before he did. She was his first cousin. That week he was one of twelve men who brought her off the mountain. Kiener lost joints from every finger but his right index, every toe on one foot and half of them on the other. Blaurock counted it two lives lost. But Kiener came back. He did botany in this park, and he spent many days out on Broadway, the ledge across that same face. I think of him there with one whole finger and a small plant, and that wall going up over him.
Photo: NPS Photo · Public domain