How dangerous was the climatic condition of the mountain may be judged from what happened on the evening of 6th July. From their camp in the foothills they saw the sky suddenly turn a sickly green. There came a deep rumbling from the Alaskan range, and as they looked the mountains melted into mist and the earth began to heave and roll. In front of them a boulder weighing 200 lbs. broke loose from the earth and moved. The surface of the hills seemed to open and the cracks to spout liquid mud. The whole range was wrapped in dust, and as it cleared they saw the peaks spouting avalanches. Had this earthquake overtaken them on the high ground all must have perished.
The story has always seemed to me one of the boldest and most patient adventures in the history of mountaineering. Slowly the travellers fought their way to the discovery of the only practical route. Mount McKinley was conquered, though they had failed to cover the hundred or so feet which would have given them the actual summit. They had blazed the path to the top and solved its mysteries. Only that maleficent blizzard at the last moment robbed them of the full fruit of six years' pioneering.
Next year the actual summit was reached. The late Dr. Hudson Stuck, the Archdeacon of the Yukon, ever since he came to the country nine years before, had contemplated an attempt on the mountain. In the autumn of 1912 he sent on supplies by way of the Kantishna River to a point fifty miles from the base. In March, 1913, he and Mr. W. P. Karstens set out to reach the peak from the north. At their base camp, 4,000 feet up, they made a fresh supply of caribou pemmican which proved more satisfactory than that used by Professor Parker and Mr. Belmore Browne. The road taken was the same as that of their predecessors--up the Muldrow Glacier and then up the central North-East ridge. They found that the earthquake of 1912 had completely changed the character of that ridge, and instead of being a reasonable snow gradient, it had become a confused mass of rock and ice, most difficult to surmount. Bit by bit they forced their way up it till they reached the upper basin, and then, being favoured with clear, bright, still weather, they managed to attain the highest point, the southern summit. There had been a story of two miners, called McGonogall and Anderson, who had reached the top in 1910. Dr. Stuck discovered that the top they had reached was the lesser northern peak, for he saw the remains of their flagstaff.