The first attempts to climb Denali, one of the world’s great mountains, and until recently named Mount McKinley, make for unique stories in mountaineering history.

The climbers who sought to be the first to climb the major peaks of Europe and Asia in the 18th and early 19th century were often “gentlemen” seeking fame and glory and bent on advancing the often nationalistic “sport” of mountaineering.

The men at the center of this story of the first ascent of Denali were cut from very different molds than such mountaineering pioneers. They were Alaskans – Alaska Natives, Alaska pioneers, or “sourdoughs,” and a cleric with a yen for adventure.

Central to the story of the first ascent of Denali, and to this book, is Episcopal Archdeacon Hudson Stuck. Patrick Dean focuses his book on this unusual cleric because, while Stuck did not do much of the physical leading on the mountain, he recruited the climbing team, organized the attempt, and was one of four who stood atop Denali.

The first half of this book follows Stuck’s life prior to the climb, providing an explanation of how a 50-year-old priest became the titular leader of such an adventure. Dean follows him from his youth in England in the 1860s and ‘70s, to arrival in Texas in 1885, where he tried his hand at being a cowboy and a teacher, to his decision to attend the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee, where in 1892 he received the degree of Graduate of Divinity and was ordained a deacon of the Episcopal Church.

After his college stint in Tennessee, which he thoroughly enjoyed, Stuck returned to Texas where he soon became Dean of the Cathedral of St. Mathews in Dallas. He became an activist for social causes, influenced by a movement called “Muscular Christianity,” adherents of which “saw it as their responsibility to improve the lot of others.” Ultimately this activist humanitarian bent and his yen for adventure led Stuck to become Archdeacon of the Yukon and the Arctic. Dean writes, “This was, in Stuck’s own words, ‘a sufficiently wide scope for any man’s wanderings and charge.’ At last he felt as though he had found a place and a job vast enough for his energy and ambitions.”

Stuck went north in 1904 – the first ascent of Denali would transpire in 1913 – and the story of the years before the climb emphasizes two aspects of Stuck’s life.

He embraced the work of administering to the spiritual needs of his flock spread over 250,000 square miles of interior Alaska, which required him to learn how to survive in the wild, cold north. He traveled by dogsled in winter and boat on the Yukon and its tributaries in summer, trips that required tremendous stamina and determination and lots of help from Native Alaskans who taught him what he needed to know and helped him along many trails.

Dean writes, “Before long, Stuck’s almost ceaseless travel made him a well-known figure across Alaska. By 1910 the Iditarod Pioneer described him as ‘famous throughout the North for the deep interest he takes in the welfare of the Alaska Indian and for his wide knowledge of Alaskan affairs.’ His circuits made a profound effect on his work, and on his relationship to the land and people of Alaska.”

The second quality of Stuck’s tenure Dean highlights is his unusual, for a cleric – essentially a missionary – respect for the life ways of the Indigenous people he encountered. Dean describes this:

He pushed back forcibly against the idea that Alaska Natives were only valuable as contributors to the economic value of the United States, as summed up in the question a US Senator asked Stuck: “What do your Yukon Indians contribute to the welfare of the world?” Stuck wrote:

The contemptuous dismission of all the little people of the world as beneath the regard to the great races, or even a supercilious rating of them by the white man’s own standards, does not seem to reflect the feeling of thoughtful men today as much, perhaps, as it did some decades ago.

In contrast to that view, Stuck describes the Alaska Natives of the Yukon as “gentle, simple, kindly people” who have occupied the land “for untold generations” in a “rigorous environment” into which they have “grounded themselves . . . to perfect adjustment.” Absent as always with Stuck is any sense that the proper thing for Alaska Natives to do is to throw over their old ways, and subscribe fully to twentieth-century Western ideas of progress or desired ways of life. 

Stuck not only admired Native Alaskans and their remarkable adaptations to an often harsh environment, he valued their culture and became an advocate for its protection. Today we would consider him an advocate for social juistice. This got him into trouble with white Alaska pioneers, who mostly wanted them out of the way.

When he decided to attempt the Denali climb, he recruited his team from both the Native and Sourdough communities. As co-leader of the  climb, he recruited the veteran Sourdough, Harry Karstens. The other members of his party were two strong, young Native Alaskans, and a young aspirant for the Episcopal priesthood. None were experienced mountaineers, or really very much interested in climbing, though Stuck had climbed a few mountains, including Mount Rainier, many years back. Stuck and Karstens liked a challenge and were ambitious. Their Native supporters were there to help but would never have attempted the climb of their own volition.

Dean briefly describes the early attempts to climb Mount Mckinley, as the mountain was named until 2015 when it was changed to Denali. He notes that as far back as the first decade of the 20th century, Stuck was advocating for the name change, believing that Native names for Alaska landforms should be honored.

In 1903 Judge Wickersham of Fairbanks made the first serious attempt to climb the mountain, but didn’t get very far. Several “expeditions” to the mountain were launched by Dr. Frederick Cook, who claimed success but was revealed as a fraud. In 1910, what Dean describes as “one of the oddest summit attempts in the history of mountaineering” was launched by a team of four Sourdoughs who thought they had succeeded but had climbed the north peak, slightly lower than the true south summit. Two members of Cook’s expeditions, Belmore Browne and Hershel Parker nearly made the summit in 1912 but were stopped by a storm only 300 feet from their goal.

There was little doubt that the mountain would soon be climbed, so Stuck pulled his attempt together the next year. The second half of the book describes the successful 1913 effort, drawing extensively on the journals kept by the climbers. Their successful ascent was achieved primarily by the redoubtable Harry Karstens and Walter Harper, son of an Irish father and Koyukon woman. Dean quotes a description of Harper:

From his mother and her people, he learned how to honor nature and the spirit world; how to burn sage and spruce boughs to clear the air of bronchial coughs and influenza germs; how to use tree sap and the pulp from devil’s club plants to clear skin of cuts and rashes. He became skilled at interpreting the dialects of Indigenous Alaska villages. He could handle boats and dogs, and he know how to survive in the forest. He could find safety in a whiteout and start a fire in any weather.

Stuck recognized the unusual nature of the young man, mentored and tutored him, and soon Harper was mushing his dogsled and piloting his Yukon River boat. Harper was not only smart and resourceful, but a big, strong fellow, and on the climb of Denali he proved to be the strongest climber.

Karstens was co-leader with Stuck, but the two men proved incompatible leaders, with Karstens accusing Stuck of doing less than his part in the hard work or the expedition. The older man suffered physically on the climb, and could not carry all that he intended to; much of his load carried at times by Harper.

Dean suggests that Karstens would much rather have attempted the climb with his friend Charles Sheldon, who successfully promoted establishment of Mount McKinley National Park and installed Karstens as the park’s first superintendent.

Karstens was a somewhat reluctant part of the team from the beginning, but when Sheldon abandoned any ambition to do the climb, Karstens' ambition led him to sign on. After the climb, Karstens would have nothing to do with Stuck and expressed bitterness toward him.

Of the possible reason for this, Dean writes, “Stuck’s campaigns against drunkenness and mistreatment of Native women by white Alaska were being held against him, and perhaps used to fuel Karstens' injured pride.”

Stuck’s prominence led to such headlines in newspapers as STUCK REACHES TOP OF CONTINENT, and Karstens undoubtedly felt he was not given the credit he was due even though Stuck readily and repeatedly asserted that without Karstens he would never have reached the summit. Harper, on the other hand, who deserved as much or more credit for the success of the ascent as either Stuck or Karstens, was satisfied with his work and remained steadfast in his friendship with Stuck.

This book is more than the story of a climb. Dean provides a profile of an interesting character in Alaska history, Hudson Stuck, and of others like Karstens and Harper from the Native Alaskan and Sourdough communities. Dean explains how a group of rank amateur climbers were able to pull off a remarkable mountaineering achievement. He sketches a picture of the social dynamics of the Alaska frontier and how an “outsider” like Stuck came quickly to see the plight of Native Alaskans and became a social reformer as well as missionary.

He was ahead of his time and many of his missionary colleagues in his views of Indigenous people. Unfortunately, Hudson Stuck died only seven years after his climb of Denali, at the age of 58. One wonders, after reading of his exploits, whether his exceptional exertions on Denali and in the Alaskan north simply wore him out.

A Window to Heaven is a valuable addition to the extensive literature on the history of Denali. It is a meticulously researched “window” through which we can gain insight into the unusual man who made the first ascent possible, into the lives of those  who joined him on the climb, and into the ways that cultural conflict in early Alaska played in the ascent and its aftermath.