Hell Is Above Us: The Epic Race to the Top of Fumu, the World's Tallest Mountain by Jonathan Bloom (bookreader TXT) 📗

the next two years, Hoyt would marry Wizzy, enroll at Columbia Business School, have two sons, and sign up for his first mountain-climbing expedition. World War I was visited upon the United States, but thanks to climbing injuries it passed William quietly by. While colleagues fought and died in European trenches, William started up his own business concern, Daily Bread, with a loan from the Dodge family. He competed directly with the Hoyt Bread Company, the business of his own father. With his well-honed business acumen, William succeeded in routing the old man at his own game.

The competition only lasted a few months. Spalding Hoyt died of acute constipation in 1920. His constipation had been so acute in fact that it attracted the attention of doctors around the world. The blockage backed up to his duodenum, the valve below the stomach. The case was infamous in medical circles. Many of the groundbreaking methods the doctors used to understand Spalding’s condition would go on to inform the methods used today for studying the physics of automobile traffic patterns.

William and his brother Randolph attended Spalding’s funeral, but spent most of their time ensuring their mother Maddy – who had gone quite mad with early onset dementia - did not blurt out comments about Woodrow Wilson’s secret life as a vampire. Like Maddy, William was not in a mental state that allowed him to shed tears at the passing of Spalding. “I was certainly full of emotion, but the emotion did not have a name. My heartbeat, breathing, and thinking were rapid. My face was warm. That is all I could say about it.”

Now the millionaire bread maker took on climbing with an insatiable zeal. He went on to not only climb Mount Rainier but to forge his own route, now named after him, halfway between the Fuhrer Finger Route and the Ingraham Headwall Variation. He took on McKinley. He traveled to Europe, the war now over, and completed the first known solo ascent of Monteviso in the Italian Alps. He was the talk of the climbing communities on two continents. His reputation for adventure also penetrated financial and social circles. People did not much like to be in his company as it was much like to trying to strike up conversation with a shoe, but they made sure to be seen with him anyway. A few minutes of miserable dialogue – or monologue as the case often turned out to be - were a small price to pay for a photo opportunity with the world’s greatest mountain climber.

Now a mother, Wizzy could not and did not want to join her husband on his climbs. William’s time with Wizzy and the children diminished. She begged him to save the climbing for when the kids were older, but he could not oblige. The weight of his father was gone. He did not want it to be immediately replaced with his family. “Please do not play that role in my life,” he once asked her. Out of deep love for her husband, Wizzy Hoyt – the woman who had run topless through Times Square, sprayed Calvin Coolidge with seltzer, and climbed many portions of the Pyrenees large men feared – acquiesced and stayed at home with her children while William climbed the world.

To be sure, William Hoyt was living out his dream. He had no idea a man was out there waiting to turn his dream into the kind of stinking, violent hallucination one experiences at the height of sepsis.

Junk hiked in front. They were now completing the main portion of the Presidential traverse which occurred on Saturday. Aside from suffering through the bodily harm they had received the night before, the day went quite well. The weather was cold but otherwise harmless. Junk showed himself to be fast and fearless. Deep snow, sheer ice, and nerve-wracking heights seemed to have little effect on him. He actually basked in it. Hoyt had to concede the glorified street urchin was a good match for him in terms of speed. “We would get separated by at most a few hundred feet, but then he would catch up within a few minutes.” After a day of solid hiking, they dug bivouacs and settled in for the night. Although cold, the situation was not nearly as bad as the night before. Their clothing had dried and the snow caves kept them relatively warm. Also, Mount Pierce is not as tall as Mount Madison where they had camped the night before, so the temperature remained slightly higher.

The final day of the trip had the potential to be short, painless, and possibly even pleasant. They simply needed to descend Mount Pierce and both men would have cars waiting for them, one driven by Wizzy, the other by McGee. As they descended, the two actually made some small talk. “I remember we discussed the delightfully sunny weather, New Hampshire history, and that socialist cripple Roosevelt,” recalled Hoyt. “I would not go so far as to say we experienced a moment of liking each other, but for a short while, we felt our adversarial relationship may not be worth it.” These are surprising words from Hoyt given that in roughly two hours – should events continue unabated - he was going to be relieved of one hundred thousand dollars.

Some time between that brief dialogue and the end of the trail, they became separated. Hoyt arrived at the trailhead but Junk did not. Whether Hoyt deliberately sped ahead is unknown to this day. Whatever the reason, Junk became lost in the woods with only a half-mile left. “I wandered like the Hebrews of old. There was no sign of a trail, a road, a human. I couldn’t follow any tracks because the low-lying area had flooded due to warm weather. The ground was slush, mud, and tiny rivers of run-off.”

Junk was lost for several hours. When Hoyt and a team of local police found him, the sun was going down and Junk had