“A Place Among Giants: 22 Seasons at Denali Basecamp”
By Lisa Roderick; Catharsis/Di Angelo Publications, 2024; 457 pages; $25.
The giants referenced in Lisa Roderick’s title, we learn, are Denali and the other mountains of the Alaska Range, but they might as well include the climbing guides, mountain rangers, glacier pilots, and rescuers who fill this absolutely absorbing memoir. This exquisite book chronicles the two-plus decades during which the author managed the basecamp on Denali’s Kahiltna Glacier, from which permitted climbers — more than 1,000 each year — mount their expeditions.
Living on the glacier for 10 summer weeks, it was Roderick’s job to communicate from “the nerve center of human activity on Denali” with the several Talkeetna air services and their pilots about weather conditions and schedules. She was also responsible for maintaining the ice-and-snow airstrip, shepherding climbers to their flights, answering questions from both climbers and tourists, assisting rangers, and responding when necessary to emergencies. She did this through raging snowstorms, high winds, intense cold, and periods of fog during which more than 150 exhausted and cranky climbers might be waiting around the airstrip for their pick-ups. She did this in one of the most beautiful spots on the entire Earth, within a community she loved.
And she did this demanding job even as, over the years, numerous colleagues and friends gave up their lives to the mountains, and even as she loaded body bags into airplanes.
In her prologue, Roderick not only relates some of Denali’s and the basecamp’s history but begins to detail one of her first days in the job, in June 2000, when a plane bringing in park rangers fails to arrive. As night falls, Roderick climbs into her sleeping bag with her radio turned all the way up. “Compelled to do something, anything, I transmit every few minutes into the blinding storm. ... Again and again, I repeat the transmission, each call met only with a cold and agonizing silence.”
We don’t return to that event until chapter five, a third of the way into the book. The hook is set, though, not only by the circumstances but by the character and emotions of a detail-oriented narrator readers will trust and embrace.
After the prologue, early chapters relate Roderick’s childhood on a Connecticut farm and the family tragedy that would prove to be character-forming, then her departure west and finally to Alaska, where she worked in various seasonal jobs before joining her pilot-brother Paul Roderick in Talkeetna. At 28, she began to manage Talkeetna Air Taxi, at least partly to keep her brother safe. She thrived in Talkeetna and its outdoors culture, fell in love with a climber she eventually married, became a serious climber herself, and, in 2000, was asked to take over the basecamp manager position.
In her new job, after advising against a flight to the glacier, she realizes “… this job is not just about managing a camp; it’s also about managing people. In the setting of this hostile environment, I am engaged with a level of responsibility that has real, physical consequences.”
Roderick’s immersive writing takes readers right into the heart of life at the basecamp, including the logistics of daily life, the various personalities with whom she dealt, and the partying and pranks that helped define the community. She very obviously held the pilots and rangers in her highest esteem, and she presents them in memorable detail. Other “characters” include the Funky Monkeys with their rap songs, a delightful group of Russian amputees, a team of NASA astronauts, a high school jazz band that flew in to give a concert, camera crews, and the Glitter Girls who shared enormous amounts of good food and set up a spa complete with mud masks and cocktails. She tells many stories of bad-mannered climbers demanding to fly out right away — “typically born of an ego bruised by Denali and/or a desire to reach cold beer in Talkeetna” — and how she responded to their personal dramas.
She does an equally exemplary job of describing the lives of alpinists and, always with understanding and personal anguish, some of the mountaineering and aviation tragedies that occurred over her years. Some of those tragedies, involving close friends, took an obvious toll.
In 22 years, Roderick witnessed many changes — to climbing styles (a faster and lighter alpinism); outdoor clothing, tents, and climbing gear; communication and other technologies; types of airplanes; and — significantly — weather and climate. Roderick writes, “Climate change continues to hit Alaska hard, and it seems we are now seeing the effects in real time as the glaciers recede and become ever more broken from one year to the next.” With the warming climate, there is less snowpack and the snow softens earlier, cutting the climbing season shorter. Storms are greater and of more prolonged severity, crevasses open, rock faces lose their snow and ice, and rockfall becomes more of a hazard. Midseason in her later years, Roderick had to move her camp to a higher landing strip.
Many Alaskans have lived interesting lives but very few seem to appreciate the difference between owning an interesting life and writing an interesting book. However great Roderick was at her job — and she must have been her own kind of giant — she has also proved to be a great memoirist. “A Place Among Giants,” presenting as it does the intimate, lived-in experience of a life filled with adventure, beauty, and sorrow, should take its place among the best of not just mountaineering and outdoor writing but of Alaska memoirs. Beyond telling the story of a singular life in a remarkable place, it asks readers to consider the values that shape a life and what it means to make choices that balance risk and safety, the needs of oneself and others, the ambitions of youth and the graces of maturity.
[Book review: An experienced Arctic adventurer returns to a changed landscape]