“A WINDOW TO HEAVEN: THE DARING FIRST ASCENT OF DENALI, AMERICA’S WILDEST PEAK” by Patrick Dean (Pegasus Books, 336 pages, $28).
In “A Window to Heaven,” Patrick Dean chronicles the adventurous life of Hudson Stuck, a Sewanee graduate and Episcopal priest. By turns a cowboy, telegraph lineman, literature professor, master of the Iditarod, best-selling writer and social activist, Stuck was above all an advocate for the rights and dignity of native Alaskans for much of his adult life.
As the book’s title suggests, Stuck – nearly 50 by then and Archdeacon of Alaska and the Yukon – along with a weary, sometimes contentious team, was the first to successfully summit North America’s highest peak, reaching the goal on June 7, 1913, after weeks of excruciating effort. The tale is thrilling in the tradition of climbing yarns, from Edward Wymper’s “Scrambles Among the Alps in the Years 1860-69” to Jon Krakauer’s “Into Thin Air,” and yet the extraordinary mountain occupies slightly less than half of the book. Mostly, “A Window to Heaven” is the story of an extraordinary man.
A steep and winding trail descends the Cumberland Plateau from the campus of Sewanee, the University of the South, to a spring that tumbles from the mouth of an appropriately named cavern: Wet Cave. Now closed due to its endangered bat population, Wet Cave was a popular weekend destination for students from the Episcopal college, who for over a century burned their names onto its white walls and ceiling with candles and carbide lamps. One name that can still be read on the walls is that of Hudson Stuck, who attended the university from 1889-92, earning a degree in theology. Besides founding the university’s literary magazine, precursor of The Sewanee Review, Stuck was a varsity football player on a team that was then a national powerhouse.
In 1885, Stuck, then 22, had left his native England, arriving in West Texas “full of romanticism, seeking his own mountain to climb, pole to reach or desert to traverse,” Dean writes. “On the edge of the frontier, he had found that, and more besides. Texas taught the youth from London to ride a horse, shoot a Winchester rifle and navigate a rough and alien world by his wits.” By the time he earned a scholarship to Sewanee’s School of Theology, he had hiked the Grand Canyon and climbed Mount Rainier, among other outdoor pursuits.