Honed. Rich Slater
With Dad and Grandpa Slater (Robbie on right)
“I’m gonna do it.” –Rob Slater “Anything worth doing is worth overdoing.” –Rich Slater
When I was fresh out of law school, trying to build a practice, I used to pass out my business cards in the local biker bars and strip joints. I rationalized it was good marketing and, admittedly, they were the kinds of places I sometimes liked to patronize. Inevitably, I found myself doing a lot of criminal defense cases. Down at the courthouse in Cheyenne, the defense lawyers joked about the old adage that “the nut doesn’t fall far from the tree,” in reference to some second-or third-generation defendant again showing up in the criminal justice system. While the adage unfortunately held true for those hapless souls, fortunately it was also true for my twin brother Robbie and me. Like everyone, from whence we came shaped our personalities and our destinies.
When Robbie and I were four, Dad took us on our first camping trip. He got both of us a knapsack, and we each put in a bowl, spoon and box of our favorite cereal – Cap’n Crunch. The army surplus canteen with the canvas sheath was filled with milk. Paul, who was only three and Tommy, who was still learning to walk, stayed at home with Mom.
We were living in Salisbury, Maryland, so Dad took us down to the flats along Chesapeake Bay and we crowded into our small canvas Sears and Roebuck pup tent, seeking refuge from the clouds of mosquitoes. There were so many of them, though, that we went home early that night. It was the first and only time we didn’t make it through the night.
Many successful camping trips followed and by the time Robbie and I were 10 years old, all of us considered ourselves outdoorsmen. The little knapsack was replaced by aluminum-framed backpacks. Dad always carried the heaviest pack, with the tent, stove, cookware and most of the food. The rest of us vied to see who could carry the second-heaviest pack, lining up at the bathroom scale the night before a trip.
In the evenings, we had campfires. We waited with great anticipation the coming of darkness, when Dad might let us light torches. Sitting around the fire, or in the tent, alone in the wild, amidst the silliness between four boys and a tolerant if not encouraging father, Dad told us stories. We loved hearing about Dad as a kid and the rest of our family history.
As he spoke, Dad would gaze into the campfire. Periodically, he jabbed and rearranged the burning logs with a stick he called a “poker.” This was “tending” the fire as he called it. We all learned how to tend the fire and competed to find the best poker.
Grandpaps Hannah, for example, our great-great grandfather on our Dad’s side, was a war hero, Civil War, Union side. Leading an escape from a Confederate POW camp, he went back to help a fallen comrade, but got shot in his heel, Grandpaps Hannah still managed to make it to freedom, along with the guy he rescued.
Grandpap’s son-in-law, our great grandpa Audrey Vernon Slater, was a farmer in West Virginia near the Pennsylvania line. In 1900, our grandpa, William Alvin “W.A.” was born. Four months later, his dad Audrey cut his thumb shucking corn. It became infected and his thumb was amputated, but that didn’t catch all the infection, so he had to have his arm was amputated above the elbow. This also failed to stem the tide of infection and his condition worsened and so, at the ripe old age of 36, Audrey Vernon Slater died. Medicine, Dad explained, was quite different back then and many people died from infection. Nevertheless, my brothers and I were sure that Dad could have saved great grandpa Slater. Finishing up this chapter of our family history, Dad told us Audrey’s widow Minnie Jane Hannah cared for young W.A. until she died in 1908 at age 40, having outlived her husband by four years.
His Royal Highness Prince Luigi Amedeo di Savoia, Duke of the Abruzzi, was a member of Italian royalty, but he was no soft, pudgy doughboy slacker of the genteel idle rich. He had eyes tightened by weather from peering into the distance and hands roughened by time spent in the wild. The Duke was missing two fingers, lost on an 1899 expedition to the North Pole. He had also led expeditions to tropical Africa to explore the legendary Mountains of the Moon in Ruwenzori and to Mount Logan in Canada.
The Duke carried an array of scientific gear on his expeditions to perform topographical, meteorological and photogrammetrical surveys. On his Alaskan expedition, the Duke brought along a brass bed, perhaps a manifestation of some immutable royal gene or, perhaps, merely for comedic relief. The Duke didn’t hang out at the castle, slouching on an embroidered sofa eating cream puffs. He made the most of the good cards life had dealt him and sought adventure for more than just the thrill. According to Robbie, the Duke of the Abruzzi was honed.
“Good work if you can get it,” Rob would say.
The Duke set out for K2 in 1909 with 262 waterproofed and meticulously prepackaged porter loads for the final leg of the journey to base camp – minus the brass bed. K2 was serious business and besides, the drafts allowed by a raised bedstead made it impossible to stay warm.
His Royal Highness brought along over 450 pounds of small change, budgeted for hiring and paying local Balti porters the most generous consideration of one rupee per day. The Duke’s expedition would become the model for all future ventures into the Karakoram and Himalayan ranges.
The expedition’s main camp was established at the base of K2’s southern faces at the head of the Godwin-Austen Glacier. After several days on the southeast ridge, the Duke was forced to call off the attempt at 19,685 feet. Although he had set a personal altitude record, he was still nearly two miles below the summit.
The party then directed its efforts around the western base of the peak. Ascending what he dubbed the Savoia Glacier, after his home province, the Duke and his team topped the Savoia Pass at 21,870 feet. Upon reaching the crest of the pass, no acceptable route could be found through the pinnacles, rock towers and massive cornices to the Great Mountain’s upper slopes.
“As a reward of his labors, what the duke thus saw utterly annihilated the hopes with which he had begun,” Filippo de Filippi, the expedition geographer, would later record. “The excursion to the westward side of K2 had not revealed any feasible way of ascent.
The Duke never made it to top of K2 and, following his 1909 expedition, he never returned to the Karakoram. But in the dreaming and planning of K2 adventures, his spirit has remained.
W.A., or Grandpa Slater to my brothers and me, went to live with his Grandpaps Hannah when he was eight. According to Dad, the young boy and his war hero grandpap lived a rather odd life together, which no doubt contributed to their respective unique personality quirks. Grandpaps was known for smoking Mail Pouch chewing tobacco in his pipe. One of W.A.’s favorite foods was stale popcorn in a bowl covered with tomato juice. “A delicacy,” Grandpa Slater would tell us.
Dad’s mom, our Grandma Slater, was a quintessential grandmother. There were always large jars of homemade sugar and oatmeal cookies waiting when we arrived for a visit. Surreptitiously, with an irreverent twinkle in her eye, she would let us steal “just one more” before dinner, as long as we didn’t tell Mom or Dad.
In 1929, another royal, the Duke of Spoleto, led an expedition of scientific exploration to K2 and the Karakoram area. In 1937, Brits Eric Shipton, Michael Spender, Harold Tilman and seven Sherpas explored K2’s Northern Flank. The next year, an American expedition including Bill House ascended what is now called House’s Chimney. House, and Wyoming’s most famous climber, Paul Pedzoldt, the founder of NOLS and Rob’s first real climbing mentor, reached an altitude of nearly 26,000 feet. In 1939, Fritz Wiessner’s American expedition succeeded in establishing nine high altitude camps on the mountain’s southeast ridge, now known as the Abruzzi Ridge in honor of the Duke. Wiessner and Sherpa Pasang Dawa Lama reached the height of over 25,000 feet without oxygen. On the way down, Dudley Wolfe and three Sherpas were lost, becoming K2’s first four victims.
The summer Robbie and I were 16, Dad took us with him to visit his