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Interview with Jim Tabor ’70
author of Forever on the Mountain 

Jim Tabor stopped by Vermont Quarterly’s editorial office on July 11 for a conversation with editor Tom Weaver. The focus was Tabor’s recently published book, Forever on the Mountain (W.W. Norton), which explores the fate of a 1967 expedition on Alaska’s Mount McKinley that claimed the lives of seven climbers. The author also talked about his roots at UVM as a fiction writer, his career as an outdoor journalist, and his days as a street cop in Washington, D.C. Excerpts from the interview follow.

VQ: What drew you to UVM as an undergraduate?

JT: I was born and raised in Virginia, then later moved to West Hartford, Connecticut and went to one of the public high schools there. When it came time to go to college, skiing was really, really important. I wasn’t a good enough skier to go anywhere and attract a scholarship, but thought maybe I had a shot at making it on the ski team as a walk-on. I applied at Colorado and Vermont, and got accepted at both places. UVM had, and I think still has, a wonderful reputation as a public ivy. It was just a really highly regarded school in 1966.

I came up and quickly learned that I wasn’t going to be a walk-on ski team racer. Oh! My skills were just so far below where the other folks were.

VQ: Alpine skier?

JT: Alpine, right. Nonetheless, after I made that first semester freshman adjustment, I really, really loved it here. Everything about it. Not only the access to skiing, just the beauty of the campus, and the beauty of the state. Having come from a suburban Washington, D.C., environment when I was younger, and then suburban West Hartford, I had never been exposed to a place like this.

Early on at UVM, I met a guy who would become a writing mentor for me, T. Alan Broughton. He really helped me find my first way as a writer. He was at the time just emerging as a poet and a novelist in his own right and continued to flourish that way. Throughout all the different kinds of writing I’ve done, we’ve stayed in touch. I’ve always felt like I’ve wanted him to be proud of me. If it hadn’t been for Alan Broughton and his creative writing classes and his support and mentoring back in ’68 and ’69, I don’t think I would have had the courage and the faith in myself to embark on a life career as a writer.

VQ: I see you later earned a master of fine arts at Johns Hopkins. You were pretty committed to a fiction-writing track at that point?

JT: I definitely was. I did a senior honors thesis here, which was a collection of short stories. That helped me graduate as the outstanding English major for 1970, which was pretty cool.  I had, indeed, intended to be a fiction writer. I went down to Johns Hopkins to study with John Barth, a famous novelist at the time. He’d just started teaching at Hopkins and accepted me and about six other people into his fiction-writing workshop. I worked with him for a couple of years, graduated, and quickly discovered that it was really tough to make a living as a fiction writer.

I hoped to come out and maybe land a job as a creative writing teacher at some school, but it was not a good time. It was the depth of the recession and there were a lot of highly qualified people with much more experience than I had vying for those jobs.

So, I started writing non-fiction—for the Washington Post, Washingtonian Magazine, some outdoor magazines—and very quickly found that there was a lot more publishing going on in the non-fiction field than in fiction. And I found that I enjoyed doing that kind of writing, too. So I kind of slid over into that. In not too long that translated into a job offer to be a magazine editor with Ziff-Davis Publishing in New York City, which at the time, this was late seventies, was publishing more monthly magazines than any other company in the world. If there was a special interest magazine that was successful, they pretty much had it. They had a thing called the outdoor group – Adventure Travel, Backpacker, Sport Diver, The Runner, Fisherman. I was hired to be a senior editor within that group—primarily Adventure Travel and Backpacker.

VQ: I read that you brought investigative skills from law enforcement to this book project? When did you work as a policeman?

JT: When I got out of Johns Hopkins with my MFA in ’74, I must have applied for 150 teaching jobs. I had a new wife and a new baby; I needed a paycheck. The metropolitan police department in Washington, D.C., was paying significant bonuses to hire people with college degrees. I thought, what the heck, so I signed on as a police officer, worked the street for three years, became a sergeant, and eventually an instructor at the academy.

I was a street cop in D.C. from about ’74 to ’79. It exposed me to a whole different realm of experience. As a white upper-middle class kid from the suburbs, I saw a slice of life that otherwise I never would have seen. I’m really glad that I had that experience.

VQ: You’ve said that your interest in the 1967 climbing disaster on Mount McKinley began on the day you pulled Howard Snyder’s book off the shelf and it grew from there. What were the next steps to turn this interest into a book project?

JT: I read Howard’s book and I read it again. I guess because it was so one-sided, I realized there has got to be another side to the story. I found that Joe Wilcox, the much-maligned leader of the expedition, had written his own book. I read that and it was clear that Joe’s book was a defense of his leadership. Howard’s book was a pretty passionate indictment of it. So, I thought the truth is probably somewhere between these two things.

From there, the next step was to talk to a couple of survivors, Howard and Joe, make sure that they would at least speak to a writer who was going to do a book. They said they would—

VQ: Did you have any resistance on that front from people who had been through it and didn’t want to revisit painful memories?

JT: Actually, neither Joe nor Howard was very willing initially. They were both pretty resistant, Howard more so. It took a number of months of just kind of introducing myself to them, building up a relationship, and explaining to them that I was not out to rake any muck. I had no axes to grind. I really wanted to do nothing but find out the truth of the story. I think eventually they became comfortable with that and Joe said, “OK, come on out and visit. Stay as long as you want and we’ll talk.” And ultimately Howard said the same thing…

VQ: There’s an interesting term in your introduction—“forensic meteorology.” I don’t think I’ve ever heard that term.

JT: I never had either. I ran across this professional meteorologist because we were both doing work for the History Channel. The History Channel uses him to recreate weather that might have happened ten years ago, a hundred years ago, or even farther back. He was very helpful in helping me interpret the huge stacks of weather data I got from the government.

There was some debate about the severity and nature of the storm that trapped the Wilcox climbers. Being able to resolve how big, how bad that storm really was would be very important to unraveling the whole mystery.

VQ: Your book points out how McKinley is uniquely positioned for bad weather.

JT: Most non-meteorologists or non-climbers probably aren’t aware that the climate changes in density as you travel around the globe—thick at the equator, thin at the poles. That definitely has an impact on McKinley’s felt altitude. But, my gosh, McKinley’s proximity to the Arctic Circle, sheer monstrous size, then its location due east of the Bering Sea, the “birthplace of storms” as they call it—the weather there is unlike anyplace else on Earth really.

VQ: What was it like to meet Joe Wilcox and the other individuals in this story after you’d read about them and done extensive research on them. Did the image in your head jibe with reality?

JT: I’ve had that experience a lot because much of the magazine writing I did involved learning a lot about people, then going out to meet them. Both Joe and Howard were pretty much what I expected—Type A personalities. They were both precise individuals. Joe is a scientist, he’s a mathematician. Howard is a museum director. Both of them really enjoy precision a lot. There is an anecdote in the book where Howard and I are going to part for a while when I go to a copy store and he’s going to go get some lunch or something. Howard says, “OK, let’s synchronize our watches.” That kind of precision was important to him in his daily life. I would say Joe similarly.

I was most curious to find how visible, how tangible were the effects of the tragedy. Neither one of them wore those effects on their sleeves. The effects weren’t immediately tangible, but the more time I spent with them, the more apparent it became that it was there with them, deep inside.

VQ: Was some of that initial reluctance to talk just a reluctance to open up those old wounds?

JT: Definitely, both of them said that. And I think Joe was wary because he had been the subject of so much criticism over the years, much of it ill-researched and ill-informed.

Howard, I think, was wary for a different reason. He had published his book and it was not well received, particularly by the mountaineering community. There were a number of people who were critical of it because it was so one-sided. He was worried about having the whole episode dug up and having another critic come at him from that vantage point.

VQ: Tell me about your own Mount McKinley attempt.

JT: My climbing partner and I had gone to Alaska with the intent of climbing Mount Sanford, which is 16,300 feet. We wanted to recreate a ski descent that had first been performed by two famous Alaskan mountaineers and really hadn’t been done similarly since then.

We got to Alaska all equipped and all prepared to do this. But we couldn’t, for the life of us, find anybody who would fly us out into the bush to get to Sanford, which is very remote. At that time it wasn’t being done very much. We were kind of stuck, had spent thousands of dollars, planned for a year or so, but were sitting in Anchorage, basically hamstrung. So we went to the bar at the Anchorage Hilton and started tossing a few beers around and my friend, who had actually been on Everest, said he’d always wanted to climb McKinley. So, he said, “Jim, jeez, you know it’s only a couple of hours to get there, why don’t we give that a shot?”

I didn’t really understand fully what McKinley was. I knew Sanford. I said, “Yeah, sure, let’s go.” That was a very ill-advised decision. Even with my partner’s considerable climbing experience, we weren’t equipped in terms of food, in terms of fuel, really in terms of psychological preparation for what McKinley threw at us.

VQ: How far did you get?

JT: About fourteen-five (14,500 feet). One guy said that’s kind of like stubbing your toe on McKinley. We had at that time run out of toilet paper, run out of most of our fuel for our stoves, run out of a lot of our food.

VQ: Closer to home, what’s your favorite hike in Vermont?

JT: Far and away, going up the Sunset Ridge trail on Mount Mansfield. I love it. It gets you above timberline pretty quick. You have these vast rock vistas with the summit, the whole profile in view most of the time. I do that a couple of times a summer if not more. That’s the hike, hands down.

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