Mt. Rainier Legend Dee Molenaar Was the Last ‘Brother of the Rope’
In early August 1953, the American Karakoram Expedition was hunkered at more than 25,200 feet on the Abruzzi Spur of K2, the highest unclimbed mountain in the world at the time. They needed only a window of clear weather to launch their historic summit bid. Instead they got snow and punishing winds, for ten days running. In those pioneering days of high-altitude mountaineering, no party had ever stayed so long at such a height.
As the seven other climbers waited and worried and schemed, Dee Molenaar painted. A 35-year-old artist and Mt. Rainier summit guide, Molenaar always carried a box of watercolors with him in the mountains. Now, his back to the tent’s pounding canvas, he painted two loving portraits of the mountain on which he and his friends were stormbound. The summit was tantalizingly close, but outside the tent’s thin shelter the climbers could see nothing but clouds and blowing snow, so Molenaar worked from memory. The water he used to wet his brushes was an extravagance at such altitude, where fuel for melting snow was in short supply, and Molenaar’s companions made him drink the gritty pigmented water when he finished his artwork. The watercolors—a dreamy view from base camp, and another of the team’s Camp VII, both in shades of white and pastel browns—are the highest paintings ever made, though just a colorful footnote in the most storied expedition in American mountaineering.
As the team waited high on the shoulder of K2, 26-year-old Art Gilkey developed blood clots in his calf. Team leader Charlie Houston, a medical doctor, examined him and told the others that when the clots reached Gilkey’s lungs, as they almost certainly would, Gilkey would die.
Though they knew there was very little hope for Gilkey, all of them committed themselves to the impossible task of bringing him down the world’s second-highest mountain. When the storm cleared, they wrapped Gilkey in a sleeping bag and tattered tent, put his feet into a rucksack and started down. Toward the end of the day, four of the party were roped in two-man teams, and Pete Schoening was preparing to lower Gilkey with a line wrapped around the handle of his ice axe, which he’d thrust into the snow behind a small boulder to use as an anchor. Molenaar had taken a rope from Gilkey and tied it around his waist.
Then a man slipped, pulling his rope partner with him. Those two swept another pair off their feet, and then Gilkey and Molenaar were caught up in the tangle. As the six men hurtled down a 60-degree slope toward a sheer drop, the seventh, Schoening, dug in his heels and prepared to be ripped from the side of the mountain. Instead, the others came to a stop, one-by-one, the rope stretched pencil-thin.
Houston was knocked out, the others shaken and bruised. Molenaar had a cracked rib and a deep slash in his hip. But somehow, all of them were alive. The climbers collected themselves, anchored Gilkey in the snow and spent a few minutes establishing an emergency camp nearby. When they came back for Gilkey he was gone, carried away in an avalanche or, some later speculated, having somehow cast himself loose to save the others from the dangerous task of rescuing him.
The team never reached the summit, but they left an indelible mark on mountaineering. The so-called miracle belay, and the brotherhood of the rope it represents, stands as shorthand for all that is good in mountaineering—teamwork, self-sacrifice, toughness, skill. In the assessment of mountaineering legend Reinhard Messner, “They failed, but they failed in the most beautiful way possible.”
The climb had a profound effect on Molenaar. “In my ‘twilight years’ I’ve come to realize how empty my life would have been if devoid of mountains and the friendships gained through climbing, skiing, and geologizing,” Molenaar wrote many years later, reflecting on a mountaineering career that would span more than 80 years. “I’ve felt a growing kinship with the observations of Thoreau and Muir, and of one religious philosopher, who wrote: ‘Rocks and mountains are a reflection of God’s solid and grand ideas.’”
Molenaar, second from left, with his brother K, head guide Clark Schurman and friends at the Mt. Rainier guide house in 1939. The quartet drove from Los Angeles in a 1928 Ford Model A. Photo courtesy of The Mountaineers.
Dee Molenaar was born in Los Angeles to Dutch immigrant parents in 1918. As teenagers, he and his brother Cornelius—known to all as “K”—explored the nearby San Gabriel Mountains and Sierra foothills. In 1939, when Molenaar was 21, the brothers and two friends drove north in a 1928 Model A Ford, drawn to the high peaks of the Pacific Northwest. When they reached Mt. Rainier, they convinced authorities to let them attempt the mountain without a guide, citing their recent summits of Mt. Shasta and Mt. Hood. Then, permits in hand, they marched down to the guide house to rent the required gear. There we met Clark Schurman, chief guide of the Rainier National Park Company, who took one look at their homemade ice axes and smooth-soled, knee-length boots and offered to rent them the needed equipment for half price.
“Somehow he seemed to take a liking to us, perhaps through empathy for our combined enthusiasm and obvious lack of much experience climbing these glacier-clad volcanoes,” Molenaar wrote in a memoir, High and Wide With a Sketchpad, excerpted in the Northwest Mountaineering Journal. “Fortunately for us, the weather did not cooperate and we were stormed off the mountain at 11,000 feet.”
