Everything about Robert Bates Mountaineer totally explained
Robert Hicks Bates (
January 14 1911 –
September 13 2007) was an
American mountaineer,
author and
teacher, who is best remembered for his parts in the
first ascent of
Mount Lucania and the American expeditions to
K2 in 1938 and 1953.==Early life==
Bates was born in
Philadelphia and was the son of William Bates, a classical scholar at the
University of Pennsylvania. He attended the
William Penn Charter School, and then
Harvard University from 1929 to 1935. At Harvard he was a member of the
Harvard Mountaineering Club and with
Charles Houston,
Adams Carter,
Bradford Washburn and
Terris Moore was part of the group of climbers later known as the "Harvard Five" who would push forward the standards of American mountaineering in the 1930s.
Mount Lucania
In 1937 Bates, with Bradford Washburn, made the first ascent of Mount Lucania in
Yukon, which was then the highest unclimbed mountain in
North America. It was also one of the most remote and inaccessible and had been declared "virtually impregnable". The pair climbed Mount Lucania, and the nearby
Mount Steele, and were then faced with a trek through wilderness to
Burwash Landing, without maps. They abandoned some of their food to save weight, expecting to restock at a cache left behind by an earlier expedition. However, the cache had been plundered by
bears, and Bates and Washburn survived on
mushrooms and
squirrels during the trek out.
K2
In 1937, Charles Houston invited Bates on an expedition to K2, the world's second highest mountain and still unclimbed. It was the first expedition to the mountain for nineteen years, and while the focus was on reconnaissance and assessing the feasibility of different routes, Bates was part of a group which reached within 800 m of the summit on the Abruzzi Spur, which would become the preferred route on the mountain. Bates and Houston returned to K2 with
a new expedition in 1953. The expedition failed due to bad weather and the sickening of
Art Gilkey, but was widely praised for the courage shown by the team in their unsuccessful attempt to save Gilkey. During the descent, Bates and five other climbers were involved in a near-fatal fall, saved only by the strength of
Pete Schoening, who was the last man on the rope. Bates later received the
David A. Sowles Memorial Award for his part in the attempted rescue.
Wartime and after
During the
Second World War Bates served in the
United States Army and was assigned to the Office of the
Quartermaster general, where he worked on the development of improved equipment and clothing for the army's mountain divisions.
Author
Bates was the author of several books. With Charles Houston he wrote accounts of their two K2 expeditions as
Five Miles High and
K2 - The Savage Mountain; the latter being regarded as a mountaineering classic. He also wrote
Mystery, Beauty, and Danger, a study of mountaineering literature, and
Mountain Man: The Story of Belmore Brown, the biography of an artist and explorer. His autobiography,
The Love of Mountains Is Best, was published in 1994.
Further Information
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