Devils Thumb & the Diablo Traverse

“All the photographs were striking, but the one on page 147 was much, much more than that: it made my skin crawl. An aerial photo by glaciologist Maynard Miller, it showed a singularly sinister tower of ice-plastered black rock. There wasn’t a place on the entire mountain that looked safe or secure; I couldn’t imagine anyone climbing it.”

–Jon Krakauer, Eiger Dreams

At the end of the 20th century, Jon Krakauer’s seminal works, Into the Wild and Into Thin Air, propelled him to best-selling fame. The books are packed with gorgeous, insightful prose and a Himalayan-sized heap of adventure. In these two books, the landscapes of Alaska and Everest mix with humanity into an amalgam of awe, tragedy, and profundity.

Krakaeur went on to profile an array of topics, including the Latter-day Saints, Pat Tillman, and violence against women. Among modern non-fiction writers, his metaphorical altitude is hard to top.

Before success, he considered himself a “dirtbag” climber, obsessed with mountains. He made a living writing articles for Outside magazine about the arduous, eccentric world of climbing. His first collection, Eiger Dreams: Ventures Among Men and Mountains, featured essays that span the globe’s gnarly crags and its craziest mountaineers. In the final piece, Krakauer dumped biography, instead recounting an insane, personal journey to the wild.

As a child, his parents gifted him the textbook Mountaineering: Freedom of the Hills, the quintessential guide to ascending peaks. In addition to learning the minutiae of mountaineering, a specific rock sliver featured in a photograph lodged itself in Krakauer’s consciousness.

Devils Thumb (the official name carries no apostrophe, like the similarly named tower) is a towering mountain on the Alaska-Canada border. Its Tlingit name – Taalkhunaxhkʼu Shaa – means “the mountain that never flooded.”

Part of the Boundary Range, which straddles the Last Frontier’s panhandle and British Columbia, the crag punches through the Stikine Icecap like a dark appendage reaching through a hoary cemetery.

The location of Devils Thumb could define “remote.” Roads reach nowhere close. The nearest town, Petersburg on Mitkof Island, approximately 35 miles away in a straight line, requires a boat or a plane to reach. To get from this frontier settlement to Devils Thumb demands a slog across rivers, ice fields, and glaciers, an approach that can take many days.

Because of its remoteness, many of the photographs of the mountain are quite misleading.

The spire is a notable jag in the skyline from Petersburg, but it’s so far away that it might not seem notably large. The zenith’s elevation is 9,077 feet (2,767 meters), a massive rise compared to sea level just 20 miles away, but Devils Thumb isn’t famous for its relatively modest height.

The mountain includes a truly massive northwest face, standing 6,700 feet (2,042 meters) above the surrounding valley! With an average angle of 67%, the face is the biggest rock wall in North America, more than twice as tall as Yosemite’s El Capitan and five times as high as the Empire State Building.

No one has successfully climbed the northwest face, and many mountaineers consider it to be the last great challenge on the continent.

In addition to the face’s scale and its remoteness, a few other factors have kept it unclimbed. Weather is notoriously awful and fickle, leaving few windows long enough to make the ascent. Further, the rock is crumbly and prone to avalanches.

Multiple attempts have ended in death.

In 1977, a young Jon Krakauer left Colorado for a month-long sojourn to attempt the northwest face. He boated, hiked, and skied over sea and ice to the foot of the mountain, dodging crevasses and seracs. He spent days in a tent, waiting out gales and whiteout blizzards, eating through his rations, hoping a planned airplane drop would bring him additional stores. During short weather windows, he perilously scaled ice veins up the northwest face. In spots, his crampons and ice axes held to rime less than an inch thick.

In the end, he couldn’t ascend the wall, but he managed to reach the peak via the southeast facade.

To date, Dieter Klose’s 1982 attempt, which reached halfway up the northwest face, is the closest to triumph.

Krakauer made the first solo ascent of Devils Thumb, but he wasn’t the first to set foot on its summit.

His fascination with the crag arrived thanks to the exploits of Fred Beckey, one of North America’s most legendary mountaineers. In 1946, he, Clifford Schmidtke, and Bob Craig became the first humans to reach the top of Devils Thumb. Many pundits considered this climb the toughest ever undertaken in North America until then, considering its technical difficulty, remoteness, and weather issues.

Beckey made over 1,000 first ascents during an astounding career, the first of which came in 1939 on Mount Despair in the North Cascades when he was just 16 years old.

As the craggy skyline indicates, the summit proper of Devils Thumb is not the only interesting spindle in the region. The surrounding massif – the larger compound of peaks connected to it – is a veritable Halloween playground. In 2010, climbers Colin Haley and Mikey Schaefer spent three days traversing the entire ridge. They dubbed the sequence the Diablo Traverse.

The subpeaks of the Diablo Traverse received names as fantastic as Devils Thumb.

Above the valley, long known as the Witches Cauldron, stand West and East Witches Tits and West and East Cat’s Ears. Why some features take a possessive and others an adjectival is anyone’s guess.

I would have included these imaginative names in this article’s title, but I knew I would immediately lose a segment of the more modest audience.

My instincts seemed correct on that assessment when I rewatched The Devil’s Climb, a 2024 documentary about Alex Honnold and Tommy Caldwell’s incredible trip to Devils Thumb. The duo biked 2,500 miles from Colorado to Alaska, then became the first people to complete the Diablo Traverse in a single day. But as you can see in the screenshot above, the editors went the safe route and called the first two peaks “The Witches,” despite all the literature pointing to Witches Tits. Belying the prudishness of the final cut, Honnold calls the first spire a “teat” on the way up!

The film boasts remarkable footage, and the scenery is otherworldly.

To date, only around 50 expeditions have summited Devils Thumb.

Few rare climbs have had as much influence on American mountaineering. Without Beckey’s ascent, perhaps a young Krakauer never yearns for the Thumb, altering his trajectory toward climbing and adventure writing. And without Eiger Dreams and Into the Wild (Krakauer details his trek to Devils Thumb in that book, as well), maybe Tommy Caldwell never brews up a daring jaunt from the Witches Cauldron with Alex Honnold, meaning we never see The Devil’s Climb.

And that film’s sights are so phenomenal that even the Devil himself might be stirred to love the mountains.