David Harrah

DAVID HARRAH The Philosopher Who Conquered Mountains While growing up in Seattle, David Harrah began outings into the Cascade and Olympic mountains of Washington at age 9, in 1935. Once he had shown serious interest in climbing, his father Edward gave him Whymper's 1871 classic Scrambles Amongst the Alps. While taking Whymper's admonitions about the perils of climbing to heart, Harrah aspired to demanding climbs. Harrah graduated through the Seattle Mountaineer climbing courses, and at the age of 15, he narrowly escaped a fatal fall by grabbing a juniper bush in mid-flight down a steep slope. Besides honing his rock climbing and mountaineering skills as a teenager, Harrah was on the track team and excelled academically at the private college prep school Lakeside in Seattle, where he graduated at the top of his high school class. After high school, he volunteered to join the U.S. Army, where he graduated from the United States Army Officer Candidate School as a commissioned officer. After his tour of duty in Europe immediately following the end of World War 2, he enrolled at Stanford University, where his two older sisters Pamela and Alexandra attended. Besides Stanford's academic excellence, he was attracted to Stanford's relative proximity to some great places for rock climbing and mountaineering, particularly Yosemite's vast opportunities. In addition, he discovered The Stanford Alpine Club, which had been recently founded in 1946, and which became one of America's prominent college climbing clubs. Although Harrah was very strong in mathematics, he decided not to pursue engineering as a major when he noticed that his classmates who majored in engineering, during the pre-calculator days, often had to spend time on weekends catching up on problem sets and other assignments which required significant time making calculations to complete projects. After completing his introductory philosophy classes, he decided to pursue philosophy as his major. Besides going to some Stanford football games, he spent many of his weekends at Stanford going with other members of the Stanford Alpine Club to the Sierra Nevada mountains, where he and his climbing buddies completed numerous challenging climbs. His first Yosemite climb was an early ascent of the Washington Column Direct Route, a long, strenuous, fifteen pitch climb involving intricate route-finding problems, which was the type of challenge Harrah loved. Earlier he had successfully climbed a new route up the 5000-foot high, immense north face of Mt. Johannesberg in the Washington Cascades, which was a multi-day ascent. Harrah particularly loved the challenges of new route finding on such climbs. Harrah quickly was recognized for his leadership skills, mountaineering knowledge, and he became vice-president of the Stanford Alpine Club early, followed by president of the club during his junior and senior years at Stanford. In addition to serious climbing in the Sierra Nevada mountains, some of his club mates rappelled down Hoover Tower in the dark of night, painting giant King Kong footprints going up the tower one year and subsequently painting giant King Kong footprints going down the tower the following year. As a junior at Stanford, Harrah was contacted by current and former members of Harvard's mountaineering club, Austen Riggs, George Bell, Graham Matthews, and Jim Maxwell, along with another Stanford Alpine Club member Charles "Chuck" Crush, to join the Harvard Andean Expedition in 1950. Their goal was to successfully climb the highest unclimbed peak in the New World, Mount Yerupaja, a 21,768-foot peak in Peru, which locals called "El Carnicero" - The Butcher. This was the kind of extraordinary challenge that Harrah had been longing for, after honing his skills in Yosemite and elsewhere during his Stanford days. After months of preparation, the team flew to Lima, Peru, drove to the remote indian village of Chiquian, at an elevation of 13,199 feet, and made final preparations for their climb, including finding mules and hiring mule guides, over several days. Finally, the mountaineering team, including John Sack, the author of the book "The Butcher, The Ascent of Yerupaja", arrived at a suitable site they established as Base Camp, at 13,400 feet elevation. The climbers reached the first glacier of their trek on July 13, followed by establishing Col Camp. After multiple attempts George Bell and Harrah first established High Camp on the mountain, following a route up the mountain sketched out by Harrah earlier, on July 22. At High Camp, there was only enough space for one tent, limiting the number of climbers there overnight. Due to weather conditions, illnesses, and fatigue, climbers would return down to Col Camp and some would head to High Camp later. Although High Camp was located only 400 feet below the summit ridge of Yerupaja, it would be more than a week before a final attempt to reach the summit was made. Only Harrah and Jim Maxwell had the strength and will to make the final attempt, and on that day they reached the summit, conquering the highest unclimbed peak in the New World. Then, after resting at the summit and taking some photos, the real drama began. As described in the book "The Stanford Alpine Club" by John Rawlings, "Down-climbing from the top of Yerupaja in the Peruvian Andes on 31 July 1950, Stanford junior Dave Harrah joined his rope mate Jim Maxwell at a belay platform on the fantastically corniced summit ridge. Maxwell prepared to take a few photos. Just then a section of ice broke under Harrah and he fell the full 120-foot length of the rope that connected them and that had a moment before lain neatly coiled in a pile at their feet Harrah wrote of himself in the third person: He fell free about fifty feet and then hit nothing worse than seventy-five-degree ice. Aware of being battered by falling ice blocks, he realized vaguely that this was going to result in two deaths [To Maxwell he shouted] "We're in for it!". But with instant adrenaline, Maxwell grabbed his ice axe, jammed it deep into the ice, and hung on for dear life. After bouncing at the end of the rope, Harrah realized that he had survived and now had to slowly climb back up to join Maxwell, despite serious pain from potentially broken ribs. After reaching Maxwell, Harrah wanted to get off the cornices on the summit ridge and down the mountain as soon as they could to nearest camp. It was getting dangerously late in the afternoon as they were descending, but they could not descend too quickly without risking a fatal fall off the mountain. As darkness came, Harrah and Maxwell realized that they could not safely reach High Camp, so they dug a small cave inside a crevasse high on the mountain to escape subzero nighttime temperatures and wind chill that would have killed them. Fortunately, Harrah had packed a candle and some matches for an emergency such as this, which they used to keep their hands and feet from freezing throughout the night. Despite this, their toes developed very serious frostbite during the night, which created a medical emergency, since frostbite can lead to permanent tissue damage and gangrene, which can require amputation of toes or even feet. After spending the night inside that tiny cave in the crevasse, they were able to make it down to High Camp that next day, where they immediately had some lukewarm water to drink, some apricots, and chocolate to eat, then immediately went to sleep. They finally were able to make it down to Col Camp, where they met their greatly relieved climbing companions. Harrah then insisted that he be rushed first on foot, then by mule, then by vehicle to the hospital in Lima, since he knew at least his toes, and possibly feet, needed to be amputated. In the end, Harrah lost his toes at that hospital, and when he returned to Seattle to meet his family, some reporters met him as he got off the plane to interview him about his ordeal. Besides "The Butcher", this climb was chronicled in the MNTNFILM documentary short film "The First Ascent of Yerupaja" by Matthew Roddy and Dave Harrah, as well as in articles in Time Magazine and The Saturday Evening Post. Following his recovery from this expedition, Harrah went on to graduate from Stanford with a B.A. in Philosophy the following year, followed by a PhD in Philosophy from Yale. While at Yale, a friend of his introduced him to Rita Giese, who had recently transferred from Stanford. Like Harrah, Rita Giese had grown up in Seattle, loved hiking, and had joined the Stanford Alpine Club after Harrah had graduated. The chemistry between them was instant, and they got married in August, 1955, moved to Riverside, California, where Harrah had been hired as a Philosophy professor at University of California, Riverside. Harrah taught "Introduction to Philosophy", "Introduction to Logic", and more advanced logic courses to students from the fifties through the eighties. Harrah specialized in logic of communication, wrote a key book in this field "Communication: A Logical Model", as well as many logic journal articles in this field, and was often asked by editors of these logic journals to review other authors' articles prior to acceptance for publication. On weekends and summer vacations, Harrah often went hiking with his family and sometimes went rock climbing with friends, as well as teaching Leadership Training classes in the Sierra Club for new rock-climbing instructors. On occasion he was asked to participate in mountaineering rescues in California as well. On one hiking trip in southern California, he experienced severe pain from what turned out to be very serious food poisoning which prevented him from walking further, and he had to be rescued via helicopter from the mountain and then rushed to a hospital, which saved his life. Harrah's two sons, Shane and Mark, both inherited his attraction for heights Shane as a hang glider pilot during the 1970s when hang gliding was a new sport, and Mark as a paraglider pilot during the 1990s through present. Besides hiking and mountaineering, Harrah was an ardent long-distance jogger for decades, and he completed many marathons and ultramarathons on weekends. He finally had to give up long distance jogging after he collapsed during the LA marathon in his sixties, after his heart went into fibrillation. Once again, a hospital saved his life after he pushed his body to the limit. After escaping death on numerous occasions, he finally succumbed to cancer on August 16, 2022 in Studio City, CA, at the age of 95. Besides preparing for various contingencies during life , which preventing him from death on various occasions, Professor Harrah gave one last piece of advice to his sons Shane and Mark, his granddaughter Christina, and his daughters-in-law Ning Xiao and Anna Simeonova: Be lucky.