#8: How research works (for me)

I’ve been thinking lately about Elizabeth Knowlton, who was part of the Nanga Parbat expedition in 1932. In the end, no one reached the summit but Elizabeth wrote a fabulous book. Hold on for the contemporary aviation angle to all this, but first, here’s a picture of Elizabeth:

When I began seriously researching Allen Carpé and the 1932 Mt McKinley Cosmic Ray Expedition, an immediate problem was that there was no central archive of his papers. I found out about his life largely through the records kept by other people, especially J. Monroe Thorington who was a mountaineer long associated with the American Alpine Club (AAC). Along the way I found a reference to Allen in Rand Herron’s AAC obituary which led me to the 1932 climb on Nanga Parbat and that brought me to Elizabeth and her book on the expedition, The Naked Mountain.

And once you read about Elizabeth, you really can’t stop.

Elizabeth was brought on to what was billed as a “German American” expedition largely to deal with the English-speaking side of things. (Rand was an accomplished climber and it was through her relationship with him that she was introduced to the expedition’s leader.) She reached over 20,000 feet on the mountain but was referred to as a nonclimbing member and her primary job was to provide dispatches to the newspapers. The Naked Mountain (the title comes from the Urdu translation of Nanga Parbat), is not an expedition report in the traditional sense at all, (the AAC reviewer was a bit flummoxed by it), and it is fair to consider it the first narrative nonfiction approach to mountaineering. I bought a used copy hoping to gain some insight into Allen and hit pay dirt. Elizabeth has several pages on how she, Rand, and fellow climber Fritz Weissner reacted to the news of Allen’s death. She doesn’t just write about the accident that killed him and Ted Koven in a factual way but writes about Allen as a lost friend. She also explains how Rand, Fritz and Allen knew each other and includes Ted in that group — they all climbed together “on the cliffs along the Hudson” back home in New York.

This was the first (and pretty much only) direct link I found between Allen and Ted and explained how they came to be on their expedition together on McKinley. It’s a minor point but at the same time a major one; before Elizabeth’s book I was stuck with a vague “they both climbed in NY and likely met at some point blah blah blah” you get the idea. The Naked Mountain gave me people who knew both men and knew they were friends (as Elizabeth notes) and that was important information.

So, following a tiny lead from Rand’s obit, I found Elizabeth’s book and some crucial comments on my subject. That I also learned more about Elizabeth in the process was just icing on the cake. The sad part is that in reading The Naked Mountain, I realized that she and Rand were a couple and his death, in an accidental fall from a pyramid in Egypt on the way home, must have been devastating for her. As she later wrote, they were returning from India and left the boat for a day of sightseeing in Giza. They climbed one pyramid and he decided to try another. He ran down it, just as he did earlier. And then, this:

“A loose pebble on a sloping block, as he ran, a slip, and he fell down the side, about three hundred feet.

He was buried that afternoon in the Cemetery at Cairo.”

There is a full chapter on Rand at the end of The Naked Mountain and while Elizabeth is always circumspect about their relationship, it is obvious how she felt about him. In the book she also included an excerpt from a letter Rand sent to Kathleen, Allen’s wife, from Nanga Parbat after they learned of Allen’s death:

“Although we climbers usually don’t admit it, Herron wrote in part, “we are always more or less conscious that the strange and irresistible call of mountains is also a call toward the end of life. And for this very reason we love them all the more, and find their call more sublime…Our secret heart’s desire is that our end shall be on them…”

I got lucky with Elizabeth Knowlton; some of the trails I followed in search of more info on Allen were a total bust. I’ve long believed that casting a wide net is pretty much mandatory when researching a topic though, and none of that work is wasted. At the very least, I find out where not to look further.

I am still waiting on scans of some documents from Princeton University that belonged to one of Allen’s closest friends and might provide some further insight into earlier expeditions they went on together in Alaska. Otherwise, I am pretty comfortable that I don’t need to search for more on him; I have enough for the book I am writing. (Which includes quite a bit that is not on Allen, but circles around the expedition, cosmic rays, and mountaineering in roughly the same time period). The Last Gasp of Dying Stars (working title) is also about investigating cosmic rays and mountaineering accidents and, because of the inclusion of pilot Joe Crosson, (who flew Allen and the rest of the expedition onto McKinley), aviation accident investigation in the ‘20s and ‘30s as well. (Both Joe’s sister and his best friend were killed in crashes in that era.)

If you are an investigator you must also be a researcher; the two go hand-in-hand. It can take me six months or more to research a contemporary aircraft accident or aviation company. There are FOIAs to submit to the FAA, many online databases to review and usually a large NTSB accident docket to read. (Some of those can be a thousand pages on their own.) There are also folks to reach out to and hopefully engage in conversation.

When I started researching the 2021 Truckee accident, it seemed straightforward, but the further I got away from the events in the cockpit, and learned about the company’s certification process with the FAA, the more complex the research became. It was supposed to be an article submitted to an aviation industry publication but then the lawsuit happened, and I feel more comfortable publishing myself right now, so it ended up here on substack. (I have developed serious trust issues since that lawsuit.) (You would, too.) (I can not believe what my life is like right now.) (FYI paid subscriptions help with the legal bills, and are much appreciated.)

But I digress.

Right now, for my second book project, (it’s been a struggle getting an agent with the Mt McKinley Expedition book; I’m trying something different in the hopes that as it is more topical, it will get swifter interest), I am wading through about a thousand pages of FAA entries in a national tracking system on four companies that were all part of one air group. It’s time consuming but important research and I am already seeing patterns that will influence my writing. I think Elizabeth Knowlton, who knew the value of getting all your facts correct, would understand how I’m occupying my days at the moment.

I’m so glad I read her book and yes, there will be mention of her in mine.

The 1932 Nanga Parbat Expedition. Elizabeth is in the center, standing. Rand is next to her with the scarf. I really wish someone would write a book about her!