'The Brotherhood of the Rope': Dee Molenaar dies at 101

A Glacier Rescue is practiced by, from left, Kurt Beam, Jim Slauson and Dee Molenaar. They are in a crevasse on Nisqually Glacier, Mount Rainier. A Glacier Rescue is practiced by, from left, Kurt Beam, Jim Slauson and Dee Molenaar. They are in a crevasse on Nisqually Glacier, Mount Rainier. Photo: Seattle Times/JR Partners, Getty Images Photo: Seattle Times/JR Partners, Getty Images Image 1 of / 3 Caption Close 'The Brotherhood of the Rope': Dee Molenaar dies at 101 1 / 3 Back to Gallery

Dee Molenaar knew and drew mountains, from 28,250-foot K2 in the Karakoram to 18,008-foot Mount St. Elias in Alaska, to his beloved Mount Rainier, which he climbed more than 50 times and chronicled in his book The Challenge of Rainier.

Molenaar, 101, passed away on Saturday. He was last survivor of "the Belay," a famous 1953 fall in which one climber's anchored ice axe held six party members high on K2, the world's second highest peak at that time unclimbed. Earlier, pinned down by a storm, Molenaar had completed the highest water color painting ever drawn.

Fellow climber/author Tom Hornbein (Everest: The West Ridge) paid tribute Tuesday to Molenaar's "unique, yodeling, inquisitive essence," adding: "Dee was a remarkable, multi-talented dreamer, mountaineer, geologist, artist/map maker, writer. The Challenge of Rainier is a classic book."

Molenaar was also an educator. A young Hearst Fellow from the flatlands of Michigan was working in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer newsroom when disaster struck a climbing party on Oregon's Mount Hood. He needed to know more about the mountain than the computer could teach him. Call Molenaar, he was told. The two spent better than an hour on the phone, with Molenaar dispensing a geological and climbing history of the mountain.

Molenaar was present for the gestation of Northwest mountaineering, in days before fancy gear and live transmissions from base camp. He would in 1946 participate in a party that made the second ascent of St. Elias, a peak of startling vertical uplift that rises more than three vertical miles above Alaska's Icy Bay.

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He would return to the world's greatest coastal mountains in 1965 as part of an expedition that put Sen. Robert F. Kennedy on the 13,944-foot summit of Mount Kennedy, a remote unclimbed peak in the Yukon named for President John F. Kennedy.

This writer's mother, Dolly Connelly, covered the climb for Sports Illustrated, and came away talking about a "quiet modest man" who feasted in grunt work and, when prodded, told fascinating stories about climbs from the Himalayas to Antarctica. Molenaar had worked years as a climbing guide on Mount Rainier, and later had a career with the U.S. Geological Survey.

Watercolors by Molenaar illustrated The Challenge of Rainier, a definitive climbing history of "The Mountain" as well as The Mountaineers' seminal instruction book, Mountaineering: The Freedom of the Hills.

Molenaar was a member of The Mountaineers for 79 years. He was already in his 70's, in 1992, when given an Honorary Mountaineers award -- other honorees, U.S. Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, and Jim Whittaker, first American atop Everest -- and pushing 100 in 2017 when honored with the Mountaineers Lifetime Achievement Award.

And "The Belay."

The 1953 American attempt on K2 climbed to above 25,000. The party was pinned down at Camp VIII by a prolonged vicious storm. While Molenaar worked at his watercolors, climbing companion Art Gilkey developed blood clots on his left calf. Before the clots moved to his lungs, Gilkey had to be evacuated. The party wrapped Gilkey in a sleeping bag and lowered him by role.

At 24,700 feet, according to an account published by The Mountaineers, the party was at the head of a steep gully. Climber Pete Schoening was lowering Gilkey toward Camp VII. One exhausted climber slipped, carrying five others toward a cliff. With his wooden ice axe ahnchored, Schoening somehow managed to hold all six climbers and stop the fall. One was knocked unconscious, three others injured.

Gilkey was anchored to the mountain, while his fellow climbers regrouped. He had vanished, possibly swept away by an avalanche, when they returned to retrieve him.

"To me that event is one of the most iconic of all Himalayan expeditions as (Dr. Charles) Houston chose to call it "The Brotherhood of the Rope," said Hornbein in an email. "Putting their lives on the line to get Gilkey off the mountain was a huge commitment. I think only Schoening and (Bob) Craig believed they could pull it off. Brotherhood don't get much more than that."

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The famous survival story from K2 bestowed on Molenaar, in Hornbein's words, "perhaps a notoriety that made him uncomfortable at times."

It also defines the best in expedition mountaineering, worth remembering at climbers walk past frozen bodies high on Mount Everest, or remembering bitter litigation among the Italian party that was first to climb K2 in 1954.

Years later, Molenaar would write to Houston: "K2 1953 was the high point of my life in so many ways and nothing will equal it."

Even his watercolors became the stuff of brotherhood.

"I think the story of Dee's expedition tent mates making him drink his used grey gritty water color water (snow melted with precious ounces of stove fuel) high on the slopes of K2 has got to be one of the most adorable mountain adventure stories ever told," said Bobby Whittaker, whose father Jim Whittaker climbed Mount Kennedy with Molenaar and Robert Kennedy.

"Half artist, half mountain man, all legend."