Robert Bates (mountaineer)

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.

Bates was born in Philadelphia and was the son of William Bates, a classical scholar at the University of Pennsylvania. He briefly attended the William Penn Charter School, and then Phillips Exeter Academy. He attended 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.

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 enlisted the aid of the pilot Robert Reeve to fly them to the mountain, but when they landed on the Walsh Glacier the aeroplane sank into the unexpectedly soft snow. After they had spent five days digging it out Reeve departed, warning Bates and Washburn that he would not be able to return to collect them as planned and that they would have to walk back to civilization. The pair climbed Mount Lucania, and the nearby Mount Steele, and were then faced with a 100-mile (160 km) 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. Flooded rivers forced them to detour many miles out of their way, and they had eventually walked an estimated 156 miles by the time they reached Burwash Landing, 32 days after arriving on the glacier. The two men lost around twenty pounds each during the walk out.

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