Nicholas Harvey Vanderbilt

ID: I623626

• Name: Nicholas Harvey VANDERBILT
• Sex: M
• Birth: 1958
• Death: 1984 in Canada
• Father: Alfred Gwynne VANDERBILT , II, Yachtsman\Explorer b: 22 SEP 1912 in London, Middlesex, England
• Mother: Living HARVEY

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Excerpted from People Magazine, full story at:

http://people.com/archive/a-vanderbilt-heir-dies-in-a-second-attemp...

Friends remember that Nicholas Vanderbilt was apprehensive about his climbing vacation in the Canadian Rockies, but not unduly so. Six years earlier Vanderbilt, 25, and his climbing partner, Francis Gledhill Jr., 29, a data processor at the University of California at Berkeley, had attempted to scale 12,972-foot Mount Robson, the Monarch of the Rockies, only to retreat when the weather turned foul.

Last month, when the two Harvard graduates set out again to conquer the highest mountain in the Canadian Rockies, the weather was perfect, their equipment brand new. They set out at 5:30 a.m. on August 21, climbing all day on the rock and ice of the Wishbone Ridge on the mountain’s west flank. After nightfall pinpricks of light from their helmet lamps were spotted about 2,000 feet below the summit. Next day Vanderbilt and Gledhill were seen near the same place. The following afternoon bad weather moved in, cloaking the mountain in cloud and dropping a six-inch blanket of snow. When the climbers failed to return as scheduled, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police launched a helicopter search-and-rescue operation. The Mounties were soon joined by a private team of volunteer climbers, partly funded by Vanderbilt’s father, multimillionaire racehorse owner Alfred Vanderbilt, 72.

For a while Jean Harvey Vanderbilt, 47, divorced from Nicholas’ father since 1975, joined the search party, hovering above the forbidding mountain in a Mountie helicopter, scanning the rocks below for some sign of her son. The aerial search was suspended a week later without finding any trace of the missing duo. Vanderbilt’s diary, containing a record of the fateful expedition, was recovered from a shelter at 8,400 feet on the mountain.

From his diary:

August 18 - In the hut at Mount Robson. A seven-hour climb up 5,000 feet from Kinney Lake. With a late start yesterday, we walked in there the night before, my nervousness subsiding as we had to talk with the other people in the campground. One fellow, a Quebecois from Montreal, told us how terrible the snow and rock was and what a bad idea it was to climb—not what I needed to hear.

August 20 - Lunch is two bits of jerky, three slices of cheese and peanut butter and a cup of soup. Francis says we are more likely to get bedsores than climbing injuries….By 9 this evening, the sky is clear and we are planning to go tomorrow.