Gunnar Naslund, 1950 – 1982

Author: John E. Duggan. Climb Year: 1982. Publication Year: 1983.

GUNNAR NASLUND

1950-1982

On August 4, 1982, Gunnar Naslund, a four-year member of the American Alpine Club, lost his life when he was struck by a collapsing cornice as he led a rope attempting the first ascent of Needle Mountain in Alaska’s remote Granite Range.

Gunnar located in Anchorage after his 1975 graduation from Marquette Law School in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. His attraction to Alaska’s mountain wilderness quickly turned to unfailing devotion when the climbing bug bit and he became an inveterate mountaineer and explorer almost from the start. After several years of sporadic legal employment punctuated by longer and longer mountaineering sabbaticals, he largely abandoned the law for the mountains. He organized Wrangell-St. Elias Mountaineering, a mountain guiding business, and taught mountaineering courses both privately and through a local university.

Whether teaching, guiding, or just climbing, Gunnar’s star always shone brightest in the mountains of Alaska. We shared a 68-day Denali epic in 1977. That same year, we were unsuccessful in attempting a winter attempt of Mount Sanford (Gunnar returned twice more in later years before finally reaching that 16,000-foot summit), and were “earthquaked” off the very top of Bashful Peak in the Chugach Range. Subsequently, Gunnar guided four successful Denali expeditions by three different and progressively more difficult routes. He also climbed on Hunter and Foraker in the Alaska Range, Bona, Churchill, Drum, Blackburn, University, and many other peaks, named and unnamed in the Wrangells, Hesperus in the Revelation Range, Newton and St. Elias in the St. Elias Range and skiied 350 miles across the Bagley Icefield in the spring of 1981 (see A.A.J., 1982, page 139).

Gunnar visited many of the world’s other great mountain ranges. On his first visit to South America, he made ascents in the Central Andes of Bolivia and Peru. He also trekked and climbed in the Himalayas of Nepal and India. On his last visit to South America he climbed alone in the Cordillera Darwin of Tierra del Fuego after he missed shipping out to Antarctica by only one day. He next joined an Argentine expedition and with another climber made the fourth ascent of the beautiful Patagonian granite spire, Aguja Poincenot (see A.A.J., 1982, page 195). On the day I learned of his death, I had just completed our joint application for a permit to climb a remote 24,000-foot peak in Nepal next year.

A self-effacing “snow cave philosopher”, Gunnar spoke little of his mountaineering adventures and often made light of the attendant difficulties. His pack was never too full for one more item of group gear and he was always the first one out to shovel snow from the tent during a storm.

When I stood on the summit ridge of Needle Mountain the week following the accident and watched his brother, Eric, cut the rope and my friend’s body slide into a crevasse on an unnamed glacier below as he had once requested, I found, at least for myself, the answer to the perennial question, “Why do you climb mountains?”—For the good company.

Here’s to you my Ramblin’ Boy

May all your ramblin’ bring you joy

He left me here to ramble on

My ramblin’ pal is dead and gone

If when we die we go somewhere

I bet you a dollar he’s ramblin’ there

Ramblin’ Boy by Tom Paxton

John E. Duggan