In the May 1960 issue of Summit is an article about an attempt to climb one of the “Last Great Problems” of the North Cascades. The 2,400’-vertical east face of what was at the time known as “No Name Peak,” about four miles from the Canadian border.
The story went into local lore, the only issue: it was fake news.
In fact, “No Name Peak” had a name (christened “Twin Spires” by the Beckeys in 1941 when they summited the steeples, then officially Mox Peaks by the Forest Service in 1942) and is located nine miles northwest of the location the article indicated.
Why did the authors write the piece (and go on to even more elaborate hoaxes)?
That's the focus of Katie Ives' book, Imaginary Peaks: The Riesenstein Hoax and Other Mountain Dreams. We're sharing an excerpt about the life (and afterlife) of hoaxes below.
Chapter 21: The Afterlife of Hoaxes, excepted from Imaginary Peaks: The Riesenstein Hoax and Other Mountain Dreams
By Katie Ives
By the start of the twenty-first century, the Riesenstein Hoax had retreated into obscure corners of climbing lore. But the No Name Peak Hoax had an unexpected afterlife. A strange sense of reality clung to the tale: the walls of both the mythical and actual mountains appeared equally mist-wreathed, hazardous, perhaps forever unclimbable. In 1968, Fred Beckey had attempted the east face of Southeast Mox, the No Name Peak route extolled by the imaginary characters. Afterward, he wrote to Harvey with little optimism: “No good—bad rock and limit where cracks go.”
Thirty-seven more years passed before someone managed to complete a first ascent of the real east face. Washington climber Michael Layton became intrigued by the route during a reconnaissance flight with John Scurlock. In the late summer of 2005, he and Erik Wolfe took seven hours to bushwhack the first one and three-quarters miles of the approach. Devil’s club tore at their skin, and slide alder soaked their clothing. Like Thiusoloc and Henry Custer on their 1859 North Cascades expedition, Layton and Wolfe clung to tree roots and balanced on branches to pull themselves uphill. At the base of Southeast Mox, they confronted some 2,500 feet of steepening gneiss. After a bivouac partway up the wall, they teetered across meandering ledges and overhanging stone. Loose rocks whistled through the air. Layton felt like bursting into tears. He knew the holds might vanish ahead, and their gear could rip out if he fell. By the time they reached the top of the East Face, they were out of food and nearly out of water. There was no question of continuing to the apex of the mountain. They left a joker playing card as a sign of their presence, and they began a long series of rappels toward the darkness of the tangled woods.
In the Northwest Mountaineering Journal, Layton reported encountering a button-head bolt on the east face. He assumed it had been left by Paul Williams’s expedition to No Name Peak, as if Harvey’s invented attempt had, in fact, taken place. When I contacted Layton in the summer of 2017, he said he had no idea the original Summit story was a hoax. He wasn’t the only one confused. Other climbers and Cascade chroniclers had made references to the 1959 Williams attempt as if it were simply part of the actual history of the mountain.
On the left is the map from the May 1960 article showing No Name Peak accessible by Noname Creek, east of Mount Prophet and about four miles south of the Canadian border. On the right is the actual location of “No Name Peak” (Mox Peaks).
As I continued my research, I found more and more coincidental details that seemed to corroborate the No Name Peak account attributed to “Paul Williams.” I started to feel disoriented. When I sent a copy of the May 1960 Summit article to Layton, he responded, “The topo on the hoax looks remarkably similar to the initial portion of our climb (more or less) and their high point is pretty much where we saw the old bolt.” On a 2005 CascadeClimbers.com thread about Southeast Mox, someone else posted, “The Paul Williams mentioned in the article is my father-in-law.” This real Paul Williams, I learned, had been an active Cascades climber around 1959, a founding member of Seattle Mountain Rescue, and an ardent conservationist. He’d once led an Arctic expedition to look for signs of the missing crew of John Franklin’s Northwest Passage expedition. He’d also guided a group of clients who hoped to find traces of Noah’s Ark on Mount Ararat in modern Turkey, near the borders of Iran, Azerbaijan, and Armenia (likely the same peak mentioned in Marco Polo’s tale). Like a character in a Harvey Manning tale, he was a seeker of geographic mysteries and legendary lands.
A thought kept creeping back, as implausible as I knew it was: Could the No Name Peak story have been true after all? Was the actual hoax the notion that it was a hoax? I had plenty of evidence for the plotting of a fake peak. There was Harvey Manning’s letter to Ted Beck outlining his idea for a fictitious climbing area (initially to be called “Crazy Creek Crags”). There was Harvey’s note to his father-in-law admitting that he’d borrowed the name “Paul Williams” for the author of the No Name Peak tale and explaining the ruse (“The mountain is not missing. It’s just misplaced.”). And there was Dale Cole’s earnest recollection of the practical joke, recorded in his interviews with me and in the obituary he wrote about Harvey for The Wild Cascades. Still, that post on CascadeClimbers.com and that bolt on the spire stuck in my mind, like hairline cracks in a giant edifice that threatened to bring the whole structure down.
But when I finally got in touch with Brian, the son of the real climber Paul Williams, he assured me that his father couldn’t have been involved in the No Name Peak story. This Paul Williams wasn’t from Portland, and he had no mountaineering partners with the names of the characters in the Summit article. So, whose traces were found on Southeast Mox, if they weren’t those of any actual person named Paul Williams? Were they from Beckey in 1968? Or from someone else? After I’d emailed many Cascades climbers, Alan Kearney suggested I ask Alex Bertulis, who told me that he and Scott Davis might have left that bolt when they retreated during “inclement weather” in the 1980s. I could almost hear Harvey Manning’s quiet laughter: after all these decades, his hoax had nearly become real.
“So, did I ever feel any remorse about any of this?” Dale said to me as we continued to talk about No Name Peak. “Of course not. In fact, as I look back at that time, it really provides some wonderful memories.” Compared to the pernicious false stories of our current time, Harvey’s 1960s hoaxes have an aura of innocence. The climbers lured to Harvey’s “Great Wall of No Name Peak” had an unforgettable experience of a wild and beautiful mountain. “I don’t think many people get the chance to feel that way about anything,” Layton recalled. He felt fortunate to have been a part of the history of Southeast Mox, to have been immersed in that “excitement of adventure, the beauty of such a remote area and the camaraderie of friendship.”
A year after the 2016 US presidential election, Kevin Young wrote in Bunk: The Rise of Hoaxes, Humbug, Plagiarists, Phonies, Post-Facts, and Fake News, “Today the hoax mostly traffics in pain.” During the Trump era, Americans confronted avalanches of fabricated information designed to undermine the credibility of journalism and the survival of democracy itself. False claims by then-president Donald Trump and others about widespread election fraud became a catalyst for the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol building in Washington, DC. Yet while Trump derided any realities he didn’t like as “fake news” and while right-wing conspiracy theories still surge across the internet, pro-democracy activists have also figured out ways to turn some hoaxes against their perpetrators. In 2017, Trump’s senior counselor Kellyanne Conway cited a nonexistent “massacre” by Iraqi terrorists in Bowling Green, Kentucky, to try to justify a travel ban against immigrants from seven predominantly Muslim countries. People responded with an outpouring of memes, T-shirts, songs, and mock memorials parodying the false story and demonstrating, as folklorist Timothy H. Evans observes, that at times the “lies of those in power could be mocked in a carnivalesque way.” Harvey, whose own satires were partly aimed at the destructive fallacies of dominant groups, would certainly have approved of such ingenious forms of resistance.
In 2017, I’d been surprised that some modern climbers and history writers still thought the No Name Peak story was a genuine, though error-ridden, account of an actual expedition. Now it seems plausible that there are many more Harvey Manning hoaxes tucked within the pages of obscure mountain journals. Given the success of the pranks we know about, why wouldn’t Harvey have been tempted to keep going, changing the hidden messages to suit the issues of each decade and making the riddles more elaborate and harder to solve? Maybe other authors, knowingly or unknowingly, picked up a few of his fabricated details and transformed them into accepted lore in climbing histories and guidebooks—now awaiting some diligent mountaineering detective of the future to uncover the secret fiction.
Among the many boxes of Harvey’s letters, notes, and unpublished manuscripts, I found numerous accounts of hidden ranges that blended reality, fantasy, and dreams. In one fragmentary paragraph, he wrote of a character who “was given a map by a dying prospector and followed it to a cave whose walls and floor and ceiling were glittering crystal quartz veined with eighteen-carat gold.” In the 1960 Mountaineer, Harvey had claimed that he himself had made a similar expedition to a “Peak X,” but failed to find the treasure. Was this other story a plan for an unrealized hoax? Or was it Harvey’s way of imagining a different ending, in which a mountain of incalculable desire becomes attainable? In a 1996 Backpacker interview with climbing journalist Mark Jenkins, Harvey described his “favorite dream” as “revisiting a mountain range I first dreamt of 50 years ago and have returned to regularly.” Did the inspiration for this mysterious range, seemingly older than No Name Peak or the Riesenstein, exist as a real place on Earth? Or did it merely arise from a blend of mythologies, adventure stories, and his unconscious mind?
Harvey was no longer around to answer any of these questions. If I wanted to understand more about the meanings behind such peaks, including my own, I’d have to look elsewhere—in the stories of imaginary ranges that continued to spread after his death and in the phantom geographies that still arise today.
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If you enjoyed this excerpt, you can grab Katie's book at Mountaineers Books and on Amazon.