Missing on Mount Cleveland

In the spring of 1970, the snow at high elevations in northwest Montana was piled deep, especially on the mountains of Glacier National Park.

On the west slope of remote Mount Cleveland, Glacier’s tallest peak at 10,448 feet, park officials noted that unusually heavy accumulations in March, April and May, had left snow and ice up to 30 feet deep. For nearly six months in that spring 56 years ago, that snow on Cleveland harbored a tragedy.

The path to Cleveland

There are several ways to reach Mount Cleveland, the easiest being a trip by boat navigating the length of Upper Waterton Lake. The trip, originating in Alberta, involves crossing the U.S.-Canadian border and disembarking at the Goat Haunt ranger station, at the lake’s southern end. From there, Cleveland looms. Its imposing 4,000-foot, almost-sheer north face is described in the Climber’s Guide to Montana as “the greatest sudden piece of vertical topography in the lower 48 states.” The mountain, with its summit frequently blanketed in clouds, appears brooding and foreboding, especially in the winter months. 

On the day after Christmas in 1969, a band of intrepid college students and mountain climbers from Butte, Helena, Bozeman, and Bigfork left their families and the holidays behind and drove north to Glacier with a lofty goal — to scale Mount Cleveland via its massive north face. If conditions precluded that route, Plan B was to climb the mountain’s more accessible west slope. Either line would be a first: There was no record of anyone reaching Cleveland’s summit via the north face, and the steep, avalanche-prone mountain had likely never been summited by any route in the depth of winter.

It was a bold plan, one that had been in the making for several years. Jerry Kanzler, 18, had grown up in Columbia Falls and had climbed extensively in Glacier and elsewhere with his father and older brother before enrolling at Montana State University in Bozeman. Jim Anderson, also 18, was from Bigfork, an MSU student with a love of climbing who had twice summited Cleveland in warmer months. Mark Levitan, a 20-year-old from Helena attending MSU, had reached the top of Wyoming’s Grand Teton. The remaining two, Clare Pogreba and Ray Martin, both 22, were the eldest of the group and students at Montana Tech in Butte, where they started a mountaineering club and were regarded as the best climbers in the club.

Pat Callis, a fledgling chemistry professor at MSU in 1969, had climbed with Pogreba, Martin and Kanzler a number of times as part of Bozeman’s clan of climbers. “It was an amazing group,” he said of the Cleveland climbers in 2025. “These kids were special.” Callis, in his late 80s and now retired, said Pogreba came to his office in 1969 and asked him to join the Cleveland attempt. Having recently returned from another climbing trip, he’d declined. “Ironically, I told them to watch out for avalanches.”

As they made their way north to Waterton, the five students stopped to share their plan with Bob Frauson, Glacier’s district ranger in St. Mary, a no-nonsense World War II veteran and experienced climber who had served in the Army’s famed 10th Mountain Division. The ranger checked the men’s gear and issued warnings about Glacier’s unpredictable weather, the slim odds of rescue if they got in trouble, Cleveland’s reputation for avalanches and a recent storm that had left the mountain coated with ice. “I talked to them a long time about the danger,” Frauson recalled years later.

The five climbers arrived at the Waterton townsite on Dec. 27 and hired a man with a boat to ferry them and their gear up the lake to Goat Haunt. The boat driver, Alf Baker, dropped the five men off; he was the last to see them alive.

The first hint that the climbers might have found trouble came just two days later when Bud Anderson, an older brother of the Bigfork climber, flew a private plane around Cleveland to check their progress. He didn’t spot the young men. He did see tracks, maybe human, maybe mountain goat, on the mountain’s west slope. He also saw signs of a fresh avalanche near the tracks.

Two days later, Anderson, joined by a Waterton park warden, took a boat up the lake to search the area near the base of the mountain. They found only skis and snowshoes apparently cached by the climbers. One day later, searchers found an assortment of climbing and camping gear, possibly a base camp, below the mountain’s north face. Tracks believed to belong to the climbers led to the west.

 Over the ensuing six days, would-be rescuers from Glacier and Waterton, as well as expert alpine rescuers from nearby Canadian national parks and Grand Teton in Wyoming, traveled to the slopes of the remote Montana peak. They were joined by volunteer searchers, including Callis and Peter Lev, an experienced alpine guide who was teaching a mountaineering course at MSU, where his pupils included Kanzler, Anderson and Levitan. Another Bozeman searcher was Jim Kanzler, Jerry’s older brother, a skilled climber and ski patrolman at Bozeman’s Bridger Bowl. Like Callis, he had spurned an offer to join the Cleveland climb, citing work and family. 

While the early days of the search focused around a campsite near Cleveland’s north face, Callis, Lev and Jim Kanzler were dispatched to the mountain’s west slope where they soon found clear signs of potential tragedy. “It was obvious that the whole face had seen a number of avalanches — there were lots of broken slabs,” Callis recalled. “It’s just like the whole west face went.”

After several days searching, the three made a key discovery — a pack that belonged to Jim Anderson, resting in a gully. Shortly thereafter, they found other items, including Anderson’s camera. Hastily developed film showed the missing five trudging through snow toward Cleveland’s west slope.

For the next few days, searchers combed the avalanche area using long probes and a magnetometer, a device that could detect metal buried deep in snow. They found no further traces of the climbers. On Jan. 9, with more snow and cold closing in, officials from both sides of the border told family members standing vigil in Waterton that, almost two weeks after their sons and brothers were last seen, they were suspending the search. They would try again in the spring, when some of the snow on Cleveland had melted.

Giving up the search was frustrating, even for those who spent days on the flanks of the mountain. “It is almost as if they were swallowed up,” Willy Pfeister, a climber and searcher from Alberta’s Jasper National Park, told an interviewer.

Kurt Seel, a Waterton naturalist that took part in the search, offered a stark assessment of Cleveland: “That mountain doesn’t give a damn about anyone. It’s not inconquerable. It is treacherous. In the summer, the rocks roll constantly. In the wintertime, it’s the wind and snow. That mountain is alive all the time.”

Inexperience? Foolhardiness?

The story of the missing climbers and fruitless search made headlines for days across Montana and the country. Indeed, newspapers in Britain, Europe and Australia carried stories of the lost young men in far-off Montana. It also sparked rumors and speculation. One theory offered the notion that the climbers had not actually tried to climb the mountain but headed north and crossed the border into Canada to avoid the Vietnam War-era draft. 

On the streets of Columbia Falls, Kalispell and beyond, “sidewalk mountaineers” questioned the skill and judgment of the five climbers, attributing their disappearance to inexperience and foolhardiness.

Jean Kanzler seemed to accept that her youngest son was gone forever. In an interview with the Daily Inter Lake newspaper in Kalispell published as the winter search ended, she offered a stout defense of her son and the other climbers.

“This was Jerry’s thing,” she said. “This was their way. This was something Ray, Clare and Jerry have been talking about for more than two years. Always, they kept coming back to one all-consuming question: ‘When are we going to do Cleveland?’ They wanted to do a first. They knew Cleveland in the winter would be a first. They wanted to be first; this was the uppermost thought in their lives.”

The loss of her son was the second recent personal tragedy in Jean Kanzler’s family life. Her hard-charging husband, Hal, an engineer at the aluminum plant in Columbia Falls who introduced his sons to climbing and outdoor adventure in Glacier at an early age, had committed suicide just two years earlier, not long after taking a promotion and moving with his family to Butte. After his death, and shortly before the Cleveland climb, Jean Kanzler moved to Bozeman to be near her sons. 

The suspension of the search brought a small measure of closure after the difficult mission. “There are regrets, deep ones of course, but no real ones,” Jean Kanzler said. “I couldn’t live Jerry’s life.” The mother also predicted that her son’s body would be the last to be found on the unforgiving mountain. Over the winter months, she also asked a Columbia Falls cabinetmaker to construct a casket for her son.

“I didn’t want to lose my life looking for bodies.”

The hunt for the missing climbers resumed in May 1970, amid dicey conditions created by melting water, tumbling rock and snowslides. At first, the recovery effort comprised a number of volunteers, including the late George Ostrom, a legendary Flathead media personality and a longtime friend of the Kanzler family. In an interview in 2019, 50 years after the young climbers disappeared, he recalled staying only briefly on Cleveland’s west slope: “The mountain was starting to get bare when I went up there,” he said. With the meltwater and falling rock, “it was a dangerous place to be. I had four kids and didn’t want to lose my life looking for bodies.”

On May 29, searchers decided to climb to Cleveland’s summit following a route possibly taken by the missing men. In a bowl area just above a waterfall, they spotted a body with a red climbing rope still attached. It was Ray Martin. That same day, the searchers reached the body of Jim Anderson attached to a gold rope. Using photos recovered earlier from Anderson’s camera, the searchers suspected they would find Mark Levitan along the path of the gold rope, followed by Clare Pogreba. They believed Jerry Kanzler was linked by the red rope to Martin. 

With shovels, Pulaskis, and ice chippers, and later using a system that tapped water in a nearby natural pool, the recovery team used a high-pressure stream to speed the removal of debris and snow up to 25 feet deep. On July 3, the searchers reached the remaining bodies and used a helicopter to ferry them to a spot near Chief Mountain, where they were turned over to family and friends. True to his mother’s prediction, the remains of Jerry Kanzler were on the final flight. 

On July 5, 1970, the Daily Inter Lake reported the final recovery and shared the comments of Glacier Superintendent William Briggle, who, along with his counterpart in Waterton National Park, had flown in the helicopter that brought the last body off the mountain. Briggle noted the sadness of the deaths on Cleveland but defended the right of the young men to climb.

“If they insist, there is nothing we can do about it. They have the right to make that attempt,” Briggle said. As for future adventurers, “we will try to guide them in making their decisions. And we’ll tell them the story of five young men and 188 days … perhaps Mount Cleveland can speak louder than we can.”

Memorializing the lost

In the coming days and weeks, Jerry Kanzler was buried next to his father in Glacier Memorial Gardens in Kalispell. A woman sang “Climb Every Mountain” at the graveside service.

Mark Levitan was buried in Home of Peace Jewish Cemetery in Helena, with burial prayers recited in Hebrew by his grandfather, Lewis Levitan.

Clare Pogreba and Ray Martin came to their final rest in side-by-side graves in Butte’s Mountain View Cemetery. Friends at Montana Tech and others formed a fund in their honor to provide money for mountaineering rescue equipment.

After a memorial service at St. Catherine’s Catholic Church in Bigfork, the ashes of Jim Anderson were spread over Mount Cleveland, fulfilling an “if anything happens” request made to his family.The Anderson family, with support of the survivors of the other climbers, built a monument memorializing the five young men in Yellow Bay State Park, next to a small creek that trickles peacefully into Flathead Lake.

In 1976, Jim Kanzler, Terry Kennedy, and Steve Jackson became the first climbers to complete a full ascent of Mount Cleveland’s north face, propelled in large part by the 1969-1970 tragedy. Callis said he would like to have joined the climb but was out of town. He returned to Cleveland in 1970 not long after the bodies were recovered but has not been back since. Recalling the invitation to join the climb, Callis said, “I’ve often wrestled with the question of whether I would have died along with them.” 

The ill-fated Mount Cleveland climb is the subject of the book The White Death: Tragedy and Heroism in the Avalanche Zones, published in 2000. Author McKay Jenkins, a college professor who lives in Maryland, first learned of the Cleveland story in 1997 after attending a presentation by Frauson during a trip to Glacier. Working over two years, Jenkins dug into the lives of the climbers and their families to capture what he described decades later as “a really indelible story.”

In 2017, after 10 years of effort, Kennedy, a physical therapist who grew up in Columbia Falls and lived near the Kanzler family, produced another book, In Search of the Mount Cleveland Five. The book chronicles the tragedy, the 1976 successful north-face ascent and the three attempts with Jim Kanzler, who died by suicide in 2011, to finally scale the daunting north face of Glacier’s Mount Siyeh. 

The summit question

Terry Kennedy has climbed Cleveland six times by five different routes, conducting a decades-spanning personal investigation into the possible sequence of events that led to the climbers’ deaths. The official 1970 park report about the Cleveland deaths speculates that the five climbers were advancing toward the summit when they were hit by a wall of sliding snow that pushed them down to the 7,500-foot level, where the bodies were found. The official report noted that, during the winter search, a helicopter was able to reach the Cleveland’s summit and a check of the climbing register didn’t include the names of the missing men. 

After the multiple Cleveland ascents, careful study of 30-some photos taken by Jim Anderson during the climb and later images made by himself and others, Kennedy offers a different scenario: The five climbers reached the summit of the imposing mountain late in the day, likely on Dec. 30.

“I think these guys reached the summit and were killed in the dark on the way down,” Kennedy said in 2025. As for the summit register, he speculated the climbers had reached the top, were being pounded by wind and cold, and as darkness approached, chose to leave the summit quickly, forgoing the register.

The possibility that the climbers reached the summit likely offers little solace to family or friends, Kennedy admits. But claiming the first winter ascent of Cleveland holds meaning in the mountaineering world.  Reaching the top, he says, would validate the effort and dreams of the young climbers. 

While he still finds the deaths on Cleveland haunting, Kennedy says his investigation more than five decades after the climb has a practical motivation. “I decided somebody has got to do it, or otherwise the whole thing fades into nothing. It’s going to be lost to history.”

Author’s note: This article is based on newspaper accounts, park documents and a series of interviews with family members and friends of the five lost climbers between 2019 and 2025.