IN 1932, MY GRANDFATHER joined an expedition of Harvard students to the coastal mountains 600 miles northwest of Bella Coola in the Fairweather Range, on the Alaska Panhandle. The group, led by the mountaineer and photographer Bradford Washburn, intended to climb 12,726-foot Mount Crillon, one of the highest peaks in the range, and survey its environs. They had the whole summer.

My grandfather later wrote a long account of the trip, which was published in the journal of the German and Austrian Alpine Club. In style it is by turns clinical and operatic, in the manner of the day ("The coast, in its southern part, is frightfully jagged and split into bays that no seafarer would dare enter"). The expedition members arrive in June, chartering a plane to take them from Juneau to a remote bay at the base of the range, from which they begin shuttling 1,500 pounds of supplies up a glacier to a base camp near the tree line. From the beginning they are engulfed by fog and torrential rain. Throughout the summer, the weather hinders their forays into the high peaks. A clearing or two gives them a taste of the mountains' majesty and a chance to have some fun in the snowfields above their camp: "Some of us seeking special pleasure go skiing in the evenings," he writes.

But then the rain comes again, for weeks at a time. "We are totally discouraged by the dismal weather," he reports. "We cannot accomplish any surveying, nor can we begin to take our packs higher up." During their ascent a nasty storm blows in and forces them to turn back. They have no choice but to pack it in; September arrives, and a boat awaits them in the bay to take them home. My grandfather, a health nut and teetotaler, ends the account with a final observation: "Even the Indians who settled here were destroyed by the humidity, although their demise was certainly hastened by the destructive influence of vodka and whiskey."

Oh, the humidity. Of course, our setup was way more plush than my grandfather's, 75 years previous. We weren't mountaineers; we were paying clients, indulgent recreational skiers. But our window was much smaller—a week, compared with his two and a half months—and so we too got totally discouraged by the dismal weather. It may be, though, that our time amid the humidity was enlivened by the ameliorating influences of booze. During the week we had many more down days than up ones, and we drank a ton. The other guests seemed to accumulate a pile of empty beer cans wherever they went—it was like Pigpen's cloud of dirt. Our group did its best to keep pace but came up short on the final evening, the night of the solstice, when the Swede, costumed in a blue velour tracksuit and heaps of plastic novelty-shop bling, badgered his guests into a competitive round of drinking songs. We Americans realized we didn't know any—the price we paid for growing up singing along to Bruce Springsteen.

Day three was a wash: no skiing, not happening. "Here and now you could grow moss on cement, eh?" said Richard, the pilot. Instead we floated a long stretch of the Bella Coola River. We saw bald eagles everywhere but no salmon. Jim, the guide, still would not let my father row, and my father would not let it go; every ten minutes he made a bid for the oars. "You missed a feather there, Jim," he'd say. "Did I tell you I was a national champion?"

There were three boats. One was guided by Les Koroluk, a voluble local with a young Thai wife, who claimed he could tie 24 flies in an hour. The lead guide, a grave figure named Kenny Corbould, barely said a word. Occasionally he'd dip a toothbrush in the river and clean his teeth. We wondered if his mouth contained some kind of salmon attractant. All three guides were vexed by the high water and the absence of salmon, as was the Swede. "I don't know about this fishing thing," he barked, Swedily. He began threatening to hire native fishing guides, so that we could use nets. But that evening, Woody Tribe, one of the ski guides, reported that he had gone out on his own, on a pontoon raft, and hooked a 40-pounder. "When it banged into the shore, it was like an earthquake," he said. After a long fight, he lost it in the current.