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Although I am not quite sure that author and
climber David Roberts makes a clear distinction
between a route through Titcomb Valley for the
failed attempt of the peak on the 14th, and the
route of the successful climb on the 15th through
Indian Basin, he does determine that the peak
climbed was indeed Fremont Peak.
And this based solely on his read of the narrative
descriptions.
The photograph, from the book, shows the author on
the summit of Fremont Peak, Fremont Glacier
below.
Frémont: "I sprang upon the summit,
and another step would have precipitated me to an
immense snow field five hundred feet
below.
 David
Roberts
A Newer World
left: Author on Fremont
Peak, Fremont Glacier below. From Book.
excerpts page 26-49
p26: The best guess of modern historians as
to where Frémont entered the Wind Rivers is
at Boulder Lake...
p27: Ten miles in, the trail skirts Seneca
Lake. The odds are good that Frémont's party
passed by here, for it lies on the direct route to
Titcomb Basin, southeast of Fremont Peak...The
evening of August 13, on the north side of a
sizable lake with a rocky island in the middle of
it, the team prepared for a second bivouac. Island
Lake, as Frémont named the site of their
nocturnal vigil, is the first point on the party's
mountain itinerary where the modern traveler can be
sure of walking in their 1842 footprints. The lake
lies close to timberline, at 10,346 feet-3,400 feet
of attitude and three miles as the hawk soars
beneath the summit of Fremont Peak...On a broad
flat rock, the men stretched their weary bones in
hopes of sleep. They had nothing to eat, and not
even their coats to cover themselves...
p43: Stiff and hungry after their bedrock
bivouac at timberline, the dozen-odd men in the
advance party (neither Frémont nor Preuss
gives the exact number) set out early on the
morning of August 14 to climb the peak. Carson,
forgiven by his commander for the fault of walking
too fast the day before, was put in the lead once
more. The mountain man guided the party out of the
valley that led to the upper lakes and, as
Frémont would write, "took to the ridges
again; which we found extremely broken, and where
we were again involved among precipices."
Soon all semblance of an orderly ascent
disintegrated; the mountaineers ran into a series
of permanent snowfields...The climb, for which
Frémont had originally allotted only two
days from Boulder Lake all the way to the top and
back, was already in its third day; though the
lieutenant never mentions the dozen men left
guarding camp on the fringe of the range, they must
have been growing anxious...
p45: So the grand alpine campaign of August
14 degenerated into something like farce-though in
all truth the party was lucky not to sustain a
serious injury during its every-man,for-himself
assault. Severally the climbers stumbled back to
Island Lake; Preuss found himself "quite exhausted"
on reaching treeline...But the eternally stubborn
Frémont had not yet thrown in the towel.
Even before regaining Island Lake, he had sent his
favorite man, Basil Lajeunesse, off on a Herculean
errand: to return all the way to the Camp of the
Mules and bring back blankets, food, and mounts,
preferably before nightfall. The next morning,
altitude-sick or not, the lieutenant would lead a
second attempt on the mountain of his
dreams.
p46: From Island Lake, most hikers follow
the trail north into Titcomb Basin, where three
turquoise lakes strung end-to-end fill a craggy
chasm: on the right, the west face of Fremont Peak
rises more than 3,000 feet in less than a mile. A
careful reading of Preuss suggests, however, that
on August 15 the climbers veered east, climbing to
a high cirque now called Indian Basin. Gaining this
cirque, the team would have stood a mile and a half
directly south of Fremont Peak...Directly north,
Fremont Peak dominates the basin. The southwest
shoulder, self-evidently the route by which to
climb the mountain, rises in a single, clean sweep
from lower left to the sharp summit...
p.47: Frémont had learned his lesson
from the chaos of the preceding day. Now the six
men climbed methodically upward together. By late
morning, they were among the cliffs and ledges of
the southwest shoulder. The party traveled light,
"having divested ourselves of every unnecessary
encumbrance." Frémont insisted that the six
men stick together, and that whenever someone got
winded, the whole team stop for a breather. Among
the cliffs, the lieutenant donned a light pair of
leather moccasins, "as now the use of our toes
became necessary to a further advance." He was
pleased to discover that "with the exception of a
slight disposition to headache, I felt no remains
of yesterday's illness."
For the modern mountaineer, the southwest
shoulder of Fremont Peak is a straightforward
scramble. Small cliffs bar the way here and there,
but they are easily turned. So vaguely defined is
the broad crest of the ridge that perhaps half a
dozen different lines offer nontechnical routes to
the summit. But for the nervy explorers in 1842,
this high waste of rock and snow teemed with
terrors none of them had previously
countenanced.
p.47: Frémont's report is full of
harrowing obstacles that the modern climber is hard
put to locate: "a sort of comb of the mountain,
which stood against the wall like a buttress"; an
overhang that had to be circumvented; "a vertical
precipice of several hundred feet"; and what one
would call today the crux of the route, a crack
that Frémont conquered only by "putting
hands and feet in the crevices between the
blocks."
Sometime after 1 Pm., as Frémont
later wrote, "I sprang upon the summit, and another
step would have precipitated me into an immense
snow field five hundred feet below." As he had
hoped and schemed, the lieutenant became the first
human being to set foot on what he believed to be
the apex of the Rocky Mountains. So precarious did
Frémont find the summit block ("which it
seemed a breath would hurl into the abyss below")
that he allowed his partners to ascend it only one
at a time. In turn, Charles Preuss, Basil
Lajeunesse, Johnny Janisse, Clement Lambert, and
the shadowy Descoteaux clambered up to the highest
point.
 p48:
Frémont unfurled his American flag,
which he would later give to Jessie as a memento of
his conquest. The men fired off pistols and shouted
"hurrah" several times. Then they settled down to
make observations with the compass, while they
stared at the Tetons in the northwest, the endless
plains far to the east: "Around us the whole scene
had one main striking feature, which was that of
terrible convulsion."
p49:
Fremont Peak, it turns out, ranks only third
in height in Wyoming, after Gannett and the Grand
Teton. It does not come close to being the highest
peak in the American Rockies, which the Hayden
Survey would prove to be Colorado's Mount Elbert,
at 14,431 feet. In Colorado alone, there are 126
summits higher than Fremont Peak.
Nonetheless, for its time, Frémont's
ascent was a bold feat of exploration, the hardest
climb yet performed by Americans in the West. His
conquest on August 15, 1842, must have seemed to
Frémont a mere youthful harbinger of a
glorious career to come. Yet in a sense, he would
never surpass that moment of unalloyed triumph.
Never again would he reach a pinnacle of
accomplishment with quite so untroubled a spirit,
so blithely beyond the reach of critics and
second-guessers.
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The ultimate curse of being a
national hero
is that once the fires of acclaim go out,
only the ashes of criticism remain.
This was the fate of John Charles
Frémont,
for he climbed the peaks of glory to
endure the deserts of despair.
Ferol Egan,
Frémont: Explorer for a Restless
Nation
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Frémont Peak--the whole story, with
other opinions.
