AMC Outdoors, January/February 2003

The mountains of British Columbia — staggering in height, draped in glaciers, and covering hundreds of miles of territory — became easily accessible in 1886. Engineers from the Canadian Pacific Railroad (CPR) had explored and mapped the ranges, looking for a way through. After years of construction, sometimes fatal to the thousands of laborers involved, trains began churning their way across the country. They brought passengers through the jagged, icy peaks of the Rockies, with elevations up to 13,000 feet, and the snowier, but less high, Selkirks to the west of that range.

The railroad did more than rush past the peaks. It built Glacier House, a room-and-board establishment high in the Selkirks whose primary purpose was to eliminate the need to haul dining cars through the treacherous passes, but whose host was "eager to encourage mountaineering, to accompany the climber, and to add to the number of possible expeditions."

Indeed, CPR was on to something. The new sport of mountaineering — which AMC President Charles Fay described as "the noblest form of sport in which energetic men indulge" — was growing fast. Those who lived to explore wasted no time making their way to this western playground: Curious climbers from the Alpine Clubs of England and Switzerland claimed the first few untrod summits. But Americans soon followed, and plenty of pristine peaks remained.

In 1890, Fay and fellow AMC member J. Rayner Edmands spent a layover at Glacier House. With 24 hours to kill, Fay made his first wanderings into the alpine zone to which he would return so many times. Unable to convince Edmands to join him, he struck out alone, scrambling through dense scrub and onto the Illecillewaet Glacier.

"The splendor of the glittering snow surging upward on the choir of peaks to the southward, or sprinkled amid the aspiring rocks of Eagle Peak and Sir Donald near at hand, under a sky of deepest blue, and radiant in purest sunlight, was almost bewildering," Fay told an AMC audience a few years later. "Everything seemed to be rejoicing in the beauty of that September morning, and it was as if the mingled murmur of the waters near and far were Nature's hymn of joy." Fay continued, "Solitude here, however, had this added and peculiar charm — it made it easier to realize that only a brief time before, so brief that it might almost be measured in months, civilized man had known nothing of these glorious scenes. The freshness of the Creation seems to be still upon them."

Taken with the area, Fay made plans to come back. He did, in 1894, and the season of his first return visit proved a busy one: future AMC member Samuel Allen, fresh out of Yale, made two first ascents and gave lasting names to at least 10 peaks, including Hungabee, Opabin, Biddle, and Wiwaxy. Meanwhile, Rest Curtis and Fay climbed Mount Abbott (no connection to Philip Abbott, AMC member and climber), Eagle Peak, and Mount Stephen. The next year, under Fay's leadership, 20 members ventured west; it was, reported AMC historian Allen Bent, "the first time in [AMC] history that an excursion was made to a region quite beyond the mountain system whose name it bears. "And it was this visit that saw the climb of Hector, AMC's first official first ascent.

Fay was 50, a professor of Romance languages at Tufts University; he would spend 14 seasons among these crags. Philip Abbot, who joined Fay on Hector and other peaks, was a 27-year-old Boston lawyer whose two climbing seasons in the West would be his last. For vastly different reasons, each man would become indelibly identified with North American mountaineering history.

But Abbot did not expect fame when reporting the success on Hector. "[We] cannot, I am afraid, lay claim much glory therefrom," he demurred. "We had no hair-breadth escapes; we did not even encounter great hardships, except such as are familiar to every bricklayer's apprentice. We did not need to exercise great generalship: the mountain was in plain sight, we walked to its base-some distance, I admit, and not exactly over a paved road-and then walked on till we reached the summit."