AMC Outdoors, January/February 2003

By Katharine Wroth

"We had been climbing for three hours with our horizon limited by the edges of a narrow field of snow. We came to the end — and it was as though we were suspended in mid-air. For three-fourths of our circumference there was nothing below us for the eye to rest upon except so far below that it did not seem part of the same world. "Philip Abbot paused, surveying the crowd before him, then continued.

"As far as our eyes could reach — and that was about as far as the human eye can ever reach, for the day was brilliant, with no hint, from horizon to horizon, of either cloud or haze — there was nothing visible but the one unbroken wilderness of ice and snow and crag, an ocean without shores whose waves were mountain ranges."

This ocean of mountains, this panorama of peaks, stunned those who saw it. But that's not what made their trip worth describing. When Abbot stood in front of 160 fellow AMC members in December 1895 to tell this tale, he was bringing news of a foreign place, a brilliant conquest. The summit that afforded such a view was Canada's Mount Hector, the three men who stood upon it AMC members. And Abbot and his climbing compatriots were the first ever to reach the top of this 11,135-foot peak.

This first ascent was one of dozens that AMC members made in Canada during the late 1800s and early 1900s. "We Americans have, hard at hand, without sea-sickness, without great expense, a range of mountains, rivaling the Alps... with peaks not only unexhausted, but even unnamed and unseen," wrote the Rev. Harry Nichols, an AMC member and the first to describe the region to the club, in 1894. " They beckon the climber, with charms that older Alps have long since lost, to the arduous toil and inexpressible gladness of their conquest."

And so the bold and the curious climbed aboard westward-bound trains and steamed toward "the Switzerland of America." They were lawyers, professors, and businessmen. Over the next few decades, they would make history, in some cases literally putting their names on the map. But the first three seasons were the most remarkable: AMC members explored with seemingly limitless ambition and success. And, at the close of those few golden years, one of their rank met his end high on a snowy peak, casting a shadow on the club and changing North American mountaineering practices forever.

Next:
Freshness of the Creation

— Katharine Wroth is Senior Editor of AMC Outdoors.