Publications

In Nature's Palace

AMC Outdoors, January/February 2003

Despite this breezy assurance, these climbs were not a walk in the park. Though the route and details of each trip vary, it's possible to imagine a "typical" voyage. An expedition for these men — and the occasional women who accompanied them, though none made it to the top in the early years — usually started out from Glacier House, in what is now Canada's Glacier National Park. Another popular starting point was a rooming house in Field, a small town in today's Yoho National Park. After a simple breakfast at the hotel, which they called for at 4 or 5 a.m., they'd strike out into the wilds.

Horses proved useful on the initial reaches, as did the occasional local men or railroad workers, who would pack in gear and set up lower-elevation camps while the others climbed. Wearing knickerbockers and sweaters, the climbers lugged rucksacks loaded with bedding; a rubber pouch of food; extra clothing, like a Macintosh coat; and gear including goggles, cameras, and barometers for measuring elevation.

For the first few miles, the groups picked their way through fallen firs — acres of which had burned in a series of fires — or through thick undergrowth, and crossed raging streams full of melt from above. "The smell of rich vegetation is in our nostrils," AMC member the Rev. Harry Nichols wrote. "The tall ferns are involuntarily crushed in our hands, as the way is forced through them, and the health and strength of the forest seems to enter through the pores of the palms. The ears drink in the sound, half roar, half splash, of the glacial streams. The eye turns from floor to ceiling, from wall to wall, of this opening hallway and staircase of Nature's palace."

Abbot offered a less spiritual report: "We used [our ice axes] as claws and as balancing-poles. We made blazes with them, and chopped away underbrush; the heads were convenient to sit on for a moment's halt; later we used the handle for a fishing-pole; and I think I have seen one of our party use the head of his axe to pass sardines at a picnic lunch."

Gaining altitude, these adventurers encountered wildflowers that struck their fancy — Selkirk lilies, alpine pinks, forget-me-nots, and "a beautiful pendulous rhododendron scenting the air with a spicy smell." They heard a curious whistling noise, which they discovered to be the call of the marmot, and spied mountain goats, bears, and, on one alpine lake, ducks.

After a few hours of toil, they polished off a "second breakfast," with a lunch of similar victuals devoured at another interval. Preserved ginger, prunes, raisins, and chocolate made a refreshing snack or, when supplies ran low, a meal. Lunch might consist of tea, bread and jam, crackers, and fried pork. Sometimes the men would dine on fresh-caught trout or cook up a partridge for extra sustenance.

Then meadows gave way to rocky slopes of quartzite and limestone. On Mount Fox, Nichols met "1,500 feet of loose rubble and boulder, hazardous for the climber, more hazardous for the man behind." Climbing Mount Temple, AMC member Samuel Allen described "fine powdery scree, packed full of slipping boulders of all sizes, no handholds nor good foothold, imminent danger of being crushed by the boulders from above." Fay described fossil-covered shale rattling beneath his feet on Mount Stephen and, farther up its flanks, a "lawn" of rock, whose sharp blades snapped beneath his hobnailed boots.

The risk of avalanche, of slipping, or of creating some danger for the man behind only increased as they inched higher. "When we left the rocks, we crept across the bit above the gully like the villains in a melodrama about to commit a crime," Abbot recalled. On snow ranging from slush to powder to hard-pack, two to four men roped together, kicking steps and relying on their ice axes — this time for the intended purpose. "That ice-axe must have known by our hand pressure how much we loved it," mused Fay. "Our rope, let out an inch at a time, must have felt that for reasons best known to ourselves we liked to hang on to it."

Creeping along, they encountered crevasses, snow bridges, schrunds — gaps between glacial ice and headwalls — precipices overlooking thousand-foot drops, crumbling rock, and melting snow. "A glacier is like a woman, charming or the reverse, in its rapidly changing moods," wrote Charles Thompson. Yet despite unsteady or unknown conditions, the men pushed on, and were eventually rewarded.

Ah, the summit: the joy, the triumph, the views. "Words cannot describe the glory of the scene witnessed here," or some variation of that phrase, marked every report. And an attempt to describe the scene followed: it was spectacular, astonishing, gorgeous, fantastic. Cold, wind, and tight schedules limited the time spent on top of the world, but they napped, took photographs, measured altitude, and built small cairns containing clean jam or pickle jars with the victors' names inside.