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Celebrating 100 years of getting high

From its origins as a Canadian Pacific Railway inititative 100 years ago - "part adult summer camp, part revival meeting" - G.D. Maxwell chronicles the evolution of the Alpine Club of Canada.
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One hundred people gathered 100 years ago for the first summer camp at Yoho Pass. Photo courtesy Whyte Museum of Canadian Rockies

By G.D. Maxwell

To a pioneering country frozen much of the year in winter, the mountains of the western frontier represented nothing so much as an impenetrable barrier. Winter and the Rocky Mountains account for much of the storied history behind the magnificent canoe routes that meandered northwest of Cumberland House, highways to adventure and rich, new trapping grounds, all ending frustratingly at the base of the Rockies.

Nineteenth-century western Canadian history is the story of unlocking the secrets of the mountains of British Columbia and Alberta and the tortured route of the great, watery highway leading east from the Pacific, the Columbia River, dominion over which was feverishly contested by the North West Company and competing American interests.

Though early explorers were awestruck by the glaciated peaks of the Rockies, Columbias, Selkirks and Coast Mountains, their admiration was tempered by their commercial desire to lay claim to the wealth of the land and discover means of traversing these formidable obstacles.

Early mountaineering in western Canada was largely a non-recreational activity. It was, for the most part, exercises in mapping and surveying, finding and refining routes through the mountains and ultimately, plotting the course for the Canadian Pacific Railway.

Ironically, the CPR itself laid the groundwork for recreational mountaineering. Having built a highway of steel connecting East and West and having constructed hotels in some of the most fiercely awe-inspiring spots in the mountains, the CPR did two more things that would indelibly shape the history of Canadian mountaineering. In 1899, as described in Chic Scott’s sweeping history, Pushing the Limits: The Story of Canadian Mountaineering , the CPR imported Swiss mountain guides to help promote tourism to their hotels. The guides and their intrepid clients opened up sport climbing and word of endless peaks and exhilarating sights spread east across the country.

The other major contribution of the CPR was hiring surveyor Arthur Oliver Wheeler to undertake a photo and topographical survey of the company’s right of way through the Selkirk Mountains. If much of the population of Canada was both ignorant of and indifferent to the wonders of mountainous terrain, Wheeler wasn’t. He knew… and cared. He cared passionately about the mountains he had spent much of his professional life photographing, mapping and exploring as one of the nascent country’s preeminent surveyors.

It was in his professional role as surveyor for the Canadian Pacific Railway he decided to do something to raise the consciousness of Canadians unfortunate enough to live east of the Rockies, which is to say almost all Canadians, to the majesty defining the western end of their country. Having been smitten by the grandeur of the peaks he’d learned to climb to discharge his surveying duties, Wheeler was keen on forming a Canadian alpine club. And during his stint with the CPR he chanced upon Charles Fay. Fay was, himself consumed with establishing the American alpine club and suggested creating the Alpine Club of North America of which Wheeler might found the Canadian branch.

Fortunately, for anyone with a nationalistic streak in them, that idea never reached fruition and Wheeler soldiered on, with a spectacular lack of success, towards his goal of forming an independent Canadian club. After several years of trying, and finding no one to take up the cause with him, pragmatism led him to advocate, in letters published in the leading Canadian newspapers of the day, interested Canadians form a chapter of the American Alpine Club.

Response to his letter was underwhelming until a staff writer with the Manitoba Free Press penned a response suggesting Wheeler was not only unpatriotic but gave him, in his own words, "… a pen-lashing in words sharper than a sword."

The staff writer turned out to be Elizabeth Parker, a Nova Scotian who migrated to the prairies but fell in love with the grandeur of the Rockies. Wheeler’s organizational skills and Parker’s evocative words were a powerful force. Four months after joining forces, their efforts resulted in the creation of the Alpine Club of Canada.

That endeavour, as with so many things historic, was given a great boost from an unexpected quarter. As described by Scott in Pushing the Limits , Wheeler was invited, by Mr. R. Walpole, general superintendent of CPR’s western division to travel to Mount Stephen House at Field to meet with the railway’s western division management. Wheeler presented his and Parker’s vision of the Alpine Club of Canada and at the conclusion of his presentation, William Whyte, second vice president of the CPR asked him what he would need to make it happen.

"I want twenty passes to Winnipeg and return from any part of the railway, to bring delegates there to found an Alpine Club of Canada."

"What confounded cheek!" Whyte replied. "Twenty passes to Winnipeg from any part of the Railway!" Turning to a deputy, Whyte sarcastically said, "What do you think of that, McPherson?"

"I think it would be a first class idea, Mr. Whyte," McPherson answered.

And so, on March 27 th , 1906, 26 delegates gathered in Winnipeg – the ironic home of Canadian mountaineering – and the Alpine Club of Canada was formed. A.O. Wheeler was elected the first Club president and Elizabeth Parker the first secretary. To buttress their groundbreaking accomplishment, the delegates decided to hold the club’s first summer camp later in the year at Yoho Pass.

One hundred people, most of them unfamiliar with mountains, attended that first camp, eager to learn and experience the joys of altitude. Part adult summer camp, part revival meeting, the group learned the art of mountaineering from two Swiss guides on loan from the CPR. They summited Yoho Pass, The President and Vice President peaks and Mount Collie. They debated structure, organization and guiding principles. Their efforts gave shape and form to the nascent ACC.

Parker, in the keynote article of the club’s first Canadian Alpine Journal in 1907, illuminated the philosophical underpinnings of the ACC. She envisioned the club’s fundamental objective to be one of popularizing mountaineering. "In time we ought to become a nation of mountaineers, loving our mountains with the patriot’s passion."

Since that first camp a century ago, the ACC’s general mountaineering camp (GMC) has been an annual feature. While no longer serving the additional purpose of being the occasion of the annual general meeting, the GMC is, nonetheless, the club’s premiere event. It is an opportunity for new members and long-timers to get together, learn from each other, swap stories and enjoy a shared passion for mountains. The format has been extended to six weeks with 32 members attending per week.

The centennial GMC will be held this summer, from July 1 through August 12, in the Premier Range of the Cariboo Mountains in British Columbia. Bivouacked in a basin near Kiwa Glacier, campers will have their choice of nearby mountains including several that are unnamed – and quite possibly unclimbed – the club hopes to name. Cost to attend the 2006 GMC is $1,295 and includes accommodation, meals, chopper flight in and out, use of gear and instruction in all things mountaineering. Enduring memories ensured.

While the early decades of the ACC were focused largely on mountaineering, it didn’t take a genius to understand the equation Canada=Winter and sooner or later the club would have to embrace the snowier aspects of mountaineering in the Great White North. It did, however, take A.A. (Mac) McCoubrey.

McCoubrey – another Winnipeg mountaineer – was born in Glasgow in 1885 and took every opportunity to travel west to the mountains in his lifelong career with the CPR. As described in Chic Scott’s Powder Pioneers: Ski Stories from the Canadian Rockies and Columbia Mountains , McCoubrey had been a passionate backcountry skier, exploring the Selkirks and Rockies for 20 years when he was elected editor of the Canadian Alpine Journal in 1930. Using that platform, he dedicated a section of the Journal to ski mountaineering, generating enough interest in the subject that a ski section of the Club was formed later that summer at the general meeting. It was another six years before the ski committee was authorized to organize a ski camp for the upcoming winter.

That first winter camp met on April 4, 1937, staying in Elizabeth Parker Hut at Lake O’Hara in what is now Yoho National Park. Attended by only 15 stalwart souls – interest in the camp by members was low enough attendance was opened to non-members – McCoubrey nonetheless considered it a resounding success, writing, "The Camp proved beyond all doubt that there will not be the slightest difficulty in the future in filling to capacity any ski camp arranged under the auspices of the club."

It was two years before the next ski camp was held, in the Tonquin Valley outside Jasper, and it took until the end of World War II before the winter ski camps became annual events. Interest grew slowly with attendance occasionally topping 30 participants through the 1950s and ’60s.

With the renaissance in backcountry ski touring that’s taken place over the past two decades, the ACC’s ski and winter mountaineering camps have taken off. This past winter 11 camps were held – the last of which will take place June 2 in the Yukon – embracing ice climbing, skiing, first summits, ski traverses and even a women’s only ski camp.

Key to the ACC’s success over the years has been the tireless effort of volunteers to fundraise, organize and build the club’s string of 23 backcountry huts spread across the mountains of Alberta and British Columbia. The huts not only provide a focal point for club activities but make the whole backcountry experience less daunting for many people venturing into the mountains for the first – or 100 th – time.

Some huts were built as national Club initiatives but many were the result of hard work and dedication – crazed dedication in some cases – of local sections of the Club. The local sections of the ACC are, in most cases, the entry point of people into the ACC. Nineteen in number, local sections span the country and provide local alpine or mountaineering clubs the chance to band together with a national organization that enjoys more clout when it comes to the often delicate and contentious issue of backcountry access and individual liability.

It was, in fact, both of these issues that gave rise to the Whistler section of the ACC. Organized and operating initially under the name the Whistler Alpine Club (WAC), the club coalesced around Jayson Faulkner and James Retty who were president and secretary, respectively. As James explained, "It (the club) was partly an adjunct to the focus of our business, The Escape Route, but Jayson could see down the road and knew that sooner or later it would take an organized effort, that is, speaking with one voice, for those of us who were interested in climbing and touring to deal with issues around competing backcountry usage. We knew we’d like to grow the club into an ACC section at some point."

That point came in the mid-1990s with the second wave of WAC enthusiasts.

Todd Bush moved to Whistler in 1994 with a young family, a strong background in ski touring in the Coast and Selkirk mountains and an interest in meeting others in town who were active in exploring the surrounding area. "There were 17 people in the club when I first joined and four trips scheduled for that first winter. Jayson was getting ready to head down to Vancouver to pursue business there and James was increasingly busy with the store and raising a family."

Tom Jeracki assumed the club presidency in 1995 and Todd took over as trip coordinator. Keen on building the club’s numbers, the two embarked on an aggressive schedule of planned events and profile building. "The grassroots of the WAC worked well. There were a bunch of guys in their mid-20s who wanted to become guides and who were keen on leading trips and honing their skills. By the end of 1996, we had 80 people in the club and were holding evening rock climbs twice a week in summer and spring, lots of day trips during the winter, ice climbing courses, avalanche courses, all because these guys wanted to practice."

But along with more people and more activities came the probability that sooner or later someone was going to get hurt, possibly killed, while taking part in a club activity. When you’re young and pretty much everything you own of value fits into your backpack, liability is a vague concept at best. But when you’ve acquired, say, a house, family and a bit more than will fit comfortably on your back, the notion of putting it all at risk in the event of a misstep or miscalculation in the field weighs heavily.

The decision was made to apply to the ACC to become an official section of the club and bring the activities of the WAC under its umbrella. "The resources of the ACC are vast," Todd explained. Not just in terms of liability insurance but in support, structure, a national voice, the hut system, everything. It would have been crazy for us not to join all that. If you want to be an alpine club, you want to be part of the Alpine Club of Canada."

During those early years of the Whistler section of the ACC, membership snowballed to around 140. It was an interesting mix of long-time locals, newcomers and, in typical Whistler fashion, a not insubstantial proportion of people who only visited here. "We have a surprising number of members who only visit here yearly or a couple of times a year," current club president Mitch Sulkers said. "Lots of them are interested because they come to Whistler and want to tour the Spearhead, for example, and quite a few, as well as lots of Lower Mainland people who may or may not be members of the club, are attracted because they want to stay at the Wendy Thompson hut."

The hut is the Whistler section’s crowning achievement and a loving legacy to Wendy Thompson, a Whistlerite and paramedic with the British Columbia Ambulance Service, who died tragically in a medivac air rescue operation in 1995. "Jayson was friends with the Thompson family," Todd explained. "Michael and Shirley, Wendy’s parents, mentioned to him they were interested in establishing some kind of legacy in memory of their daughter. Jayson said he was keen to put a hut somewhere in the local ski touring area and the family offered to fund the first $5,000 of the effort."

In a long – and liquid – brainstorming session, alternatives were discussed and debated. Cayoosh, Meager Creek, Place Glacier, Spearhead were all considered. "But we decided we’d do it up on the Duffey, somewhere we could link Place Glacier to the Marriott Basin and traverse across that ridge to the back side of Duffey Lake," said Todd.

"When we went in to check it out, it was perfect." About a 5 km walk, the basin is graced with an upper lake, cascading waterfalls, a creek running through to a lower lake, more waterfalls and the whole is completely surrounded by rock bluffs – perfect for climbing – and 30-40° slopes on the side for skiing, with a big, headwalled, 9,000 foot summit in the back.

It took two years to get the necessary approvals and a tireless volunteer effort to build it… twice. "Rob Withey insisted we build it once in the valley before we took anything to the alpine. He insisted… and he was right," Todd related. The gothic arched hut was built in Tom Dudley’s backyard and finished the same day the muni issued a cease and desist order, assuming the structure was being erected as illegal, supplemental accommodation.

Everything was weighed, bundled in staged groupings, trucked as close as possible to the site then flown in in 19 helicopter loads. "But it paid off," Mitch exclaimed. "It only took five days to erect once we got everything flown in."

"Yeah," Todd interjected. "We were hammering away, Mitch hadn’t even put the tin on the roof yet, and a guy backpacking shows up asking if the hut’s ready. We told him to give us a few more hours."

When it was all finished in 2000, the Wendy Thompson hut became one of the jewels of the ACC’s hut system, a satisfying legacy to a missed daughter and a testament to the power of a group of like-minded volunteers. "The hut ended up costing $26,000. Michael and Shirley graciously paid for the whole thing. Its replacement value is around $75,000 because of all the volunteer labour," according to Todd.

The Whistler section is facing transition these days. Like all other aspects of a town where people come and go, many of those who were active in the past have moved on and the club faces the future with unanswered questions. "We spent a lot of time at our last meeting discussing what we do next," Mitch said. "Do we want to reach out and find those people who want to train up and become guides? Do we want someone who would like to jump into the executive and build whatever comes next?"

It seems likely the outcome will be renewed growth and interest. With surging interest in backcountry skiing, alpine touring and mountaineering, and a steady population of newcomers eager to take advantage of the rich assortment of opportunities the rugged mountains around Whistler have to offer, what better way to jump into it all than embrace the spirit, ethic and camaraderie of the Alpine Club of Canada as it strides, climbs and skis into its second century?

For more information:

The Movement World Backcountry Freeride Jam kicks off with a birthday bash to mark the ACC’s 100 th anniversary at Dusty’s, Friday, April 21 st . To celebrate the event, Chic Scott will be on hand with a slide presentation of great achievements in backcountry skiing and there will be a silent auction.

The Alpine Club of Canada: www.alpineclubofcanada.ca/Whistler Section:



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