Читать книгу Canadian Adventurers and Explorers Bundle - John Wilson - Страница 14

In July 1927 Phyl and Don, with Phyl’s sister Betty, again journeyed up the coast in search of their mountain. The SS Venture carried them to Glendale Cove cannery at the head of Knight Inlet, and then they motored the last fifty-five kilometres in their outboard boat. They travelled up the Klinaklini River and went on foot up the Franklin Glacier towards Mystery Mountain. But nature was not co-operating. The routes they scouted to the summit were “guarded by hanging glaciers, icefalls, or rock towers.” On the east ridge of the mountain, the danger from rock falls was extreme. All three of them ended up bruised and cut. On one occasion, Phyl averted a disaster when she glanced up and saw a cavalcade of rocks falling down towards Betty. Quickly she put up her arm to deflect some of them away from her sister, but one of the rocks struck Phyl on her head. The gash bled profusely, leaving her dizzy, in need of surgical stitching, and in pain. But with Bettys help, Phyl cleaned herself off in a glacial pool and soldiered onwards.

While attempting a route on the west ridge, the climbers made bivouac on Fury Gap (elevation 2900 metres) midway up the Franklin Glacier before they tackled the remainder of the ascent. Part way up, the weather changed within minutes. Clouds rolled in, bringing darkness. Fierce rain and wind, followed soon by lightning and thunder – wild flashes and fierce, violent crashes – caught the climbers exposed on the rocks in a terrifying electrical storm. Phyl had never been so afraid.

The party scrambled back to Fury Gap. “We had trouble keeping our lights alight, and it was just pouring down. It’s really wild when it’s like that, and all these tongues of fire on the rocks and tongues of fire on our ice axes, buzzing. Just like a blowtorch almost, with sparks of fire coming off the tip of my ice axe. We couldn’t throw them away because we needed our ice axes to cross the glaciers. When we got to Fury Gap we picked up our frozen tarp and all the things that we’d left there – film boxes and that sort of thing, and food and a Primus stove, and we stuffed them into our packs. Then we went down the slope onto some shelves of rock – wet, of course, and cold as the dickens – put a tarp on these rocks, and we three down, pulled the tarps over our heads, like a lean-to, and we stayed there for the rest of the storm, until it was light enough to come down the glacier.”

In 1928 they returned with Don’s brother, Bert Munday. The weather was extremely poor and they bided their time on first ascents of lesser peaks until it was clear enough to attempt their Mystery Mountain, which now had an official name given by the Canadian Geographic Board that spring. Mount Waddington it was now called, to commemorate Alfred Waddington, whose attempt to build a road from Bute Inlet into the Interior in 1862 had ended in disaster. Phyl and Don must have been disappointed, for their original wish had been that their Mystery Mountain retain the name they had always used. The mountain now also had an officially recognized elevation, and the Mundays’ estimates of its height were almost bang on. In 1927 a survey crew led by J. T Underhill had completed triangulation of the mountain and calculated the elevation as 4016 metres. Mount Waddington was now on record as the highest peak entirely in the province, a claim previously held by Mount Robson.

Finally the weather cleared, and the Munday party tackled the mountain, working this time from the northwest. They arose just after 1 a.m. on the morning of 8 July and headed out. After many hours of struggle, they reached a spot where a five-hundred-metre icy slope stretched upwards before them. It was supper-time, could they continue on? The slope was brittle and dangerous. Slabs of ice broke away under their feet. Don cleared and cut steps and handholds and upwards they climbed. The last 130 metres took over an hour. All at once they were there on the top. Surely it was victory at last.

“It was such a satisfaction getting to the top,” Phyl recounted. But how crushing it was for the weary climbers as they looked out beyond. The ridge on which they stood, and which they had thought to be the main summit of the mountain, fell away. Across the airy space ahead of them they could see the actual main tower, only sixty metres higher than where they stood on the northwest summit. “We were absolutely aghast. We were so close to the main tower but yet so far. It was out of our reach.”

Phyl looked across. The main tower seemed scarcely more than an arms length away. She would never forget the details. “The rocks of the tower were not all just plain grey; they were different colours, and so beautiful in the evening light.” But it was obvious to the Mundays as they examined the summit from their lofty position that the “main tower was a difficult climb.” It was now close to 8 p.m. After hours of climbing and little food, the Mundays had to get back to Fury Gap before nightfall. With heavy hearts they retraced their route back down to the camp. They didn’t realize that they had reached the highest elevation they would ever achieve on Mount Waddington. Although they continued coming back almost every season for the next eleven years, the prize was not to be theirs.

For Phyl, Waddington was an endless source of frustration, and even Don called it “a nightmare moulded in rock,” but at the same time this Mystery Mountain was addictive. Phyl always made it clear that climbing the summit wasn’t their only rationale for the repeat visits. Years after their Waddington expeditions, an experienced climber asked her why, with all the opportunities she and Don had, they didn’t just conquer the mountain and be done with it.

“Why did you keep going back, Phyl? Wasn’t it just wasted time skirting around the big peak and never being successful?”

“Why there isn’t any one mountain worth throwing your life away on. Our lives were more important than any mountain. If the day wasn’t good, we’d go off and do something else. There is a whole new world out there, hundreds of peaks, hundreds of glaciers, and all of it uncharted. It is all so marvellously exciting. Even though we started out on a quest for our Mystery Mountain, we ended up with a lifetime of options, and a lifetime of adventures. Every time – it doesn’t matter whether it’s storm or sunshine – it’s always worth it.”

Phyl and Don pioneered exploration in the Mount Waddington area and believed that as pioneers, they should document their activities and also leave a legacy for a wider audience. They knew that it was not just a matter of their own satisfaction and privilege that they climb. They knew that by recording their observations, taking notes and measurements, and collecting specimens, they made important contributions to the understanding of British Columbia geography, flora, fauna, and natural history. This work was their hobby, and they treated it as inseparable from the physical aspects of hiking and exploration. It was the exploration, the need to know and to see and to travel over little-known or little-understood lands that provided the impetus to keep them going.

“We didn’t go into the Waddington country just to climb one mountain and run out and leave it. We went in to find out all that we possibly could about glaciers and mountains and animals and nature and everything about that particular area – completely unknown before we went in to it – so that we could bring out the information for the interest of other people as well as ourselves.”

Their exciting new discoveries in Waddington territory were worth every hour of struggle, every brush with death. They had many close calls: avalanches, falling rock, rotten snow, fragile ice bridges, unforeseen weather, turbulent glacial rivers, logs and debris, and bears. Phyl was fearless, or at least that is how she appeared to Don and it was how he wrote about her in many articles and stories. It was also how she appeared to fellow climbers, many of whom were in awe of her physical strength and stamina, her level-headedness under pressure, and her natural ability to suss out the one possible route when the way looked blocked.

At various times Phyl coped with salt-craving porcupines, rodents, wolverines, and bears. The bear stories got all the press. Fearless, she charged – more than once – a grizzly bear threatening Don. In 1936, as they paused on a rocky shoulder in a narrow gorge, they spied a young grizzly some distance away.

“Ah, at last, a chance to photograph a bear!” wrote Phyl some time later as she recorded the incident in a chapter of a manuscript she titled “Mountain Memories.” The first buzz of Don’s movie camera brought the bear’s head up with an angry jerk. With teeth gleaming in the sunlight, he bounded straight up a rocky ravine towards Phyl and Don.

“At that very moment we heard a terrific roar close beside us, and there, rushing right at us, was a large she-grizzly with her two cubs, one on each side of her. We were terrified. It is useless to run in a place like this, especially when clad in heavy mountain boots. We stood our ground and waved our arms, screaming and yelling at the top of our lungs. She took a particular dislike to me, and charged straight at me. Don rushed her, to divert the brute’s attention, and to my horror she turned at right angles and charged him instead, and there they were, face to face. The bear was so close Don could feel her hot breath in his face. They roared at each other, the grizzly with her mouth wide open, and all hair standing on end like a fighting dog. I was so sure the infuriated brute would lift her paw and tear Don to pieces before my eyes. I grabbed my ice axe and rushed at her intending to hit if she dared lift it… I was fighting mad too.” Phyl paused in her writing and then she added: “My knees shook for a long time after that, and do, even now, when I think of it. I doubt if I will ever go through anything like it again, and live to tell the tale.”

Throughout the 1930s Phyl and Don continued their endless love affair with the Waddington country. Each season they tried different entry points and covered much territory. Soon the documentation they brought back confirmed that the heart of the Coast Mountains featured vast ice valleys and towering rock summits, undreamed of in either mountaineering or geological circles. The region offered brand-new challenges for committed and skilled mountaineers. The Mundays made first ascents of many major peaks in the area, and on three separate occasions they used skis to make these first ascents and to carry out many of their mapping and natural history observations.

Edith did not take part in the entire Waddington trip until 1937, the summer she was sixteen. That year, the Mundays travelled for ten days up the coast in the Edidonphyl (the handmade boat Don built in the basement of their home) from Vancouver to Bella Coola, a distance of six hundred kilometres. They searched for a great peak that had shone out to them while they were on Mount Waddington several years earlier. By hiking overland through some of the most magnificent country they had yet seen, they found and made a first ascent (with Edith), of the mountain they named Stupendous (elevation 2728 metres). Phyl was so proud of Edith – the way she paced herself and handled the ever-changing obstacles of the route. In the deep river valleys, they made their way through underbrush as thick as any they had ever encountered, and on the opposite extreme, they climbed icy slopes and glaciers. Edith’s fortitude was a natural inheritance from her gifted parents.