As I sit at this keyboard in the comfort of my home, it seems a lifetime ago that I went to Avalanche Mountain. I am writing this in August of 2017, and I went to the mountain in 1965 – June 19, 1965 to be exact. Fifty-two years have passed, and for some of my readers, that’s more than a lifetime. Yet in some ways, it seems like yesterday, I can remember the details so clearly. Let me give you a little background leading up to the climb.
I was a student at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. As my first year of studies was concluding, I knew it was crucial that I secure some kind of job for the summer break so I could afford to return to school in the fall. A fellow I’d met while I was in my final year of high school (he worked at a bank in my small town) had moved up into the interior of the province to a small town called Golden. He was working for a branch of the same bank up there and we had kept in touch. He told me of a large sawmill in his town that hired students for the summer and that I should write to a Mister So-and-So about employment. I did, and the man wrote back offering me a job for the whole summer – it was April 23 when I received the good news, and I was over the moon!
After my final exams, I went to my home town of Mission and spent a few days with my mother and sisters, then boarded a train on April 29th for the 18-hour trip to Golden. Upon arrival, my friend met me at the station and took me to a boarding-house where he’d arranged lodging for me for the summer. Oni Kattelus and his wife, an older Finnish couple, had a room upstairs in their simple home where there were 4 single beds. For $90 a month, you had a bed and all the food you could eat. It was simple fare, but plentiful – she was a good baker, that I still recall, but she boiled all the meat, no matter what it was, and it was grey and bland. Nobody went hungry, though, and she’d pack you a lunch, as big as you wanted, to take to work, with everything wrapped in waxed paper. One quirky thing about living there, though, was that although they had a modern bathroom downstairs in the home, they wouldn’t let you bathe in it, neither shower nor tub. Instead, there was a shed out in the back yard which they had rigged up with a sauna. You poured water over hot rocks and the place filled with steam – it was the first time I’d ever seen such a thing. That was the only way you could bathe at their home, and there wasn’t even a place to rinse off with cool water afterwards, so you came out of it one big sweatball, nearly as dirty as when you entered.
A picture I took many years later when passing through Golden – this is the back of the house. The sauna was in the shed on the left.
It took a few days before they actually hired me at the mill, and May 5th was my starting date. Since I was low man on the totem pole, they put me on the afternoon shift. We all belonged to the union, the IWA (International Woodworkers of America). The base salary that year for us union workers was $1.99/hour, and if you worked the afternoon shift you got $2.05/hour. Don’t laugh, it was a living wage back then. A fellow could work at the mill for that wage and support a family, make mortgage and car payments and get by.
I was a liar. You had to be 18 years of age to work at the sawmill (union rules), and I wouldn’t turn 18 until the end of August. The job was everything to me, so naturally I lied about my age to get hired on. They didn’t ask for a birth certificate or anything like that, they just took my word for it. It was a big mill, with over 400 men in total working the 3 shifts. The section of the mill I was assigned to was the planer mill. Rough lumber that had been dried in the kiln would be brought to the planer and fed through machines that turned it in to the nice smooth finished lumber that you buy at Home Depot. It was hard work. I worked out on the planer chain, where the finished lumber would come out on a conveyor and we’d grab it and slide it down on to stacks of the appropriate size. One man would have a few stacks he’d be responsible for, say 2x4s and 2x6s, and it’d come at you for 8 hours. I was a scrawny 130 pounds soaking wet, so I found the job to be quite demanding – I ached all over at the end of my shift until a few weeks had passed and I toughened up a bit.
As time passed, I became more depressed. The few people I knew in town, I never got to see. They all worked normal 8 to 5 jobs. My shift was 4:30 PM to 1:00 AM. By the time they were getting off work and had their evening ahead of them to enjoy, I was newly-arrived at work, and didn’t get home until 1:30 in the morning. By the time I arose, mid-morning, they were already at work for the day. I had no vehicle, so had to walk everywhere, which made it hard to do or see much. As a result, I lived for the weekends, my only chance to visit anyone, and did way too much drinking for my own good.
One weekday, bored to tears, I discovered the small library at the edge of town. In I ventured and took a good look around – I had nothing but time on my hands, so perused much of what they had. There was a small section on travel and adventure, and one book caught my eye, The White Spider, written by a German named Heinrich Harrer – it described the climb of the North Face of the Eiger in the Swiss Alps. I joined the library and checked out the book. Back in my room, the book had me transfixed as I read the history of attempts to climb the mountain, and of Harrer’s team’s successful first ascent of the peak. This peak had captivated the mountaineering world for decades, so when Harrer climbed the Eiger, he immediately became world-famous. The movie “Seven Years in Tibet” was about a part of Harrer’s life. He went on to other major climbing accomplishments: first ascents of Mount Deborah and Mount Hunter with Fred Beckey in Alaska, and the first ascent of Carstensz Pyramid in Indonesia.
It’s hard to describe how excited this book made me feel. I had never before read any book on mountaineering, and this brought about a major change in my thinking about mountains. It’s not that I had never climbed a mountain before this – I had, but only smaller wooded peaks near my home 50 miles east of Vancouver. For 3 years, that’s the only mountaineering I had done, simple stuff, and it seemed enough at the time, but now this book had given me a whole different perspective. Now don’t get me wrong, I had no illusions of wanting to go out and try something like the Eiger, but I was really excited nonetheless.
It was hard to wait for the weekend – I was going to go out and climb a mountain, something bigger than I had ever done before. Fortunately, Golden was surrounded by them. Since I had no wheels, I knew I’d have to hitch a ride, and that’s exactly what I did. Early Saturday morning, June 19, I stuck out my thumb on the edge of town on the Trans-Canada Highway. I snagged a ride pretty quickly (it was a lot easier back then) and 50 miles later I was dropped off in Roger’s Pass on a sunny morning.
At about 4,300 feet, the pass was not a high one, but because Canada’s #1 highway came right through it, it was a busy and important spot. I knew before I got there that Avalanche Mountain was what I wanted to climb. I had seen it before when I’d passed through on the highway and it didn’t look difficult. I picked a spot to begin, very close to the high point of the pass. This seemed like a good starting point because avalanches had swept down the mountain slope, wiping it clean of nearly all of the trees that would normally grow there (its name was well-deserved). Understand that I didn’t own any real climbing equipment, nothing – no boots, ice axe, crampons, nothing (I wouldn’t get my first ice axe and crampons until 1967) – I didn’t even have a day pack with me on this day. What I did have was a light jacket, a cap, jeans and a bit of food in my pockets – oh yes, and my clumsy, steel-toed work boots.
I first had to walk across a flattish area which was a bit boggy, with puddles of water to negotiate. My boots were soon wet because they weren’t waterproof. The slope gradually steepened but was still pretty gentle and consistent. Since it was just the start of summer, there was still a lot of snow on the mountainside, which served to cover a lot of the brush through which I’d normally have had to thrash my way. I had to watch my footing on the snow, as my boots didn’t have anything like a vibram sole, but I zigzagged a lot. Also, I used any stretches of dirt and rock that were exposed for better traction. It was exhilarating, every bit of it, but not really difficult. The weather was perfect, pleasantly cool and sunny, no wind.
Several hours after setting out, I reached the top, well above treeline. Now some of you who know Avalanche Mountain well will doubt me right away, and you’d be right to do so. I had reached a bump with an elevation of about 8,330 feet, and it seemed like a mountaintop to me because everything sloped down and away on all sides. I didn’t realize that the true summit of Avalanche Mountain, elevation 9,386 feet, towered over 1,000 feet above me and was a full mile away to the southeast. I had no map, so I had no way of knowing precisely my location, and no way of knowing my elevation at that time (I verified those soon afterwards on topographic maps). They say ignorance is bliss – well, I was ignorant, and feeling a lot of bliss. I sat there for a short while, ate some lunch, then started back down. I was able to glissade on my boots and made good time back down the easy slope to the highway, where I quickly hitched a ride back to Golden.
I had climbed 4,000 vertical feet up a slope which averaged only 25 degrees – an easier slope of that size it would be hard to find. To me, a 17-year-old kid with stars in his eyes, it might as well have been a Himalayan giant, instead of a gentle slope in the Selkirk Mountains. Sitting on my shelf today is a small piece of rock which I brought from my “summit”. I have a label attached to it which says the following:
Avalanche Mountain elevation 9,397 feet June 19 1965 12:41 PM PDST
That was the day which I think of as the true start of my life of climbing, and I’ll always be grateful I found “The White Spider” and went to Avalanche Mountain.
Please visit our Facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/pages/Desert-Mountaineer/192730747542690