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Big Mike
Trad climber
BC
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Topic Author's Reply - Jan 4, 2013 - 01:45am PT
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What a shame! It's pretty tall!!
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harryhotdog
Social climber
north vancouver, B.C.
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There was also the church, Epiphany chapel on your way out to UBC along Chancellor blvd. It had a nice granite wall with the tell tale signs of rock climbers all across the wall. It was high also if you wanted to recreate soloing and safer too as the Lord was taking care of you.
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TheSoloClimber
Trad climber
Vancouver
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BK, where were these roof cracks you speak of?
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Ghost
climber
A long way from where I started
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We only got booted off occasionally when some pole up the butt west van bag would march straight to customer service to complain about the unseemly riff raff probably high on drugs and causing a public disturbance. It was a taste of what the Mundays were up against back in the thirties.
Don & Phyl bouldered on the Eaton's wall in the thirties?
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MH2
climber
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Did Don & Phyl have anything to do with Squamish? Were they West Vancouverites? Some old guy on the bus once told me that he knew one of them through some (alpine?) garden club.
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Tricouni
Mountain climber
Vancouver
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Did Don & Phyl have anything to do with Squamish? Were they West Vancouverites? Some old guy on the bus once told me that he knew one of them through some (alpine?) garden club.
They had nothing to do with climbing at Squamish. I never knew Don, but that definitely was not something that remotely interested Phyl. What was important to her (and probably him, too) was just being in the mountains. And that became especially true later in their lives.
They lived in North Vancouver, not far above the Upper Levels Highway, between Lonsdale and Mountain Highway. Small little house; it's probably gone by now. One of my prized possessions is a photo of Waddington taken by Don from the top of Munday on the first ascent in 1930; this photo hung above Phyl's fireplace for years.
I didn't know that Phyl was in the Alpine Garden Club, but it wouldn't surprise me at all. She loved flowers and gardens. She and Don had planned a book of photos featuring their flower photos, but Don's death intervened. The book never appeared, but around 1958 Home Oil produced a 16-page colour pamphlet containing many of Phyl's wildfower photos.
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Tricouni
Mountain climber
Vancouver
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The Chief was just a great big lump as far as they were concerned. Ask Anders..........but I don't think it was until the late '50's that anybody got around to ogling the thing as a climbing destination........
I just found out yesterday (courtesy of old diaries) that I spent considerable time in the Touch & Go Towers (west of Squam, across the river) before setting foot on the Chief. And that only happened because one day we went to Squamish and found the suspension bridge across the river was gone! So we turned to the Chief....
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Relic
Social climber
Vancouver, BC
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Wow that's crazy Tricouni. Bypassing the chief to canoe? to little cliffs?
Ohh, suspension bridge. I wish there was still one up there!
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harryhotdog
Social climber
north vancouver, B.C.
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When I was house hunting in 1990 we went to their house when it was up for sale. The scumbag realtor was touting that it was owned by some famous mountaineers and that some old 8mm film footage was found in the attic and that it would come with the purchase of the house.
I immediately got in touch with the BCMC about it and never did find out what became of the footage.
You were right about the house being small,it was tiny even by 1920 standards but why do need a big house when your true passion is the outdoors?I believe they built it themselves also.
Tricouni do you know anything about this film footage?
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Big Mike
Trad climber
BC
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Topic Author's Reply - Jan 4, 2013 - 11:30pm PT
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that only happened because one day we went to Squamish and found the suspension bridge across the river was gone! So we turned to the Chief....
Did you miss this relic? ;)
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Ghost
climber
A long way from where I started
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My parents ( and those of Bruce Kay & Randy A among others.........) would take the ferry to Squamish & board the train there & go to Garibaldi Stn to head into Black Tusk meadows. The Chief was just a great big lump as far as they were concerned. Ask Anders..........but I don't think it was until the late '50's that anybody got around to ogling the thing as a climbing destination........
My ex-father-in-law was a climber. He was a Brit, who wound up as a prof at Oxford, but in his younger years he was a climber. Even did some early ascents in the Himalayas. But he did spend some time in the Northwest US/Southwest Canada, and told me stories about climbs of Mt Garibald that involved trains and boats, and wilderness. But for him, and others of his time, Squamish was just a town, and that big cliff above it wasn't anything at all.
I took him up on something on the Chief -- Sparrow, I think -- and he loved that. Don Serl and I also took him into the Waddington Range, and climbed some not-so-technical things with him. Funny trip, because there were several "old people" who were, then, exactly the age that Don and I are now.
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Mighty Hiker
climber
Vancouver, B.C.
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From learning about the 1940s and 1950s at Squamish, the Chief seems to have been the elephant in the woodpile. It hardly even got mentioned in the weekly paper, except for a very occasional scenery shot. Mountaineers and backcountry skiers passed by it en route to Garibaldi Park, and local people were active in the outdoors. But there doesn't seem to have been much thought of let alone action relating to climbing on it, although people did hike up it. There are some interesting loose ends and circumstantial evidence, which may always remain that.
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MH2
climber
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I spent considerable time in the Touch & Go Towers
!!!
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Relic
Social climber
Vancouver, BC
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Maybe no one climbed it cuz there weren't many chimneys n offalwidths up it
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Big Mike
Trad climber
BC
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Topic Author's Reply - Jan 5, 2013 - 12:03am PT
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That shot is so ominous mh2!!
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MH2
climber
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Check with Perry sometime. Once I pulled from my collection of cliche, "Back when dinosaurs walked the Earth..." and Perry said, "Dinosaurs do walk the Earth." He may have been referring to those Lost Worlds across the river.
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Oplopanax
Mountain climber
The Deep Woods
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I spent more than a few evenings at the Eatons Wall in the 1990s with other West Van/North Shore climbers who were too poor or otherwise unable to go to the Edge. I recall it being pretty crimpy. Tendinitis special.
There is an awesome offwidth between two of the concrete pillars that I once managed to get about 5 feet off the ground on before slowly oozing down and gobying up my thigh something fierce. Guy I believe went up and down it in his ginch.
The mall security was some 90 yr old guy with an electriccart and it was always a battle when climbing there to see which would stop us first - cold and overcrimped fingers or mall grandpa yelling "You damn kids get off my wall!"
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Tricouni
Mountain climber
Vancouver
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Glen - Is this the same Phyl Munday photo that you have? I think it made the rounds of the local alpine inteligentsia so I now have it via my mom and dad.
Bruce, your photo is the famous one the Mundays took from the NW summit looking at the main peak. I think at that point they must have known they were never going to get up it.
My photo is taken from Mt Munday, with the first really good view they had of Wadd and the Tiedeman peaks. It's in Culbert's guide, one of the fold-out glossy photos; that photo was reproduced from mine.
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Tricouni
Mountain climber
Vancouver
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Tricouni do you know anything about this film footage?
Harry, fascinating that you guys looked at the house when it came on the market. It was indeed at 373 Tempe Crescent, as Tami noted. I believe but am not certain that the film footage is either in the Provincial Archives (Victoria) or with the Mundays' great-niece who lives in Washington.
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Tricouni
Mountain climber
Vancouver
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Thats so interesting that you guys were all over the touch and goes before even thinking about the chief. you guys were so summit oriented eh? There really seemed to be a distinct cultural separation between the mountaineers and the "rock gymnasts" as G W Young and all the brits and earo's were going on about back then. How did Beckey fit in?
Bruce, yes we (me, Culbert, my brother Bob, our circle of friends) were summit-oriented: we liked things with tops. Hence the T>, the Acrophobes, Trestle Tower in Cheakamus Canyon, miscellaneous rotting (and not) towers in the interior of the province, the Moles, and so forth. The T> have tops to them, some of them not easy to reach.
MH2: lovely, moody photo of the Castle that you posted!
Bruce, in Vancouver in the early 1960s there wasn't really a gap between the "rock gymnasts" and the mountaineers, partly because rock climbers were few and far between (Les Macdonald, Joe Turley, possibly Dick Willmott, and (to some extent) Hank Mather). Everyone else hiked (not necessarily summit-oriented) or climbed summits, hard or easy according to their abilities and tastes. Ex-Brits like Ashlyn Armour-Brown and Hamish Mutch were both highly competent mountaineers and rock climbers, better on the rocks than most of the home-grown crowd.
Jim Baldwin went on a few BCMC trips and did a few things with Dick Culbert, but was mainly a rock climber. Ed Cooper was competent at both (and was to some extent part of the Beckey group). Fred, of course, did both. He was the mainstay of the early climbs at Leavenworth, starting in the late 1940s, in the Peshastins and Castle Rock. But even Fred and Pete Schoening were succeptible to "summit fever." How else to explain why hard-to-reach Tumwater Tower and Chumstick Snag were among the earliest acents in the Leavenworth area? Fred liked obscure, backwater pinnacles as much as anyone.
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