Canadian Alpine Journal/Volume 1/Number 2/A Day on Sir Donald

by Frank W. Freeborn

A DAY ON SIR DONALD.

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By Frank W. Freeborn.

Sir Donald, one of the most conspicuous of the Selkirks by its height and position, rises at the side of the little valley in which stands the Glacier House. On its left it is buttressed by four noble peaks, and on its right the big Illecillewaet Glacier comes tumbling down four thousand feet, a mighty cataract of ice, a mile wide. Its sharp pyramid, rising to the height of 10,808 feet, is so steep that little snow can rest on its surface, but in its lap it holds a living glacier. In actual height it is overtopped by some mountains that are oftener climbed, but in elevation above any convenient starting point it considerably surpasses them. Add to this fact its excessive steepness, the difficulty of crossing its bergschund, and the danger from falling rock, and you have the ex- planation of the infrequency of its ascent. Only two ascents were made, I think, in 1905, and after the first in 1906 the guides were very loath to try it again that season. So when I reached Glacier House near the end of July, 1907, after a week in Paradise Valley with the Alpine Club of Canada, I had little hope of realizing my ambition to climb it. But when I hailed the elder Feuz on the subject he at once consented to try it with me. At the same time Miss Jean Parker, of Winnipeg, one of the practiced climbers of the Canadian Alpine Club, engaged the younger Feuz to go with her. So we fixed an early day for the climb, July 26th. The day before was an ideal one for the task, and we wished we had chosen it. But when at 3.30 o'clock the next morning we four met for an early breakfast, the clouds hid all the mountain tops, and the prospect was gloomy. But at 4 o'clock we set out, hoping the adverse weather might change with the rising sun.

It was a silent, wet, chilly tramp that we four had by the early light up the Illecillewaet path for a half hour; then we branched off into a narrow trail to the left through dripping weeds and bushes, across two streams, uncomfortably wide and full even at that hour, and up a wooded ridge that led us to the terminal moraine of the Vaux Glacier. Here we found conditions of ascent better than usual. The crevasses were safely filled with hardened snow, and when the glacier became much steeper, the snow gave us a fine footing to kick our steps in it and make it our stairway. With this advantage we came at 7.45 to the bergschrund. This had always been one of the most serious obstacles to the ascent; but, thanks to the enormous masses of snow that had fallen the previous season and until early summer, the dreaded chasm was, when we happened to reach it, no chasm at all, and we could walk directly up to the cliff that forms the head wall of the glacier basin. Up this we swarmed with much use of our arms. The foot-holds and hand-holds were small, but generally more secure than in the Rockies. Two hundred feet up we came to a series of horizontal ledges none too wide, but wide enough for our purpose. These we followed straight across the face of the wall to the left until we reached the main mass of the mountain. Along this part of the way we had some encouraging weather promises; patches of blue sky appeared, and once for a few minutes the whole pinnacle of Sir Donald was free from clouds. How huge it towered in that sudden nearer exhibition!

Arrived at the end of this ledge, we stopped for twenty minutes for our breakfast. Then we tackled a narrow gully, one of the bugbears of the ascent, for it is the pathway of much falling rock. And so with anxious upward glances, and hurrying feet, we got through it as

MISS PARKER CLIMBING MT. SIR DONALD

F. W. Freeborn, Photo

MISS PARKER CLIMBING MT. SIR DONALD

MT. SIR DONALD

F. W. Freeborn, Photo

MT. SIR DONALD

soon as we could, and halted for rest and breath, crouched at the foot of an overhanging cliff that rose vertically hundreds of feet above us, its face from top to bottom so jagged and loose-jointed, with such fresh-looking cleavage, that it threatened at any moment to drop tons of wreckage at our feet. The weather had grown thick again, streams of leakage were trickling down upon us, and so we kept our refuge no longer than we really had to.

Just beyond this halt we struck to the right and somewhat upwards over the face of the main peak; at first across a shallow couloir 200 feet wide, plainly in most of its curving width a pathway of rocky débris, where watchful eyes and active feet were needed. Beyond this a traverse was made of a rather steep snow slope. We were still two parties, and so we took the couloir and the traverse separately, Miss Parker and young Feuz going first, and then when they had got well started on the snow, the elder Feuz and I followed rapidly. Luckily, neither in this couloir nor in the one below had we to dodge so much as a pebble. In this we fared much better than some of our predecessors.

Our course lay towards the conspicuous shoulder on the right of the mountain, and thence along the sky-line to the top. The climbing was steady and slow and always somewhat strenuous, but in two and a half hours from our refuge under the cliffs, we came suddenly and somewhat unexpectedly upon the summit.

Miss Parker was the first Canadian woman to tread that windy peak. Only four women had preceded her, Mrs. Berens, Miss Benham and Miss Tuzo of Old England, and Miss Raymond of New England, all four names well known to the mountain-climbing world.

We were almost exactly eight hours in going from the Glacier House to the summit. We had been shut in by clouds and snow squalls for some time, and in a continuance of such condition with no view beyond a few rods, we sat there and ate our lunch. It was a cold eating place; no sun to cheer us, no landscape to repay the toilsome climb, a cold wind blowing, our benumbed feet in a snow-bank, the flakes falling thickly over us. Then we came down.

The weather played us many tricks on the return, sunshine, rain, hail, sleet, fierce winds, snow squalls, in turn and sometimes in conjunction, gave us all the variety we needed to kill monotony. A little way below the summit the clouds blew away from about us and discovered a wide landscape to the east and south. Still farther down the whole mass of clouds would lift at times and we could look under them over the broad Illecillewaet Neve with its ten square miles of pure white, looking from that height as level as a floor. Now and then beyond appeared the mighty mass of Dawson, and further to the right the graceful curves of the Asulkan Pass and Glacier, with a wilderness of nameless ice-clad giants in the west beyond them as far as eye could see.

The most striking sight of all was a brief view that came to us when we were near the base of the main peak. We had just been pelted with a fierce squall of wind and rain and hail. It passed, and we stood in an oasis of sunlight. The lower clouds were gone. To the south a broad band of sunlight lay across the Illecillewaet Névé; the heavy blanket of the upper clouds threw its gloomy shadow on all the world in that quarter save the single peak of Mt. Purity, its perfect cone a brilliant gleaming white in the bright sunlight that transfigured it alone. I tried to catch the scene with my camera, but the result is only a faint suggestion of the majesty and beauty of the original.

Our descent was made by practically the same route as the ascent, but greater caution was necessary for safety; and so we all four went upon one rope. So carefully had we to pick our way, that even with less stops than on the way up, we were more than an hour longer in descending from the summit to the glacier than in covering the same space in the ascent. But once on the glacier, we could avail ourselves of the same tactics that had served us so well on the peaks and passes about Paradise Valley; now rushing down in the yielding snow by leaps and bounds, now sitting and taking a long glissade. So with alternate sliding and striding we soon reached the moraine. Then, with a short but heavy shower, the cantankerous god of the weather gave us his parting blessing, and we plodded prosaically along until, in a trifle over seven hours after leaving the summit, we were back at the welcome shelter of the Glacier House. Tired? Of course. Exhausted? By no means. Happy? Only those who hold in memory the retrospect of such a day can know the feeling.