Mountaineering logs donated to Banff museum
A Banff museum is now home to decades-old records of the first documented ascents of major peaks in the Canadian Rockies.
The Calgary Mountain Club donated its collection of mountaineering archives, including articles, hut registers, photographs and logbooks filled with handwritten descriptions to the Whyte Museum of the Canadian Rockies.
Chic Scott, a Banff-based historian and former president of the Calgary Mountain Club, said many of Canada's greatest climbers lived in Calgary and were club members.
One particularly special piece included in the donation, he said, is a large leather-bound ledger that details climbs completed in the 1960s and 1970s.
LISTEN | The Calgary Mountain Club has donated its collection of rare archives to the Whyte Museum in Banff:
Among the accounts are climbs on Mount Yamnuska, including Red Shirt, Forbidden Corner and the Bowl route, which are now climbed by hundreds each year.
Scott said climbers of that time were often modest about their achievements.
"There's not a lot of superlatives. But what they do is they actually give a description of how to climb these things, how the route works its way up the steep mountain face," Scott said on the Calgary Eyeopener.
Chic Scott is the former president of the Calgary Mountain Club. (Monty Kruger/CBC)
"And, of course, this was in the days before we had guidebooks that you could just purchase in a bookstore."
Another donated item is the collection of minute books that date back to July 1960, when the club was formed.
"It's great from a historian's point of view. This is where you get the real nitty-gritty detail on what the club was and what it did."
Ken Wiens, the club's director of communications, said that when he joined the club in 1974, there was little in the way of formal training programs.
"So the best way to learn was to cling on, literally, to these bold pioneers of Rockies' first ascents," he said in a joint media release with the Whyte Museum.
Climbers Billy Davidson, John Lauchlan, Don Vockeroth, Brian Greenwood and Klaus Hahn are all represented in the donated items.
Kate Nielsen, archivist at the Whyte Museum, said the museum was a natural place for the records to end up.
"It is such a really integral part of mountaineering history over the last 60 years."
