Imaginary peaks, p.17
Imaginary Peaks, page 17
Mountaineering communities were much more scattered and disconnected from each other than they are now. News and rumors disseminated slowly and often remained incomplete, fragments spread by word of mouth or reported in regional bulletins and annual alpine club journals. The only source of information about the first ascent of a lesser known peak or the topographic details of its upper regions might be the people who claimed to have climbed it.
Founded in 1955, Summit was the first monthly climbing magazine in the United States, and its influence remained paramount until the 1970s. When I visited its old office in October 2014, one of the retired editors, Jean Crenshaw, told me she’d often had to depend on her instincts to decide whether a writer was telling the truth. While she and co-editor Helen Kilness had struggled to verify the reports they received during the decades before our current Information Age, they’d also relied on that lack of connectedness to conceal facts about themselves. Concerned that no one would buy the magazine if readers knew it was run by women, they’d hidden their gender on the masthead, listing themselves as “J. M. Crenshaw” and “H. V. J. Kilness.” Later, Jean switched to using “Jene M. Crenshaw” in print (which sounded more like a man’s name to her than “Jean” did). They published letters to the editor that addressed them as “Dear Sirs,” without correcting the writers’ assumptions. By the time their secret was out, the magazine was well established. “It was a man’s world,” Jean said. “I didn’t resent it. It was just the facts of life. The less people knew about us, the easier it was to work. We had to do our own thing. We kept to ourselves. We had to.”
The cabin where they lived and worked for much of the year was on a mountainside above Big Bear Lake in California, reachable only by long, winding roads. Stark light fell around the oak leaves, pinecones, and needles as I gazed at the surroundings. Low peaks rose across the valley, pale green and sunbaked white. The distant lake narrowed to an iridescent blue band. The small, brown-shingled building perched atop a granite crag, its sides merging with giant boulders. To train, Jean explained to me, the editors and their guests traversed around the outside walls of the house, clinging to the rocks and bricks, trying not to let their feet touch the ground. Other boulders clustered in alcoves nearby, offering rounded cracks and sloping holds that were perfect for practicing all kinds of movements—a natural sculpture garden of stone. It was the kind of place where a climber might dream of living.
The previous owner had designed each architectural detail according to his eccentric imagination, creating toy-size model dwellings nestled high in the rocks and constructing a little bridge over a small pool. For the front door of the main building, Helen and Jean had hired the magazine’s main cartoonist, Sheridan Anderson, to paint a sign with the image of a piton and the words SUMMIT HOUSE.
When I stepped over the threshold, I felt as if I’d passed through a cliff face into the cool quiet interior of a peak. A blue waterfall glistened within a diorama of a mountainside. Beneath the floor was a catacomb-like basement, formed by a natural cave of wedged boulders, with stairs cut into the rock itself. Jean and Helen had created a darkroom inside a nook partly jackhammered out of the surrounding stone. There, they set up their printing press and stitched together the early issues.
Although other female editors had served at North American club publications such as The Canadian Alpine Journal and The Mugelnoos, Helen and Jean had launched Summit at a time when women had largely faded to the background of mountaineering stories in the US. Wartime posters of heroines working in offices and factories disappeared during the late 1940s, replaced by gleaming advertisements that showcased suburban housewives consuming new kitchen and beauty products. Women’s magazines alternated between publishing scattered stories about female career achievements and promoting a vision of domestic bliss so perfect it was unattainable for real families.
Some men who felt stifled by the conventions of 1950s society could find an outlet by pursuing adventures in the mountains. Women who sought similar forms of escape sometimes had trouble finding a place in the growing counterculture of climbing, where their presence wasn’t always welcomed. As American historian Ruth Rosen explained in The World Split Open, “For young men determined to avoid the world of their fathers, freedom meant cutting loose from women and children.” Alongside the rise of postwar technology, Yosemite climber Joe Fitschen recalled, big-wall climbing became “quite violent . . . with the bashing of pitons and the struggling over overhangs.” For many, “it just didn’t seem to be the kind of thing young women should be doing.” Examples of strong female lead climbers, such as Bonnie Prudden, who established dozens of new routes in the Shawangunks of New York between 1946 and 1955, or Jan Conn, who made hundreds of first ascents across America, remained fairly rare. Irene Beardsley (who later took part in the first American ascent of Annapurna) met a number of talented, active women when she joined the Stanford Alpine Club in Palo Alto, California, in the early 1950s. But she didn’t start leading, herself, for several years. “I think I positively enjoyed the freedom to be different,” she recalled. “At the same time, I was quite shy. I did feel I was defying norms.” With few clear paths to follow, female adventurers of the era often had to create their own.
“Everything was a challenge, and I was out to meet it,” Jean told me. “I’ve never been frightened in my life. I can’t even remember what it’s like to be frightened.” After the death of her father, an electrician, Jean’s mother struggled to raise her and her brothers in Huntington Park, California. Like many of her high school classmates, Jean enlisted during World War II. While stationed in Georgia with the US Coast Guard, she met fellow radio operator Helen—a quiet woman who had grown up on a South Dakota farm. At the end of the war, the two friends pooled their small savings, bought a motorcycle, taught themselves to drive it, and set off across the country together.
Jean learned to climb with the Sierra Club on large, coed trips to the hills that provided a relatively friendly environment for female members. The idea of Summit came from her passion for the mountains and from her desire, after years of working for a Masonic publication, to have a magazine of her own. “Once we got started,” she said, “the stories came to us.” Many now-legendary climbing writers published their earliest articles in Summit, experimenting with new styles and ideas. Royal Robbins, who served as Summit’s rock climbing editor from 1964 to 1974, helped usher in the age of clean climbing. Cartoonist Sheridan Anderson poked fun at the grand protagonists of the Golden Age of Yosemite climbing. Jean and Helen presented groundbreaking first ascents and ordinary excursions on an equal level, as if all that mattered was a love of mountains for their own sake—the ability, as contributor Rick Sylvester wrote, “to take pleasure from the experiencing, not just the experience.”
In 1956, a reader penned an infamous letter that began, “Sir: I find a regrettable tendency in your magazine to refer to mountaineering as a career equally adaptable to both men and women.” Outraged responses flooded the letters section over the next several issues (which perhaps was the publishers’ intent) defending women’s right to climb—including a note from Elizabeth Knowlton, who had accompanied a 1932 attempt on 26,657-foot Nanga Parbat. A year later, Jan and Herb Conn’s article “We Work in Our Spare Time” explained the principles of dirtbaggery for couples: “It’s a simple matter of mathematics—two people working six months a year are just as good as one person working twelve months to support two people.”
Between Summit deadlines, Jean and Helen went on climbing trips in an old pickup with a small trailer. After dark, they’d turn off some back road, extinguish the headlights, and continue by moonlight or starlight until they found a hidden place to sleep. They preferred scrambling up unfrequented peaks, and they kept no record of their ascents. During one of their last big Sierra Club excursions, the trip leader had asked them to take a novice along on a route. At the top of a pitch, Jean told the man to stay to one side while she belayed Helen up, but he kept shifting back and forth, knocking rocks loose. A big stone thundered down, and for a moment, Jean thought Helen was dead. At last, Helen shouted up, “I’m all right.” Jean recalled that “those were the happiest words I heard in my life.”
After that day, they mostly climbed by themselves. “It was safer that way,” Jean explained. “We knew what we were capable of.” They trusted each other more than anyone else. “People would often try to play tricks on you,” Jean said of her days as an editor, when I asked her about the Riesenstein. “People liked to do that to us.” And then she laughed, with a glint in her eye, at once mischievous and mysterious. “That’s the sort of thing I would do to someone else.”
CHAPTER 14
The Land of Beyond
EVER SINCE I SAW THAT sly expression on Jean’s face in 2014, I’ve wondered if she’d known the Riesenstein was a hoax when she published the original story in 1962. Had she gone along with the practical joke out of sheer amusement? To get readers riled up and sell more magazines? Or to watch the ensuing scramble to find the real peaks? If she had, it didn’t surprise me that she’d said nothing about her complicity over the decades or that she’d allowed other climbers, mostly men, to think she was gullible. A skilled mechanic, Jean used to approach male drivers whose cars had broken down in the mountains, ask them what was wrong in her charming voice, and then enjoy their shock while she swiftly fixed their machines. Silent humor, she told me, was a means of coping with sexism: “That’s your reward. You can laugh in your head, but not out loud.”
If, on the other hand, Jean and Helen had fallen for the prank, they weren’t the only ones—climbers across the United States did as well. “Like any good joke,” mountaineering historian Andy Selters explained in an email to me, “timing was critical. Because Half Dome and El Cap had been climbed, [the Riesenstein] could then seem a logical, but mythical step, a Yosemite in a faraway pristine land with unlimited potential for challenge and expansion.”
If the hoax had been published even a few years before 1962, Summit readers might have simply fantasized about the peaks of the Riesenstein, never imagining themselves capable of scaling such long, steep, storm-blasted rock walls. But the article came out in the midst of the Golden Age of Yosemite climbing. In 1957, Royal Robbins, Jerry Gallwas, and Mike Sherrick had made the first ascent of the Regular Northwest Face of Half Dome, a sheer, monolithic cliff more than 2,000 feet high. “We feared the enormity of the wall,” Robbins recalled in his memoir Fail Falling. “We dreaded having to reach so deeply within ourselves and maybe find ourselves lacking.”
In 1958, Warren Harding, Wayne Merry, and George Whitmore became the first to complete the Nose on El Capitan, a granite prow that sweeps in a lunate arc for nearly 3,000 feet up a cliff face. It was a feat that once seemed impossible, even in climbers’ dreams. Other routes soon multiplied across daunting big walls throughout Yosemite. A year after Summit printed the Riesenstein Hoax, one of the leading figures of the Golden Age, Yvon Chouinard, published his manifesto, “Modern Yosemite Climbing,” in the American Alpine Journal. “The future of Yosemite climbing lies not in Yosemite, but in using the new techniques in the great granite ranges of the world,” he declared. “The Coast Ranges, the Logan Mountains, the innumerable ranges of Alaska, the Andes, the Baltoro Himalaya all have walls which defy the imagination. . . . A new generation of super-alpinists . . . will venture forth . . . to do the most esthetic and difficult walls on the face of the earth.”
Heidi Brooks remembers listening to Harvey and his friends laugh about how climbers were responding to their hoax. In those days, she explains, “[There was] a race to see who could get the most first ascents. That just drove Harvey and everybody else in his group nuts because it was such a pretentious bullshit thing.” When a well-known mountaineer announced that the Riesenstein was next on his tick list, the joke seemed complete.
Like other imaginary peaks, the Riesenstein flourished because it reflected the longings of its audience. For ambitious American climbers, the fake routes marked on the Summit photo corresponded to half-conscious reveries they’d just become bold enough to try to pursue. The real ranges in Chouinard’s manifesto also included granite cliffs and spires that soared above glaciers. There, alpinists would face not only the sustained, technical challenges of climbing vast rock walls, but also the high-mountain hazards of storms and cold, ice and snow—just as in the Riesenstein.
That the Riesenstein might exist in the isolated Coast Mountains of British Columbia seemed feasible to many readers, at least initially. In High Worlds of the Mountain Climber, a few years prior, Harvey himself had observed that there were still a lot of unclimbed peaks north of the US border. “Canada,” he joked, has enough “mountains to use, mountains to waste and mountains to export if practical.”
Like prospectors of the gold rush days, many US climbers were eager to get to a seemingly untapped resource before anyone else. As Mike Graber recounted in his history of the Kichatnas for the 1980 Ascent, “enthusiastic American mountaineers began planning expeditions [to the Riesenstein] and flooding the Canadian government map office in Ottawa with requests for topographical maps and aerial photos.” Fred Beckey wasn’t fooled for a moment. “It was immediately obvious this was a hoax, to me anyway,” he recalled in an email in 2011. Fred had explored the Coast Mountains since 1942 when he and Helmy made the second ascent of Mount Waddington (Xwox in the local Tŝilhqot’in language), once known as “Mystery Mountain,” a 13,186-foot peak hidden beyond a mass of chaotic forests and crevassed glaciers. But even without drawing on his personal knowledge of the geography of British Columbia, Beckey spotted the clues the hoaxers had planted, including the resemblance between the name of one of the imaginary Austrian climbers, Kronofer, and a climbing-shoe brand.
Nonetheless, Beckey admitted, he wasn’t sure of the actual peaks’ location at the time. He hadn’t come across anything exactly like them during his endless peregrinations across North American ranges. “The photos were obviously real,” he wrote to me. “I did not know about the Kichatnas . . . but suspected [the Riesenstein was] in Alaska [in] some place that Washburn had not seen.” Maybe it was something about the combination of roiling clouds, crevassed glaciers, and snow-crusted walls that gave Beckey the idea. There weren’t a lot of mountaineers who could have guessed correctly, he added. “There was still so much left [unknown in the 1960s]. Only a few had the energy, time and money and wilderness zeal to go after such remote places.”
Canadian climber Glenn Woodsworth was also sure the Riesenstein was a hoax when it was first published, but he appreciated its cleverness. Back then, printed maps of the Coast Mountains still recalled the old sepia cartographies of much earlier days. In one 1959 map, which Glenn later sent me, Mount Waddington, the highest peak of the range, is surrounded by blank patches, the color of ocher, broken only by the tentative lines of rivers, a few dots of elevation points, occasional eruptions of contour lines, and the enticing admonition of “RELIEF DATA INCOMPLETE.”
In 1962, as Glenn carefully examined aerial pictures of the Skeena region, he didn’t discern any mountain faces that appeared steep and long enough to be the grand walls of the Riesenstein. Local pilots assured Glenn that they hadn’t flown over anything like the mountains that appeared in Summit. Climber and cartographer Neal Carter had photographed the same area from the apex of the nearby Seven Sisters Peaks on a clear day in 1941. He told Glenn that he hadn’t seen any giant rock towers either.
During the early 1960s, Glenn’s friend Dick Culbert was working on a guidebook to the Coast Mountains, and he, too, hadn’t come across any record of big spires. To complete his guidebook, however, Dick still had to visit the region in person. “We both knew that the alpine journals—the records of recreational mountaineers—were only part of the story of those mountains,” Glenn explained. “Their history was also in the memories of prospectors, loggers, trappers, bush-rats, misfits, First Nations, and others who lived in and near the mountains and occasionally climbed them.”
Members of the Ts’mysen tribes had long charted their unceded lands between the Nass and Skeena Rivers with footpaths, canoe routes, and stories. In an oral history recorded by Ts’mysen chief William Beynon, a local Gitksan shaman, Isaac Tens, had described a vision of flying in a canoe toward a great, sheer mountain. As he got closer, its summit split into two sentient peaks who spoke to each other in a language that sounded like the ringing of bells.
Now, spurred by a flurry of letters asking him about the imaginary spires of the Riesenstein, Dick invited Glenn to join him on a reconnaissance trip in the winter of 1963. To save money, they got a ride from their home city of Vancouver to Squamish and then began hopping trains. When Glenn hoisted his backpack onto the top of a flatcar and jumped aboard after it, he tried not to remember how a similar leap had left his hero W. H. Davies, Welsh author of The Autobiography of a Super-Tramp, with a wooden leg. As the train went around a bend in the dark, Glenn noticed sparks flying off the metal of its wheels “like a line of fireflies twinkling along the track.”
From the town of Terrace, southeast of the alleged site of the Riesenstein, they hitchhiked and walked up back roads in search of longtime residents who lived in cabins and might have stories to share. A Swiss Canadian prospector, Joe Felber, told them about wandering across rugged ridgelines, climbing several nearby mountains and attempting 9,052-foot Howson Peak, the tallest real summit in the area, during the 1920s. Howson Peak wasn’t as technical as the imaginary spires (though it turned out to be dozens of feet higher). Still, its particular combination of isolation, obscurity, rock, and ice was enough to keep many people away, and it has at least one thing in common with the real Kichatnas, as Glenn later realized. “It is a magnet for foul, beastly weather,” he told me.
