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Mt. Vancouver 1975

This is perhaps my most significant trip. It was done with M.I.T. Outing Club people in 1975. We made the first ascent of the Northeast Ridge of Mt. Vancouver in the St. Elias range, Yukon, Canada. Mt. Vancouver is reaches 15,825 feet. The south summit is one of the markers of the U.S. - Canada border. We climbed the north summit. It is not clear which is higher, but a proper analysis of the photo taken toward the South Summit from the North Summit might be able to tell. A casual analysis is hampered by a hazy horizon over the ocean.

The following is lifted directly from the 1976 issue of the American Alpine Journal. It describes our climb.

"Mount Vancouver, Northeast Ridge. The 1975 M.I.T. Outing Club Expedition assembled in mid-June at Haines Junction. We consisted of Cliff Cantor, Bob Dangel, Paul Ledoux, Rob Milne, Hal Murray, Bob Walker, John Yates and me as leader. We conversed briefly with a Japanese party that had just completed an ascent of the north side of Mount Vancouver, a route we had considered as a possible alternative if we found the northeast ridge impractical. On June 16 in the evening, we were transported in three helicopter loads to a strikingly beautiful location near the base of the northeast ridge at 4800 feet on the Hubbard Glacier. The ridge above us rose in a series of steps to a snow-covered peak at 10,600 feet, above which it widened and became easier, merging with the main summit mass at 11,500 feet. We planned a high camp just beyond P 10,600, from which we felt we might push to the summit in one day. Climbing at night to obtain better snow conditions, we explored route possibilities and established Camp I above an active icefall which guarded a large, amphitheater-like basin on the south side of the ridge. From here, we were able to reach the 8200-foot plateau on the ridge with relative ease, occupying Camp II on June 22. We fixed 1100 feet of rope below the plateau to facilitate load carrying. Above the plateau, the ridge rose in three steps to P 10,600, the first step being the most difficult. This was a triangular-shaped face of rock and snow with sharp edges and steep, snow-filled gullies. On the night of June 24, Murray and I climbed up the right side of the face and on to the corniced, knife-edged ridge beyond while Ledoux, Milne, Walker, and Cantor fixed 1600 feet of rope up the central gully. On the night of June 26, following a snowstorm, Murray, Yates, and Cantor fixed 500 feet of rope along the knife-edged ridge, while Walker, Milne, and I fixed another 1000 feet up the central gully of the second step and climbed on over easier terrain to the summit of P 10,600. On the night of June 27, all of us packed loads to Camp III just beyond P 10,600, the rapid progress made possible by virtue of the fixed rope. The night of June 28 was clear and calm. Carrying only bivouac gear, we passed one final ice pitch on the ridge, then intersected the main summit mass up which we climbed with ease. We reached the north summit (15,825 feet), the highest, at about nine A.M. on June 29. The descent was tiresome and slow, but we finally reached Camp III after 17 hours of climbing. By the morning of July 3, we were all back in Base Camp, having removed our fixed ropes and equipment. Dangel and Milne flew back to Haines Junction with most of the climbing gear on July 5, while the rest of us donned skis and shouldered packs for an overlandreturn via the Hubbard and Kaskawulsh Glaciers. We covered 68 miles of spectacular glacial terrain during the next seven days, arriving back at Kluane Lake on July 11.

Barton DeWolf"

Note I was known as Bob Walker in the Outing Club (full name Robert Craig Walker - my attempts to switch to Bob in college failed because too many people knew my family and knew me as Craig).

Technical details:

The photos were taken on Kodachrome 25 or 64 (I forget which) which were new at the time and had a color balance issue. The camera was a Konica Autoreflex T3. Shortly after the trip, I made a slide show of 122 images. Most, but not all, were mine. Some were duplicates. Unfortunately the slide duplication technology (slide to slide) was not too good, so the quality of those duplicates was not so great.

I had a dozen slides digitized to PhotoCD in 1996 as part of a come-on offer when I bought a printer. Later I acquired a Minolta Dimage Scan Elite film scanner which I used in 2006 to scan the first 56 images. But that is fairly tedious, and I got very busy so I did not finish the project. The scanner was always fairly slow, and then, when I got my Mac Pro in 2009, became a problem because of its SCSI interface. The project languished until I retired at the end of 2014. I then set up my DSLR, a Pentax K5 with a 100mm macro lens, on a kludged mount using the slide holding end of an old slide duplicator (originally for the Konica) and proceeded to copy the rest of the slides by photographing them. The raw (DNG) images were processed in Lightroom. I also went back to the tif files from the scanning and redid most them in Lightroom for consistency. In the end, I think the best copies, and certainly the highest resolution (although the resolution is film limited) were from the camera. Warning, the EXIF data indicated many of the photos were taken by the Pentax K5 and automatically generated captions reflect that. But that is an artifact of the digitization process.

The duplicates are labeled in the captions as such. Those photos were taken by other members of the party. Several appeared in a recent slide show by Bart DeWolf, so were taken by him. It is possible that they are all from Bart. I needed other's photos because it was too dark on my helicopter filght in, and my photos of the key ridge climb were underexposed.

Note that these are 40 year old slides and are still in near perfect condition.


 

Click on the image for a screen size version.
The "2000" and "full size" versions are larger (not available in web versions).

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Duplicate. Photo by Bart DeWolf.

Duplicate. Photo by Bart DeWolf.

Duplicate. Photo by Bart DeWolf.

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This photo was taken from the North Summit looking toward the South Summit of Mt. Vancouver. A careful analysis might be able to settle the question of which is higher, especially because the distant horizon is over ocean. Unfortunately there are haze and low clouds so the horizon is not well constrained. Also, I'm not sure which lens was used. Options were 28mm, 50mm, and 85-210 zoom, with the 50mm being the most likely. The photo was cropped slightly when digitized because of the mount so some work would be needed to determine angles. Someday, maybe I'll spend some effort to do the analysis. Also I should check for other summit photos that did not make the edited set.

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