Chapter 1

Conflicting Claims

On Friday, August 13, 1909, on the flanks of Mount Robson, George Kinney and Donald Phillips awoke to a clear sky. Climbing was excellent on the hard snow above their bivouac at 10,000 feet. Approaching the summit, Kinney stated they were met by a storm "so thick that we could see but a few yards, and the sleet would cut our faces and nearly blind us." Kinney continued, "When within five hundred feet of the top, we encountered a number of cliffs, covered with overhanging masses of snow, that were almost impossible to negotiate. The snow driven by the fierce gales had built out against the wind in fantastic masses of crystal, forming huge cornices all along the crest of the peak. We finally floundered through these treacherous masses and stood, at last, on the very summit of Mount Robson. I was on a needle peak that rose so abruptly that even cornices cannot build out very far on it." [Kinney and Phillips 1910]

Kinney had no doubt about the magnitude of his achievement. "I doubt if ever a peak was fought for more desperately, or captured under greater difficulties, than was that of Mount Robson," he wrote. "Situated in the heart of the Rockies, some fifty miles or more north of the Yellowhead Pass, and hundreds of miles from civilization, the mountain could only be reached by pack-trail after long weeks of strenuous effort, through trackless forest and muskeg, by nameless mountains and raging torrents." [Kinney and Phillips 1910] "For three long years, expedition after expedition had failed. Climb after climb, up every side of the mountain, had hitherto left that noble peak still unconquered; till hope long deferred, had sapped our courage and left the spirit faint." [Kinney 1909]

"Gentlemen, " Conrad Kain announced to Albert H. MacCarthy and William W. Foster atop Mount Robson on July 31, 1913, "that's so far as I can take you." [Kain 1915] The Austrian guide's herren thought this meant that their attempt had failed. Then they realized that they were but two steps shy of the summit, and could complete the ascent on their own.

If Kain could take them no further, there awaited at base camp a person who could: Donald Phillips, who was catering a special mountaineering camp organized by Arthur Wheeler, director of the Alpine Club of Canada. The fifty-some camp attendees arrived at Mount Robson Station on the virgin tracks of the Grand Trunk Pacific Railway, and were carried to Robson Pass over a newly-completed horse trail.

Pressed by the crowd, Foster and MacCarthy related the details of their climb. "When the tale was finished," Elizabeth Parker recounted, "Curly Phillips, who had listened eagerly, went up to Mr. Foster and said: 'We didn't get up that last dome.'" Parker asked Phillips how high that dome was. "Between sixty and seventy feet." [Parker 1914]

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