Chapter 2

Attempts on Mount Robson
in 1907 and 1908

George Rex Boyer Kinney was born in New Brunswick in 1872. Following his father, he became a minister of the Methodist Church, serving briefly in Nova Scotia and Manitoba before filling temporary positions in Banff and Field. [Mortimore 1950] In Field he investigated the fossil beds on Mount Stephen: "With hammer and chisel, I opened Nature's book, and there, page after page, were trilobites of rarest form." In October, 1904, at the age of 32, he made a solo ascent of Mount Stephen, a feat recorded in the first volume of the Canadian Alpine Journal [Kinney 1907]. CAJ editor Arthur Wheeler remarked, "Never before or since has the climb been made by one man alone, and at a time of year when the conditions are such as to be almost prohibitive." So begins the litany of Kinney's "almost prohibitive" feats.

Kinney was one of the 79 original members of the Alpine Club of Canada. The member's list gives his residence in 1907 as Michel, B.C. [Alpine Club of Canada 1930]. (Michel as a settlement is not listed in the current Gazetteer of British Columbia; but Michel Creek is near Crowsnest Pass and is on the main line of the Canadian Pacific Railway.) In addition to ascents of Mount Stephen and Mount Vice-President, the 1907 membership list credits Kinney with a number of climbs between 8,000 and 10,000 feet in vicinity of Crowsnest Pass. Kinney later wrote that he had also climbed mounts Aberdeen, Temple, Pinnacle, and Fay. [Kinney 1909]

At the ACC's first annual general meeting and mountaineering camp in the Yoho Valley in 1906, Kinney assisted in guiding nine club members the top of Mount Vice-President, the club's first official climb (in the early years, members graduated to the active class after making an ascent above 10,000 feet). [Bridgland 1907] Kinney also attended the 1907 camp in Paradise Valley, where he was one of the "gentlemen placed in responsible positions as guides to various ascents and expeditions." [Bridgland 1908] (He apparently missed the camps in 1908 at Rogers Pass and in 1909 at Lake O'Hara. In 1910 at Consolation Valley, Kinney was again an assistant, but afterwards he is not mentioned. [Canadian Alpine Journal 1910])

Kinney presided over a congregation at James Bay in Victoria in 1907 when he was asked to join Arthur P. Coleman, also a founding member of the ACC, and his brother Lucius, a rancher at Morley, Alberta, in an attempt on Mount Robson. [Mortimore 1950] (Kinney may have met Coleman through the intercession of W. Lashley Hall, custodian of Ebenezer Robson's diaries. [Hall 1934]) Coleman, a professor of geology at the University of Toronto who had been exploring the Canadian Rockies since 1884, was being pressed by Wheeler to conquer Mount Robson in the name the Alpine Club of Canada before a foreign team claimed the prize. [Parker 1914] Kinney's father came out of retirement to take over the congregation and "caused a great revival."

Kinney left Morley, Alberta, at the end of July, and a week later met the Colemans at Laggan (Lake Louise). The group followed a route close to what is now the Icefields Parkway, running into Mary Shäffer in a blizzard at Wilcox Pass. Coleman was "disgusted to find the upper Athabasca valley burnt and the trail ruined by falled trees during the years since we had been there before [1892 and 93]; but the promised land was now in sight after our long battle with outrageous trails, and we should soon be on the well-beaten road used by hundreds of packers and railway engineers on their way from Edmonton to the Tête Jaune Cache." [Coleman 1911] It was September when they first sighted Mount Robson. "Oh what a glorious sight he was that day we first saw him," Kinney wrote. "There, buttressed across the whole valley and more, with his high flung crest manteled with a thousand ages of snow, Mount Robson shouldered his way into the eternal solitudes thousands of feet higher than the surrounding mountains." The next day Kinney and Lucius (Dr. Coleman having cut his knee with his geological hammer) set out separately to seek a climbing route. Kinney discovered the lake named after him, and the Valley of a Thousand Falls, which he named. "Eleven thousand feet of frowning cliffs and battlements rose in sheer masses out of the lake; countless tortuous ravines, gushing with many a fountain jet, scarred and chasmed the mountain's base on every hand: while fleecy clouds drowsily nestled in the sheltered niches of every high flung shoulder. Such was the wonder world that I discovered that day, when as the first white man I explored the base of Mount Robson." [Kinney 1909]

The group attempted a climb above Kinney Lake, but "in the morning more than a foot of snow had fallen. Our last glimpse of Robson showed clouds driving past a vast cone of white, broken in the lower parts by bands of nearly horizontal cliff; and then we turned up the Fraser valley and saw no more of the fascinating peak that had cost us so much toil." [Coleman 1911]

The trio was back at it in 1908, this time from Edmonton with the assistance of packer John Yates of Lac Ste. Anne, Métis guide Adolphus Moberly of Jasper, and "a party of Indians, including men, women, children, and dogs, with a mob of ponies." On Moberly's recommendation they ascended the Moose River valley to Moose Pass, descended Calumet Creek to the Smoky River, and followed the Smokey up to the foot of the Robson Glacier. "Rain fell in the valley and snow on the heights day after day," Coleman wrote, "making a heart-breaking delay after our last year's experience; and as the upper part of the mountain was shrouded there was nothing to do except map the surroundings and get things ready for a start. Every morning I rose at 3.30 to look at the weather, and then turned in again when the upper part of Robson was invisible." Two attempts were frustrated by bad weather and early snowfalls. "It was September 9th, and to all appearances our chance of reaching the top of Robson was over; but Mr Kinney, with immense pluck and well-justified in his powers as a climber, wanted to make one more effort, this time by a new route which he had been planning, attacking the mountain from the north-west side instead of the east, where we had met the difficulties of hanging glaciers. My brother thought for a time of joining him, but the effort seemed so hopeless that he gave it up, and Mr. Kinney set out alone. It seemed a foolhardy thing to do, but we knew that our friend was used to working alone and was at his best when depending on himself." [Coleman 1911]

"All day it stormed, but as I thought it was our last chance at the mountain, at four o'clock that afternoon I said goodbys to my companions, and with a fifty pound pack on my back started off alone into the storm. I crossed the gravel beds of the big Robson River, then scrambled for another mile over the great boulders that strewed the shores of Berg Lake. The short day was nearly done by the time I had passed over the rock-strewn floor of the valley below the lake and crossed its turbulent river. Then for a thousand feet and more, I packed that load of blankets to a shelf on a cliff in mid air. I had no fire, for the tree-line was far below. I ate in silence my cold goat meat, and drank the drip of the icicles from the cliff. Then night swallowed up the surrounding mountains and valleys, and the great storm clouds swept in ragged tatters all about me as I rolled up in my blankets in the snow. All through all that wretched night, the avalanche awoke the echoes of the hidden hills with din and roar, or the loose rock would clatter down among the canyons. By the first light of dawn I was storming the heights. The day had begun fine. But here I met a screaming gale and the wrack of clouds was already burying the distant mountain peaks now on a level with me. That storm was one of the fiercest blasts that I ever met. Three times, while crossing an exposed shale slope on the west, it literally tore me from my footholds and tumbled me over. While there were times when I could not advance a single step against it. For over an hour I waited in the lee of a cliff, hoping the storm would pass. But instead of it subsiding it added the lash of snow to its fury, and whipped around the jutting crags in a foaming swirl of white. I determined to make a desperate attempt, thinking that possibly I could climb above the storm. I worked my way up protected gullies, and left cliff on cliff behind. But the increased storm brought an enemy that completely vanquished me. All the big cliffs had been climbed, and I now had only to scale the smaller ones on the upper slopes of the couloirs, and it was there that my enemy lurked. There were no big glaciers above me, no frowning cliffs of ice to topple debris upon me, but in that blinding blizzard each and every gully became a foaming stream of hissing snow. At first it came in little dribbles, and cliff on cliff was left behind. But soon I was climbing knee deep in rushing torrents of dry kerneled snow. There was no escaping it. I struggled on till I was ten thousand five hundred feet altitude by my anaroyd [sic], but those rivers of snow were becoming avalanches, and to be swept off my feet meant certain death below. It was hard to have to give it up, but wind and snow were too much for me. I would liked to have made a camp there in some sheltered nook, but I had promised my friends to be back that day, so I turned my back on the peak and tried for the valley below." [Kinney 1909]

The following evening "the plucky fellow turned up, soaked and defeated, though still in good spirits. He had a thrilling story to tell of his forlorn hope expedition in a howling blizzard at one point well above ten thousand feet as shown by aneroid, he decided that to go farther would be madness, and turned back, facing even worse risks." They determined to return east the next day, "but with the morning came the finest weather of the season, and we could not resist the temptation to make another assault on Mount Robson, which stood clear cut against the sky without a wreath of vapour." By five o'clock in the afternoon "we were probably still at least two thousand feet below the top, since one aneroid read 11,300 feet and the other 11,600, while Mr McEvoy's triangulation gives Mount Robson the height of 13,700 feet [see McEvoy 1900]. It was pretty certain that a night high up on Robson could mean nothing less than frozen limbs, so that idea was given up. Twenty-one days had passed at or near our beautiful camp ground in the grove beside the main glacier, and in that time there had only twice been two fine days in succession." [Coleman 1911]

"On our way east from Mount Robson," Coleman continued, "we often talked over the best method of attack on a future occasion, agreeing that perhaps the route most promising of success was that taken by Mr Kinney on his lonely climb up the talus slopes and rock cliffs toward the north-west; and before parting it was agreed with Yates that he should arrange for horses in the following summer if we should join in a third expedition to the unconquered. My brother and I expected to take part in this, but Mr Kinney was able to get off earlier than we could, and learning that he was already on his way up to Mount Robson our plan was given up." [Coleman 1911] In English climbing circles, "Kinney's failure to honor these plans would have been a gross breach of climbing etiquette," according to Philips's biographer William C. Taylor.[Taylor 1984]

SPIRAL ROAD - DIGITAL BANFF