Chapter 5

The official first ascent:
Kain, Foster, MacCarthy, 1913

William W. Foster, in his report of their 1913 climb, called Mount Robson "a peak which the Club's executive had determined to make its own" [Foster 1915]. After Kinney's climb,was it not already was their own?

The team put together by Arthur Wheeler in1913 consisted of Foster, who was the deputy minister of public works for the B.C. government (whose wife Olive was daughter of George Stewart, the first superintendent of Banff National Park); Albert H. MacCarthy, a retired U.S. naval officer (Foster and MacCarthy were later among the team that made the first ascent of Mount Logan); and the illustrious Austrian - Canadian guide Conrad Kain. They were ferried to the foot of Mount Robson on the Grand Trunk Pacific railway, still under construction in the Yellowhead Pass. They were shepherded to base camp by Donald Phillips and his ponies, and lavished with all the support necessary for a summit bid.

Phillips didn't realize that he had not made it to the top of Robson until early in the 1913 camp, according to a letter Wheeler wrote to J. Monroe Thorington after Phillips's death in 1938. Wheeler said that he "did not know of any controversy concerning Kinney's and his [Phillips's] ascent of Mount Robson in 1909. There never was any blame attributed to either and the facts are simple: Kinney was perfectly honest in his belief that they had attained the summit of the mountain. You have doubtless read the joint narrative by Kinney and Phillips in the 1910 issue of the Canadian Alpine Journal, which set forth their climb in detail, and they were credited with the first ascent until the Club's 1913 Mount Robson camp, at which Phillips made the statement that subsequent study of the mountain convinced him that they had not reached the highest point by some sixty feet. This is easily understood," Wheeler explained, "when it is considered, as is told in the narrative, that the whole top of the mountain was densely enveloped in cloud. There is no doubt they reached the summit crest, but were unable to distinguish the actual highest point, which otherwise they would have attained. Acting upon Phillips' statement at the 1913 camp, Foster and MacCarthy followed the guide, Conrad Kain, to the real summit and made a traverse of the mountain. These are the facts as I know them," Wheeler wrote.

"While Conrad's ascent was a magnificent feat," Wheeler continued, "he was a professional and much experienced guide, climbing under excellent weather conditions and with a full stomach, and technically the first ascent belongs to his party. On the other hand, Kinney and Phillips were amateurs and had only their own individual, half-starved efforts and their indomitable courage amidst storm conditions to rely upon. I always feel the actual first ascent belongs to them and Phillips's statement and its results nearly broke Kinney's heart." [Wheeler 1938]

J.W.A. Hickson, a professor of metaphysics at McGill and president of the ACC from 1924 to 1926, also writing to Thorington after Phillips's death (in an avalanche), did not agree that Kinney had made an honest mistake. "Phillips knew nothing of mountaineering, and it was reported to me afterwards that he was instructed by Kinney to support the assertion that they had reached the top of Mount Robson. It was at the A.C.C. camp [1910] when Kinney gave an account of his alleged triumph, and I remember expressing doubt to Dr. Longstaff, who was unable to follow the description then given. Phillips showed pluck." [Hickson 1938] In addition to impugning Kinney's honesty, Hickson seems to doubt that they lacked only 20 m, for such a shortcoming would not be evident in the route description.

According to Elizabeth Parker, Phillips did not make his assertion until after the successful ascent. When Kain, Foster and MacCarthy's tale was finished, 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," she reported his reply. "This quite artless and spontaneous statement is not repeated in the mood of the hair-splitter, but merely to illustrate the ingenuousness of Phillips, who, in telling his own story, would giggle ever so little over his own terror on the narrow ledges and almost vertical slopes on new snow. 'The rest of you may tackle Mount Robson as often as you like, but not me! Not for ten million dollars!'" [Parker 1914]

Kain corroborates Parker: "Phillips words are as follows: 'We reached, on our ascent (in mist and storm) an ice dome fifty or sixty feet high, which we took for the peak. The danger was too great to ascent the dome.'" Kain does not say when Phillips made this statement; he does not imply that it was a response to his own, Foster's and MacCarthy's statements. [Kain 1915]

In a close-knit group like the Robson camp attendees, one might presume a rapid spread of news that fellow members had just made "the first complete ascent" (as it was written up in the journals) of the highest mountain in the Canadian Rockies. But when Lawrence J. Burpee, travelling in the Mount Robson region at that time, "sat down to rest among the tents of the Alpine Club," he was told "of how George Kinney and Donald Phillips against all possible odds fought their way to the supreme peak of Robson." Kinney's story was still current, even though "a few days before two members of the Alpine Club with the Swiss guide Konrad Kain had climbed to the summit of Robson, and while we were in camp another party came down, unsuccessful, after three days spent on the peak." Burpee1914.

Even club secretary Paul A. W. Wallace didn't hear the news until a few days later. "Curly Phillips, who accompanied Kinney up Mount Robson, was telling me tonight that they did not reach the actual summit. The weather was bad, four feet of snow were lying on the mountain. They did not intend, when they started out, to attempt the peak, but only the angle where the slope towards the summit begins to ease off. But they went on further until they reached the foot of the final dome. Above them stretched a slope of snow (about 60 feet high). It appeared as if they could surmount it in a few minutes, but their clothes were frozen, and the snow was uncertain, so they turned around and went back" [Wallace 1913]

Wallace wrote the Club's official account, which was published by the Banff Crag and Canyon: "Thirteen hours of strenuous fighting up rock cliffs and dangerous slopes of snow and ice, where sixteen hundred steps had to be cut with the ice axe, brought them [Kain, Foster, MacCarthy] to the summit at 5 o'clock in the evening. They were the first persons to set foot on the actual summit of Canada's greatest mountain." [Wallace 1913]

The Alpine Journal (London) reported: "The first complete ascent and traverse of Mt. Robson (13,068 ft) was made by one party." [Alpine Journal 1914]

Wheeler, in his address to the 1914 annual meeting of the ACC at the Upper Yoho Valley Camp, recounted the previous year: "The crowning feat of the year was the first complete ascent of Mt. Robson by Conrad Kain, accompanied by W.W. Foster and A.H. MacCarthy, all three of whom are here present. It is a source of much gratification to me to have had the ascent made by a gentleman high up in official Government circles one who at that time was a Deputy Minister and whom I hope before long to see a Minister of the Crown. It serves to show that the thrall of the mountains reaches to the highest estate in the land as well as to the lowest, and it does one good to meet a politician who can climb a mountain." [Alpine Club of Canada 1906-1914]

SPIRAL ROAD - DIGITAL BANFF