“We saw to the south across Resplendent Valley one particular peak that rose from the centre of a snow massif like a huge rock-finger pointing heavenward,” wrote Arthur Oliver Wheeler [1860–1945] during the 1911 Alpine Club of Canada–Smithsonian Robson Expedition. “On seeing it Konrad exclaimed, ‘Ach! That is my peak,’ and thereafter we knew it as ‘The Finger of Kain.’ To Konrad’s disappointment, his ‘Finger’ later showed a broad slab of rock, but it must have been a very thin one.”

Alpine guide Conrad Kain [1883–1934] was born near Vienna, Austria. When Conrad was nine his father died, leaving a large family in poverty. Kain left school at 14 and became a goatherd, later a quarryman, and in 1904, a mountain guide. He arrived in Banff in 1909, and started an assault on Canadian peaks which resulted in the first ascents of over sixty mountains. He accompanied Arthur Wheeler’s Yellowhead expedition in 1911, making the first ascents of Mount Resplendent, with Byron Harmon, and Whitehorn, solo. Kain spent that winter on the Smoky River, trapping with Donald Phillips. In 1913, Kain led William Foster and Albert MacCarthy up the north-east face of Mount Robson to the top of the highest peak in the Canadian Rockies.

Kain married in 1917 and settled on a little farm in the Columbia valley, where he raised mink, marten and chinchilla, and continued mountaineering and guiding. In 1923, he accompanied an expedition to the Athabasca Pass and the Tonquin Valley, and the next year he was back at Mount Robson conducting climbing parties.

“Conrad Kain brought glamour and imagination into the sport of mountaineering as few guides have done before him,” stated a memoriam in the Canadian Alpine Journal. “Recalling his personality and amusing stories one should not forget that his approach to mountains was first and foremost an aesthetic one; he saw a peak first as something beautiful — the technical problem was always secondary — and nothing counted beside that vision.”

J. M. Thorington wrote that “The people at Red Pass Station do not know the name of Mount Kain, but call it Needle Peak because of the enormous hole that pierces it just northeast of the summit.” Thorington, who edited Kain’s autobiography, Where the Clouds Go, made the first ascent of Kain Mountain in 1934.

Mary Lenore Jobe Akeley [1878–1966] explored the Mount Sir Alexander area in 1914 and 1915, on expeditions guided by Donald “Curly” Phillips [1884–1938] of Jasper.

Surveyor Alan John Campbell [1882–1967] named this mountain for his sister Jessie in 1925.

A Dominion Land Surveyor, Campbell worked on the Alberta-British Columbia Boundary Commission survey from 1913 to 1924. One of the privileges that fell to him as surveyor was naming mountains and passes. In this he says that he preferred to employ descriptive terms rather than commemorate the names of persons.

In the spring of 1913 Campbell went to Tête Jaune Cache in the Cariboo mountains. He traveled the Fraser River by canoe and raft and with Dalby Brooks Morkill [1880–1955] ran the Giscombe and Goat River Rapids. Up-river from Giscombe as far as McBride, Campbell surveyed land sections. He recalled that the first building in McBride was known as Dan’s Place. All other accommodation was in the form of tents, but in Dan’s Place one could rent half a bed for an eight hour stretch. Those beds, he recalls, were never empty.

Named by Walter Alfred Don Munday [1890–1950] during his explorations in the Cariboo Range:

The dominant feature of the scene was the magnificent mountain which the Carpé-Chamberlin party proposed to name Mt. David Thompson (11,250 ft.) in the belief that the pass north of it was the true source of the North Thompson River. Northward of this pass gleamed an ice guarded mountain which we refer to as Mt. Hostility (11,000 ft.). The sunlight threw into relief the whole expanse of glacier, the lower part marked by great concentric ridges where the dry glacier describes an arc of nearly 90 degrees.

Munday doesn’t elucitate on the reasons for the name “Hostility,” but the party experienced unpleasant weather.

This unofficial name was superseded in the Premier Range commemorations.

This mountain overlooking the Athabasca Pass was named in 1827 by David Douglas [1799–1834], “in honor of my early patron, the Professor of Botany in the University of Glasgow.” Professor Sir William Jackson Hooker [1785–1865] became Director of the Royal Botanical Gardens, Kew, in 1841.

Douglas’s estimate of the height of the mountain, about 16,000 feet (4880 m) , was reduced to 9,000 feet (2740 m) in 1893 by Arthur Philemon Coleman [1852–1939].

See Mount Brown for more information.

Name adopted in association with Holmes River.