The name “Nevin (King) Creek” appears on the 1915 Provincial Pre-emptor’s map. The creek is still referred to locally as “King Creek.”

Perhaps named for Slim Niven, “a well-known oldtimer who lived in Tête Jaune Cache during railway construction, around 1912,” according to Margaret McKirdy of Valemount.

Not named after the Dunster old-timer and trapper John Niven who came from Scotland to Canada in 1923 and to B.C. in 1924.

Oscar Lamming opened his Wildlife Museum in 1965, when Museum Road was part of the highway. The collection featured Lamming’s taxidermy and local pioneering artifacts. In 1958 Lamming had opened a smaller museum in Lamming Mills, where he was able to show off his taxidermy, a skill he had learned at the Northwest School of Taxidermy in 1917. In 1970 there were thirteen hundred visitors at the museum, but the construction of the new highway, which by-passed the museum, drastically reduced the number of visitors.

Origin of the name unknown.

Mount Mumm at Berg Lake.
William James Topley, 1914
Library and Archives Canada

A. L. Mumm and guide Moritz Inderbinen. Mount Robson Camp on Snowbird Pass.
Photo by Frank W. Freeborn, 1913
Canadian Alpine Journal 1915

During the 1911 Alpine Club of Canada–Smithsonian Robson Expedition, surveyor Arthur Oliver Wheeler [1860–1945] climbed a peak on which he had noticed a rock cairn. “It had been placed there in 1910 by Dr. J. Norman Collie and A. L. Mumm, accompanied by the well-known Swiss guide, Moritz Inderbinen. The peak has been christened ‘Mumm’s Peak.’ From the summit the scene beggars description.”

The British climber Arnold Louis Mumm [1859–1927] first came to Canada in 1909 at the invitation of Alpine Club of Canada director Wheeler. After attending the 1909 ACC camp at Lake O’Hara, Mumm, along with Leopold Charles Maurice Stennett Amery [1873–1955], Geoffrey Hastings [1860–1941], and Inderbinen [1856–1926], made an unsuccesful attempt on Mount Robson.

Mumm returned with British professor John Norman Collie [1859–1942] in July, 1910, when the Grand Trunk Pacific Railway’s steel had been laid as far as Wolf Creek, about one hundred miles east of the Yellowhead Pass. The party spent some time about Mount Robson, but there was so much snow on the mountains and the weather was so stormy that climbing was out of the question, and they were able to ascend only some of the lesser peaks. They returned down the Smoky and Snake Indian rivers.

The name was adopted in 1965, referring to Ray Zillmer [1887–1960] and his son John, “the only persons known to have ascended the creek of the same name”

James Monroe Thorington [1895–1989] stated that Zillmer and his son in 1947 made the first crossing from “Tête Creek to Canoe River, thence to the N. Thompson and out to Gosnell (C.A.J., XXI, 21). A glacier heading in the only large lateral branch of Tête Creek was named Gilmour Glacier.”

Rollin T. Chamberlin, L. E. “Slim” Goodell, Allen Carpe, A. L. Withers, George Burns
University of Chicago

Jasper National Park employees pictured in front of the Park Administration Building in 1931. Group includes (sitting): E.A. Sullivan (instrument man), J.B. Snape (res. engineer), Col. S. Maynard Rogers (superintendent), H.G. Carlton (accountant), R.W. Langford (superintendent, warden). Standing: C.E. Burrows (steno), H.E. Sullivan (steno), W.R. Evans (foreman), J.R. Heckley (cashier), A.J Dube (timekeeper) W.Booth (clerk), H.S. Davis (game warden) and A.L. Withers (clerk). JYMA PA 18-110.
Jasper-Yellowhead Museum and Archives

Named in 1963 in honor of A. L. (Pete) Withers , a Jasper resident who was a pioneer climber in the area. The name was proposed by the 1949 mountaineering party of Sterling Brown Hendricks [1902–1981] and Andrew John Kauffman [1920–2002].

In 1924 Withers, Allen Carpé [1894–1932], and Rollin Thomas Chamberlin [1881–1948] went up Tête Creek “and made some fine climbs, among them Sir Wilfrid Laurier.”

In 1932, Withers accompanied Clifford White [1902–1964] of Banff, Russell H. Bennett of Minneapolis, and J. A. Weiss of Jasper, on a 480 kilometer ski trek from Jasper to Lake Louise in a 20 day period.

Withers is identified as a clerk in a photograph of Jasper National Park employees in 1931.

Newman D. Waffl
Canadian Alpine Journal

Newman Diefendorf Waffl [1879–1930] died on a solo ascent of Mount Robson. The feature has been known as Mount Waffl since that time.

A native of New York state, Waffl was for 25 years headmaster of a private academy in Orange, New Jersey. He climbed extensively in the Swiss Alps and in the Rockies. Along with Andrew James Gilmour [1871–1941] and Helen I. Buck [1884–1972], Waffle was the first to climb Mount Sir Alexander in 1929. On his return from Sir Alexander he caught his first glimpse of Mount Robson, which impressed him as unsurpassed in his climbing experience. When the rest of his party moved on, he remained for two weeks at the Berg Lake camp of Roy Frederick Hargreaves [1891–1971], climbing the surrounding peaks for better views of the eminence.

He returned the next July, and unable to attract climbing partners, proceeded on August 4 to climb alone. A sudden change of weather brought an exceptionally warm day and night, which started avalanches of unusual number and violence. When Waffl did not return on schedule, several searches were made along his route, discovering some torn clothing and a rucksack. In a letter written shortly before his death, Waffl wrote, “Mt. Robson is not so much difficult as dangerous. It is no mountain to trifle with.”

A memoriam published in the 1930 Canadian Alpine Journal states that Waffl “was a climber of unusual skill, strength, and daring, but his daring was never rashness. On the contrary, his climbing was also an intellectual as well as a physical exercise. He was not only a climber, but a mountaineer with a wide knowledge of mountains and mountain lore. He held that no climbing was good climbing which was not also safe climbing. It seems the irony of fate that a climber of such skill and experience, to whom the forseeing and avoidance of undue risk was fundamental, should have been the victim of a mountaineering accident.”