THE ROOF OF CANADA.

Hawera Star, Volume XLV, 26 October 1925, Page 9

THE ROOF OF CANADA.

CONQUEST OF HIGHEST PEAK. SIX WEEKS ON THE ICE. After a* terrible struggle with ice and snow and hurricane of wind., Mount Logan is in the extreme west of Canwhich rises to an altitude of 19,539 ft, has been conquered by six members of the Canadian Alpine Club. Mount Logan is in the extreme wets of Can ada, in the Yukon territory, close to the Alaskan border. Naturally, so far north, the line of perpetual snow is low, and the party actually travelled on ice for 44 days. The summit was reached on June 23rd, and the story of the final climb has just come - through. The scene at King Col Camp, from which the final dash was made was ‘ ‘in the midst of monstrous ice-cliffs and blocks of fantastic shapes, with overhanging masses challenging the approach.” The only way up proved to be under a vast arch of ice, below which was with a direct drop of a thousand feet! Eor five days the climbers waited in a storm until the clouds lifted, only to camp for a night and * day in a renewed hurricane. At Windy Camp, 16,800 ft. up, the temperature was 32 degrees below zero, and only one day’s ration remained, so that five men had to go back to King Col for more. The summit was still some miles away, and was only visible now and then. At 18,500 ft. two men were compelled to give up, the other six managed to keep on to the end, though everyone was frost-bitten.

ONE HOUR’S GLORIOUS TRIUMPH

On the morning of June 23 the climbers were still four miles from the top peaks of the mountain, when, suddenly, there was glorious weather. They decided to make a dash, but it was not until five in the evening that they topped the nearer summit. And there they saw, two miles farther on, the still higher peak, with a valley between, a thousand feet below!

It must have needed great courage to start off again at that hour. The final climb was up an ice slope, often of 40 or 50 degrees, heart-breaking work indeed. Yet at 8 o’clock the thing was done. In a rainbow crowning Logan was the shadow of each of the six men—Captain MacCarthy, Colonel Foster, Carpe, Lambert, Read and Taylor —as they stood at the top, gazing at the amazing spectacle of seas of cloud.

The party stayed on the summit for an hour. Then the oncoming of another storm, increasing cold, and failing light, drove them down. Just an hour, with all that strenuous toil behind them and equally strenuous toil before; —just an hour they stood in the sunshine on the summit of achievement ; but it was one of those crowded hours of glorious life of which the poet sings. Then came the plunge downwards. Soon after midnight, 500 ft down, exhausted and numb with cold, they dug themselves into the snow and went to sleep. BACK TO CIVHJSATTON. Storm followed storm, “as though Mt. Logan still desired to punish its conqueror's.” To frostbite was added hunger, for two successive stores of food left for the downward trek were found to have been raided by bears! But the cache at Trail End, the beginning of the mountain trail, was intact, and by July 7th the explorers were at Kubricks, the nearest outpost to civilisation. Their further adventures included a wild rush down the rapids of Ohitina. river, on a make-shift raft. When at last they got to McCarthy, 70 miles below the rapids, they found a search party just setting out!