“There, that’s my marker. Phyllis Beatrice James Munday was here!”
The hour was late, and their comrades awaited them just below the summit cornice. “I’m afraid that we cannot linger here on the summit,” Kain remarked with an apologetic look on his face. “I must let the others have their turn and then we will all have to begin the descent before we run out of daylight. I don’t fancy a night on the mountain, at least at this altitude! It’s not stable up here – just look at the shifting snow – and the temperature will drop at least twenty degrees overnight.” With that last remark, Kain held out the looped Beale rope to show Phyl. The rope was frozen stiff and hard, a testament to the coldness of the air, which Phyl had forgotten for the last few minutes, as she surveyed the scene from the summit.
There were eight climbers that day, four on each rope. Each would have their time at the top. Phyl moved off to allow the next two their turn. Ten minutes of pleasure and five of teeth chattering, that’s how Kain described their brief reward on the summit. “A night out is hardly ever agreeable, and above 3000 metres, always a lottery,” he commented. “We four must get down and let the others up. Time is now of the essence.”
Twenty-one-year-old Phyllis James on the B.C. Mountaineering
Club trail up Grouse Mountain, ca 1916.
1
In the Wilds
Mountains – and the need to climb them – dominated Phyllis Munday’s life for almost as long as she could remember. As a young girl she lived for a time on Slocan Lake and also on a ruggedly treed hillside high above the western shores of Kootenay Lake, about twenty kilometres northeast of the town of Nelson, British Columbia. All around lay the Selkirk Mountains, one of four parallel ranges in south-central B.C. that form the Columbia Mountains.
On this rugged hillside Phyllis and her younger sister Esmée lived with their parents Frank and Beatrice James and baby brother Dick in a small, basic house that in winter was nearly covered by snow. Access was by either a rough cart track around the end of the west arm of Kootenay Lake – which could take some time, especially in winter when the deep snows blocked the way – or by water. Travelling by water was much easier, and even leisurely. Large paddlewheelers and steamers such as the SS Moyie and the SS City of Ainsworth operated on a regular schedule to serve the people in settlements up and down the lake and to connect the dozens of mining claims – like the Blue Bell Mine at Riondel across on the east shore of the lake, or here, where the James family lived near the Molly Gibson Mine – to the urban centres like Nelson. The steamers moved passengers, food, and machinery as well as sacks of zinc, silver, and lead ore from the mines to the barges and docks that were the terminus for the small railways that then connected to the Canadian Pacific Railway at towns like Revelstoke. Railways provided the transportation and communication links joining the Kootenays to the rest of the province, to Canada and beyond. But travel, whether overland or by water, all but ceased in the long winters of deep snow and a frozen lake.
In this isolated spot in the Kootenays, Frank James was employed as a bookkeeper. Family life here was a dramatic contrast to their earlier brief residences in Manitoba and England, but it was worlds away from what it was in the British colony of Ceylon, (now the country of Sri Lanka) an island just south and east of India. Phyllis was born in the central hill country of Ceylon on 24 September 1894. In Ceylon they had lived as privileged colonists – English citizens occupying the upper ranks in the island’s social strata. Frank James managed tea plantations for the Lipton and Ridgeway companies. The family lived in the hill country on a tea plantation and enjoyed the comforts of colonial life that mirrored their social position. They were pampered, with servants to attend to the household responsibilities and nursemaids for Phyl and Esmée, who was known as Betty. The girls’ mother, Beatrice, lived a life of leisure; she did not need to concern herself with cooking, cleaning, or many aspects of childcare.
Phyllis was only seven when the family moved from Ceylon in 1901, but these early days were imprinted on her memory. They gave Phyllis, in later life, an appreciation for her mother’s strength of character, which allowed her to adapt from such a pampered existence to the one of self-reliance necessitated by Canadian living. Cooking, cleaning, planting and tending gardens, first aid, and other realities of rural domestic life all had to be learned and learned quickly. The Interior wet-belt of the Kootenays – heavily wooded with cedar, fir, hemlock, and birch trees – with its northern hemisphere climate of distinct seasons and dramatically cold winters, couldn’t be more opposite to tropical Ceylon.
But the wild Kootenay country suited young Phyllis and her sister. Although the girls were quite young, here they were given a great deal of independence and freedom, in marked contrast to life in Ceylon, where servants were always present. Together they rambled and explored on their own, spending long days clambering along the hillsides. This tomboy existence was Phyllis’s chief joy, but it was a concealed joy. Her mother didn’t always know exactly where they were on these rambles and would have been distressed to learn that Phyllis’s favourite activity was to walk along the windfalls of trees across the ravines and deep gullies on the hillsides. She pretended to be a circus performer on a tightrope wire. These trees were fun to cross over by balancing along the trunk and scrambling over branches. The higher up the better. As Phyl became more proficient she challenged herself not to be frightened of heights and to focus on the act of balancing rather than the distance to the forest floor below. These skills in concentration and in footwork would be important for her later mountaineering expeditions.
By late 1907 the isolated life and the irregularities of the mining concerns, combined with the fact that Frank James was in his late fifties and wishing to lead a less strenuous lifestyle, prompted a decision to move away from the Kootenays. Evidently the family decided to emigrate to New Zealand. Perhaps this was an opportunity to return to a more temperate climate. At any rate, they packed their belongings and came by steamer across the west arm of Kootenay Lake to Nelson, then by train from Nelson to Nakusp. At Nakusp, a small settlement on Arrow Lake, they transferred to a steamer, travelling to the head of the lake and then on to Revelstoke, where they boarded the Canadian Pacific Railway passenger train to Vancouver. From here they planned to depart for New Zealand.
But Vancouver was as far as they got. Once in Vancouver, the employment opportunities for Phyl’s father combined with the pull of the city amenities and the gorgeous urban setting proved too great to resist. Vancouver was in the midst of a boom period in both population and economy. In 1901 the population totalled about 27,000 but by 1911 grew to 100,400. The city sat between the north bank of the Fraser River and Burrard Inlet. Beyond lay the very edge of the Coast range of mountains. Forests led up away from the populated urban areas to hills and snowy peaks. To the south, the flat, rich delta land of the Fraser River offered some of the best agricultural opportunities in the province. It was an extremely beautiful spot. And it was a much more accommodating climate with mild winters and warm – but not overly hot – summers. The James family settled on Keefer Street near the Grandview area, and it