For Phyl, Waddington was an endless source of frustration, and even Don called it “a nightmare moulded in rock,” but at the same time this Mystery Mountain was addictive. Phyl always made it clear that climbing the summit wasn’t their only rationale for the repeat visits. Years after their Waddington expeditions, an experienced climber asked her why, with all the opportunities she and Don had, they didn’t just conquer the mountain and be done with it.
“Why did you keep going back, Phyl? Wasn’t it just wasted time skirting around the big peak and never being successful?”
“Why there isn’t any one mountain worth throwing your life away on. Our lives were more important than any mountain. If the day wasn’t good, we’d go off and do something else. There is a whole new world out there, hundreds of peaks, hundreds of glaciers, and all of it uncharted. It is all so marvellously exciting. Even though we started out on a quest for our Mystery Mountain, we ended up with a lifetime of options, and a lifetime of adventures. Every time – it doesn’t matter whether it’s storm or sunshine – it’s always worth it.”
Phyl and Don pioneered exploration in the Mount Waddington area and believed that as pioneers, they should document their activities and also leave a legacy for a wider audience. They knew that it was not just a matter of their own satisfaction and privilege that they climb. They knew that by recording their observations, taking notes and measurements, and collecting specimens, they made important contributions to the understanding of British Columbia geography, flora, fauna, and natural history. This work was their hobby, and they treated it as inseparable from the physical aspects of hiking and exploration. It was the exploration, the need to know and to see and to travel over little-known or little-understood lands that provided the impetus to keep them going.
“We didn’t go into the Waddington country just to climb one mountain and run out and leave it. We went in to find out all that we possibly could about glaciers and mountains and animals and nature and everything about that particular area – completely unknown before we went in to it – so that we could bring out the information for the interest of other people as well as ourselves.”
Their exciting new discoveries in Waddington territory were worth every hour of struggle, every brush with death. They had many close calls: avalanches, falling rock, rotten snow, fragile ice bridges, unforeseen weather, turbulent glacial rivers, logs and debris, and bears. Phyl was fearless, or at least that is how she appeared to Don and it was how he wrote about her in many articles and stories. It was also how she appeared to fellow climbers, many of whom were in awe of her physical strength and stamina, her level-headedness under pressure, and her natural ability to suss out the one possible route when the way looked blocked.
At various times Phyl coped with salt-craving porcupines, rodents, wolverines, and bears. The bear stories got all the press. Fearless, she charged – more than once – a grizzly bear threatening Don. In 1936, as they paused on a rocky shoulder in a narrow gorge, they spied a young grizzly some distance away.
“Ah, at last, a chance to photograph a bear!” wrote Phyl some time later as she recorded the incident in a chapter of a manuscript she titled “Mountain Memories.” The first buzz of Don’s movie camera brought the bear’s head up with an angry jerk. With teeth gleaming in the sunlight, he bounded straight up a rocky ravine towards Phyl and Don.
“At that very moment we heard a terrific roar close beside us, and there, rushing right at us, was a large she-grizzly with her two cubs, one on each side of her. We were terrified. It is useless to run in a place like this, especially when clad in heavy mountain boots. We stood our ground and waved our arms, screaming and yelling at the top of our lungs. She took a particular dislike to me, and charged straight at me. Don rushed her, to divert the brute’s attention, and to my horror she turned at right angles and charged him instead, and there they were, face to face. The bear was so close Don could feel her hot breath in his face. They roared at each other, the grizzly with her mouth wide open, and all hair standing on end like a fighting dog. I was so sure the infuriated brute would lift her paw and tear Don to pieces before my eyes. I grabbed my ice axe and rushed at her intending to hit if she dared lift it… I was fighting mad too.” Phyl paused in her writing and then she added: “My knees shook for a long time after that, and do, even now, when I think of it. I doubt if I will ever go through anything like it again, and live to tell the tale.”
Throughout the 1930s Phyl and Don continued their endless love affair with the Waddington country. Each season they tried different entry points and covered much territory. Soon the documentation they brought back confirmed that the heart of the Coast Mountains featured vast ice valleys and towering rock summits, undreamed of in either mountaineering or geological circles. The region offered brand-new challenges for committed and skilled mountaineers. The Mundays made first ascents of many major peaks in the area, and on three separate occasions they used skis to make these first ascents and to carry out many of their mapping and natural history observations.
Edith did not take part in the entire Waddington trip until 1937, the summer she was sixteen. That year, the Mundays travelled for ten days up the coast in the Edidonphyl (the handmade boat Don built in the basement of their home) from Vancouver to Bella Coola, a distance of six hundred kilometres. They searched for a great peak that had shone out to them while they were on Mount Waddington several years earlier. By hiking overland through some of the most magnificent country they had yet seen, they found and made a first ascent (with Edith), of the mountain they named Stupendous (elevation 2728 metres). Phyl was so proud of Edith – the way she paced herself and handled the ever-changing obstacles of the route. In the deep river valleys, they made their way through underbrush as thick as any they had ever encountered, and on the opposite extreme, they climbed icy slopes and glaciers. Edith’s fortitude was a natural inheritance from her gifted parents.
11
Climbing Season
For Don and Phyl Munday the decades of the 1920s through 1940s were composed of two seasons – climbing season and preparation for climbing season. Climbing usually began in June and extended through September. Winter climbs were generally weekend jaunts close to Vancouver and did not require the same preparation as did the more extensive expeditions of the climbing season. In the winter Don concentrated on his writing and submitted many articles for publication. The previous season’s hiking and exploration provided plenty of raw material. He also wrote up his notes and researched the history of the areas they travelled into. Don spent a great deal of time corresponding with surveyors, archivists, and historians to learn what he could of past explorations and to locate old maps and writings, which he examined carefully for clues about potential routes or for information about rivers and watersheds.
Phyl cooking a meal, Last Valley Camp below the Franklin Glacier, 1933.
Don was a member of the International Commission on Snow and Glaciers and a member of several scientific societies. He corresponded with British scientists and passed on his firsthand observations of the huge snowfields, including the massive Franklin Glacier. At this time people were still unsure about whether glaciers moved or were static. Don’s detailed measurements and keen observations of specific features, combined with documentary photographs, made an important contribution to scientific understanding.
Nomenclature – the formal naming of geographic features such as rivers, creeks, mountains, valleys, and glaciers – is an important aspect of mapping. As they encountered each unnamed river or mountain, Don and Phyl named them, informally at first, so