Although the mountains surrounded the Vancouver suburbs, transportation to the extremities was limited. Each mountain required different access points. Once in North Vancouver, to go to Grouse Mountain (elevation 1211 metres), Phyl and her friends walked from the end of the Lonsdale streetcar line by trail. To go to Mount Seymour (elevation 1453 metres), the most easterly of the North Shore Mountains, they walked all the way from Lynn Valley. Some destinations required travel by B.C. Electric Railway interurban train into the Fraser Valley to get to areas like Golden Ears or the Chilliwack River and Mount Slesse (elevation 2375 metres) near the international border with the United States. The Lions (elevations 1599 and 1646 metres) northeast of the city, could be reached overland from Grouse Mountain or via the Howe Sound Crest Trail. A quicker way was to take a boat from English Bay or Horseshoe Bay and land on the beach at the foot of The Lions, then ascend straight from sea level. As her first big club climb, Phyl climbed the West Lion in 1916.
To get to the more distant peaks to the north, the club-chartered motor launch the Tymack left on scheduled Saturdays from pre-set locations at 2:30 p.m. precisely. The launch took the members closer to their climbing destinations by ocean, thus eliminating the time-consuming overland portions of the trip. Peaks such as Mount Tantalus (elevation 2603 metres) at the head of Howe Sound on the west side of the Squamish River, and Mount Garibaldi (elevation 2678 metres) sixty-five kilometres north of Vancouver, were not easily accessible.
Phyl met new friends in the BCMC, and many of these were young men. She and a girlfriend spent several happy afternoons joking with young men stationed at Point Grey to await their turn to head off to the battlefields of Europe. They played with the heliograph, a device for signalling by means of a movable mirror. The mirror positioned at the correct angle to the sun created flashes of light beams visible over a distance. The flashes, either long or short – dots or dashes – using Morse code, allowed Phyl and her friends to send silly messages back and forth between the girls near the club cabin on Grouse Mountain and the boys at Point Grey. Another station was on the top of the Vancouver Building on Granville Street, so they had a triangle for signalling. It was a lot of fun.
Phyl was often at the club cabin with hiking friends Peggy Worsley or Margaret Lewis. She also brought her Girl Guides on summer weekends. In 1916 along with BCMC executive member P.J. Park, Phyl climbed up with soldiers on leave from the 62nd Battalion of the Canadian Expeditionary Force, then stationed locally awaiting their orders to mobilize and go overseas to the fighting.
In September of 1919 Phyl’s Guides (between forty and fifty of them) travelled to Victoria on Vancouver Island to attend the first Provincial Rally, which was held in the Pemberton Woods near Oak Bay. Lady Barnard, wife of British Columbia’s lieutenant-governor, was the Girl Guides’ provincial president, and she took the salute to formally open the Rally. Each company spent a fun-filled competitive time showing off their skills in competitions to win the provincial pennant. The 2nd Vancouver Company and the 1st Burnaby Company together underwent formal inspection by His Royal Highness, the Prince of Wales.
5
Bloomers and Britches
“Phyl,” began one of her colleagues at the hospital, “how can you be so perky at work every Monday when I know that you have been tramping in the bush and pushing your way through the forest climbing up some blasted mountain? Why aren’t you exhausted?”
“Oh, it’s not exhausting, I mean yes, it is exhausting, but it’s exhilarating at the same time. It’s hard work, but because it’s hard, you feel so great when you’ve accomplished your goal. I never tire of that. Oh, I know I’m contradicting myself, but until you do it, you won’t really understand how it can be.”
Phyl James and Don Munday on the windswept summit of Mount Blanshard, 1918. Don poses with his camera while Phyl holds up a handkerchief to disguise her ripped clothing.
Don’s first cabin on Dam Mountain. Here he and Phyllis stand beside the unfinished verandah, ca 1919–1922.
“I don’t know if I’d ever want to do that – climb mountains, that is. I’d get all scratched and muddy and rip my skirts.”
“We don’t wear skirts. That would be nonsense. We would have to stay on nice, cleared trails and ramble ever so slowly if we dressed in skirts.”
“But I’ve seen you on the streetcar on your way back home. Remember last month when you told me you had been up Mount Seymour?”
Phyl laughed. “Well,” she said. “It’s a better-kept secret than I thought. You don’t honestly think we could get up the way we do and cut trails in a skirt? No, we start off from home in skirts but we always wear bloomers underneath. Some girls even wear britches underneath. Anyway, we can’t be seen with anything like that, so we keep the skirts on over top until we’re past civilization, where we can take them off and cache them under a log or something until we come back. Then the skirts go back on, and we’re all ready for the streetcars and the ferry and for walking into the house.”
“Well, that makes sense. I couldn’t really figure out how you could do so much.”
“You know the really funny part?”
“No.”
“The worst thing is that when we cache our skirts, we lose our flexibility. We have to come back to the same spot at the end of the hike to collect them. Otherwise we can’t get home! Did you know that it’s against the ferry policy to allow women with bloomers on to the ferryboat? I’ve heard of a girl who had that happen to her. She came down at dusk, desperate to catch the last ferry from Lonsdale or else she would be stuck on the North Shore overnight and wouldn’t be able to get home until the next day Well, do you think she could find her skirt anywhere? She was running out of daylight and she came out of the bush a little west of where she went in, and in the failing light, she couldn’t quite recall where she stashed it. She finally gave up and jumped on the streetcar to get to the ferry dock. But they wouldn’t let her on the ferry. The purser told her that he was unable to accept her as a passenger unless she was appropriately dressed. So without her skirt, she lost her chance to get home that night!”
“That’s hilarious. I can just see some poor girl who’s miscalculated where she stashed her skirt turning over every rock and windfall desperately searching so she can run to the streetcar and not miss the last ferry. What a world we live in!”
“That never happened to me, but something really embarrassing did happen just a few weeks ago. We were on Dome1, and it was a regular club hike. I was climbing over a great big log. It was on a slope, and a little bit off the ground, and as I got over it, the elastic in my bloomers got hooked on a snag and hung me up. There I was, suspended in the air, and I couldn’t reach the ground. I was held up by the leg of my bloomers! Well, the boys all began to laugh, but eventually someone helped unhook me. I still haven’t lived that one down. It will be a while yet until something equally embarrassing happens to someone else and I’ll be out of the limelight.”
“Oh Phyl,” said Nina, as the two young women walked down the hill towards their streetcar stop. Remember at tea break I mentioned my two new patients? Well, one of them seems like someone you should know. I asked him if he knew you, but he