The Mundays wrote stories about their discoveries that were published across the country, setting off a national craze to conquer BC’s tallest mountain.

by Trevor Marc Hughes (Ronsdale Press $24.95)

Review by Tom Hawthorn

Mystery Mountain was often obscured by cloud, by fog and by the haze of distant forest fires. It was in a remote, forbidding environment where potentially deadly squalls occurred even during the summer climbing season.

“It looked very forbidding,” Phyllis Munday noted on her first closeup view in 1926, “and far away with all the icefalls in front of it.”

They were to discover the summit was even more awe-inspiring.

“Only a few feet distant,” Don Munday wrote after their 1935 expedition, “the great spire poised in the void, an incredible nightmarish thing that must be seen to be believed, and then it is hard to believe; it is difficult to escape [the] appearance of exaggeration when dealing with a thing which in itself is an exaggeration.”

A photograph of the spire adorns the cover of The Final Spire. It is a rocky, craggy, ice- and snow-covered raised middle finger to any who dare to tame it.

And try the Mundays did. Again and again. Trevor Marc Hughes tells a riveting story in The Final Spire: ‘Mystery Mountain’ Mania in the 1930s about those who sought to conquer Mystery Mountain. The author of three previous books, including Capturing the Summit (Ronsdale, 2023) and Zero Avenue to Peace Park (Last Autograph, 2016), Hughes includes helpful background on the elite groups of scientists and clergymen who pioneered mountaineering in the Alps during the Victorian era. Those early climbers did so to answer questions both scientific and theological, their proximity to the heavens accentuating the spiritual nature of their quest.

Hughes credits Don Munday’s writings in mountaineering newsletters for sparking several expeditions. “Munday was also developing the forbidding reputation of Mystery Mountain,” writes Hughes, “generating awe in readers but also throwing down the gauntlet, creating a romanticism and allure for this remote environment, inhospitable to all but the hardiest of regional mountaineers, and also piquing the interest of those who might come from farther afield than British Columbia.”

Mystery mountain stands 13,186-feet tall (4,019 metres), the tallest of British Columbia’s Coast Mountains and the tallest mountain to be entirely within the province. (Both Mount Fairweather and Mount Quincy Adams are taller, though they straddle the Alaska-British Columbia border.) In 1927, the government named it Mount Waddington after Alfred Waddington, the colonial politician and businessman who, in 1862, sought to build an ill-fated road connecting Bute Inlet to Fort Alexandria and the Cariboo gold fields beyond, sparking a war with the Tsilhqot’in people, who feared further devastation from smallpox. Of course, the local Indigenous people, the Homalco, also known as the Xwémalhkwu, have a name of their own for the mountain: Xwe7xw.

To promote his road, Waddington hired the engraver Frederick Whymper to produce drawings and watercolours. These in turn were to be sold to the Illustrated London News to stimulate interest in possible investors for this new road in a far-off land. It was the artist’s younger brother, Edward, who first conquered the Matterhorn, though four men of his party died on the descent. In Whymper’s works, the author finds the connection between the Victorian mania for mountaineering and one sparked 70 years later in British Columbia.

The expeditions faced treacherous circumstances. “Threatening avalanches. Deep crevasses. Daunting icefalls. Collapsing ice and rock,” Hughes writes. “The overall impression for the [Mundays’] 1927 expedition is that of an environment that was not only inhospitable but presented a climb of excessive danger and challenge, even for the experienced climber.”

Mountaineering was never for the fainthearted. The Final Spire is littered with the names of climbers who died in falls and avalanches, their names added to geographic features as a memorial. In cheering on the exploits of those seeking to tame Waddington, a reader worries about the fate of climbers. The end can come suddenly, without warning.

In 1934, four friends from Winnipeg drove a four-year-old Plymouth towing a trailer loaded with food and equipment west in an attempt to tame the mountain from the east. The Neave brothers—Ferris, 33, and Roger, 28—were joined by Campbell Secord, 21, and Arthur Davidson, the least experienced climber among them (though outfitted with new boots). In their famously flat province, the men had trained by climbing a rock quarry in running shoes.

In the days before the Trans-Canada Highway, even the drive from the Manitoba capital through the Rockies and into the British Columbia Interior was fraught. The car’s tires suffered blowouts, as did the burdened trailer. Rain turned roads west of Williams Lake into muddy gumbo. Gales turned a lake into a roiling sea. And the terrain was too treacherous for pack horses, forcing the men to cache supplies and equipment as they advanced to the mountain in stages.

Once on Mount Waddington, they faced true peril— all recounted in a diary which allows the author to take us along with the men as they gingerly seek a path across crevasses.

“One which remains in the memory,” Roger Neave wrote, “was spanned by a thin snow-bridge pierced by two holes through which the prone occupant got a stimulating view of the depths below. It was crossed by faith, eked out by a wriggling motion of the buttocks.”

The Winnipeggers don’t reach the summit, but they also survive—a miracle and a relief to the reader.

Spoiler alert: Mount Waddington is finally conquered in 1936 after more than a dozen failed attempts. In the end, the journey to the top is far more interesting than being at the top. These were people “who longed to connect with nature,” Hughes writes, “not necessarily for their own glory, but to glorify and accentuate nature, and to further know themselves.” 9781553807223