Stories from the Mountains
Guest Speaker is David Harrap
Twenty-Nine Years On Top Of The World .
Tickets are $10.00 for the general public but only $5.00 for Historical Society members. Tickets can be purchased at the museum in advance or at the door but space will be limited to 70 people.
Cash Bar.
I’d never climbed a mountain before coming to Jasper in 1993; growing up in England I’d climbed lots of trees, though! My son, Liam, had never climbed a mountain, either . Pyramid Mountain would be our first one. I was 48, Liam had just turned four. I’m a single dad, and had his mother been alive she would have said :“You’re taking him–where? Are you nuts!”
And so it began: hundreds of mountains climbed, thousands of nights in a tent, summer and winter. Boiling hot (I was out last summer when the heat dome in June arrived, camping in the alpine with not a bloomin’ bit of shade to be had! ); and freezing cold (minus 35 C one trip in the Tonquin). Camping and climbing in Canada, the US, Iceland, Scotland and Australia.
Many of the mountains climbed were unnamed, that is until we climbed them and gave them a name; for that’s the prerogative of climbers who strike off where no one wants to follow! They don’t have the cachet of named peaks but you have them all to yourself.
I’m still out there dragging the old bones up mountains; Liam and I did three more mountain trips this summer. And I was out on my own (as I have been for the last 15 years since Liam took off to uni and work) this summer, camping with my brothers the grizzlies, having my tent blow away like a balloon for a kilometre in one hell of a gust, and trying to get up a couple of peaks ( I chickened out on one close to the summit; and got stumped on the other–close to the summit).
So it would be stuff like this. And I have photos.
