sign in sign up
<<
Home , Carl Blaurock, Colorado Mountain Club, Crestones, Crestone Needle, Fremont Peak (Wyoming), Grand Teton

ROBERT ELLINGWOOD. Born 1918.

TRANSCRIPT of OH 1449V A-B.

This interview was recorded on December 5, 2006, for the Maria Rogers Oral History Program. The interviewer is Wendy Hall. The interview also is available in video format, filmed by Wendy Hall. The interview was transcribed by Cyns Nelson.

NOTE: The interviewer’s questions and comments appear in parentheses. Added material appears in brackets.

ABSTRACT: Robert Ellingwood talks about his father, Albert Ellingwood, who was an academic and nationally known author in the fields of political and social science and the law. More notably, Albert was a pioneer climber during the early 1900s, acquiring his craft and taste for the sport in the Swiss Alps. In this interview, Robert describes his father’s climbs, companions, preparation, and equipment—some of which is shown on video. Interviewer Wendy Hall reads excerpts from books and articles, including Albert’s 1934 eulogy in Trail and Timberline, to frame the interview. She also displays photographs that illustrate Albert Ellingwood’s accomplishments.

[A].

00:00 (I’m Wendy Hall with the Maria Rogers Oral History Program of the Carnegie Branch Library, and I am at the Carnegie Branch Library today, December 5, 2006, with Robert Ellingwood, who is the son of Albert Ellingwood, about whom we are going to talk today.)

(Albert R. Ellingwood was a mountain climber, and his son Robert has brought in some of his more interesting artifacts related to climbing. To begin today’s interview, I’m going to read Albert Ellingwood’s obituary, out of the magazine Trail & Timberline. It was published June 1934; it’s number 188. And if you would, Mr. Ellingwood, I’d like you to comment as I’m reading from the obituary.)

Okay. I’d be glad to.

(“Albert R. Ellingwood, one of the most valued members of the Mountain Club, died on May 12, following an operation. He had been ill for several months. Dr. Ellingwood was born 46 years ago, in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. He attended Colorado Springs High School and Colorado College.” When did he move from Iowa?)

That’s an interesting little thing. His father, Francis Ellingwood, was a carpenter in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. And when they heard about the Cripple Creek Gold Rush, in 1894, he decided that it would be a great opportunity to build houses for the miners. So he moved his family, wife Amanda and my dad, little boy, to Cripple Creek, to get in on the big building program as Cripple Creek was being built up as a gold mining community. And then, as happens in gold mining towns out West here, they had flu epidemics but no doctors and no hospitals. And the father, my dad’s father, Francis Ellingwood, died a few years later in about 1902 or thereabouts from the flu epidemic. And so after he’d passed away and was buried in Mount Pisgah Cemetery, in Cripple Creek, his mother Amanda and my dad moved to Colorado Springs because the schools were better and he was getting ready to go into high school, and she wanted him to have a good high school and college education. So that’s how come they got to be in Colorado Springs.

(It continues: “In 1910 he was awarded the Rhodes Scholarship for Colorado and attended Merton College, Oxford, from 1910 to 1913, taking the degree of Bachelor of Civil Law in 1913.”)

Okay. Interesting little point there, that award, the Rhodes Scholarship, was the first Rhodes Scholarship that was awarded from the state of Colorado.

(And your father received it.)

What?

(And your father received it.)

Yes, that’s right.

(“After a year at the University of Pennsylvania he taught political science at Colorado College for five years. In 1918 he was given the degree of PhD from the University of Pennsylvania. From 1919 to 1927 he was professor of political science and social science at Lake Forest College, Illinois.”)

Lake Forest is a suburb of Chicago, several suburbs north of Chicago, along the western shore of Lake Michigan. And he took that position because at that point in his academic career he had his eye on Northwestern University as an upgrade in his teaching opportunities. And Lake Forest College was only about 10 miles from Northwestern, so it enabled him to get closer and closer to his ultimate academic goal, which was Northwestern University.

(“From 1927 until his death he was professor of political science at Northwestern University. And also during summer sessions he was professor of political science at the University of Illinois and the University of Southern California.”)

It was quite popular in those days, for professors to teach summer school at some other university. And he did that, as you just heard.

05:00 (“Dr. Ellingwood’s talents as an administrator as well as a teacher were soon recognized, and he was Dean of the Department of Business Administration, Lake Forest College. And since 1931, he was Assistant Dean of the College of Liberal Arts at Northwestern University. According to newspaper reports, he was Dean of the College of Liberal Arts at Northwestern University at the time of his death. He was a member of the Chicago Government Planning Commission.”)

(“So Dr. Ellingwood was a nationally known author in the fields of political science, social science, and law, contributing articles to the leading reviews devoted to each of these three subjects. A bibliography of his publications is contained in the American Oxonian, volume 19, number one. He was the author of three books connected with these subjects. And the books were: Departmental Cooperation and State Government, published in 1918, The Government and Labor, in collaboration with Whitcomb [Whitney] Coombs, published in 1926, and The Government and [Railroad] Transportation, also in collaboration with Whitman [Whitney] Coombs, published in 1930.”)

(“Persons interested in climbing in Colorado cannot fail to recognize that Dr. Ellingwood contributed more to the sport of in Colorado than any other person.” What an achievement!)

Something I’m very proud of, of course.

(“Among his achievements were the following first ascents: , , and Kit Carson, all in 1916.”)

Those are in the , running north and south on the east side of the , northeast of Alamosa, in southern Colorado.

(“Also , Pigeon, and Turret, in 1920.”)

Those are peaks in the San Juans, over in the general vicinity of Durango and Silverton and Telluride.

(“Also the Bishop Rock in Platte Canyon, in 1924.”)

That’s a rock climb southwest of .

(Okay. “Many of these climbs were considered impossible before Dr. Ellingwood’s ascents.” That’s impressive. “In accomplishing these ascents, he was the first person to make any substantial use, in Colorado, of the proper rock-climbing technique in the use of ropes and other safeguards.”)

I might inject a comment there. The listener wonders, when the person hears this, where he learned this. He learned it while he was at Oxford. The Rhodes Scholarship is a very generous grant, which takes care of all your living expenses and your tuition and everything, and it gives quite a bit of extra money for a person that has a Rhodes Scholarship to travel extensively in Europe during the vacation periods while you’re at Oxford. So, he took advantage of that. And many of his travels during those vacation periods were to Switzerland and the Alps, to learn climbing from the Swiss guides, who were then well developed. His love of Colorado, of course, began with his living in Cripple Creek and then in Colorado Springs. And when you have that kind of love of the high country, it never goes away. And so, when he got over there it was a priceless opportunity to learn climbing from the people that were the top of the sport.

Climbing began in the late 1800s in the Swiss Alps. And by the time he was over there on his scholarship, 1910 to 1913, the profession of Swiss guides was very well developed. So, he seized the opportunity to learn everything he could. He was over there a number of times climbing, so that when he got through, he came back to this country, and he brought with him all this marvelous knowledge that he had learned from the Swiss guides. He also did a little extra traveling while he was over there. I remember him telling me about taking a trip to Egypt one time. He was very interested in the pyramids and the Valley of the Kings and all of that. And he traveled around Europe a little bit, France and Germany and all. But his main spare-time activity when he was at Oxford was spent in the Austrian and Swiss Alps.

10:05 (It says: “Dr. Ellingwood also made many difficult ascents by new routes or by routes not often used, such as Pagoda by the west ridge in 1916.”)

That’s right up here in Rocky Mountain National Park.

(“Blanca by the east face and north ridge, in 1916.”)

That’s down northeast of Alamosa.

(“Maroon by the south ridge, 1919, and North Maroon by the east ridge in 1919.”)

Those are the two that are about 10 or 12 miles southwest of the famous town of Aspen. And they’re now affectionately know to all of us as the .

(“Evans by the north face in 1920.”)

That’s straight west of Denver.

(“North Maroon by the south ridge in 1922; Maroon by the north ridge in 1922; Crestone Needle by the east ridge in 1925; Little Bear, by the west ridge, in 1925.” Little Bear.)

That’s down next to Blanca, also just northeast of Alamosa.

(Okay. “And Crestone by the north ridge in 1925, and Long’s Peak by the east face, in 1927.”)

In the twenties, climbing anywhere on the east face of Long’s Peak was considered quite an achievement. It’s been done a number of times since then, but he was one of the first to do early climbs on the east face of Long’s Peak, which is almost straight up and down. It’s a very difficult rock climb.

(It continues to say, “His climbs were not confined to the summer season, for he made and ascent of on snowshoes in March of 1916.”)

That was when he was when he was teaching at Colorado College. And he thought it would be fun to try a winter climb. [Laughter.]

(“Dr. Ellingwood was one of the three men who had climbed all of the officially named 14,000-foot peaks in Colorado. But he did not confine his interest in the only to the peaks of this altitude, but climbed many other peaks, including the following: the Ogalalla, the Silverheels, Matterhorn, Jupiter, Holy Cross, Gemini, Buckskin, Andrews, Alice, Adams, Watanga, and Hiamovi.”)

These are peaks that are scattered all over the state. Beside the , Colorado has far more high mountains than any other state in the . And there’s—I forget the exact figure—but there’s something like 200 peaks at eleven-, twelve-, and thirteen- thousand foot elevation in the state of Colorado besides the fourteeners. The [U.S. Geological] Survey discovered that, much to everybody’s amazement, when they came out here about 1870 and started measuring and surveying, and discovered there’s more high ground in Colorado than anyplace else anywhere in the country.

(Well, “Dr. Ellingwood was also one of the many college men who had both surveyed and climbed our mountains since the 1860s. The only heights which we have for Crestone Needle, Mount Columbia, and Little Bear are figures obtained by his careful triangulation.”)

He was—did some surveying in connection with his climbs, and carried a very accurate surveyor’s altimeter with him. And as it says there, helped the Geological Survey people determine the elevations of some of the peaks.

(“He was interested not only in climbing, but in many other phases of our mountains, and had a fine collection of books on mountaineering and related subjects. He also assisted The in building up the library now contained in our club rooms. His achievements in were of no less importance than in Colorado. Among his first ascents were: the , the —both of which were 12,500-feet or more—in 1923; , 13,600; , 13,500; and , 13,720.” That was done—all those were done in 1924.)

Those were in the in north-central Wyoming, about a hundred miles east of the Tetons.

14:55 (“He also climbed Knife Point, 13,007 feet; Peak F3, 13,000 feet; and Sacajawea, 13,607 feet in 1926. Other noteworthy ascents included the third ascent of the , the third ascent of —the highest in Wyoming—the second ascent of Mount Helen, the second ascent of , and the ONLY [emphatic] ascent of by any route other than the one used by Lieutenant Fremont in 1842.”)

Lieutenant Fremont was one of the early government explorers out west here, and helped to open up some of that mountain country just as Lieutenant Zebulon Pike and Lieutenant [Major] Stephen Long helped to open up the mountain country here in our in 1806 and 1820.

(“Dr. Ellingwood was devoted to the Rockies, and his only climbing outside of Colorado and Wyoming was in California in 1928, when he climbed Black Kaweah, Russell, Whitney, Tyndall, and Junction Peak by the east ridge. He wrote entertainingly on mountaineering in several publications including Trail & Timberline, Appalachia, Outing, and Outdoor Life.”)

That’s great.

(“His vacations were usually spent in Colorado with his wife, Rea Schimpeler, and his two sons, Robert Whitcomb”—you—“and Donald. He spent much of his vacations climbing with these two sons, commencing with the easier climbs of the lower Colorado regions, and eventually introducing his boys to the highest mountains in the state.”)

I might inject with a little bit there. We spent all of our summers—after he moved to Illinois, he couldn’t stand the idea of spending the summer in Illinois. He wanted to get back to Colorado. And so every summer that we were at Lake Forest and Northwestern, we rented the house to a summer teacher and came back out here—at first on the train, sleeping in a famous Pullman car, drawn by an old steam engine. Then, after a while, it was about 1926 or 1927, he decided that was awkward because when he got here we didn’t have any way to get around. So at that point he bought an old Studebaker, which was a famous car in those days, something like a large Buick, and we drove out every summer, so we could have a car to go to mountain habitats around the region. And we had summer cabins, summer homes, in Green Mountain Falls, Woodland Park, Divide, Buffalo Creek—Grand Lake, west of Estes Park, one time—and spent our summers that way, so that we were actually spending our summers in the mountains. And that’s when I learned my early hiking as a youngster, in places like that. And so that was the beginning of renewing our acquaintance with Colorado, was coming back every summer after we moved for his teaching at Northwestern.

(Well it continues to say, “The fact that in recent years his sons were his regular climbing companions, together with the fact that the prominent position which he had obtained made great demands on his time, prevented his seeing as much of his friends in the Colorado Mountain Club in recent years as he had previously done. He impressed all people who came to know him with his pleasing personality and unusually fine mind. He was a good companion and will be missed by all of our members who were fortunate enough to climb the mountains with him.” And this was written by JL, JH.)

Stands for Jerome Hart, who was one of my father’s close Mountain Club friends and was also a prominent Denver lawyer, along with his younger brother Steve Hart, who began the Denver law firm, which still exists, Holland and Hart. And Jerry Hart knew my dad probably as well as anybody. And they were also companions because Jerry Hart, being a prominent Denver lawyer, and my dad being a professor of political science and constitutional law, they had a common bond in their common interest in the law. So, that helped bring them together.

20:05 I might add one comment here that’s interesting, [that] has to do with the law part of the story. He was so interested in constitutional law, and learning more about it, that when we were living at Northwestern, he went back a couple of times, during a school vacation, to Washington D.C. to visit the Supreme Court Library and study for a week or so in the Supreme Court Library. And while there he met the justices of the United States’ Supreme Court. And I remember him telling me about that when I was 15 or 16 years old, shortly before he passed away. And two of the famous jurists that he met were Charles Evans Hughes and Oliver Wendell Holmes, who were big names in the Supreme Court at that time.

(That’s impressive. Now I think what we’ll do is take a break and try to focus in on some photos and another book that talks about your father.)

All right.

(So this is a photograph of Albert Ellingwood that is taken out of the Trail & Timberline from June of 1934. Do you know about—approximately when this photograph was taken?)

Yes, it was taken while he was at Northwestern. He was about 44 at that time, 43 or 44, it was taken around 1930. It was just three or four years before he passed away.

(Okay. This is a book that is in our collection entitled A Climber’s Climber: On the Trail With . [Edited by Barbara J. Euser; call # 796.522092 Blaurock] And, can you tell me who’s on the over photograph?)

Yes. My father, Albert Ellingwood, Carl Blaurock himself, and Hermann Buhl, who was the third male member of that party, who came over from Europe. His wife was also on the party—she didn’t do all of the climbing, but she was present in a lot of the scenes and she took many of the pictures. And there’s a picture for their log in the book, here, that shows them at a campsite up there.

(Okay. So the book that I have here, called A Climber’s Climber: On the Trail With Carl Blaurock, was written by him and about his various mountaineering adventures. But, there are many references to your father in this book. One of the first that I came across was about first ascents. And I just want to read this particular section that was written about him [written by Barbara Euser in the her introduction]: “In Colorado, Carl claims only one first ascent, and that was of Lone , made with Steven H. Hart. As Carl says, ‘When I speak of first ascents, I speak of them with a question mark—who knows whose been ahead of you? In 1920, when I climbed the Crestone Needle, I thought we had a first ascent. After I got back to Denver, Francis Rogers heard of our climb and said, ‘Well, you know, Ellingwood and Eleanor Davis climbed that in 1916. But we saw no evidence on the top.’”)

Well, what’s traditional among mountain climbers—who are doing pioneering and first ascents and all—to show that they’ve been there, is to build a cairn, which is a pile of rock 20 or 24 inches high, showing that somebody was there and built that cairn. I mean it doesn’t build by itself. And it can only be done if the top of the mountain is structured in such a way that there are scattered loose rocks around that you can pick up and pile up. The top of Crestone Needle is a very bald, hard rock surface. There are no loose rocks to build a cairn [laughs.] And so that’s why they didn’t see a cairn. But he did leave notes to indicate that he’d been there. This is on several peaks—Crestone Needle, also his climb of the Grand Teton. He was a great person to drink hot chocolate or cocoa in camp. And so that was carried in little cocoa cans. And he would carry an empty cocoa can and some paper on his mountain climbs and would leave record of the climb in a cocoa can, which was found then later by climbers that followed years later.

25:02 (So that was probably the predecessor to what they do today, where they have—)

Now, as it’s gotten to be such a widespread thing, mountaineering, the Mountain Club has had bronze register containers made and has placed them on top of all of the peaks. There’s a scroll that’s rolled up that fits inside, and there’s a waterproof lid and a pencil and all, so that when a person climbs now, they get out the container and take up the scroll and sign their name and put it back in. And the Mountain Club keeps those registers. When the register’s full, it’s brought back to the Mountain Club office and replaced by another one. And the same sort of thing is done by the rangers in Rocky Mountain National Park, right up here near Estes Park. That’s a way to keep track of who has done the climbing.

And there’s an interesting side story to that, that I find particularly interesting. My father and Eleanor Davis made one of the early climbs on the Grand Teton. And they left their signatures and records of the climb in a little can on top of the Grand Teton. When the rangers started accessing the mountains up there, they brought this stuff down from the early climbs—there were three or four early climbs—and put it in a little museum behind a glass case in the Jenny Lake ranger’s station. And that is there at the present time, showing the early history of the climbing in the Tetons. And when I was up there in 1951 and made my first ascent of the Grand, and told the ranger what my name was, he says Oh, we’ve got your dad’s notes in our little museum right here in the Jenny Lake ranger station. And he walked me around to the back room and I saw all this stuff with my dad’s signature and handwriting, there in their little display case.

(Well it says here—it’s amusing, because it says: “Well maybe we didn’t search hard enough, because I know that in climbing with Ellingwood we always left a record with a bottle or a tin can, or something, of our climbs. But we saw no can and didn’t find the record. That and the fact that the rancher down at the foot said, ‘Well, as far as I know, the haven’t been climbed,’ made us think that we had a first ascent. But now I know it was the second ascent.”)

(Another reference, in this book, is to equipment. And that is what we’re going to be talking about today—the equipment that your father used. Carl says, [This quote and the one in the following paragraph are from the introduction to the book by Barbara Euser.] “By the early 1920s, climbing was a much more developed sport in Switzerland than in the United States.”)

Yes, that’s true.

(“It was in the Swiss Alps that Carl learned ice and snow techniques. Although he took his first pair of crampons to Switzerland with him, he didn’t use them there. In fact, Carl didn’t use crampons at all until he climbed in 1939. Instead, he relied on his ice axe and step-cutting techniques—crampons were, in Carl’s words, ‘kind of a nuisance to wear.’”)

What they did wear, in climbing on the ice and snow in Switzerland, were special hobnails—I have a boot here showing those—called Swiss edging nails. And these are in a pair of my boots, that I bought in 1951, to have a good pair of boots when I went to the Tetons for the first time and climbed the Grand Teton. And I needed better boots than what I had been using up to that point.

How did I get these? When my father was in the Alps, during his period at Oxford, he prepared a pair of boots, and he used them after he came back to this country, but he brought back an extra box of all of the nails.

(Those are nails?)

These are Swiss edging nails, with hobnails in the middle. So, I found this box with his things, after he passed away, and saved it, and brought it out here. And I bought a pair of surplus army boots in 1951, after World War II, and had a local boot maker—a grand old classic boot maker here in Boulder, named Warren Perry—and he put these nails in my boots. And I use these on many of my climbs. And the way I came into possession of these—my dad brought these back from Switzerland in 1913.

30:11 (So, let me just—the camera really makes them look like modern boots, but really they’re metal.)

They’re metal. They’re big, heavy, metal things. Maybe turn it sideways.

(And they’re attached—)

The way they’re put in is very interesting. The way Warren Perry put these in: He soaked the boots in water, to soften the leather, and then you take an awl, which is an ice pick type of thing, and work holes in the periphery, all around. Then the edging nails have a shaft on them, and you poke the edging nail into the hole. The spike shaft comes out the other side, and then you bend it around and close the thing. That’s what holds it in place. The center nails are simply pounded in, and they’re creased on the inside by being pounded against a shoemaker’s last. And that’s the way they’re put in.

I did a lot of climbing in these boots, and my dad’s boots looked very much like these, but somewhere in the shuffle since he passed away, the boots got lost. I do not have a pair of his boots. I have a pair of my boots that look something like those.

(Let’s just turn them sideways one more time, so that people can see these.)

What people climb in now, starting about 1952, are cleated hard rubber soles that look very much, superficially, like the hard black rubber on automobile snow tires. And they have cleats in them, somewhat similar to the cleated rubber-sole boots that professional football players wear. And those are lighter in weight by quite a bit. With this much iron in here these things are heavy.

(How much do you think they weigh? Or that one weighs?)

Well this one weighs—oh, I’d say five, six pounds.

(Yeah. I was thinking so, too.)

And you have one on each foot, so just on your feet you’re carrying 10 or 12 pounds. And then, as we’re going to discuss later, the weight of the sleeping bags and the blankets and the food and all the rest of it, these early climbers were carrying loads of 50 and 60 pounds in a big backpack to get up to their campsite before they ever started climbing.

(Right. Now if you flip those over, they’re leather. And then they laced up at the base, and then—)

Yeah. I don’t have the laces in here, but they lace up.

(And then hook.)

So this is basically what climbing boots looked like in the days of my father and Carl Blaurock.

(Okay.)

[Break in the sound recording.]

—lost, somewhere in all the movings that have taken place since he died. And his ice axe, which shows in some of the pictures, I don’t know where that is. He left the ice axe probably with some friend in Colorado Springs, to be picked up the following summer, but I never found out with whom he left it so it’s lost. I have my own ice axe, but—

(Well since we’re talking about shoes, what did other people do for having shoes?)

Well, if they didn’t have access to these wonderful Swiss edging nails, which were the superb thing at the time, they would go to a store that emphasized a lot of workman’s clothing and workman boots and things like that—Sears Roebuck was the top place at that time—and get a pair of very heavy, strong eight-inch workman’s boots, laborer’s boots. People that worked outside, people that worked in logging camps, people that worked around mines, prospectors, very tough strong boots. They had leather soles, which you could pound ordinary hobnails into, American hobnails. Or they had composition soles—that’s the way they were built in those days. But they weren’t as good. That’s what I used when I started climbing. But then I got these boots with the edging nails when I went to the Grand Teton, because I knew from what people had told me that to climb the Grand Teton I better have something better than old workman’s shoes. It’s a good thing I did.

34:53 (In this book it talks about Carl’s climbing partners and it says that he “climbed with many members of the Colorado Mountain Club and other notable outdoors people, including Albert Ellingwood, Dwight and David Lavender, Stephen H. Hart, Hermann and Elmina Buhl, Agnes Vaille, and his most frequent partner, William ‘Bill’ Ervin.”)

And there were some others that aren’t mentioned here. Jerry Hart, the older brother of Steve Hart, Carl Blaurock himself, of course, and since my dad came from Colorado Springs, or got close to people interested in climbing down there, one of them was Barton Hoag, who was connected with the college. He was the one that made the first ascent of the Lizard Head with my father. And Bob Ormes, who wrote the first guidebook, known as the Ormes Guidebook. Ormes did a lot of climbing with my father. He was the son of Manly Ormes, who was on the Colorado College faculty. When he grew up—and I was still a little boy at that time—my dad took possession of Robert Ormes, you might say, and taught him a lot of the climbing that he knew, and then when I got older, after my dad passed away, Bob Ormes took me on and taught me what my dad had taught him. And that’s the way I learned quite a bit. We did a lot of climbing in the summer of ’40 and ’41 in The Garden of the Gods, and trails, and things around Pikes Peak. And then at the end of that summer, Labor Day weekend of 1940, I was privileged and honored to be invited by Bob Ormes to go to the Elk Range with him when he finished his fourteeners—and we finished on Castle, and Snowmass, and Capitol. I was with Bob Ormes when he finished on Capitol. So that was a very honored thing, that I got to be with him, because he had done so much with my father.

(This has a nice couple paragraphs about your father, in this book. It says: “Albert Ellingwood was an Oxford scholar who learned to climb in Switzerland. After receiving his education in mountaineering there—and graduating from Oxford—Ellingwood returned to the United States and taught economics at Colorado College in Colorado Springs. Carl recalls that Ellingwood’s principal avocation was climbing, and he was well known among the Colorado Mountain Club group in Colorado Springs. He climbed extensively with Eleanor Davis, Bob Ormes, and Steve Hart.”)

Right.

(“I was actually only on two expeditions with Ellingwood. One was on the Wind Rivers in 1924, and the other was our own private expedition to the Sierras in California in 1928.”)

Right.

(“Ellingwood had his summers free, so he had lots of opportunity to climb. After he left Colorado, he was an assistant dean at Northwestern University. He died in 1934, but it was quite some months before I heard of it.”)

(So we’re going to talk a little bit about the Wind Rivers trip in 1924, and look at some of the photographs from that trip, and talk about the different equipment that they used during their hiking days.)

I have a wonderful story about the Wind River—

[Break in sound recording.]

(This is the chapter about Wyoming and their trip to the Wind Rivers and the Tetons in 1924. And this is a wonderful photograph that, actually, your father took—so he’s not in it—but it is of the three others who accompanied him on the trip. And they are: Carl Blaurock, and Elmina Buhl, and—actually, Elmina’s on the right and Hermann Buhl is in the middle. And behind them is the vehicle in which they used to travel [light laughter] up to Wyoming. Do you want to say a little bit about it?)

Well, all I can say is—I don’t remember that he ever told me what it was, but at that time—this was in 1924—that was when Model T Fords were being made, and very early Chevrolets. I think Carl was the one that actually owned the car, and they drove 400-and some miles up to the Wind Rivers—it’s clear up in northern Wyoming, almost in Montana, in this old jalopy, I’ll call it. And tires were so poor in those days. Cars were brand new things, and the tire manufacturers hadn’t learned how to do it very well, and there were no repair shops along the way, everywhere, where there are now. And they carried several extra tires tied to the back of the car so that when the tire blew out they would change tires and go on. That’s the way they made it up there. And there’s all gravel roads, of course, which is pretty hard on the tires in the first place.

40:30 (Well that’s a great segue into this journal that Carl kept, because it says: “August first, left Denver at 11:30 A.M. and drove through to Laramie, arriving at 8:00 P.M. [Laughter.] Lost a lot of time due to three blowouts before reaching Longmont.” So, for us, driving from Denver to Longmont might take, what, 40 minutes? Forty-five minutes?)

Right now you could drive from Denver to Longmont in less than an hour. You can drive to Laramie—Well, I’d drive, when my daughter was up there at school, I would drive from Boulder to Laramie in about two hours and fifteen minutes. Add on another half- hour for Denver and you could drive it in three hours.

(So it took them eight and a half. [Laughter from Ellingwood.] “Roads in general were in good shape. Stopped at the Connor Hotel, probably the best. Room was three dollars and fifty cents for two.” [Light laughter.] So they had quite an interesting challenge getting there. Then they rented some horses that took them up closer to the peaks. And the book goes through trying to get set up, and get furnished with saddle horses, and packing their duffel bags on the pack horses, and riding so many miles, and places that they camped, and what the weather was like, and how they cooked their meals, and how the sleep was—)

The Wind Rivers is an example of a mountain range that is quite spread out. There were ranches close around there—western ranches—where you could rent a saddle horse and a pack horse to help get some of your heavy gear closer to the high country where you were actually climbing. That’s what they did there, they did over in the Elk Range, a couple of other places. But some of the pioneer climbing they did here in Colorado there were no ranchers anywhere around or horses or anything. They had to backpack on their own backs from the last bit of transportation way into the high country in order to do their climbing. They had to carry food and knapsacks and bed rolls and the packs—in some of his notes he relates that the packs getting into their base camp weighed 70 and 80 pounds, just to get all of their supplies in, where they would base camp from which they would climb three or four peaks.

(So one of the articles that they would take with them would be their sleeping bag.)

That’s right.

(And we’re used to down sleeping bags, or maybe a mummy bag, so that we could keep warm. And you brought with you one of your dad’s sleeping bags that he used on his various and sundry mountaineering expeditions.)

Now, the story on these is quite interesting. Mountaineering equipment stores didn’t even exist in those days, because these guys were doing work, stuff that no one had ever done before. With proper apologies to modern Star Trek fans, these guys were going places where no man had ever been before! So, they had to come up with the equipment that would do for them because there was no mountaineering store like present-day Holubar, for example, to do this.

His first sleeping bag I have here. Unrolled, it’s six-and-half feet long. Where it came from: These bags were made by western ranch stockman supply places for ranchers, prospectors, miners, people driving cattle across the plains, sleeping out at night. There were companies that made heavy-duty, very waterproof, very heavy material sleeping bags for those guys to use. And that’s all that was available! So, if you wanted to go mountain climbing and sleep out, you jolly well better buy a bag from a western ranch supply store, because that’s all there was. There were stores like this in Colorado Springs where he was based and was living at the time he was doing all this. And there was a lot of mining, exploring, prospecting and all, going on. And there were stores in Colorado Springs where this could be done.

45:30 This bag here is his first bag, and it’s made of a heavy waterproof material. It’s very heavy. And what made it worse, there’s a lining of thin blanket in here but that’s not enough to keep warm. For warmth, they took blankets—woolen blankets which were available, of course, at stores, people had them for mountain cabins and all—and folded a couple of heavy wool blankets and pinned them together. Now let me show you. You buy a heavy wool blanket—and heavy means heavy weight as well as thick—double-bed size, and you fold it over like this, and then you pin all around the edge, making a bag out of it. Here are huge safety pins that I still have, that were used to pin that together. Then when you got one bag pinned like that, then you took the other bag and ran it the other way, and pinned it. So you had a double blanket bag that you slipped down inside of this waterproof bag, and that was what you slept in. That’s what miners, and prospectors, and range riders and cattle drivers and all these western people did. For them, weight wasn’t a problem because they traveled by horseback, and you had a pack horse you could pile all the weighty sleeping bags and stuff on that you wanted to. This bag, with the blankets in it, weighs about 35 or 40 pounds. Just an empty bag here weighs close to 20 pounds. So, by the time you have that, plus your food, plus your heavy clothing—cooking utensils and all—it’s easy to see why you’d have a pack going into a base camp that was 50 or 60 or 70 pounds. So, that was the early sleeping bag that he had.

Now, I’ll show you the next thing.

(I’m going to stop the tape for a minute.)

Stop the camera.

[Pause in the recording.]

(So the heavier bag was used in the late teens on the Crestone trip.)

Yeah. This was used on the Crestone trip, and it was so heavy that it was quite a burden. But it was the only thing that was available. Well then, a couple of years after that, my mother’s mother, who was German, took frequent vacation trips to Germany. And when she was over there around 1918, 1919—a couple years after the Crestone expedition with this very heavy blanket bag—she discovered a German eiderdown. Eider is the name of a German duck, and it produces wonderful down. The Germans had discovered that you could make a lovely down comforter, for a cold winter bed, out of the eider duck down.

So she brought back two of these eiderdown, double-bed size, and when my father saw that—Just what I need! He talked her out of one of those. He folded the double-bed size over, had a heavy-duty sewing material shop put snaps all around the edge, thus making it into an eiderdown bag. Then he went to an outdoors shop in Colorado Springs, and somehow or other they came up with some lightweight waterproof material, which I have here, and he had this waterproof bag made to order to go around the eiderdown bag for warmth. And that’s what I have here. This is a flap that goes over your head after you get into it. You slide in this way, and then if it’s a bad night for warmth you can pull this over your head. The weight of this bag, with the soft, fluffy eiderdown for warmth inside of it, was less than half of what that heavy blanket bag was. Which made into the high country a lot easier. So this bag was used on all the climbs after that bag.

50:20 We kept both bags, because when I started going out with him—when I was 12, and 13, and 14 years old, and he would take me on trips around Colorado, and we would camp out and cook our meals and hike and do some simple climbing that I could do at that age, and all—I needed a bag to sleep in, and he needed a bag to sleep in. So he slept in his wonderful down bag and I slept in the old blanket bag! We were in the old Studebaker at the time, so the weight wasn’t a problem, but we had need for the two bags. And then when he passed away I acquired the two bags and saved them, and here we have them today so that I can demonstrate them. These along with other things I’m going to show you are going to the library and museum in Golden, as historic memorabilia concerning all this wonderful early climbing.

(And this bag snaps, is that right? Snaps up the side?)

Yeah. This was done in snaps.

(I can see on the far side of the table there’s some snaps.)

Yeah, here they are. Here.

(And there, too.)

Inside.

(Farther down. Yeah.)

This had to be done by a special, well, there are a couple—there are two or three shops in Colorado Springs, I remember seeing them when I was growing up, that specialized in putting together heavy canvas-type materials: awnings for store buildings, for private homes, porches; covers for garden furniture, and all that, were made out of heavy canvas- like materials and had to be put together by very heavy-duty sewing machines. Ordinary household sewing machine wouldn’t cut this material at all. This is very thick and very tough. He worked with one of those shops that he liked and designed, with the man, this sleeping bag and had it made to order, to fit the eiderdown bag that would go inside for warmth. So when it’s all rolled up, and you carry it on your shoulders, as I said, it weighs less than half as much as this old blanket bag. So that’s what he used for all of his climbs after 1919, 1920, which includes, of course, the famous Teton climbs and the Wind River climbs, and all.

(That’s great.)

All right. Here’s the inside of the lighter-weight bag, showing the width. And, when unrolled all the way, it’s six-and-a-half feet long so that a tall man—like my dad and myself, we’re both tall—could get into it. Then the eiderdown bag, for warmth, slid down inside here, like so. And then you actually got in the eiderdown bag. And then if it was a cold or damp night, you pulled this hood that he designed up over your head so that you actually were covered. Because it’s very important that you keep you head covered.

(And here’s some little eiderdown.)

The eiderdown part of it, I might comment about—you can see pieces of it here—was used so much by him and by me in all of my climbing, that the covering—it’s sort of a silky, satiny cover like on quilts—wore through, and the feathers were falling out! Here’s some of them right here! I gave the eiderdown part to the Goodwill several years ago, for some poor person to patch and put on his bed. But you can see the tail end of the feathers that are still in there.

(I guess these snaps eventually got replaced with zippers.)

Yeah, they could be. [Pause in talking; sound of snaps.]

54:58 A little side story: I used this bag when I was—I don’t know if you want to photograph this or not—I used this bag when I was climbing with Bob Ormes on Snowmass and Capitol, on Labor Day Weekend, that we just talked about. And I pulled this hood over me because it was quite a cold night, and my head is under here. It’s very important that you keep your head warm and dry, because if your head gets cold your whole body gets cold. And it was a blessing that I did this, because when I woke up the next morning the hood and the whole bag were covered with two inches of fresh snow. You know how we get snows here in early September? We were camped at about 10,500, after climbing Capitol, and by golly it snowed that night! I pushed this hood back, and there was snow all over everything, and I reached out with my arm and swept all the snow off so I could get out of the bag, dumped the snow out of my boots. [Laughs.] I remember that, clear as anything.

(Like it was yesterday.)

Oh yeah.

(So, out of the book that we’ve been talking about, this is a photograph of Albert Ellingwood and the caption reads: “Ellingwood traverses on the northeast ridge of Mount Moran.” So, what people need to note in this photograph is the backpack that he was carrying. And you have that backpack with you today?)

I have it with me right now.

(Okay.)

That backpack is this backpack, which he used on his climbs—most of his climbs. It’s a very old backpack, he got—

(It’s at least 90 years old, if the hike was taken in 1924, right?)

Oh yeah. This goes back 80 to 90 years. That shows how well it was built. It was used by him on all of his climbs, and then I inherited it after he passed away, and I used this on most of my climbs. I thought it would be a great idea to climb with his backpack. And it was used so much that between the two of us, holes got worn in the bottom of it. I had to take it to a special canvas shop. And as you can see here, a second bottom was sewed onto it, over the original bag, so that I could carry things in it without them falling out. This bag—if this bag could talk, boy would it tell stories.

(What would it say?)

This bag has been on top of most of the Fourteeners on my dad’s back and again on top of most of the Fourteeners on my back. This bag has been on top of the Fourteeners in Colorado twice.

(So it’s got two outside pockets.)

Yeah. And that’s what he carried his notebooks in. I have several notebooks where he recorded the details of his climbs—mileages, elevations, routes, and all that. This is a sample of one of them. And they fit in these pockets.

(And then it’s a large open pouch inside.)

Yeah, it gathers. You pull the strings, and pull it together at the top, like this. This is what they used—what I used and he used, it looks about like this in the picture—for carrying your daily supplies: extra sweater, rain gear, food for the day and all that. This isn’t anywhere near big enough to carry, of course, a sleeping bag and a big supply of food. But each day you leave camp and go up on the mountain, you have to carry things you need that day, and that’s what this pack was for.

(Okay. Well let’s just see the bag back. So this went over the front. So two large leather straps. I wish the bag COULD talk.)

[Laughs.] I have to do the best I can.

(Okay. I think we’re going to take a break.)

All right.

60:01 [End of tape A.]

[B].

00:00 (Okay. This is a photograph out of the book, titled Three Climbers, Three Friends. Albert Ellingwood is in the middle, and you can see he’s wearing kind of a heavy coat with lapels on it, and buttons down the front. This was a photograph that was taken on a trip to Wyoming in 1924. And you have the coat here with you today?)

I have it right here. Here’s the coat, with the corduroy collar. A very heavy, weatherproof double-thickness coat that he wore on all of his mountain climbs. It can take quite a beating, rubbing against timber, rocks, and all of the things that people get into when they’re stomping around in the mountains. I’m very glad I still have that. I should tell— [brief break in sound] —it’s not mountaineering equipment. That part of the thing that’s really interesting is where all this stuff came from. Where did guys buy this kind of stuff when they were climbing, before climbing was done? [pause] I’d like to talk about that.

(Okay. I’m going to set it down here. Where did they get this climbing equipment?)

All right. Look at the label. It says “Duxbak.”

(“Duxbak trademark rainproof sportsman’s clothing, Utica, New York.”)

That’s right. You want me to go over it now and then you photograph it?

(Sure.)

All right. The only clothing available in 1915, 16, when he started all this in the Crestones and on from there on, was the outdoor clothing that was available to duck hunters, and deer hunters, and elk hunters, and people like that who were doing rugged outdoor activity. Mountaineering shops as we know them today hadn’t, of course, come into being because there was no mountaineering! Manufacturers don’t make mountain climbing clothing if there’s nobody climbing mountains. And places like Holubar’s and Gerry Cunningham and all the rest of them came into being when climbing got started in the late ‘40s after World War II. But Carl Blaurock and my dad and Eleanor Davis and Hermann Buhl and all of these people that were doing this pioneer climbing, they had to make do with what was on the market at that time. And what was on the market was hunters’ clothing. This particular brand is called Duxbak. And it’s a contraction of duck’s back. A duck’s back is very durable and waterproof, and the manufacturer squeezed that together and came up with the trade name Duxbak.

(Right. And they spelled it D-u-x-b-a-k.)

And it’s spelled D-u-x-b-a-k. And this particular one was made back East, in Utica, New York, where quite a bit of hunting and fishing and tramping around in the Appalachians and the Adirondacks was going on at that time. But it hadn’t spread out West yet. So the clothing that these early western climbers wanted to use had to come from back there because that’s the only place it was.

(So you have his coat here with you, and you also have his pants.)

I have his coat and I’ve also got a pair of his pants.

(And I have a photograph here afterwards, of him climbing, showing the pants, too.)

They had to make do with what was on the market at that time. Because mountain climbing—the basic issue here is, mountain climbing was unheard of. When my dad and Eleanor Davis and Carl Blaurock and Hermann Buhl and all of these people were doing it, they had to wear what was available on the market at the time.

The pants are the same material.

(Really. How much does this weigh?)

It’s pretty heavy!

(It’s very heavy!)

Let’s see. Oh my gosh, that weighs seven or eight pounds.

(Yeah. I was thinking six, but yes, it is very heavy.)

And the pants are the same material: double thickness, waterproof. They had some scheme for waterproofing, I don’t now how it was done. This one looks like it’s been patched. You can stick your fingers in the bottom here and feel the double thickness.

05:15 (They’re very heavy. And this is Duxbak also.)

Oh yeah, it’s the same outfit.

(And it looks like they’ve been repaired, because you can see a variety of buttons going up the front.)

Well, where this stuff gets wrecked is in rock climbing. If you’re back bracing up a narrow crack, and you’re pushing your back against your feet on the opposite rock wall, it wears holes in the pants. And that’s what happened here. Let’s see [chuckles]. Well, that would happen on climbing the bishop. The bishop is a very deep crack in the rock, and you back-brace your way all the way up the thing. I’ve done it myself.

(Okay. So, on this one you can see that the clothing gets a good workout.)

[Big laugh.] I love that!

(This one is labeled “Ellingwood on the Crawl,” and you can see that he’s being held on with a rope, but that he also is crawling along the edge of that crevasse. And then this one is called “Ellingwood standing at the Crawl.” So you can see his coat there, and his pants. And then, this one’s called “End of the Crawl.” And last, but not least, here’s a photograph of two men, and Ellingwood is standing on Carl’s shoulders. It’s titled “A Friendly Assist.” [Laughter from Ellingwood.] So, is this like creative mountaineering?)

Yeah. If you couldn’t quite reach a handhold that you were trying to reach, your fellow climber gave you a boost.

(And that’s exactly what he’s doing.)

That was done a time or two.

(So in this book, for August 10th, as they are recounting their hikes, Carl says: “At 8:00 A.M. After a breakfast of prunes, oatmeal, and coffee, Albert and I hit the trail for Mount Harding at 10:00 A.M.. Hermann had a sore toe and decided to stay in camp with Lou. At 10:45 we were at lake at head of valley and below pass we came over yesterday. By 11:00 A.M. we reached foot of first long snow bank between moraine and rock wall, and at noon we arrived at end of moraine. Here we headed directly up the east side of the glacier toward the pass at the top.” So he’s talking about having a breakfast of prunes, oatmeal, and coffee. Can you tell me what kind of other food, or what kind of food they brought? And how they decided on the kinds of food they were going to have?)

Well, yes I can. The primary consideration, in planning food for these expeditions, is weight. When you’re backpacking with heavy, double-thickness clothing, sleeping bag, cooking utensils, candle lantern, camera, various other things, your weight can add up in a hurry. And so a critical thing, to keep the weight down, is to use as much food as possible that’s dry and is made usable by getting water out of nearby streams. There’s streams everywhere, wherever you climb, so that you always pick a campsite that’s near a little stream where you can scoop up water. And oatmeal is the prize example of that. For breakfast you can get—remember, everybody remembers seeing in the grocery stores, even back then, these great big, round tubs of Quaker Oats. And they don’t weigh very much, and oats is very, very nourishing. And so breakfast—a standard breakfast when he did it with his people, and I did it when I climbed—was to cook up a big pot of hot oatmeal, using the water from the stream, and you had your little cooking pot and all. And then throw a handful of raisins in it, and they get soaked up and expand, and make a little more nourishment. And you can eat a breakfast of—fill yourself with hot oatmeal and that really sticks to your ribs until about two in the afternoon. Very nourishing.

10:14 If you happen to be camping at your car, which happens occasionally if you’re near some mountain that you can do from your car, people sometimes attempted to take eggs and bacon. That’s no good. Eggs and bacon have no lasting quality to them. If you have a bacon and egg breakfast, you’re hungry by ten o’clock in the morning. So, we just don’t do that. Oatmeal is the best. Another good, similar type thing is buckwheat cakes. Heavy buckwheat pancakes has the same kind of nourishment that oatmeal has, the only problem is you got to carry along syrup to bake on it. The popular syrup back in those days was Karo, and it’s very nourishing, very rich. So that was another popular breakfast. Then, that would get you into the middle of the afternoon.

And then you would have in your knapsack some nice, dry, lightweight wheat crackers, a little package of cheese, maybe a wholesome candy bar or two, and that would get you through the rest of the afternoon. You don’t carry cans of juice because they weigh too much. You drink the water that’s on the mountain. You carry a little canteen to fill and carry high on mountains where there are no streams. You’ve got to have some water when you get way up high—you can’t be dehydrated, especially in the summertime when you’re climbing in the hot summer sun and you’re climbing at, let’s say, 13,000 feet where there’s no more water—you have to carry a little bit with you. So there’s no avoiding it, you have to carry some liquid. But you keep it at a minimum.

Then for the evening meal, again you have the weight problem. My dad learned and some of these early old-timers also learned, from the Orientals, that one of the most nourishing things to eat in the evening was rice. Rice is much like wheat and oats here in this country. The Orientals make a big thing of rice as one of their main diet items. And of course they grown rice all over the place in the Orient. Japan, China, and all over. So you can buy a bag of rice at a grocery store here, which is lightweight because it has no water in it, and carry that way up to your camp. And then, to make a wonderful supper, you do have to have a little something to put it in. There’s no way out of it. You carry a good- sized can of tomato stew and make up a pot of tomato stew with rice that’s been boiled up until it’s nice and soft. Mix that all together and you have a pail full of tomato stew with rice that can fill three or four hungry tummies around the campfire very well. And that makes a good evening meal, and it doesn’t weigh too much.

And then for drinks, my father was not very keen on either coffee or tea because it doesn’t have much nourishment to it. If you’re going to have a hot drink, the preferred hot drink was cocoa or hot chocolate. And that, of course, has a lot of nourishment to it. And to add to the nourishment, take along a package of dry powdered milk and mix with the cocoa. And that makes a hot drink in the evening, around the campfire, that has a lot of nourishment to it. They weren’t very much in favor of coffee and tea, and he even writes to that effect in some of his hand notes that I’ve read, that they just don’t bother much with coffee and tea. So that was how they kept body and soul together up in the high country and kept the weight down. Items like that.

14:37 (You’ve mentioned him writing notes or keeping notebooks. Can you go into a little bit more detail about those?)

Yeah. My father was very, very meticulous in keeping very careful records of all of his climbing expeditions that went on for many years. I have here, one of eight or nine notebooks that I have at home, that are going to the Alpine Club museum and library in Golden, ultimately, when I’m finished working on these notes. But he kept very meticulous notes along the trail. Very small writing, carried a pencil with him, and when they’d have a little rest stop alongside the trail he’d sit down and write a few notes about how many minutes or hours it took to get from yea to yea, how much mileage, what elevation—he carried an altimeter with him. These are very detailed notes of all the climbs, from the base camp clear to the summit. And from these and his study in the evenings back in the winter time, he would use these as source material for writing the articles he wrote for the American Alpine Club journal, Trail & Timberline, for the Colorado Mountain Club and outdoor magazines and things. He did quite a bit of writing, and a lot of the information came from his own handwritten notes.

(So this is the inside of one of his notebooks. I was going to see if I could focus in on his writing. So he’s basically writing specifically about how they got from one spot to another, any problems that they encountered—)

That’s right. It’s very detailed because it gives elevations and times that it took to get from yea to yea, and the routes that they used. If there’s a choice of a certain valley versus another valley, or a certain ridge versus another ridge, or when they got way up on the mountain, this rock approach looked better than that one. It’s all described in the notes. So the climb—when he got back and was writing up articles about this—could be very clearly reproduced from the notes that he had.

(How many books does he have?)

I’ve got eight of these. There’s one for each of the major mountain ranges that he climbed in. For example, the Sangre de Cristos down northeast of Alamosa; the San Juans, down around Durango and ; another one for the great ; another one for the Elk Range; another one for the Tetons; another one for the Wind Rivers. Each mountain range had its own separate notebook, because they were done different years. And he would start a new notebook every time he started a new climbing expedition.

(Now this one in your hand, actually at the top has a recipe for John’s Pancakes. And it says, “Crumb a thick slice of stale bread and soak in a cup of water. Stir in one tablespoon condensed milk, two tablespoons syrup, and two more cups of water. Melt the butter. Stir in the eggs and the salt.” And then it goes on about salad plants. Veronica americana, Trifolium. I’m guessing these are different plants he would have encountered along the way that he might have eaten.)

I suppose so.

(And then greens. Different kinds of greens, and how to cook them. And the bottom part is “Estimated mileage” in ink. August 4th where it went—)

You can turn a page or two and read a little bit of that, just to get an idea of the kind of content that’s in those notes.

(Very detailed. “Slept in ‘til 8:00 in the morning on August 7th.” How long it took to get from one place to another.)

There’s one notebook I have at home that I was reading the other day, saying, “Up at 7:15 and spent an hour doing camp housekeeping—

(What does that mean?)

—and then we got our lunches together and started on the climb.” Camp housekeeping means, maybe drying out some things that got wet, gathering a supply of wood and have it piled in a safe place so they’d have firewood when they got back to camp at night. And he called it camp housekeeping. I have another little camp housekeeping thing to tell you, when you—are we recording now?

(Yeah.)

20:08 Okay. A thing that I learned from him that I thought was very, very clever— critical, as critical as food, lightweight food, is being able to build a fire. If you can’t build a fire, you don’t eat. And his way of solving that problem, under various tough weather conditions, was to keep—he had a short hand axe that was in a leather case that hung on his belt. When they were climbing at fairly high altitudes where you reach these gnarled old twisted timberline—Foxtail Pine and Limber Pine and all—that are so prevalent at high altitudes, when those trees die and dry up they have a lot of pitch in the wood. Pitch Pine. And Pitch Pine is wonderful for starting fires. Pitch Pine burns like crazy. Pitch Pine is like wood soaked in gasoline. And he would take his axe and chop out pieces of Pitch Pine out of a log like that, that he found, and put the chips in the pocket of his big jacket and carry it around with him. And when it got time to start a campfire in the evening, if the wood was a little damp or the pine needles were a little damp or something, he’d get out the Pitch Pine and make a little pile. You know what kind of matches they had in those days? Old-fashioned kitchen wooden matches. Three inches long, came in a box made by the Diamond Match Company, about two or three hundred wooden matches to a box. And of course the wood burned once you struck it and got it going. Then put that under the Pitch Pine, get a little heat going, then put some Ponderosa Pine needles on it, then a little more wood. Pretty soon you build up enough heat that you could make a pretty good fire. That’s the way they made fires under all kinds of conditions. And the clever part of it was that Pitch Pine was the secret to building fires under adverse conditions.

(And he was quite handy with the axe.)

I’ve got the axe at home. I didn’t bring it today, but it looks like any little hand axe except it has a leather case that straps through his belt and hangs down. I’ve still got the axe.

(And you also have his candle lantern, too, right?)

Oh, I’ve got his candle lantern. That is a very unique thing. Let’s take a look at that. Are we on camera?

(Uh-huh.)

All right. Let me explain how this came about. In the teens and twenties, when he and Eleanor Davis and Carl Blaurock and all these wonderful people were doing all this, there were no flashlights, operated by batteries like we have now. They had to have some emergency light, because sometimes a climb turned out to be a little tougher than they expected. And they got down off the steep, rocky part of the mountain, but they hadn’t got back to camp yet before it got dark. Now in the summertime it’s light until 8:00 or 8:30, or a quarter to 9:00, in the sky, enough that you could see your way through the forest or field of grass or whatever. But after that it gets good and dark. Sometimes they’d have to finish the last mile or two back to camp in almost pitch darkness. So, they had a candle lantern. It was carried in a leather case that you see here. And, we’d take it out, and the candle, wrapped in the paper here, is carried in the case. It unfolds, and opened up into a little box, and then the floor inside goes down, and you stuff the candle in the little holder in the bottom, bring the lid down, buckle it in—find the slot where that goes, there we are—and the little handle, and a neat little candle lantern.

25:12 (And there you have your candle lantern.)

And that’s icing-glass windows that casts enough light on a pitch-black dark night that you can see to walk along through the grass or through the forest and not stumble over boulders and rocks and stuff, and gradually get yourself back to camp. And of course it’s pitch-black dark when you get to camp, you can’t even see where your wood pile is. So, while the candle lamp’s going you get out the Pitch Pine and a few little twigs and get your campfire started. And once you get a roaring campfire started and start cooking your dinner, then, of course, that makes more light than the candle there, and you put this away. That’s the way they navigated. And he’s got some reports in some notes I have at home, of a climb they did down in the Crestones in 1916, when the climb went very badly and they were way late getting back. And it got dark on them long before they— they were still several miles from their campsite, and they used the candle lantern to help them find their way through the forest and the grassy slopes. He went on to say, following the detail of my dad’s lovely notes, they didn’t get back to camp until two o’clock in the morning.

(Oh.)

All the way, much of the night, with the candle lantern.

(Yeah. You had the advantage of flashlights, though.)

When I started climbing in the late thirties, and into the forties and fifties, I of course always carried a flashlight. And it’s surprising—speaking of light in the high country at night—how much you can see in the high country if it’s a clear night, which it often is. It doesn’t rain very often in the high country. On a clear night, crystal-clear air at that elevation, and you’re miles, and miles, and miles from any city with any city lights, and at that clear air there are thousands of stars. You don’t ever anticipate that when you’re here in town, because streetlights mask most of that out. But the heavens are beautiful. There are so many stars that the congregation of all the stars actually casts enough light that you can see to walk through a field of grass, or something like that, or start a campfire, by starlight. And I have done that on a number of times, occasions, too. If you’re in a deep forest—the evergreen forest, of course, cut out the starlight, but if you’re just making your way across a mountain meadow or a field, trying to get back to camp, the starlight is often sufficient. And, of course, if it’s a moonlight night, oh boy! The moonlight makes almost as much light as the sun does at that elevation. No problem at all. Full moon up there is extraordinarily bright.

(So let’s see, you’ve brought the clothing and the sleeping bags, the candle lantern and the back pack, and you’ve showed your shoes, and the notebooks. And I wasn’t sure— did we cover everything?)

I think—are we on camera?

(Yeah.)

I think we’ve covered most of it. I didn’t bring the hand axe, but that wasn’t particularly unique. Everybody knows what a hand axe looks like. The thing I cannot supply, which is part of the gear of course, and I’ll comment about it, was the ice axe, which is used on the steep glaciers and snow fields. It shows in the pictures there where—you might want to get a picture of that. He had an ice axe; I have an ice axe. His ice axe got lost somewhere. It was left in Colorado Springs when we went back to Northwestern for the winter. And when he passed away, and I came back the following summer, I had no idea where he’d left the ice axe. So I never retrieved that. But I have an ice axe of my own that I bought. Ice axes, most of them, were made in Austria. And the two ice axes that I have, have Austrian names on them—were made in Austria. And the other thing is climbing rope. And I might comment about that.

(Okay.)

30:04 This is another thing that made climbing such an achievement, you might say, when these fellows did it. For safety purposes they carried a climbing rope, to belay one another on steep dangerous climbs and to use for repelling down a steep rock face. When they were finished with a climb and wanted to get down quickly, and get back to camp before dark, they would repel down. Well, the rope they used was the only rope that was available in those days. Hemp rope, made of hemp. The same kind of rope that was used on all the sailing ships, for centuries, to pull the sails up onto the masts of the sailing ships. Very strong, but very heavy and very hard on your hands. It’s bristly. But that’s all they had. And wonderful nylon climbing rope, as we have today, wasn’t developed until the years of World War II. Chemical companies learned in those days to come up with synthetic fibers: nylon, Dacron, polyester, all of these wonderful things that we have now. But those didn’t exist before the war. And climbing rope now is half or five-eighths inch nylon, and it’s very easy on your hands, it’s soft and comfortable for one thing, and much stronger. A half-inch diameter, five-eighths inch diameter, nylon climbing rope can hold over 2,000 pounds. So we all have now nice nylon climbing ropes, which we use for safety in repelling and all that.

His climbing rope, again, got lost in the shuffle some place. There was no point in carrying ice axes and climbing rope and boots with hobnails, and things like that, back to Northwestern in Evanston, Illinois, for the winter. He left that with friends in Colorado Springs. He knew many, many people from all his years living there. And people were tickled, of course, to store his stuff for him. Then after he died unexpectedly in 1934 and I started coming back to the Springs on my own, I went through visiting many of his friends and rounded up some of the stuff, including the sleeping bags. They were left— The year that we were last together, in 1933, he fully expected to come back the following summer, in 1934, and take me on a climb, a more serious climb. And he died the following spring and we never made it. So the sleeping bags, even, were left in Colorado Springs with a good friend, to save for our return in the summer of 1934. So when I came back, I immediately went and retrieved the sleeping bags and the candle lantern and a few other things. But I never found out where he left his boots and his ice axe and the climbing rope.

(This book, The Climber’s Climber, comments on climbing ropes. It says, “The climbing ropes were made of hemp before World War II. And although Carl learned to repel some time around 1920, he used a rope more as a hand line than as a belay.”)

That’s right.

(Then it goes on to say: “When the formation of the Tenth Mountain Division began during World War II, Carl received a nylon rope, piton hammer, and pitons from the war department with a request to use the rope and give government authorities the benefit of his ideas on how it performed as a climbing rope.”)

Yeah, well that was—I’ll go on with that. That was when nylon rope was developed and was first used by the mountain troops. That’s a very famous part of all this Western stuff. Fort Carson, just south of Colorado Springs, huge army base, was the base for the famous Tenth Mountain Division. And nylon climbing rope was developed while that was going on. Their practice rock-climbing was done in North Cheyenne canyon, the back of the Broadmoor, just a few miles from Fort Carson. My dad’s disciple and my good climbing friend, Robert Ormes, was a civilian instructor in rock climbing for the Tenth Mountain Division in North Cheyenne canyon. And I’ve been to that site where that was done— Bob took me out and showed me—and they built a little viewing stand on a rock ledge over here, and the great rock walls where the climbing was done was over here, and the generals would come and sit and watch the soldiers practice their rock climbing over here on this huge granite wall, with Bob Ormes doing instructing. That’s what he did during the war, was train the mountain troops in rock climbing.

35:35 The winter mountaineering was done up at Camp Hale, which is a high snow area up beyond Leadville, at about 11,000 feet. There’s no snow, of course, in Colorado Springs. You can’t do winter mountaineering there. But they set up Camp Hale at over 11,000 feet up near Tennessee pass, beyond Leadville, and that’s where they did their ski and winter mountaineering training. That’s all torn down now. If you go—drive through there going over Tennessee Pass, go past the old Camp Hale site, all you see is the old concrete floors.

(You see some foundation.)

Foundation, that’s all that’s left of it.

(Right. Well, I think maybe we’ll just close with one last photo, of your father, that says: “Ellingwood and Buhl on Mount Helen.”)

That’s in the Wind Rivers.

(Right. And this might be a fitting end. So this is one of the last photos from the book that we have, and it’s titled: “Ellingwood and Buhl on Mount Helen.” So the two men, standing beside the cairn that they built. Do you have any closing comments about your father that you’d like to share?)

Yes, I’d like make a comment about how wonderful all of this pioneering activity was, that he did, how it has opened up—he and Carl Blaurock and the rest of them, this handful of people—opened up mountaineering in Colorado. It simply didn’t exist before they started it. As I talked in an earlier tape that I did on this series, what we’re talking about today is what led to the Mountain Club, and the U.S. Geological Survey, and the U.S. Board of Geographic names, naming a 14,000-foot peak that was discovered more recently that was named Ellingwood Peak. That was named out of tribute and respect for what he did for mountaineering in Colorado, much of which we have talked about here in this program this afternoon. And I’ll make my own comment about my—Well, before I do that I’ll make one more comment.

I respect a great deal, my father’s feeling and compassion for the Native American Indians. They are all over the West. And where it particularly affected him was in the Wind Rivers. This huge mountain range in north-central Wyoming, the entire mountain range is on an American Indian reservation. He had so much respect for the ownership, the territorial rights, you might say, of the American Indians and that reservation, that when he and Carl Blaurock and Hermann Buhl, as we’ve been discussing today, decided to go up and do pioneering climbing in the Wind Rivers—never been done before—they went and saw the Indian chief that was in control of that reservation—it was in a small community on the east side of the Wind Rivers, New Boy [?] or Lander, I forget just exactly what it was—but I remember him telling me how he met with the Indian chief on the reservation. And he explained that they were mountain climbers for recreation, and they were helping the government learn about the mountains and take pictures and make maps and teach people about the sport of mountaineering. The Indian chief replied that their gods lived on those mountain tops and they wanted be very careful not to disturb their gods. My dad and Carl Blaurock reassured him that they would respect their gods living on the mountains and that they wouldn’t disturb them. And after considerable exchange with the old Indian chief, the Indian chief gave them permission to go up into the Wind Rivers and camp and climb, with his blessing. That’s the way he felt comfortable about going ahead and doing that. I’ve always admired that respectful attitude, because it just showed proper respect for the Native Americans.

40:40 I tell my own little story, in connection with my own climbing, that goes along with that. I’ve had some interesting experiences with wild animals, in my climbing experience in the thirties and forties and fifties. Bears, and deer, and beaver, and porcupines, and so forth. I sum it all up this way: The wild animals that one meets in the mountains have their own life, they live their way. My climbing friends and I live our way. Those two ways of life don’t necessarily mix all that well. But we stay out of each others’ way; we don’t bother the animals, the animals don’t bother us. There’s plenty of room for both of us up there. I have a great respect for the Native American animals, and the mountain climbers, and the Native American Indians.

(Thank you, very much, for your interview today.)

41:50 [End of tape B. End of interview]