By Peter Geiser

Snowpatch Spire

The previous summer Dave had disappeared from the Gunks to purportedly visit a fabled range of “real” mountains that the Vulgarians had never heard of; the Bugaboos. Dave returned with great tales of gleaming granite spires, rising gloriously out of glaciers. Most of the peaks had only a single route and were therefore virtually unclimbed; tales of Snowpatch Spire, the mountain with the hardest “normal” route in North America climbed only a handful of times; of Bugaboo Spire and the of the even more challenging Howsers with it’s South Tower which had only been climbed once. What was even more enticing was that this climbing Shangri-La was a mere 2500 miles away and on the same continent!

By the time the summer of 59 rolled around a Vulgarian raiding party had formed with plans for an assault on this fabulous treasure. The fact that this would be the first time that any of them except for Craft had even been in an alpine environment was considered a mere bagatelle.

Anyway with all the overweening overconfidence of youth, plans were made, gear assembled and an assault team consisting of Gran, Craft, Geiser, Sadowy and Suhl formed. The only thing that now stood in their way was a little problem of money.

Only two people in this group, Craft and Gran, had regular paying jobs. Geiser, Sadowy and Suhl consequently had to spend the first part of the summer working in the south Bronx for Senator Frozen Products, a tiny mom and pop ice cream manufacturer that was coincidently about to give rise to an ice cream revolution.

Because Senator was a Teamster union shop, and because manual labor actually got a living wage in those days, they managed to accumulate sufficient boodle to finance their planned venture. Not only did they get the boodle, but they also intersected with an historic moment in the ice cream business, the birth of Hagen-Dazs. At the time, Senator Frozen Products, a family affair, was under a lot of rather hard ball pressure from it’s much larger competitors, so in the summer of 1959, in a last ditch effort to stave off bankruptcy they decided to create a product that they were pretty sure their competitors couldn’t match, namely the first commercially available super-premium ice cream. Boy did they get that one right!

Although the “boys” didn’t know that they were witness to ice cream history, they did know when they’d accumulated the necessary funds for the western adventure. Consequently, towards the end of July, the necessary $ in hand, the five man assault team with all its gear, squeezed into Art's 57 Olds and headed west.

NY, NY to Spilamacheen, BC; two and a half 24 hour days of driving across pre-interstate America. Eternal 2 lane arrow straight blacktops leading to the tiny town of Spilamacheen and Jim Pauls(?) gas station. $25/person got you a place in his jeep/trailer combo. 3 or 4 hours of four wheeling in the long Canadian evening through the still, semi-virginal BC wilderness, got you to the so-called trailhead; an abandoned lumber camp.

There the party met John Rupley and Hans Krause already climbing for a week or so and come out for more supplies. Morning comes and staggeringly heavy packs are mounted for the 4.5 mile ascent to Boulder camp. A network of game trails leads to the foot of the moraine along which there's a fairly well beaten path which unfortunately dissolves into a maze of boulders, scree and shrubbery protecting the final (steep, really MF'ing steep) hump into Boulder camp:

Boulder Camp

(L-R) Fred Becky, Claude Suhl, (feet don’t count), Art Gran, Ed Cooper

Boulder Camp is pretty crowded, Ed Cooper is camped under the "Boulder", Fred Becky and his climbing partner are hacking away at the first ascent of Snowpatch East face, while off away from all the hurly burly of Boulder Camp, Krause and Rupley have pitched camp up in the Pigeon - Hauser col.

A day or so of "acclimatization" and the Vulgarian party makes the 32nd ascent of Snowpatch; feels great, running around these hills. Various day ascents are made of Anniversary and Pigeon peaks, and a visit to the Krause - Rupley camp while Gran and Cooper start to work on the East face of Bugaboo.

Geiser and Sadowy join forces with Becky and under Fred's tutelage, and a long day, knock off the first ascent of the west face of Bugaboo.   

                                                    

Roman Sadowy on top of Bugaboo Spire

Claude Suhl

At the end of the first week there are a few more arrivals, Bill Kemsley(?), following the directions left with Jim Paul to " Don't bring food, bring beer " actually packs in two cases of beer instead of food and declares himself a ward of the camp. About this same time Roger Chorley of Himalayan fame, where he also contracted polio leaving him with only one fully functioning leg, showed up as well.

After about two weeks of escapading about the Bugs,with the weather deteriorating, the VMC party departed for the Tetons. Without knowing it many US climbers had fallen in the ways of the old trapper parties who used to rendezvous annually in Jackson Hole at summers end. So the "boys", although initially side tracked into the Jenny Lake camp ground, soon discovered that the party was in full swing at the old CCOC camp. There, a bunch of hard core California climbers including Yvon Chouinard and Ken Weeks were living in the old abandoned ovens and pushing the envelope with new difficult rock routes. In fact Chouinard was just recovering from a rather nasty fall off a new line he and Weeks (?) had been pushing on the Broken thumb. He'd zippered a bunch of pins on an overhanging section of the route kissing the rock with his knee when he swung into the wall as Weeks caught him off the last pin. They then proceeded to self rescue, bushwacking down in the dark, a particularly painful experience for Yvon when the occasional branch would whack him on his newly insulted knee. Needless to say the Vulgarians were impressed.

Although there wasn't a lot of climbing that got done, a couple of rock climbs on Disappointment and Black Tail Butte, the Climbers camp was great. There, there was much partying and palavering as well as trips into Jackson Hole. Jackson in those days of yore was still a sleepy western town. A place where at noon you could practically go to sleep on Main street and not have to worry about getting hit by a car; old dogs moseying along, the occasional cowboy, the odd citizen and almost no tourists.

Art Gran leading in the Tetons

In addition to the Yosemite crew, the Vulgarians also met the climbing Rangers who manned the Jenny Lake ranger station and saved the odd climber and/or lost hiker. Pete Sinclair, Dave Dornan, Sterling Neal, etc. were a bunch of very decent guys and outstanding climbers with a "live and let live" attitude towards the goings on at Climbers camp. Ultimately it was time to leave. Time to get back to school.