An Ill-Advised Attempt of the Canadian Rockies’ Highest Peak
Jim Donini is an icon of American climbing who raised standards in world alpinism for decades. In Survival Is Not Assured, excerpted below, award-winning author Geoff Powter dives into Donini’s remarkable life story, exploring his groundbreaking climbs and his tumultuous experiences both on and off the rock.
The peaks of Glacier National Park are perfect first mountains. When you’ve driven from the east and have spent days rolling through the endless grasses of the high prairies, the Rocky Mountains roar up and crack the western Montana sky, clearly proclaiming that a very different world lies ahead.
When Jim woke to the dawn of the second morning of the drive and looked out the car window, the Rockies were burning with alpenglow from one edge of the sky to the other. “I had never seen anything like that in my life, and I’d never felt anything like that,” Jim remembered. “The thought that struck me, profoundly, was I have been here before. I knew right then that I would spend the rest of my life in the mountains. Nothing had ever seemed so clear.”
What Jim was seeing was the wild country he’d been dreaming about since boyhood but had never been able to find in the East. All four of the men were ignited, and as they followed the last leg of Highway 2 through the rolling hills of Blackfeet country to the eastern edge of the park, they sang their astonishment. The scale of the vertical rise of the gray walls at the head of Saint Mary Lake was overwhelming. They jammed their packs with supplies in town, then drove up into the high heart of the range and started hiking.
Though they didn’t know it when they started up the trail, it was an uneasy time for four young and inexperienced men to walk off into the Glacier backcountry. A couple of weeks before, two young women had been killed by different grizzlies on the same night, and those tragedies had shaken not just the park but the entire National Park Service (NPS). The maulings would change the way that wilderness access was managed across the country. The official report called the night of August 12, 1967, “the moment innocence was lost in our national parks.”
Jim and his partners heard about the killings, but they weren’t fazed. They thought what countless climbers before them had thought: That won’t happen to me. They ignored the restrictions that should have stopped them from hiking, shouldered their packs, and set off toward a suitable-looking peak that was barely a mile from the location of one of the attacks.
It’s unclear to Jim just what his first summit was, but his description suggests it was likely Mount Cannon, an 8,956-foot summit reachable via a moderate scramble. Cannon was visible from the road and didn’t seem to have any snow or ice, which was critical, as none of the men had ever seen a glacier.
The foursome started up the trail, thinking that they’d bivouac and then tag the top the following day. Just after dawn, Jim, Ross, and Brian summited. It was an easy ascent, but Jim believes the day cemented his future. “Standing on top of that little mountain was everything that I’d been dreaming about for years,” Jim said. “This was what climbing was supposed to be. All I wanted was to keep feeling like this.”
The only thing missing was a view: smoke from the fires that had been plaguing the park all summer shrouded the peaks. That night, celebrating in the bar, they hatched a plan they were sure would include some real mountain vistas.
They’d find a place with clear skies and even more real wilderness.
They’d go to Canada.
“You might as well aim high if you’re going to aim at all,” Jim recalled with a laugh. “We knew there were bigger, harder mountains up in the Canadian Rockies, so we figured we’d just go try one.”
They passed hundreds of perfectly acceptable peaks on the 400-mile journey north, but they’d heard of a mountain town named Jasper, and they fixated on getting there. In Jasper, the first thing they did was go into the only climbing store in town and announce their plans. Jim laughed again: “We honestly said to the guy, ‘What’s the biggest, baddest mountain around here?’ ”
The clerk cocked his head. “That’s Mount Robson, but . . .” He paused for a moment and took measure of the boys. “What kind of experience do you have?”
“We dodged that question,” Jim said, “but then the salesman asked, ‘What kind of gear do you have? You’re going to need ice axes and crampons for Robson.’
“He eventually managed to convince us that we’d need real mountain gear to get up the highest peak in the Canadian Rockies—but he had to work to get us to listen. We had a high enough opinion of ourselves to believe that we could probably get up anything with what we had—which was basically jeans and hiking boots—and thought he might be taking advantage of us. Still, we bought a bit of snow gear and the next day set off up the trail.”
I had to stop Jim there and ask whether he’d learned anything about the routes before starting the approach or had even looked at the regal peak from the trailhead. By any measure, Robson is a massive and serious undertaking. All sides of the peak are guarded by vertical walls of rock and ice, and the summit soars 9,300 feet above the road, with almost all of that gain on the mountain itself. No routes to the top are remotely suitable for novices, and there are often years when no one of any skill level reaches the top.
“None of that mattered,” Jim said. “All I could think about was how incredible it would be to stand on that thing. Somehow, we honestly thought motivation was enough to get us up. Ignorance, as they say, is bliss . . .”
The men hiked the eight-mile fire road into Kinney Lake and only by chance pitched their two-pole pup tents below the great wall of slabs that begin Robson’s easiest route, the South Face. They had no idea where the route went, but felt ready to start up, sure they could learn how to use axes and crampons as they went.
The big mountain laughed at their pretentions. As the men slept, a foot of snow fell. They were woken by the sound of climbers walking by early the next morning. Jim stuck his head out of his tent, saw that the world had gone white, and was greeted by an impressive figure with a strong accent. The man was Hans Schwarz, one of the renowned Canadian Swiss guides, who had enough experience on Robson that a feature on the route that Jim was about to try—the Schwarz Ledges—was named after him.
Schwarz announced that the Robson season was over and then, after hearing Jim’s accent, asked, “You are Americans, ja?”
Jim nodded.
“Then you should go back to America.”
Schwarz started to walk away, then turned and added a more gracious close: “Go to the Tetons. It’s very good rock climbing, which is maybe better for Americans.”
The boys walked out through calf-deep snow, pointed the car south, and started the 1,000-mile drive to Wyoming.
Preorder Survival Is Not Assured here.
Excerpted from Survival is Not Assured: The Life of Climber Jim Donini Geoff Powter (June 2024). Published by Mountaineers Books. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission.
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