ledges with her nailed boots.
Happy honeymooners. Don and Phyl snuggle together
“in the wilds,” 1920.
“Are you stable?” Don asked. “I’m just hanging by a thread,” Phyl replied, as she looked around for a more promising ledge. Together they scrambled away from the gully edge and crossed the moraine upward, towards their companion. Around the campfire that night Don told the story. “Phyl was a marvel. She seemed to know even before I did of the danger that I was into.”
Instinctive action or not, Don was convinced that a bond of communication existed between the two of them that did not require audible language. And thus commenced Don’s courtship. By nature, Don was taciturn, uncomfortable with extended conversation. His face held little expression, and it was difficult to read his thoughts. His outward appearance was the very opposite of Phyl’s; her expressive face could bubble over with enthusiasm. But behind Don’s façade was a romantic soul who composed poems about the beauties of nature and was a keen observer of all living things.
He had loved before and knew love’s joys and pain. When he left for France he left also a relationship. While fighting in the trenches he had plenty of time to muse, but unfortunately, as he wrote, “my thoughts [alas] will return to where my heart is still.” By the time he was back at home in Vancouver, Don was over this love, and then appeared Phyl, embodying in her love of mountains a reflection of his own self. She was the one for him! Phyl, however, was not immediately smitten with Don’s personality. He was very different in character, she more spontaneous and outgoing, he more quiet and soft spoken, and he seemed so intense – but that was a characteristic shared by many men upon their return from war. She enjoyed his company and respected his abilities – he could teach her a lot about mountains and climbing. But, she insisted, she did not feel romantically inclined towards him. Phyl took a while to be persuaded by Don, who patiently bided his time. In the meantime they continued to hike on club-organized events and spent increasing amounts of time together.
When Munday finally completed treatment for his injury, he had not regained the complete use of his arm and hand. He was able to do many things, but certain movements, such as carving a roast or tying his shoelaces, remained difficult. He was forever to travel with a small ball of wadded paper in his pocket. At odd moments he would put his hand in his pocket and roll the paper to keep his fingers nimble.
Munday’s army discharge came in the fall of 1918. Because of his injury he could not resume his previous work as a carpenter but concentrated instead on expanding his freelance writing career. Besides, the typewriter provided good physiotherapy for his injured arm and kept his fingers agile.
In his spare time, Munday served on the executive of the BCMC and for two years volunteered as the editor for the monthly newsletter, The BC Mountaineer. He also contributed much of the content. He wrote up accounts of climbs he, Phyl, and their friends undertook, many of which were first ascents, that is, the first documented climbs to the highest point on a mountain.
On 4 February 1920 Phyllis Beatrice James married Walter Alfred Don Munday at Christ Church, Vancouver. Don’s brother, Bert Munday, and Phyl’s sister Betty McCallum (who herself had married a young soldier in 1914) stood as witnesses. The Vancouver Province reported the event in its social pages, noting: “the young couple are concluding a romance that started with mountaineering some years ago.”
The day of the wedding was uncharacteristically foggy. Phyl had a small apartment on Walden Street in South Vancouver. It was not a long distance to the church, but given the weather, the bride-to-be arranged to leave the house for Christ Church an hour early She was to be there in time for the service at nine o’clock that morning. The groom lived with his widowed mother on 29th Avenue East, just around the corner from Phyl. Despite the worry, everyone arrived on time. The ceremony was attended by many family members and friends, but immediately afterwards, Phyl and Don – much to the chagrin of Beatrice James – exchanged their wedding clothes for hiking ones, picked up their packs, and headed off to catch the streetcar and then the eleven o’clock ferry to North Vancouver. They caught the Capilano streetcar to the end of the line and walked all the way from there over to the west ridge of Dam Mountain, where Don had just finished building a small cabin. Their idea of a honeymoon was to do what they loved best – live in the outdoors away from the city – and to do it together.
The weather was cold, but the cabin had a chimney, and soon a big fire kept the chill out. While Vancouver experienced a week of thick fog and drizzle, above the clouds the Mundays enjoyed clear, bright, glorious February weather. From the cabin they climbed somewhere different every day.
Building the cabin had been Don’s own special therapy, but it made a romantic story at the time of his marriage and caught the imagination of the local press. Single-handedly he blazed a trail, then “every weekend and on holidays laboriously, and with the patience of an ant, stick by stick, stone by stone, piece of furniture by piece, he carried the makings and furnishings of a little hut up the steep mountainside to a cunningly concealed broad ledge with a wonderful outlook on the sea and land. Then he built a comfortable mountain retreat, thinking of the day when he would spend his honeymoon there.”
In February 1920, a few weeks after their wedding, Phyl and Don decided to go to the Rockies for a mountaineering challenge. They had heard so much about these mountains from friends in the BCMC and felt confident in their abilities to climb farther afield. They loaded their supplies on to the Canadian National Railway car and travelled across the province to Mount Robson Provincial Park. Arranging for pack horses proved impossible so they carried their thirty-kilogram packs from the train station by trail to Berg Lake, where they camped. One might have thought that entering a new territory such as this in mid-winter without guides and relying only upon maps and Don’s compass would be daunting. For the Mundays it was adventure. While ascending Lynx Mountain (elevation 3170 metres), they discovered that even the surefooted mountain goat could make a fatal misstep as they watched a young goat fall while climbing a cliff above them. Despite this sad event, the frequent glimpses of wildlife in this park made the biggest impact on their remembrances and were an important turning point in their views about game hunting. The camera would remain the Mundays’ only means of hunting game and their only trophies would be photographic ones.
Phyl and Don Munday also climbed Resplendent Mountain (elevation 3426 metres), and not merely via the route established by legendary guide Conrad Kain in 1911. They pioneered a new route. A sudden weather change forced them to race for their lives to a rock rib when snow on an ice slope began avalanching. Lynx and Resplendent exceeded the elevations of any of the coastal mountains they had yet encountered, and these ascents gave them a taste for something more than what they were used to. Because of their elevations, both mountains presented more ice climbing than rock. Phyl liked climbing on snow and ice, because, as she put it, they are always changing. Rocks were fixed things, so rock scaling did not interest her. But the ever-changing conditions of snow and ice on high mountains created an unstable, evolving landscape and presented a mental challenge to find the best route as well as a physical challenge to withstand the conditions of cold, wind, and the dangerous natural obstacles created by glaciers and avalanches.
Phyl learned a tremendous amount on this 1920 trip to the Rockies. She now had firsthand knowledge of a new mountain paradise and wanted to become involved with the people who climbed there. Applying for membership in the Alpine Club of Canada (ACC) seemed the best way to do so, and together she and Don schemed to facilitate a trip to one of the fabled ACC summer camps in the Rockies.
She had also had the opportunity to see Don in action with his new boots. For years climbers wore leather boots with edge nails. Edge nails
