and the Tantalus Range way in the distance.”
It wasn’t long until the Mundays were once again in the news. Don’s financial situation was made public as he went to court to claim unpaid wages for the 156 days he had spent building the Alpine Lodge. He had not yet been paid the $785 owing, calculated at five dollars per day. For reasons not published, the Court dismissed his claims. It was an embarrassment to have their business affairs become reading material for the city, but losing the court case was also a real financial blow to the Mundays, who believed that they had been taken advantage of and deliberately misled.
Now that she was back in the city, Phyl’s horizons for Guiding expanded. When Edith was seven she was old enough to become a Brownie, so Phyl created the 1st North Vancouver Brownie Pack, with herself as Brown Owl. Long after Edith progressed through to Guides and Rangers, Phyl maintained this position, for she really loved working with these little girls. After several years of her Lones work she needed to actually be with the girls, not just in long-distance communication. She eventually became a District Captain and then Commissioner. In 1945 she reluctantly gave up her Lones work at the request of the Guides and assumed the role of Provincial Woodcraft and Nature Advisor. Her knowledge of the outdoors and her dynamic teaching skills combined in these positions.
Munday party crossing a snow bridge on their 1933 attempt
to reach Mount Waddington from the northeast
via Combatant Mountain and Mount Geddes.
10
The Quest for Mystery Mountain
In July 1927 Phyl and Don, with Phyl’s sister Betty, again journeyed up the coast in search of their mountain. The SS Venture carried them to Glendale Cove cannery at the head of Knight Inlet, and then they motored the last fifty-five kilometres in their outboard boat. They travelled up the Klinaklini River and went on foot up the Franklin Glacier towards Mystery Mountain. But nature was not co-operating. The routes they scouted to the summit were “guarded by hanging glaciers, icefalls, or rock towers.” On the east ridge of the mountain, the danger from rock falls was extreme. All three of them ended up bruised and cut. On one occasion, Phyl averted a disaster when she glanced up and saw a cavalcade of rocks falling down towards Betty. Quickly she put up her arm to deflect some of them away from her sister, but one of the rocks struck Phyl on her head. The gash bled profusely, leaving her dizzy, in need of surgical stitching, and in pain. But with Bettys help, Phyl cleaned herself off in a glacial pool and soldiered onwards.
While attempting a route on the west ridge, the climbers made bivouac on Fury Gap (elevation 2900 metres) midway up the Franklin Glacier before they tackled the remainder of the ascent. Part way up, the weather changed within minutes. Clouds rolled in, bringing darkness. Fierce rain and wind, followed soon by lightning and thunder – wild flashes and fierce, violent crashes – caught the climbers exposed on the rocks in a terrifying electrical storm. Phyl had never been so afraid.
The party scrambled back to Fury Gap. “We had trouble keeping our lights alight, and it was just pouring down. It’s really wild when it’s like that, and all these tongues of fire on the rocks and tongues of fire on our ice axes, buzzing. Just like a blowtorch almost, with sparks of fire coming off the tip of my ice axe. We couldn’t throw them away because we needed our ice axes to cross the glaciers. When we got to Fury Gap we picked up our frozen tarp and all the things that we’d left there – film boxes and that sort of thing, and food and a Primus stove, and we stuffed them into our packs. Then we went down the slope onto some shelves of rock – wet, of course, and cold as the dickens – put a tarp on these rocks, and we three down, pulled the tarps over our heads, like a lean-to, and we stayed there for the rest of the storm, until it was light enough to come down the glacier.”
In 1928 they returned with Don’s brother, Bert Munday. The weather was extremely poor and they bided their time on first ascents of lesser peaks until it was clear enough to attempt their Mystery Mountain, which now had an official name given by the Canadian Geographic Board that spring. Mount Waddington it was now called, to commemorate Alfred Waddington, whose attempt to build a road from Bute Inlet into the Interior in 1862 had ended in disaster. Phyl and Don must have been disappointed, for their original wish had been that their Mystery Mountain retain the name they had always used. The mountain now also had an officially recognized elevation, and the Mundays’ estimates of its height were almost bang on. In 1927 a survey crew led by J. T Underhill had completed triangulation of the mountain and calculated the elevation as 4016 metres. Mount Waddington was now on record as the highest peak entirely in the province, a claim previously held by Mount Robson.
Finally the weather cleared, and the Munday party tackled the mountain, working this time from the northwest. They arose just after 1 a.m. on the morning of 8 July and headed out. After many hours of struggle, they reached a spot where a five-hundred-metre icy slope stretched upwards before them. It was supper-time, could they continue on? The slope was brittle and dangerous. Slabs of ice broke away under their feet. Don cleared and cut steps and handholds and upwards they climbed. The last 130 metres took over an hour. All at once they were there on the top. Surely it was victory at last.
“It was such a satisfaction getting to the top,” Phyl recounted. But how crushing it was for the weary climbers as they looked out beyond. The ridge on which they stood, and which they had thought to be the main summit of the mountain, fell away. Across the airy space ahead of them they could see the actual main tower, only sixty metres higher than where they stood on the northwest summit. “We were absolutely aghast. We were so close to the main tower but yet so far. It was out of our reach.”
Phyl looked across. The main tower seemed scarcely more than an arms length away. She would never forget the details. “The rocks of the tower were not all just plain grey; they were different colours, and so beautiful in the evening light.” But it was obvious to the Mundays as they examined the summit from their lofty position that the “main tower was a difficult climb.” It was now close to 8 p.m. After hours of climbing and little food, the Mundays had to get back to Fury Gap before nightfall. With heavy hearts they retraced their route back down to the camp. They didn’t realize that they had reached the highest elevation they would ever achieve on Mount Waddington. Although they continued coming back almost every season for the next eleven years, the prize was not to be theirs.
For Phyl, Waddington was an endless source of frustration, and even Don called it “a nightmare moulded in rock,” but at the same time this Mystery Mountain was addictive. Phyl always made it clear that climbing the summit wasn’t their only rationale for the repeat visits. Years after their Waddington expeditions, an experienced climber asked her why, with all the opportunities she and Don had, they didn’t just conquer the mountain and be done with it.
“Why did you keep going back, Phyl? Wasn’t it just wasted time skirting around the big peak and never being successful?”
“Why there isn’t any one mountain worth throwing your life away on. Our lives were more important than any mountain. If the day wasn’t good, we’d go off and do something else. There is a whole new world out there, hundreds of peaks, hundreds of glaciers, and all of it uncharted. It is all so marvellously exciting. Even though we started out on a quest for our Mystery Mountain, we ended up with a lifetime of options, and a lifetime of adventures. Every time – it doesn’t matter whether it’s storm or
