My wife gave me a good read as a Valentine’s Day gift: Capturing the Summit: Hamilton Mack Laing and the Mount Logan Expedition of 1925, by Trevor Marc Hughes. Despite the title, it was as much about a member of the party who did not accompany the mountaineers on the arduous assault of the summit of Canada’s tallest peak.
In May of 1925, a party of eight men, consisting of American, Canadian and British adventurers, set out from Seattle on an ambitious attempt to reach the summit of Mount Logan. Their names: Albert McCarthy (the leader), Fred Lambart, (the second in command), Colonel W.W. Foster, Alan Carpe, and three Americans – Henry Hall, Norman Read and Robert M. Morgan.
Hamilton Mack Laing, the final member of the party, was the self-described “tail of the kite,” the one who didn’t fit in. And while this story provides a detailed account of reaching the summit, it is obvious that author Trevor Marc Hughes was particularly attracted to the story of the odd-man out.
Laing had been assigned the task by the National Museum in Ottawa to accompany the party and collect specimens of wildlife while the remainder of the team continued on without him to attempt the ascent.
Arrangements had been made before their arrival for caches of equipment and food to be placed along the icy route to the summit. The party sailed up the coast of Alaska to Cordova, from whence they took the train into the interior. From the end of steel, they headed toward the icefields of present-day Kluane National Park and Reserve.
The narrative relies heavily upon the accounts of Laing and a member of the climbing party, Lambart, to carry the story forward. Laing’s account of the journey was not measured in weeks and days or distances traveled, but in the frequent bird sightings along the way. No sooner had the boat carrying Laing to Seattle left the dock in Victoria, he was documenting his bird sightings – 150 gulls here, 100 cormorants there.
As the ship bearing the party north approached Cordova, Laing noted six puffins, a flock of 500 shearwaters, two black-footed albatrosses, sandpipers and kittiwakes. Similar observations are noted throughout the book
He was to collect specimens of birds and mammals to be sent to the National Museum in Ottawa. The means of collecting: Laing’s trusty .32 calibre rifle; from this account, it appears that Laing was an excellent marksman.
Laing had an additional responsibility – to document the progress of the expedition with a movie camera until the party reached the dividing line between forest and ice. He was to remain in the former, while the rest of the party forged ahead over the massive icefields to reach their destination. For the following two months, Laing led a solitary existence while the climbing party relied heavily upon their comradeship to overcome the challenges that lay before them.
Though the climbers came well prepared for their epic trek, their actual knowledge of the terrain through which they would traverse, was sketchy at best, and they learned to adjust their plans and adapt to the conditions they encountered.
They forged ahead on foot and relayed supplies from their caches to set up base camps along the route to the summit. The work was gruelling and monotonous, and the journey filled with discord, exhaustion and heartbreak, but the author carries the progress toward the summit with compelling narrative. Day by day, the perilous journey unfolds.
As they approached the summit on June 23, they were subjected to high altitude exhaustion. The thin air stole the energy from the determined but oxygen-deprived mountaineers, who faced the capricious coastal conditions where there could be fog, clear skies or vicious blizzard at any time. Temperatures reached minus 36 degrees Celsius, and the climbers froze their fingers and toes. Winds reached 100 kilometres an hour.
After a brief stay at the summit, the exhausted men retraced their steps to a base camp lower down on the flank of the summit. By this time, the combination of high altitude and exhaustion produced hallucinations. They survived frozen digits and tumbles on the unpredictable glaciers. On the return journey to the Chitina Valley, they found that the food caches that had been set up for them had been vandalized by bears. Climbing Logan today is a lot easier, with all of the technological advances, than it was 99 years ago!
Some of the members of the climbing party arrived back at Laing’s verdant base camp having not eaten anything for three days. Meanwhile, Laing had been systematically gathering specimens for study back in Ottawa and keeping meticulous notes of his day-to-day observations, weather conditions and descriptions of his forays into mountains and valleys surrounding him.
From the day that the two parties parted company, the narrative alternates in each chapter between Laing’s activities and the climbing party’s labours. They are in stark contrast, with the former seemingly more mundane than the latter. From day to day, the progress of the climbers is charted, with the challenges they encountered. Meanwhile, the body count climbed rapidly as Laing “collected” specimens of birds and mammals and prepared them for the long journey back to the nation’s capital.
If this story had been only about Laing’s accomplishments, it might not have been as interesting to read, but the author’s device of placing Laing’s daily activities in juxtaposition to those of the mountaineers gives energy and relief to both accounts.
The main focus of the book is clearly upon Laing. The introduction and the afterword both make that clear, but combining Laing’s story with that of the challenging assault on the tallest mountain in Canada strengthens the readability of Capturing the Summit.
The photographs were a welcome complement to the story, though I felt the pictures lacked sharpness and contrast so much of the impact of the images was lost. I was disappointed that no map or maps were included that marked the progress of the party through Alaska and into the icefields of the Yukon.
I think that readers will enjoy this account. People who have never climbed mountains will gain an appreciation for the trials that face an ambitious mountaineering expedition, while others will learn about the accomplishments of a biologist whose work has gone unrecognized for too long. People interested in birds should find this account informative.
Capturing the Summit was published by Ronsdale Press in 2023. It is 268 pages long, with 28 photographs, but no maps, a five-page bibliography, index and a four-page appendix of the common and scientific names of the species encountered by Laing while on this expedition.
Michael Gates was the Yukon’s first Story Laureate from 2020 to 2023. His latest book, “Hollywood in the Klondike,” is now available in Whitehorse stores. You can contact him at msgates@northwestel.net