All of us who call ourselves climbers can probably recall our first experience in the mountains. Mine happened in March of 1962. I was a high-school student in the small town of Mission, or Mission City as it was known back in the day, in the province of British Columbia, Canada. I cannot recall what possessed me to do it, but one Saturday I hopped on my bicycle and rode eight miles north of town on a good paved road. There, a dirt logging road left the pavement at just under 600′ elevation and headed north. I stashed my bike in the bush and started walking.

Someone must have told me about this road and the tale had piqued my curiosity. The road hadn’t been used for logging for many years, but it wasn’t too overgrown and was easy to follow. It climbed fairly steadily, and after four miles and a gain of 1,000 feet, it leveled out. Lo and behold, I was looking down on Hoover Lake. The ruins of an old corduroy road led from my vantage point down to the lake shore. It was still level in some places, while in others it tilted badly, so much so that it presented a slippery challenge to keep walking on it.

If memory serves, it seems there was the ruin of an old building at the edge of the lake, rotting into oblivion. A peninsula of sorts jutted into the lake – I crossed this and, on the shore, found an old raft. It looked serviceable, so I mustered up my courage and stepped on to it. This was a big deal for me, a guy whose definition of swimming is “staying alive in the water”. There was a pole with it, which I used to propel myself across the lake to gain the eastern shore.

The low hills around the lake had had the bejeezus logged out of them years before and were covered in a secondary growth which presented a real bushwhack..

Curious to see if I could get to a higher point, I thrashed my way up and to the south, to finally arrive at Peak 2200. Little did I know it, but I had just bagged my first peak. I could see north up Stave Lake, and a big snow-covered mountain really caught my eye. I wouldn’t learn until some time later that it was Mt. Robie Reid. It seemed impossibly steep and wonderful.

The whole experience was pretty amazing to the fourteen-year-old boy that I was on that March day long ago. I was smitten. Over the course of the next two years, I made repeated trips back to Hoover Lake and its surrounding hills. I was so enamored with the place, I just had to share it with others – several of my high-school friends made the trip with me to the lake.

Do I look happy to be there, or what!?

Many years later, in 1989, after I had moved to Arizona. I managed a return pilgrimage to the lake. By then, the road up the mountain had become a local hiking trail of sorts, complete with a sign at its start. The corduroy road had further rotted, and was collapsing into the underbrush. The lake looked the same, but the second growth of trees had filled in much of the old logged-off areas surrounding it, evening out the look of things. And it felt good to stand there again.

Even today, more than fifty years on, it’s still a great memory – that fourteen-year-old kid standing wide-eyed on the mountain top, looking out over a sea of peaks, dreaming of doing the next one.

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