It’s August of the year 2022 as I write this story, and I’ve now posted well over 500 of them on this website. A great many of those stories involve details of mountains I climbed as much as 40 and even 50 years ago, and some even earlier than that. I’ll be the first to admit that my memory would not be of any use to recall the amount of detail that I include in those stories, so how do I do it? Diaries – that’s my secret weapon, Folks – diaries, plain and simple. It wasn’t even my idea, actually. I can thank my dear mother for that.

In the summer of 1964, as I was about to turn 17 and preparing to leave home and head off to university, my mother gave me a small diary. She urged me to write down my thoughts each day, and predicted that in the years to come I might find it both interesting and useful to look back on what I had written. Now, my mother was very wise and I always did well to follow her advice. The diary seemed like a good idea, and I added my own twist to it. A diary should be as private as possible, I thought, so why not add an extra layer of privacy.

In 1957, we had moved to Quebec and had lived there for 4 years. French-language instruction was mandatory, and when my family moved back to British Columbia in 1961 I studied French each year in high school until I graduated. In that final year of high school, I had crammed 3 years of Spanish instruction by correspondence courses into one year, so by the time high-school graduation rolled around in 1964, my brain was awash in both languages. Why not write my diary in French one day and in Spanish the next? That way, it’d be harder for prying eyes to read my private thoughts, and I could keep my hand in both languages. I started the diary on Wednesday, September 15th, 1964, which was the day I moved into my dorm room at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, and kept it faithfully all through the school year, and then the following summer when I worked in the Canadian Rocky Mountains. That first diary then was the one that kept a record of easy climbs done in the Fraser Valley near my home in Mission and also climbs done in the summer of 1965 while working in Golden, BC.

By the time I returned to school for that second year at UBC, I was pretty much hooked on the idea of continuing with the idea of keeping a diary. I went out and bought myself a fancy little book – it had gilt-edged pages like the one my mother had given me the year before, and even had a little lock on it!

 

I continued the Spanish-French thing, and by the time the summer of 1966 rolled around, the diary proved to be an accurate record of trips that my room-mate and I made to the mountain areas of such places as Emerald Lake, Golden, Banff, Jasper, Kootenay National Park, Mt. Temple, Nakimu Caves, Takakkaw Falls, the Icefields Parkway and the Bugaboos.

Once the summer was over, we returned to UBC. It was time to start a new diary. Here was something easily found for years to come, my new favorite type of diary. The price tag shows 79 cents.

1967 – the diary above recorded details of trips to the Interior of BC, but especially the long and special summer spent in the Stikine region of far northwestern BC, as well as time spent in the Nass River area of central BC. Plus the school year at UBC.

1968 – the same type of diary was used for the school year at UBC, plus trips to Banff, Black Tusk, Vancouver Island, the Rockies in winter, two climbs on Wedge Mountain and a complete record of months of camping and climbing in such places as Stein River and the Telkwa Range in BC.

1969 – the year I finished university. The diary records trips to Harrison Lake, Manitoba, Mount Baker, the Okanagan and the Yukon.

1970 – so much travel, so much climbing. The diary recorded it all. Trips to the Kootenays, Lillooet, Pemberton, California, the Canadian Rockies, a major trip to Mexico. I love reading back on it all. When friend Dan Murray and I entered Mexico, it had been 6 years since I had last studied Spanish. However, since I had been keeping my diary in Spanish ever since then, I slipped fairly easily into using the language and did so very comfortably for the many weeks we traveled there. Writing in the diary really paid off.

1971 – only minor climbing trips to Black Tusk, Pemberton and Vancouver Island.

1972 – I made a trip across Canada and then to Spain and back again, the whole thing lasting 7 months and well into 1973, all of it detailed in the diary. Also a one-month trip to California, a trip to Squamish and a camping trip to the BC Interior in the winter.

From June 18 to September 5th was another trip to Mexico. The diary I kept for that trip was in English and was on pages like these.

1973 – otherwise, I was back to the blue diary as shown above. I recorded every day of every year, as always, but I mention the climbing highlights because those are the days I have been able to look back on to write my stories. For example, in 1973, trips to Black Tusk, Wedge Mountain, the Harrison Lake area, Hoover Lake area, Mt. Baker and the Okanagan area.

In 1974, for some reason I used a different type of diary, some sort of field book I had left over from my geology days.

1974 – this diary earned its keep, recording not only everyday life but also details of climbs at the border, in the Chehalis, by Chilliwack Lake, by Edge Peak, of Glacier Peak, Mt. Shuksan, Mt. Cheam, Mt. Baker, at Nelson Island, in the Okanagan, at Pierce Lake, in the Rockies, at Seton Lake, of Wedge Mountain and of Williams Peak.

1975 – I had reverted back to the Hilroy style of diary shown above for 1967. It documented climbs in the Fraser Valley, the Statlu area, Mount Truax, Mount Breakenridge, Mount Rainier and Skihist Mountain as well as other minor climbs.

1976 – by this point in my life, I had been self-employed for several years. When the weather was fair, I climbed; when it was doubtful, I worked. It was a system that seemed to pay the bills. My goal was to climb 2 peaks each week, for an average of 1,000 meters of vertical gain for each peak, and I would try to do this all year. It was more challenging in the winter months, but I made up for it by choosing the peaks more carefully. I was meeting my goal each year. I won’t bore you by listing all of the trips or all of the peaks, but the diary kept track of them all. A trip to climb the Mexican volcanoes was memorable though.

1977 – same type of diary, same busy pace of climbing. I won’t bother to list them as there were too many, but climbs in the Statlu area stand out, as do the Cascade volcanoes.

1978 – this was the last year I used that type of blue diary. It recorded many climbs, but the real standouts were those of Robertson Peak and Nursery Peak. Not only were the diary entries useful for creating stories on this website but also for stories written for the Canadian Alpine Journal.

I used a separate book I took into the field with me on trips for the Lillooet Range, the Stein River, and both trips to do the peaks on the east and west sides of Tretheway Creek in 1977 and 1978. The same book was used for a trip to the Columbia Icefields in August of 1981 and the Hawaii volcanoes in 1990.

There was a definite lull in my climbing from 1979 to 1985 while I moved to the States and lived in decidedly non-mountainous areas.

In August of 1989 I used a small spiral notebook on a trip to Mamquam Mountain and Mount Robson. I was also wrapping up a 4-year odyssey of climbing the high points of the 193 mountain ranges of Arizona and I entered a number of the highlights of the final trips in that notebook.

During the 1990s, I kept personal diaries on and off but they were very sporadic. Only diaries kept on climbing trips were of any importance, and they were all in English. I’ll elaborate a bit on them because they were important for the climbing details they contain.

Aconcagua Jan, 18, 1990 to Feb. 24, 1990 – my first attempt on this peak in Argentina

Aconcagua Dec. 3, 1990 to Jan. 13, 1991 – my  second attempt, book 1

Aconcagua Jan. 14, 1991 to Fab, 13, 1991 – travels in South America

Argentina – June, July 1991

Copper Canyon, Mexico; Lake Louise; Utah; Alamos, Mexico; Salton Sea – 1991/1992

Kauai – 1993; Canada road trip – June, July 1994; TX-OK–NM high points – 1995

Australia – July 1992

New Zealand – August 1992

Bolivia – June, July 1996

Roskruge Mountains – Nov. 1997 to Feb.1998

Panama Canal – January 1999

Agua Dulce Mountains – October 2013

North Growler Mountains – December, 2013

Granite Mountains – February 2014

Aguila Mountains – December 2015

Crater Range – December 2016

Tank Mountains – December 2017

Chocolate Mountains – December 2018

There were also quite a few of these little notebooks which I used for multiple trips. One of them could serve for as many as half a dozen short trips of a few days each. More recently, I’ve started using these thicker books as diaries when I go on overnight climbing trips. They are 400 pages each, and as you can see, they serve for many trips.

So there you have it, Folks. My secrets have been revealed. The 40 or so diaries that I have amassed over the years contain a wealth of climbing details that are of absolutely no use or interest whatsoever to any human on this planet other than myself. If it weren’t for the diaries, I wouldn’t be able to include in my stories the details that I do. And it doesn’t hurt that my collection of photos to support the diaries has now grown to over 35,000, which surprises me, but I still find that there are many photos I wish I had taken but didn’t.