Blending Old With New – A Virtual Tour of the First Ascent of Wedge Mountain

Among the tens of thousands of photos in the Whistler Museum archives, Neal Carter's are my hands-down favourites. Carter was one of the most prolific mountaineers on the BC Coast during the 1920s and 1930s. In an admirably ahead-of-his-time move he even managed to turn his climbing hobby into a career, getting a summer job as as a surveyor for hydro crews around Garibaldi Lake, and then playing a major role in creating the first proper topographic map of Garibaldi Park in 1928.

The fifty-odd Carter photos in our collection document a two-week exploratory mountaineering expedition into what is today the Whistler-Blackcomb backcountry, but back in 1923 was still a virtually unexplored mountain wilderness. We also have the written account that Carter's climbing partner Charles Townsend had published in the British Columbia Mountaineering Cub’s journal. Taken together these images and words provide a pretty cool insight into these pioneering climbers' first encounter with now-iconic peaks.

Because we've been lucky enough to familiarize ourselves with this zone's rad terrain, we were able to plug the images accurately into Google Earth and recreate their historic journey as a sort of virtual tour. 

This first video revisits the first two days of their trip, during which the pair managed the first ascent of Wedge Mountain – the highest peak around. Instead of contently heading back to Rainbow Lodge, Neal and Charles continued deeper into the Coast Mountain wilderness towards the lesser-known but equally formidable Mount James Turner, which they named after a popular Vancouver reverend.  Check back in a few days for this second episode. We'll conclude the trilogy with their second week, during which they climbed Whistler Mountain and gained a handful of bigger ascents deeper in the Fitzsimmons Range.