Canadian Adventurers and Explorers Bundle. John Wilson
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longer to travel in the sling. So guess what, Mum? My clever husband has made a very nice little carrier for Edith. The carrier will fit right on to his packboard over top of a small load, and that way Don will be able to pack Edith in a much safer way. She’ll like it too because it will give her a little more freedom to look around. The carrier has a wooden base with canvas on it and a big canvas band, so that when we put her into it, it holds her right around from her hips to under her armpits. It supports her firmly so that she doesn’t slide down into it, and best of all we can put her in, fully dressed, and she’ll be covered up with the canvas. That way we don’t have to worry whether it rains. She won’t get wet. Don has also made a hood to it, so that if it really rains we can pull it over her head. And then, mosquito netting. That will be ever so important in the summer.”
A few days later on the first of July the Mundays packed right through the Seymour valley and down the Stawamus valley into Squamish with Edith. On the way they camped in one of the cabins of the Britannia Mining Company. The cabins were equipped with bunks and a stove for cooking. Phyl, ever resourceful, quickly saw a practical use for one of the monstrous big bread pans that the company cook used for baking. What better bassinet for bathing my baby in the morning? One day while they were still staying at the cabin, three geologists from the mine dropped in for a visit. They were absolutely stunned when they saw a small baby in a bread pan on the oven door.
Later in the same year Phyl and Don went into the Selkirk Mountains to the BCMC camp and took Edith along. It was just shortly before the old hotel at Glacier was closed, and the people there wouldn’t believe there was a baby at camp up the valley. She was contented and seemed to enjoy being out like that, so Phyl and Don just brought Edith with them all the time. Had Phyl been less strongwilled about her love of the outdoors, and had Edith been less co-operative, the young mother would have had to give up her outdoor activities now that she had a child.
7
Rambling High on the Ridges
Phyl and Don, accompanied many times by Edith, spent the decades of the 1920s and 1930s in Phyl’s words, “rambling high on the ridges.” They were bounded by the routines of family, employment, and domestic responsibilities yet managed to set and keep as a priority this need they both shared to be in the mountains.
“My love for the mountains is terribly deep,” Phyl wrote in her diary. “They mean so much. It is impossible to explain what they do to your soul. There is nothing on earth like them.” On many weekends, and for longer opportunities in the spring and summer, the Mundays climbed in the lower mainland or the Tantalus and Britannia Ranges on the coast north of Vancouver, the Cheam Range south of the Fraser Valley, the Cariboo Mountains, and the Rockies. Before their marriage, Phyl at times had incurred the displeasure of her employer when she arrived late for work on Monday, or alternately, did not make it in until the next day. It was impossible to be sure about how long it might take for a weekend hike. Weather could change, transportation might cause delay, injury or accident was always possible. Phyl managed to convince her boss at Begg Motors that she really wasn’t dallying with the time clock.
Phyl and three-year-old Edith outside Alpine Lodge, their home
on the Grouse Mountain plateau. Phyl packs chairs for the cabin
and ferns for the table setting, 1924.
“The only boat we could get to rent was a yacht with a very deep keel. We went in on a high tide at Bishops Beach way up Indian Arm and of course, we didn’t allow for the tide and we got stuck and couldn’t get away again until the next high tide. That didn’t get us back until the next morning, you see, the morning after we should have been back. So, I’m sorry, but that is why I missed a whole day’s work.”
Her boss had remained unconvinced. In his eyes, Phyl, nicely turned out in a smart suit for her office job, did not appear as he imagined a passionate mountain climber should look, especially one who claimed to have been marooned by the tides. He really believed she was making up the story.
“I’ll bring you evidence to prove that I was mountain climbing,” she had promised, hoping she would not be fired. “I’ll show you the pictures. I can take the film in today at lunch and it should be ready later this week. Just please, let me stay here working until then, and then you will see. I don’t mean to miss work, but sometimes the unexpected occurs.”
The pictures backed up her story, and Phyl’s boss had finally believed that she really had intended to get back on time, and had not just fabricated a wild story to get an extra day off.
Don earned a living as a freelance journalist and a writer. He had no boss to face on Monday morning, although manuscript deadlines and publication dates kept him on track.
Phyl put her skills and experience on hold for several years and stayed at home to care for Edith. Yet Phyl’s “at-home” life was not exactly traditional in routine. Taking advantage of what she called “the extra time” she now had as an at-home wife and mother, Phyl continued with BCMC activities, especially the social ones, and organized many club dances and parties. She undertook more and more responsibilities in Guiding and, as always, partnered with Don on outdoor ventures, in their leisure time “exploring and climbing in unknown mountainous parts of B.C., mapping, studying, and collecting specimens of insects and flora for the Provincial Museum in Victoria, as well as photographing and studying the snow and ice of the big glaciers.”
Women climbers in Phyl’s day were accepted only if they kept up with the men and disguised from others the fact that they hiked. Phyl always thought it unfortunate that so many women were discouraged from pursuing climbing because they were not as strong as the men, and she advised women: “Don’t go too fast at first. Just go steadily to begin with and do the breathing, in and out as regularly as you can, with the movement of your body. Have the right attitude and just hang on with it.”
There had been some changes in women’s clothing since Phyllis first began to hike and could wear hiking garb only on the mountain slopes, never below. Knickerbockers were a wonderful improvement over the bloomers that had been easy to hide under skirts but so voluminous they caught up on the bushes. Knickerbockers were tapered like a man’s pant, but only came to the knee. Women could wear knee socks or tights underneath, although “puttees,” a kind of khaki cloth wound round the legs below the knickers almost like a bandage from the knee to the boot, were most popular. Puttees were actually good for snow because they kept the snow from getting in your boots and were thus a precursor to gaiters. Britches – as Phyl called the first trousers worn by women – were held up by a pair of suspender straps. Eventually in the 1930s and 1940s women began to wear more tapered ski pants with an under-foot strap that held the pants tight to the body and prevented snow from getting under the legs of the pants.
The fabrics used in those early days were made from natural fibres, not synthetic. The first tents Phyl and her Girl Guides used were a heavy canvas that was firm and stiff and very water repellent. The canvas was perfect for a fixed camp location but not at all suitable for packing and taking on the trail. For backpacking in to the bush and on climbing expeditions, Phyl sewed their tents of sail-silk or Egyptian cotton, a light, tightly woven cloth that had proven to be durable in wind and rain. Don designed the tents and made templates for all the pieces. Then they shifted the furniture out of their living room, laid out the fabric on the floor, and cut it all out. Phyl sewed the pieces together using her trusty treadle, a sewing machine operated by foot power. The treadle mechanism connected to the arm of the needle, and as Phyl worked the treadle with her feet, the needle arm pumped up and down, lifting the needle in and out of the fabric, which Phyl guided with her hands.
When the tent was completed, snaps and all,