BANFF – Chic Scott, a household name in international and Canadian mountaineering circles, has found a new way to honour the past.
In 1996 and 1997, the Banff-based historian and mountaineer recorded 84 interviews with leading mountaineers and climbers from all across Canada as research for his book, Pushing the Limits: The Story of Canadian Mountaineering, which was published in 2000.
Working with Scott, filmmaker Glen Crawford selected 11 of the best interviews, edited them and added photographs to create enhanced interviews as part of a legacy project.
Scott said he is pleased to see these interviews he recorded so long ago now be available to the public online, calling them a “wonderful window on a bygone era.”
“I videotaped them because I realized that down the road this would be a special collection,” he said. “Today, we now have those 84 interviews with some pretty special people.”
For 25 years, these interviews by Scott have been safely stored in the Whyte Museum of the Canadian Rockies. Through recent efforts of the Whyte Museum Archives, they have been digitized and revitalized.
The 11 selected interviews are with Tim Auger, Sharon Wood, Hans Gmoser, Kevin Doyle, Brian Greenwood, Barry Blanchard, Leo Grillmair, Pat Morrow, Don Vockeroth, Charlie Locke and Laurie Skreslet.
One interview will be released each month during 2022 on the Whyte Museum’s website, available on the digital vault. The film series started with the Jan. 15 release of the interview with Auger, one of Canada’s finest mountaineers who died in August 2018, at age 72.
Auger pioneered new routes on the Squamish Chief, climbed in Yosemite and Nepal and was still active climbing the hardest routes in the Canadian Rockies at 50 years of age. He spent 30 years on the Parks Canada public safety team rescuing and helping people in trouble in the mountains.
“Tim was such a good storey-teller and he was so eloquent,” said Scott. “To get him just telling stories with no interruptions for almost two hours was remarkable – it’s a real treat.”
The next film release will be Scott’s interview with Sharon Wood, which was videotaped at her Canmore home on Nov. 12, 1996. Check out the Whyte Museum’s digital vault starting on Saturday, Feb. 12, for a link to the film.
While Wood reached the summit of Mount Everest on May 20, 1986 – becoming the first North American woman to do so – she paid her dues over the years on the frozen waterfalls of the Canadian Rockies, on Mount Logan, Denali, Aconcagua, Makalu and Huascaran.
Wood has gone on to have a remarkable career as a public speaker and a climbing guide, has raised a family of two boys and has written a book titled simply Rising.
Scott said his interviews with Auger and Wood and the other 82 ice climbers, alpinists, Himalayan climbers and sport climbers are a snapshot of the climbing and mountaineering world as it was in the 1990s.
He said the interview project was originally sponsored by Hans Gmoser, a founder of modern mountaineering in Canada who died in 2006, who saw the potential value of it down the road.
“This is his legacy too,” said Scott. “It is now a great treasure and irreplaceable.”
The project was important to Scott because it documents climbing and mountaineering history.
“History, to me, is very important. It’s like the group memory, it’s who we are, it’s what we’ve done – it’s our story,” he said.
“When I started climbing in the early 60s, there wasn’t much of a group story or a group memory of the mountain community and over the years it’s grown and now we have it.”
Scott said it is also important to know and respect the people who have pioneered the way.
“We think the world was born the day we were born, but as we grow older, we come to realize that there were people here a long time before us and we’re all standing on somebody’s shoulders,” he said.
“So many of the good things in our life that we have today were the result of other people’s hard work and foresight.”
