# Canadian Alpine Journal/Volume 1/Number 1/Report of Secretary

REPORT OF SECRETARY
The Editorial Committee of this journal has asked me to give a sketch of the Alpine Club, with a report of its progress up to April 15th of the current year. To begin before the beginning, it was foreshadowed twenty-four years ago on a clear, bracing, sunny day, when Sir Sandford Fleming, K.C.M.G., his son, S. Hall Fleming, the late Principal Grant of Queen's University, and party with pack train emerged from the slow, difficult forest trail and rested at the welcome meadow on Rogers' pass. Inspired by the glacier-mountains rising far and high about them, they resolved themselves into a Canadian Alpine Club; elected officers; passed a resolution of gratitude to Major Rogers, discoverer of the pass; proposed the conquest of the most formidable peak in the whole region; drank the Club's health in a stream sparkling at their feet; and so ended. But the incident was prophetic as well as gay and picturesque. And that the element of gaiety was in it, Sir Sandford gives evidence, when he tells how these grave and reverend seniors performed a game of leapfrog as an act of Olympic worship to the deities in the heart of the Selkirks.
Since that day on Rogers pass, the alpine idea has been stirring in the Canadian mind, faintly at first and slowly, but gradually increasing until it gathered enough momentum to be called by that potential term—a movement. In the winter of 1905-6, appeals were made privately and through the press to persons proper to the project—appeals which won a response justifying the calling of a meeting in March, when twenty-eight delegates from every part of the Dominion gathered in Winnipeg, and the movement assumed tangible form, on March 27th, Mr. A. O. Wheeler, F.R.G.S., assisted by the Rev. Dr. Herdman, gave an illustrated lecture, "The Wonderland of Canada." On the following day at noon Mr. Wheeler addressed the Canadian Club on Canadian Mountaineering, and in the afternoon the Club was formally organized, with seventy-nine members. Sir Sandford Fleming being chosen as Patron and Mr. Wheeler as President, both by hearty acclamation. The inaugural dinner followed in the evening, when some stirring speeches were made born of experiences in rare altitudes, and the healths of the King (God bless him!), the Club and its officers, were drunk with all the enthusiasm of a young mountaineering organization.
Photo, Byron Harmon
ON THE SUMMIT OF MOUNT VICE-PRESIDENT
ON THE SUMMIT OF MOUNT BURGESS
The Constitution provides for a summer camp in some strategic place, where graduating members may qualify for active membership, and all except subscribing members may foregather for climbing and mountain study. The first session of this school of mountaineering was held July 9-16, 1906, on the summit of the Yoho pass, between two grey rock-peaks, by the margin of a mountain tarn of purest emerald-green, the most limpid and radiant eye that alplands ever opened to see blue sky, withal. Forty-four graduated to active membership and one hundred or more members were in attendance at some time during the week. Eight high mountains were climbed and daily excursions made to contiguous points of interest, and into the Yoho valley to the Wapta glacier, where metal plates were set out to measure its movement.
For the unqualified success of this first annual "meet" of the Club, first credit is due to the President, whose generalship, including a patient and amiable faculty for detail, won enconiums from all. Thanks to Mr. Wheeler, the "meet," which began as an experiment, ended as an institution. Hearty thanks are owing to many others, but notably to Mr. J. D. Patterson; to the Dominion and Alberta Governments; to the C. P. R. Company, the Royal North-West Mounted Police, the Superintendent of the National Park; and last but not least, to those fine fellows and true lovers of the hills, the men in buckskin—our mountain outfitters. Without the generous help of all these, the Yoho camp had not been possible.
The next session of this charming summer school will be in Paradise valley, where there are a score and more glacier mountains near at hand. The present indications are that the attendance will be much larger than last year. The camp will ​be situated on a beautiful meadow at the foot of the Horseshoe glacier, at the base of Mt. Hungabee, which closes the valley on the south. These delightful summer outings are no idle holiday. There is no foolishness in mountaineering; it is too vigorous a pastime. Even the nonsense that may escape at intervals around the camp-fire takes on a sober coloring from the grim old heights, that have kept watch for ages over these gaily-flowered alpine meadows and sombre green wooded valleys.
During the Christmas season, the President made an Eastern tour, giving illustrated lectures at Winnipeg, Toronto, Woodstock. Collingwood and Ottawa, thereby awakening interest in mountaineering and adding somewhat to the Club's exchequer. In Ottawa, he addressed the Canadian Club on Canadian mountaineering.
On January 11th, a meeting was held at Winnipeg to discuss the affairs of the Club. The meeting was adjourned to Calgary for the 17th of January. It was decided to publish the first issue of the Canadian Alpine Journal under the auspices of the Club, and $800.00 of the Club's revenue was voted for this purpose. It was also decided to contribute $50.00 to help pay for the handsome marble monument recently erected in honor of Sir James Hector at Laggan station by his friends in Canada, the United States and England.
The affairs of the Club are in its own hands under the Executive, which advises and acts independently, if the Club may so direct. Election to membership is by vote of the whole Club through the ballot. The standard of qualification may not be lowered, but as climbing becomes more general, it will certainly be raised. The Alpine Club of Canada is as democratic as the Church itself: any man of good character who fulfils the conditions of active membership, is eligible.
The first annual meeting was held on the summit of the Yoho pass by the light of the camp-fire, when the President gave an address and the Secretary and Treasurer presented reports. The officers were all re-elected, and Mr. S. H. Mitchell was appointed Assistant Secretary. Mr. Mitchell is both efficient and willing, and has borne the burden of the Secretary's work ever since. Very few days pass without letters of enquiry or applications for membership.
The Club is growing fast, but not too fast. The only royal road to membership is by the "Associate" way of twenty-five dollars a year. It is a worthy way and an honorable for men whose circumstances will not permit them to qualify, by way of crag and precipice and glacier; and it is money invested in nationhood, yielding a far-off interest, not of tears but of noble, patriotic temper. For the Alpine Club of Canada will, more than any national sport in the Dominion, weld together the provinces in the bonds of brotherhood; and furnish training in the more Spartan virtues of times of peace. It will not be many years before it will have entrenched itself deep in every province between the two oceans, when its membership will be in the thousands, and each and every Canadian mountaineer make the Club's motto his own—"sic itur, ad astra."
Elizabeth Parker, Secretary.
This work is in the public domain in the United States because it was published before January 1, 1929.
This work may be in the public domain in countries and areas with longer native copyright terms that apply the rule of the shorter term to foreign works.
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