Voices
First Recorded Ascent of Mount Seymour
Video Transcript
Background Description: A black and white photograph shows a young man perched amid the craggy rocks on a mountain capped by a small gnarled tree shaped like a water pump. The title onscreen reads ‘First Recorded Ascent of Mount Seymour: How Pump Peak Got Its Name. A Story of Charles Chapman’.
Lid Hawkins speaks: Three generations of my family have climbed in BC mountains. I didn’t get the mountaineering gene – I got the photography gene.
Background Description: A recent colour photograph shows Lid’s brother Hugh Kellas in sunglasses and ball cap leaning on a hiking staff in a forest. Next, three old black and white snapshots show a man standing on a mountaintop labeled the Stawamus Chief, three climbers roped along a narrow rock ledge, and a woman in full climbing gear atop a snowy peak.
Hawkins says: My grandfather, Charles Chapman, had both.
Background Description: A black and white photo shows Charles Chapman standing on a sloping mountain meadow in rolled-up shirtsleeves, puttees and soft fedora hat. Next the colour photograph of Hugh Kellas reappears.
Hawkins says: But when my brother suggested we do a hundred year anniversary climb of Mount Seymour, I thought it was a great idea. We had pictures of that climb and I wanted to re-take them.
Background Description: A black and white panorama shows the Vancouver city skyline against a backdrop of Burrard Inlet and mountains rising above the water.
Hawkins says: In 1908 – in the summer – our grandfather Chappy and five friends made the first official ascent of Mount Seymour
Background Description: A black and white photograph shows Charles Chapman in profile shouldering a big pack on a snow-covered summit. Mist is swirling.
Hawkins says: – and he took along his Kodak Folding 4 A.
Background Description: A black and white photograph shows Chapman at base camp near a tent, holding the large-format camera at his side.
Hawkins says: It took them all day to get to the base of the mountain ...
Background Description: A hand-tinted photograph postcard shows the North Vancouver waterfront wharves, and then dissolves into a black and white photograph with streetcars at the base of a wide avenue leading up through wooden town buildings.
Hawkins says: – they took a ferry, then a trolley to the end of the Lynn Valley line – then they walked...
Background Description: A black and white photograph shows a party of climbers carrying packs, hiking up a wooded forest.
Hugh Kellas reads from his grandfather’s memoirs: A rough road led to the head of Lynn Canyon.
Background Description: The camera zooms in on a hand-drawn period map tracing the route through the valley to the peak.
Kellas continues: Descending to the creek, we forded it, took a trail past Rice Lake and to the old intake, forded the Seymour and made for the mouth of the great gully which descends from the north side of the main peak, whose snow filled depths are a prominent landmark from Vancouver.
Background Description: A colour photograph shows the North Vancouver skyline of towers with a float-plane flying and a backdrop of snow-covered mountains and sky.
Hawkins says: So on August 16, 2008, Hugh and I drove up Seymour to the parking lot. He packed the Kodak 4 A even though there is no longer film available for it – my water and lunch was all I could handle in my pack. Even then I lagged behind struggling up the trail.
Background Description: Colour footage shows a panoramic sweep around distant mountain ridges and peaks seen against a clear sky from a rocky summit in the foreground.
Hawkins says: It took us a few hours to reach the lowest peak. It was sooo hot – the sky almost painfully blue. I was exhausted and needed to find a bit of shade. I guess it was warm there 100 years ago too.
Background Description: A black and white photograph shows a line of five young men wearing only undershorts and boots on a snowy slope.
Hawkins says: I considered a dip but the mountain was crawling with hikers – dads with little kids, large groups with walkie-talkies, girls wearing flip-flops.
Background Description: A black and white photograph shows two swimmers bobbing in a water-filled mountain tarn.
Hawkins says: My brother made it to the summit with Popa’s camera ...
Background Description: A colour photograph shows Hugh Kellas in hiking shorts and t-shirt standing on rock holding an old camera with accordion bellows, with blue-green peaks and bright sky above.
Hawkins says: ... and on the way back he found one of Popa’s pictures!
Background Description: A colour photograph shows a view of Seymour's three rocky peaks with snow, scrubby trees and boulders between, which dissolves into a black and white photograph of the same peaks.
Kellas reads: We gained the summit at about ten a.m. After building a cairn we strolled over to the middle peak and reached the amphitheatre below the third peak. On the ascent of the third peak they noticed a decayed stump – it looked like a pump complete with spout and handle.
Background Description: The camera zooms in on a detail of the black and white photograph showing a small tree silhouetted against the clear sky.
Hawkins says: I imagine them all laughing about the stump and Popa setting up to photograph it. I realized I had been resting below where the pump stump had stood 100 years ago.
Background Description: A colour photograph shows Lid Hawkins in a striped sunhat standing with her brother in sunglasses, with a mountain backdrop of forest and blue sky.
Hawkins says: We wondered how Popa would have felt to see us that day – and to see so many people enjoying the mountain. I guess a lot of them wonder... “why do they call it Pump Peak?”
Background Description: The camera zooms in again on the black and white photograph of Charles Chapman standing astride the summit, a handsome, muscular young man in hobnailed boots and fedora, shouldering a big pack amid misty peaks. A black and white photograph reappears showing the detail of a small tree silhouetted against the clear sky.
Kellas continues reading: When speaking of the climb later the third peak was generally referred to as Pump Peak. The name stuck and remains to this day, an awful example of how a casual remark may perpetuate such an unsuitable and mystifying name.
Acknowledgments: ‘First Recorded Ascent of Mount Seymour: How Pump Peak Got Its Name’ written by Lid Hawkins and produced during a February 2009 Centre for Digital Storytelling workshop that was organized by the North Vancouver Museum and Archives as part of the Virtual Museum of Canada’s project, ‘Climbing to the Clouds: A People’s History of BC Mountaineering’. Lid Hawkins also thanks Hugh Kellas and Michael Conway Baker for their support and direction. The City of Vancouver Archives, John Neville (Bird Songs of Canada’s West Coast) and Sam Hinton (Master of the Solo Diatonic Harmonica) kindly provided some images and background sound.
Music: ‘The Eight of January’, ‘Skye Boat Song’, ‘Land of Drumblair’, performed by Sam Hinton from the album, ‘Master of the Solo Diatonic Harmonica (EWM-1001). www.samhinton.org
