By 1958, Bruce Gilbert had climbed some of the most prominent peaks in Europe and the Pacific Northwest.
But it was only last month that Gilbert learned that one of his climbs more than 50 years ago was a first ascent.
Gilbert, 79, was in the audience of about 80 residents at a Sheldon Museum presentation by Gerry Roach, a climbing legend making a presentation on a lifetime of ascents, including one up 16,523-foot Mount Blackburn in the 1960s.
Roach was explaining his party’s trek up Blackburn’s east peak, mentioning that when it was first climbed in 1912, it was believed to be the top of the mountain. Modern survey methods, however, determined that the mountain’s west peak was 80 feet higher.
Thus, Roach said, a group that climbed the west peak in 1958 holds claim to the first ascent.
“It was funny how it came about,” Gilbert recounted this week. “I was sitting in the front row and (Roach) started talking about Blackburn, and I said, ‘I was there.’ Then he started talking about our expedition, and I said, ‘I was on that one!’”
On climbing the mountain 52 years ago, Gilbert said he and four others from a Seattle mountaineering group had talked about the 1912 ascent by Dora Keen, who’d set off from Chitina with two miners as packers.
Detailed in East Coast newspaper accounts, Keen’s 33-day odyssey was fraught with hardship and deep snow as storms battered the mountain’s south side. They were left without tents for most of their climb and cooked with candles for 10 days.
“That was the only ascent that we knew of,” Gilbert said this week.
In contrast, Gilbert’s group was dropped at 7,500 feet elevation on Nabesna Glacier by Talkeetna’s Don Sheldon and headed up the east ridge, only to be turned back by storms.
Some in the group tried a frontal assault on a 7,000-foot vertical wall, but the group ended up taking a northwest route and making it in a few days. Except for a spire they had to scramble over, it was one of his easiest climbs, Gilbert said.
“It’s quite revealing that this (west) knob was higher. It’s kind of a fluke.”
Keen’s trip, Gilbert said, was one for the adventure books. Keen, a pioneering alpinist, hiked up the mountain from its base. “When you fly in on a mountain, it’s a different way of doing it. It’s expedient. You get to the top faster. But it’s not the same.”
Roach’s group went up the east side, pioneering a challenging route to reach the east peak, then hiked across a flat plateau to the west one. Roach’s slides and description have rekindled Gilbert’s interest in the peak, and he said he now wants to see it again – this time from an airplane.
“I’m going to go back and take another look and see if I can find that (thumb) again. I want to see the double top. For some reason, I can’t remember it.”
About two weeks after bagging Mount Blackburn, Gilbert turned his VW bug north and joined a team of six climbing Mount McKinley, the mountain he’d hoped to get on when he joined the group climbing Blackburn. Gilbert became the 63rd climber up McKinley.
The group had unknowingly reached a false summit, then met another team of hikers who asked if they’d seen a bamboo flagpole left at the top by Bradford Washburn, a leading Alaska mountaineer of the era. When Gilbert’s group realized they hadn’t made it to the top, they turned around and went back up again – in shirt sleeves, Gilbert said.
On the way home to Yakima, Wash., a stone from the territory’s rugged roads busted out the VW’s rear window, Gilbert said. “It was a good thing we had our mountaineering gear to keep us warm.”
Gilbert’s later climbs included an attempted ascent of McKinley in 1966, starting from Wonder Lake. The six-person trip spent 43 days on the mountain, including a storm-bound week hunkered down inside a crevasse. Members of the group made the 19,400-foot north summit, about 1,000 feet below the true summit.