On Wednesday, April 2 at 7 AM Pacific, BC Parks will re-open reservations for Mount Robson Provincial Park’s Berg Lake Trail. You can bet it’ll be sold out by 8. The Berg Lake Trail, maybe the most popular backpack in the British Columbia provincial parks, has been closed since flooding in 2021. That beautiful region has captivated outdoorsmen for over a hundred years, and we may be sure there is pent-up demand.

One of the first it entranced was the Reverend George Kinney, clergyman and founding member of the Alpine Club of Canada. A capable amateur mountaineer, Kinney developed an obsession with climbing Mount Robson, the highest peak in the Canadian Rockies. Eleven times he attempted it, sometimes alone, sometimes with the best Canadian companions available; eleven times he was rebuffed. In August 1909, he tried again with Donald “Curly” Phillips, later a legend of the Canadian Rockies but then a 25-year-old fresh from the Ontario bush of no prominence or climbing experience. Their first three attempts also failed but on the last, Kinney’s twelfth, they attacked a fearsome direct route up the northwest face and claimed to reach the top.

Few today believe this. Their rash route seems beyond Kinney’s skill, let alone the unequipped novice Phillips. Though an accomplished alpine photographer, Kinney took no photos near the summit. He had preempted a planned ACC expedition, breaching climbing etiquette: learning of a British group attempting Robson, Kinney struck out half-cocked to beat them with less than three dollars in his pocket and hopes to find cash and a companion as he went. There was little of either: he had to sell horses and gear on the trail, and a succession of men bailed out of an awful, cold, wet journey until he struck upon the non-mountaineer Phillips. Kinney then claimed an extraordinary climb for which he had little evidence. Doubts formed rapidly, and continue to this day.

Whether they succeeded or failed, those who hike the Berg Lake Trail this summer will hike through the legacies of Kinney and Phillips. Theirs are some of the most remarkable stories in Canadian Rockies history.

George Kinney was not a man easily stereotyped. A minister born in civilized New Brunswick, Kinney lived and worked in the most remote parts of British Columbia for most of his career. Although an amateur climber he was, by home-grown standards, for a time a minor star. He made the first solo ascent of Mount Stephen, and though the import of Alpine guides was already in vogue the part-timer Kinney served as an expert guide in the Alpine Club of Canada’s first climbing camps. On many expeditions, whether leader or follower, Kinney wrote the story up for the alpine journals: he was both a vivid, though unstylish, writer and a fine photographer in an age of heavy cameras with glass plates. He was also defiant of the British tradition of minimizing difficulties. When Kinney overcame trouble, he told you all about it. Some of his Alpine Club contemporaries disliked him, considering him too much the boaster¹, and when he needed support, few had his back.

The ACC’s adventurous monarch A. O. Wheeler had praised Kinney’s climbs before, but Mount Robson roused suspicions. From the start Wheeler seemed unconvinced, and though the ACC voted Kinney a prize of $100 Wheeler continued to politely but pointedly nudge him to produce his evidence; without actually saying he questioned Kinney’s word, he made it clear he did². On tricky parts of the ascent Kinney had tougher non-photographer Phillips carry the heavy camera gear, and on the summit thick clouds that prevailed for all but a minute made photography impossible. Though he had laid cairns lower down he didn’t on the summit, for the conditions were inappropriate and he saw no point.

He did know his route, but that may have done him more harm than good. An ACC expedition under Wheeler and including Kinney and Phillips went to Jasper in 1911, two years after that climb, and did some natural science for the Smithsonian Institution, and though they were financed for that purpose, naturally enough the Alpine Club of Canada snuck in some alpineering. Relatively early in the trip Kinney made the first ascent of the 9,000-foot Pyramid Mountain, in the Victoria Cross range, with Conrad Kain, a formidably good Austrian-born Alpine guide and the professional climbing leader of the expedition³. From there they climbed and naturalized their way towards Kinney’s old stomping grounds around Mount Robson.

It was a rare chance for Kinney to show Wheeler, in person, what he said he had done: an blood-curdling direct ascent up one of Mount Robson’s worst avalanche-swept faces. Wheeler was shocked to his toes. Though compulsively generous and genteel in print, Wheeler’s genuine horror that Kinney would have been so reckless as to climb such a route, let alone bring a novice like Phillips up it, came through repeatedly, unequivocally, and in writing⁴. Even apart from the doubts over whether he’d made it, that was the end for George Kinney as a leading member of the Alpine Club of Canada. Kinney spent the rest of the expedition on mundane, low-altitude tasks before Wheeler sent him home with Kain and Phillips, and though Kain achieved more first summits Wheeler forbade serious climbing on Robson itself, although that was why both Kain and Kinney had come. It may be, though this is mere speculation, that Wheeler did not feel he could allow Kain to climb Robson without including Kinney, but also that based on what Kinney had told him Wheeler would no longer trust Kinney with another man’s life.

This trip served as a reconnaissance for the ACC’s 1913 formal assault on Mount Robson. Climbing was led by the redoubtable Kain, Wheeler was organizing boss, Phillips outfitted the expedition but did not climb, and Kinney was entirely uninvolved⁵.

Kain and two others made it to the top. The other two were, like Kinney, serious amateur mountaineers, but it was Kain’s show: famously, nearing the summit he carved out steps in the ice with his axe until he looked back to his companions and said “that’s so far as I can take you.” The other two were worried until, climbing the steps, they arrived two easy strides from the top of the mountain. Mount Robson had been conquered, officially for the second time, but when they returned to camp, Curly Phillips congratulated them for being the first. It was then, and only then, that Phillips told the climbers that in 1909 he and Kinney had only reached the summit ridge, turned back by the sixty-foot ice dome Kain had cut a way up.

That Phillips said so is not in doubt. Kain quoted Phillips’s words in 1915⁶ but unlike most Phillips quotes it reads more like a matter-of-fact interpretation by Kain subsequently re-rendered in English by Kain’s translator. Elizabeth Parker, a Winnipeg journalist and the ideological matriarch of the ACC, was also present and quoted Phillips closer to life. Parker wrote that “Curly Phillips, who had listened eagerly [to the climbers’ story], went up to Mr. Foster and said: ‘We didn’t get up that last dome.'”; a rush of excitement in the spur of the moment. Telling the story later to the ACC secretary, Phillips repeated the story and either added, or the secretary understood him to mean, that Kinney and Phillips thought they could have climbed it “in a few minutes” but were too tired and frozen to do so⁷.

From that point, the controversy was essentially over. There was no media battle as there was in the United States, when Frederick Cook and Robert Peary both lied about reaching the North Pole and the press turned up every discoverable fact and invented others as required. With two important exceptions, everything we know about the two expeditions today was known at the base of Mount Robson in 1913, and more has been forgotten. The ACC was the authority, and had all the information it needed to proclaim in all good faith that their official expedition had been the first to succeed. Phillips didn’t care. Kinney cared deeply, but he was no Cook or Peary, the conscientious objector of 1914 was equally unwilling to fight a paper war: he stuck to his story, but that was all he did, and rather than slug it out he simply drew back from the Canadian climbing community forever.

The first change to the story came years later, in a conversation recollected by Phillips’s brother-in-law Bert Wilkins, with whom Phillips was close both personally and professionally. Phillips said that he and Kinney had been turned back not by the summit ice dome but an unclimbable, temporary ice spire at the top⁸, which would generally count as summitting the mountain. The conversation is undated, and cannot automatically be trusted, but while the two stories contradict each other it’s not by much, especially not by Parker’s account. Phillips, freshly hearing of his friends’ triumph, excitedly thinking that the summit dome mentioned by the climbers must have been the feature that he and Kinney had turned back from, and passing on information based as much off what he had heard as his own recollections, until he had time to sit down and think about it. It is also reasonable to suppose that Wilkins, writing many years later, was misremembering the story in the favour of his friend and relative. Kain thought Phillips’s dome story was interesting, but not particularly decisive: even afterwards he would on occasion describe himself as one of the second party to climb Robson. Parker, who was largely responsible for the ACC existing independently rather than as a branch office of the American Alpine Club, was fiercely protective of her institution and, as would have looked sensible until Phillips changed the dome to a spire, does not seem to have tried to pick the story apart. We will never know.

Kinney liked to toot his own horn, but this was his only brush with even implicit dishonesty. His accounts mentioned neither dome nor spire, which may have been truth, honest ignorance, a pedantic refusal to confuse his story with irrelevant ice, or deceit. However, on his earlier expeditions he’d had better opportunities to fake an ascent if he’d wanted to, attempting the mountain solo with not even the inexperienced but clever and capable Phillips to contradict him. All his life, Kinney maintained he climbed Mount Robson: the story that he wavered in old age is unsupported and looks like a journalist’s fantasy, while his family wrote that even if he said it he’d been, rhetorically, beaten into submission⁹. General belief then and now is that Kinney and Phillips reached the summit ridge, a heroic achievement under any circumstances, let alone after weeks of hard travel on short commons, and that in poor visibility Kinney was genuinely, if optimistically, mistaken that there was nowhere left to climb. This would mean that Kinney and Phillips had in fact done their near-impossible climb up the mountain’s face, but of course not summitted the mountain. It is a generous interpretation, but such incidents have happened dozens of times in mountaineering history¹⁰.

From the perspective of the Alpine Club of Canada, all was well. Kinney, who much of the membership didn’t much care for, could either deal with it or not. Phillips had already dealt with it; peak-bagging had never been in his bones anyway. Mount Robson had been definitively conquered by not merely a Canadian, but an Alpine Club of Canada expedition, admittedly with a summit party led by an Austrian (Kain) and including one Canadian (William Wasbrough Foster) and an American (Albert MacCarthy).

Yet nobody is sure. The Whyte Museum in Banff still has Kain’s hand-drawn map of the route, with his writing: “showing route taken on the second ascent of Mt. Robson, July 31, 1913”; in his Canadian Alpine Journal article (written in German and translated) Kain takes the credit for the first ascent but rather equivocally¹¹, and it sounds like he never made a habit of it¹². Even Wheeler, while he never said after 1913 that Kinney and Phillips had been the first to climb Mount Robson, said in 1916 they deserved full credit for it¹³ and in 1938 that “I always feel [my emphasis] the actual first ascent belongs to [Kinney and Phillips].”¹⁴ Wheeler explicitly thought Kain and party had reached the summit while Kinney and Phillips had not, but such words show something in Wheeler’s mind a bit beyond respect for a hard slog. It was a private letter to J. M. Thorington, Kinney was long out of the picture, and Phillips was dead. Wheeler would hardly have been considering their feelings. Phillips had just died, but Wheeler’s next words were “and Phillips’s statement and its results nearly broke Kinney’s heart” which is hardly hagiography. Wheeler knew full well that climbing a mountain except for an ice dome at the top is not summitting; even so, whatever he knew and whatever he saw in the summer of 1911, when Kinney pointed to his route up that horrific face, by 1938 Wheeler was thoughtful. Wheeler didn’t think Kinney and Phillips really made it, but he thought Kinney thought they had, and if so, theirs had been an even more remarkable climb than Kain’s. Kain’s thoughts were less explicitly expressed, but in general he seemed to think that what Phillips had said he and Kinney hadn’t done was irrelevant to the question of whether they summitted.

Another of Thorington’s correspondents, former ACC president J. W. A. Hickson, frankly thought Kinney a fraud who’d forced Phillips to back him up. Whatever Hickson might have thought from his comfortable Montreal estate, the staggeringly tough and self-reliant Phillips was certainly no man to be bullied by a pacifist clergyman. Phillips’s later achievements fully justified what, at the time, might have appeared as Kinney’s suspiciously generous praise of the 25-year-old as a backcountry superman: Phillips was the only man Wheeler would admit was quicker and better on the trail than he was. If Kinney and Phillips were an unlikely pair to conquer such a peak, there have been unlikelier.

The official account of the climb published by the the Canadian Alpine Journal in 1910 mixes the separate stories of Kinney and Phillips and, in the only forms available, contains crucial misprints as the actual account of reaching the summit switches from Phillips’s perspective to Kinney’s mid-narrative, with Phillips’s own recollections of the summit, if he ever had them, missing¹⁵. As perhaps a foretaste of official disapproval, the editors placed this remarkable-if-misprinted story after Alfred Mumm’s description of the later, failed British attempt Kinney and Phillips forestalled, and perhaps because the published ACC account was so mangled at the printers Kinney wrote a separate 1910 account for an American journal¹⁶. It doesn’t help. There is much self-justification for not providing the evidence, beyond his word, that Kinney already knew was wanted; one has to admit sympathy with J. W. A. Hickson and say it smells rather of fish.

There is a possibility that Kinney and Phillips got a long way up the mountain but not particularly near the summit. The cache containing a flag Kinney told Wheeler he left in “a natural crack” a hundred vertical feet down¹⁷ was in fact found in 1959 by an American party including Leo Slaggie and Craig Merrihue. 40 years later, Slaggie told Chic Scott and Gillean Daffern that while they were climbing Robson’s Emperor Face, still over a thousand feet below the summit ridge, Slaggie spotted Kinney’s cache “out of the corner of [his] eye.” Though Slaggie had forgotten how it was all packaged, it proved to contain just what Kinney told Wheeler it would: the Canadian flag and a note-card describing Kinney and Phillips’s triumph. It’s a remarkable story with nearly decisive support: Scott reproduces a contemporary photo of Merrihue holding a weatherbeaten old Red Ensign circa 1868 to 1922¹⁸.

This, the second and most dramatic piece of new information since the climbs themselves, strongly suggests Kinney thought he reached the summit or at least came bloody close, since it’s hard to imagine why on Earth a fraud would leave so unambiguous a record as unambiguously far from the top of the mountain as Slaggie and Merrihue found it when he could just not place a record and say he did. Slaggie leaves open the possibility that, in zero visibility, Kinney thought a high point in a relatively low bowl was the summit, but strains himself to do it (and small wonder; over a thousand feet is an acceptable error if you’ve been on a mountain once but not if you’ve tried to climb it eleven times). It’s also possible that the cache had naturally moved over the intervening fifty years, pushed by avalanches or carried by birds, and Kinney and Phillips really did top the thing off. Kinney lived another two years after Slaggie and Merrihue found his cache, but there’s no evidence he ever heard about it. Scott and Daffern treat the story as rather a scoop, and the American Alpine Journal‘s brief description of the climb mentions no historical discoveries at all.

Mount Robson is difficult to climb. The summit, as every passer-by knows, is cloudy much more often than not, so Kinney’s story about packed-in cloud making a photograph impossible, or an ice dome invisible, checks out. Even today, with better equipment and technique, much easier travel, and better routes to the summit (though none is anything like simple), only one attempt in ten succeeds. George Kinney was a good climber, but not the best. His vocation was ministry, and his claimed ascent of a bad route on an unofficial expedition with an underqualified companion cried out for decisive proof which he could not provide. His vague descriptions are impossible to confirm but, unlike most frauds, have also not been contradicted: Kinney identified tell-tale ice features near the summit on the Emperor Ridge. Whether a success, a failure, or a fraud, Kinney had put himself in an awkward position: even today an adventurer expects to be taken at his word most of the time, but when you thumb your nose at the authorities and go to do the impossible, you know you will be asked to prove it, and Kinney could not.

This author is certainly not qualified to rewrite the mountaineering record of Mount Robson and has no grounds to try. So let it stand: the first ascent was made by the Alpine Club of Canada 1913 expedition, led by Conrad Kain with Albert MacCarthy and William Wasbrough Foster.

Yet, as the question is so unanswerable, why is it still interesting? Let’s take another tack. The highest mountain in Canada is Mount Logan, in the Yukon Territory. Who achieved the first ascent of Mount Logan? You have an advantage, I just told you two of them: Albert MacCarthy, William Wasbrough Foster, H.F. Lambart, Allen Carpé, Norman H. Read, and Andy Taylor, in June 1925. Outside of enthusiasts, these names are not generally known.

But the Reverend George Kinney’s is. Scott calls Kinney “enigmatic and troubling”¹⁹, but his life is well-attested. He was a minister first and a mountaineer second. His life was spent in wild places but not with mountaineers; rather, with the Methodist and, upon its founding, the United Church of Canada, Kinney ministered for decades to the most remote parishes of British Columbia. He appears to have left no sermons, no theology, no illustrious list of those shaped by his ministry, which is not to be wondered at since he had a horror of ministering to big cities and their literate crowds; he was another country parson, in a very Canadian sense of the word “country.” He would both write and speak of his achievements when he had an excuse, but once his Mount Robson obsession was dispelled he concentrated on more important things. The biographers seem to draw enormous importance from Kinney’s withdrawal from mountaineering after 1913, but once his word as a gentleman was officially in question he hardly had a social reason to stay. Then there was the war, which though a conscientious objector he spent overseas in the ambulance corps, and afterwards he was 46 and would have been near the end of the line as a front-rank climber anyway. He traveled an enormous amount, led what must have been a fascinating life, never made any money, married late, raised three children who defended his memory, and was the last survivor of the first-hand players in the drama of Mount Robson.

Kain was the first to die, in 1934, aged only 50, of encephalitis. Curly Phillips, already a legend, was the youngest and also the next, killed in an avalanche near Elysium Mountain north of Jasper in March 1938 aged 43. Elizabeth Parker, whose story about Phillips denying they’d reached the top killed any chance of official recognition, died at home in Winnipeg in 1944. A. O. Wheeler, the elder statesman and prime mover of that denial, died in 1945, his life garlanded with success. William Wasbrough Foster, after some great climbing and an even more extraordinary civic career that took him from high rank in the army to government ministry to chief constable of Vancouver to head of BC Hydro, died in 1954, and his American co-summitter Albert MacCarthy died in 1956. The Reverend George Kinney died in Victoria in 1961, aged 89, and is buried modestly at Hatley Memorial Gardens in Colwood.

One is tempted to say that the truth of who first climbed Mount Robson died with him, but in fact it had probably gone long before. Phillips in the end was not clear enough to resolve doubts either way, Kain was inclined to give Kinney and Phillips the credit but perhaps more with his heart than his head²⁰, Wheeler thought Kain had done it but seemed at times to rather wish Kinney had. Unless Kinney had deliberately lied, only in heaven did Kinney ever find out if he was first or nowhere.

Yet, in his lifetime and beyond, Mount Robson Provincial Park rejoices in the name and the work of George Kinney. Even day hikers at Mount Robson Provincial Park know Kinney Lake, the beautiful, vast expanse of the Robson River met two and a half miles into the Berg Lake Trail, named after Kinney by his friend and early expedition leader Arthur Philemon Coleman. Coleman’s expedition, with Kinney, also named Adolphus Lake, on the far end of the Berg Lake Trail. Nor is that all. Kinney, in fact, had such a turn of phrase that it was he, and not the expedition leader Coleman, who penned an account of the 1908 expedition for the Canadian Alpine Journal. Kinney is said to have named Berg Lake itself and the Valley of a Thousand Falls. To walk the Berg Lake Trail today is to walk through the most memorable, though not the greatest, years of George Kinney’s life.

It is also, unusually literally, to walk Curly Phillips’s path. When they tried to climb Robson Kinney and Phillips went up the Moose River, but the scenery and mountaineering prospects in Berg Lake were obviously ripe for tourism and when the British Columbia government, the ACC, and later the Canadian Northern Railway, wanted to open the Berg Lake region up with bridges and trails, who would they turn to but Curly Phillips? It was Phillips who built the first incarnations of the Berg Lake Trail, who threw astonishing cantilevered wooden bridges over the many tricky crossings of the Robson River, and who opened the region up for the ordinary adventurers who will flock there again this summer. The Berg Lake Trail is not the only tribute to Curly Phillips in the Canadian Rockies, as he also built the original Maligne Lake boathouse; his lakeboats were said to be so good that a French visitor bought one and transported it all the way home. But it’s a doozy.

Kinney and Phillips were neither the first nor the only pioneers of Berg Lake and Mount Robson, and in fact their prominence on the maps comes entirely from Kinney’s attempts on Mount Robson before he supposedly climbed it, and Phillips’s work after. One might say that, if it was a legacy they wanted, they hardly needed to suffer trying to climb the mountain at all. Yet a legacy does not come just from achievements, but from a legend, and the legends of Kinney and Phillips, so often separate and so briefly and dramatically intertwined, has won them a place in history separate from the dozens of other pioneers, outfitters, mountaineers, railwaymen, and trail-builders who turned a foretaste of heaven weeks away from anywhere into the foremost backcountry playground in the dominion.

It’s an easy story to champion the Reverend George Kinney, the underdog backwoods clergyman who might have achieved his dream in the most unlikely way, only to be nobbled out of the credit by the official climbing community. It’s more truthful to admit that, while there is no proof in any direction, “no summit” smells better, and probably the official story is closest to reality. Kinney and Phillips came within a sixty-odd-foot ice dome of summitting Mount Robson by the hardest route, and either Kinney didn’t know, or after his exertions he thought he’d bloody well come close enough to get the benefit of the doubt²¹. If that is so, then under the circumstances both Kinney and the climbing community handled the affair rather well. Not without heartbreak, broken friendships, and hurt feelings, but that is inevitable in such things: as it is, the names of not just George Kinney and Curly Phillips, but also A. O. Wheeler, Elizabeth Parker, and Conrad Kain, are remembered whenever men trek in the wild parts of the Rockies a century later, and that’s not an unfair outcome at all.

1. Don Beers, Jasper-Robson: A Taste of Heaven (Calgary: Highline Publishing, 1996), 206.
2. For a brilliantly-researched and detailed post on the affair I strongly recommend James L. Swanson’s “Kinney at Robson,” posted on Spiral Road. The entire site is superb.
3. A. O. Wheeler, “The Alpine Club of Canada’s Expedition to Jasper Park, Yellowhead Pass and Mount Robson Region, 1911,” The Canadian Alpine Journal IV no. 1 (1912), 16. https://alpineclubofcanada.ca/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/1912.pdf.
4. Most vividly, and most publicly, in Wheeler, “Jasper Park, Yellowhead Pass, and Mount Robson,” 58.
5. Swanson quotes Esther Parker’s 1978 biography of A. O. Wheeler as saying that in late 1911 criticism of Kinney and Phillips’s climb was appearing in the Alpine Club of Canada. Parker had access to Wheeler’s personal papers, but does not quote them here: she hypothesizes that Phillips had told Kain, with whom he had become close and spent the winter trapping furs, that they had not climbed the mountain, that Kain had put the word out, and that word had reached Wheeler. This seems like ill-founded speculation: Swanson’s other quotes makes it clear that Wheeler was unsure of Kinney by 1910, and Kinney’s on-site description of his irresponsible route in the summer of 1911 had hit Wheeler like an artillery shell. Nobody needed to tell Wheeler anything in late 1911; Wheeler already thought it. It also contradicts Phillips’s excitement to tell the 1913 summit party of where he and Kinney had fallen short once he realized it, and Kain’s general reticence to claim the first summit.
6. Conrad Kain (P. A. W. Wallace trans.), “The First Ascent of Mount Robson, the Highest Peak of the Rockies (1913),” The Canadian Alpine Journal VI, no. 1 (1915): 27. https://alpineclubofcanada.ca/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/1914-15.pdf.
7. Swanson, “Kinney at Robson.”
8. Beers, 205, and Swanson, “Kinney at Robson”; clearly based on the same letter in the Yellowhead Archives. Swanson adds that Wilkins’ son believed this account.
9. Swanson, “Kinney at Robson,” quoting personal correspondence with Kinney’s daughter, and Chic Scott, Pushing the Limits: The Story of Canadian Mountaineering (Calgary: Rocky Mountain Books, 2000), 80, https://archive.org/details/pushinglimitssto0000scot/page/72/mode/2up, quoting one of Kinney’s sons.
10. See for example Cho Oyu, the easiest of the eight-thousand-meter mountains in the Himalaya, requiring no technical climbing but ending in a vast, featureless plateau. One part of that plateau is the summit of the mountain. Climbers who posed for victory photos on other parts of the plateau have been told by the recognized authorities that they did not climb the mountain, and since collecting eight-thousanders is a common mountaineering goal, they’ve got to either do the thing all over again or tell the recognized authorities to pound sand.
11. Kain, “The First Ascent,” 27.
12. Beers, 206, quoting J. M. Thorington.
13. Beers, 206, though sadly he doesn’t give his primary source. It does not appear in the Canadian Alpine Journal of 1916.
14. Swanson, “Kinney at Robson.”
15. Rev. George Kinney and Donald Phillips, “To the Top of Mount Robson.” The Canadian Alpine Journal II, no. 2 (1910): 21-32. https://alpineclubofcanada.ca/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/1910.pdf. This is obviously a digital reproduction, either re-typed or OCRed. The Internet Archive has a scan of the journal, starting at position 288/550 for the Kinney-Phillips account. Unfortunately for history this issue is a travesty of misprinting, with some pages missing and others doubled. It looks as though the ACC’s modern editor tried to smooth this out into a readable narrative, but the journal pages are obviously wrong and the reproduction is subtly wrong, which can be important. Mumm’s account is similarly afflicted.
16. Rev. George Kinney, “Ascent of Mount Robson: The Highest Point in the Canadian Rockies.” The Bulletin of the American Geographical Society 42, no. 7 (1910): 496-511. https://jstor.org/stable/199536?seq=1.
17. Swanson, “Kinney at Robson,” and Kinney and Phillips, “To the Top,” 31 (PDF version).
18. Scott, 82.
19. Scott, 72.
20. Scott relays a story that, on the summit, Kain’s party found a piece that must have came from the walking sticks of either Kinney or Phillips, and though Kain lost it on his way down he told everybody about it. That story comes second-hand after Kain’s death without corroboration, and unless he was censored by the ACC he would surely have mentioned it in his Canadian Alpine Journal account.
21. For what it’s worth, that is the author’s guess: that by some mixture of defiance and delusion Kinney really thought he had done it. After a horrible trip to the mountain and somehow even more horrible a climb, just prior to success they came to a very dangerous type of obstacle: the mental one, the one you’re certain you could handle if you will suffer enough to do it when you have already suffered plenty. Kinney may legitimately never have seen the dome in the brief clear window, when he was looking out towards the future Berg Lake Trail, while Phillips did. Or maybe Kinney thought he might have seen something, but visibility was bad, they were frozen solid and in real danger on their return, and besides, after what they’d done, what would sixty moderate feet matter even if they existed? In the conditions, even if he saw the dome Kinney could easily have not been sure of it if he wanted not to be sure. This explains Kinney’s instinctive defensiveness, his guilelessness in leaving the summit cache, his correct identification of the Emperor Ridge “gargoyles,” his sticking to his story for decades, and the vanity-free Phillips’s excitement to learn that one unconquered obstacle had in fact been conquered by his friends. It explains why Kinney wanted to climb Robson badly enough in 1911 to sign up for a long naturalists’ expedition, and why he never tried afterwards. He wanted to make sure, see and climb that ice dome he didn’t want to think he saw, but Wheeler’s utterly sincere (and rather just) mortification at the route Kinney had put himself and Phillips through put paid to any chances with the ACC, Kain knocked the bugger off in 1913, and that was that. The posthumous and second-hand story of an ice spire to Watkins was, like most posthumous and second-hand stories, not quite true. The cache found by the Americans fell down the mountain in a natural way over fifty years. This is one man’s guess. The next-most likely is that George Kinney and Curly Phillips summitted Mount Robson in 1909. I look forward to asking Kinney in heaven, but will be unable to report back.