The Mountaineers Historic Films

The Mountaineers History Committee has been working for several years to preserve films held by the club and other Northwest mountaineers. The Committee is preparing a grant request to support physical preservation, digital video transfer, and creation of on-line finding aids for nearly 200 films. We expect to carry out this work in partnership with the University of Washington.

To support our grant request, the History Committee has prepared over 40 video clips of selected films and posted them on the Mountaineers website:

www.alpenglow.org/mountaineers-history/cat/movies-film.html

These videos are typically two to three minutes long. For sound films, we've pulled a single clip from each film. For silent films, we edited each video like a trailer, a story in miniature. These clips were prepared for films that we have already transferred to digital video. As you can see from the complete list, there are a lot more films that have never been digitized. Most of them haven't been seen for over fifty years, and they're bound to hold delightful surprises.

I'm posting this message to increase awareness of The Mountaineers films and to build support for their preservation. Take a few minutes to look at some of these films. (It's a great way to blow a lunch hour or two.) I hope you'll agree that they represent an important historical legacy for Northwest mountaineering. Perservation of these films is a long-term effort, and the collection offers opportunities that have not been explored. If you'd like to help work with the Mountaineers History Committee on these films, or if you know of other films that deserve to be preserved, feel free to contact me.

--Lowell Skoog
Mountaineers History Committee chairman

---

Here are links to a few of my favorite clips:

1928: Like Washington crossing the Delaware, Edmond Meany crosses the Skagit, click here .
1930: Called forth by Ned's bugle, The Mountaineers encircle Rainier, click here .
1930: On Whitehorse Mtn, how not to glissade with an alpenstock, click here .
1932: At the basecamp below Mt Hood, McKee is deloused, click here .
1938: Dwight Watson and Sigurd Hall ski Mt St Helens, Glacier Peak, and Eldorado Peak, click here .
1939: Otto Trott, Andy Hennig, Sigurd Hall, and the Beckey brothers climb Mt Shuksan, click here .
1940: Jim Crooks and Fred Beckey scale The Tooth, click here .
1949: Fred Beckey and Pete Schoening demonstrate tricks of the crag rats, click here .
1955: Bob and Ira Spring go Skiing Above the Clouds, click here .
1956: Chuck and Marion Hessey ski Cascade Wilderness, click here .
1957: Climbing the Daiber way with Ome and Matie, click here .
1959: Chuck Hessey shares skiing at Crystal Mtn, before chairlifts, click here .

Thanks Lowell!

Now I know what I'm doing for lunch...

-Dave

Thanks Lowell.

Thanks Lowell! I love "Crystal Mountain and You". The whole basin was so wide open back then...

I also like the brief scene of the old Miners Basin cabin. That cabin stood for at least a decade (maybe two) right next to Chair 1 after the ski area opened. I don't remember exactly when it was removed.

It burned down. The cause of the fire I think is unknown. It was known as the party cabin for some time. Visitors leaving their bottles and crap. To bad that piece of history is gone.

Thanks for putting the effort into getting these clips online with links.
Sure is good stuff.
The skiers of those days had some pretty good skills with the low top boots, cable bindings longs skis with screw on edges. And that's talking about their modern gear.
My dad had a ski rental shop in the basement of his hardware store and got a deal on a lot of the older gear to rent. We got the leftover stuff to ski on.

There is some cool stuff in there. Thanks for sharing!

Couldn't wait til lunch. Classic sub-alpinism on Index. The scenes in the undeveloped Crystal area give me a feeling of nostalgia. Amazing that we can see Fred Beckey using crampons for the first time. Thanks!

For those of you into "turns all year," you may enjoy Marion Hessey's magic ski backpack. Click here .

Imagine what it must have been like to be the Hesseys in the 1950s, with the undeveloped basins of Crystal Mountain as their backyard.

Another great film is Dwight Watson's 1939 documentary of skiing in the northern Olympic Mountains. Click here . I love the opening scene of the ski car loading the old ferry. In his interview with Harry Majors at UW, Watson talked about trips to the Olympics:

They took the Ballard-Ludlow ferry to the northern Olympics in those days. The return ferry didn't reach Ludlow until 11 p.m. so they would take their time hiking out, swim in the hot springs, then have a late dinner in Port Angeles. They'd roll out sleeping bags on davenports on the ferry. The ferry departed at 4 a.m. and arrived at Ballard at 6 a.m. Dwight recalled, "The nice thing about the boat was, it left at four. You got in at six in the morning in beautiful weather coming down the Sound. And you could shave and get cleaned up on the boat and we just dashed home, dumped our stuff and ready to go to work. So we had plenty of time that way."

Mountaineer film clips can now be viewed on your iPhone!

When I posted the film clips described in this thread, I provided versions to work on the Firefox, Internet Explorer, and Chrome browsers. I didn't provide a version for Apple's Safari due to lack of time and expertise. I've rectified this, and you can now watch these clips on your iPhone. Give 'em a look...

The Mountaineers History Committee has obtained a grant from the Brunhilde Wislicenus Fund of the Mountaineers Foundation for the preservation of these and many other films in cooperation with the University of Washington. The complete list of films can be found here:

www.alpenglow.org/mountaineers-history/cat/movies-film.html

For those of you into "turns all year," you may enjoy Marion Hessey's magic ski backpack. Click here .

Imagine what it must have been like to be the Hesseys in the 1950s, with the undeveloped basins of Crystal Mountain as their backyard.

Thanks for posting these video links Lowell.

I was in Explorer Troop 9 from Yakima and have some very fond memories of many ski tips to Gold Hill and some fantastic BC skiing.

I remember Chuck and Marion skiing into the cabin at least one time in the mid 80s (they were both pretty old by then but still going strong!) with us. We also used to stop at their cabin on the way up from Yakima and our Scout master (Craig Gilbert) picked up ski wax from them and always got a good story out of them.

I always heard about the movies they had made but never got a chance to see them so it's a real treat to finally get a chance!

Ted

A satisfying ending to this project...

UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES - University of Washington

PRESS RELEASE -- For Immediate Release
April 25, 2012

UW Libraries, Special Collections, awarded $200,000 NEH Grant

The University of Washington Libraries, Special Collections, has been awarded a $200,000 Humanities Collections and Reference Resources grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Humanities Collections and Reference Resources Grants allow institutions to preserve and provide access to collections essential to scholarship, education, and public programming in the humanities. The award to the UW Libraries is for the preservation, arrangement and description, digital reformatting and selective web streaming of 448 films, created by the Mountaineers Club, that document the natural environment of the Pacific Northwest. The 2-year project was submitted by Nicolette Bromberg, Special Collections Visual Materials Curator and will continue work on the moving image collections currently supervised by Hannah Palin, Film Archives Specialist. 

The Mountaineers, an outdoor recreation, education, and conservation group based in Seattle, Washington, recently donated the films to Special Collections. The collection includes the films of Bob and Ira Spring, Dwight Watson, and Charles and Marion Hessey, as well as, a newsreel shot by Selznick Pictures cameraman Charles Perryman documenting a 1922 winter ascent of Mount Rainier. Highlights from the collection include Mountaineers' trail trips and summer outings, a tour of the Paradise Ice Caves, mountain rescue films such as Mountains Don't Care and This is Self Arrest, and performances by the Mountaineer Players at the Kitsap Forest Theater including Alice in Wonderland, Sleeping Beauty, and A Midsummer Night's Dream. Earliest films in the collection date to the 1920s and extend to the early 1970s.

The University of Washington Libraries, Special Collections is a major resource for rare and unique materials. Research strengths include the history of the Pacific Northwest, Alaska and Western Canada; architectural drawings; book arts; photography, and the University of Washington Archives.  The film collections include home movies, documentary film, news film, industrial film, educational film, and more. Examples from the moving image collection can be seen at: content.lib.washington.edu/filmarchweb/index.html

The Moving Image Collection housed in Special Collections on the University of Washington Seattle campus contains films created or collected in the Northwest covering a wide range of topics and genres.  Home movies, industrial films, documentaries and art films capture life in the Pacific Northwest and beyond from the earliest film shot in 1914 through videotape taken last year.

The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) announced earlier this month that $17 million in grants were awarded for 208 humanities projects. The grants will also support fellowships for scholarly research, the development and staging of exhibitions, digital tools, and the preservation of humanities collections and reference resources. Several projects receiving grants in this funding cycle will help preserve fragile historical and cultural collections and make them more accessible to the broader public.

Institutions and independent scholars in 42 states and the District of Columbia will receive NEH support. Complete state-by-state listings of grants are available here (39-page PDF): www.neh.gov/files/press-release/march2012statebystatefinal.pdf

The National Endowment for the Humanities was created in 1965 as an independent federal agency supporting research and learning in history, literature, philosophy, and other areas of the humanities by funding selected, peer-reviewed proposals from around the nation. Additional information about the National Endowment for the Humanities and its grant programs is available at: www.neh.gov. Media Contacts: Paula Wasley at (202) 606-8424 or This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

The NEH grant is a wonderful confirmation of the importance of these films.  It's a tribute to the people who helped care for the films over the years.  Here's an article from the Moving Image Archive News on the NEH grant:

www.movingimagearchivenews.org/money-for-mountain-films/

My thanks go especially to the Mountaineers History Committee, the Mountaineers Players, the Mountaineers Foundation (Brunhilde Wislicenus Fund), the Ira Spring and Charles Perryman families, friends of Charles and Marion Hessey, and the estate of the Dwight Watson.

Congratulations to Nicolette Bromberg and Hannah Palin of UW for their work on the NEH grant request. This is a big shot in the arm for the University's film program, and I'm proud that The Mountaineers were able to help. I look forward to seeing the UW's online finding aids take shape in the months ahead. In the meantime, you can find more information about these films on the Mountaineers History Committee website here:

alpenglow.org/mountaineers-history/cat/movies-film.html

Lowell Skoog
History Committee Chairman
The Mountaineers

A satisfying ending to this project...

Hopefully this is just the beginning!   Will the $200000 grant finally result in the films being viewable online as the quote below seems to indicate?

"The award to the UW Libraries is for the preservation, arrangement and description, digital reformatting and selective web streaming of 448 films, created by the Mountaineers Club, that document the natural environment of the Pacific Northwest."

Hopefully this is just the beginning!   Will the $200000 grant finally result in the films being viewable online as the quote below seems to indicate?

Well, the project is ending for me... I've been working on it for over 11 years.

I don't know how much of the films the UW will put on line. When the Mountaineers donated the collection last autumn, we included money from a Mountaineers Foundation grant, but not enough to do everything you'd like to do. So we left it up to the UW to decide how best to support the collection with those limited funds. The UW has no budget for film preservation. All their film work is funded by grants. They applied for the NEH grant, and happily they got it.

The collection now belongs to UW Libraries, though the Mountaineers retain the right to use the films. I'm happy to let them manage it. You can see clips from many of the films on the Mountaineers website (linked above). I don't know anything more, at this point.

I did some poking around in the UW's moving image collection:

content.lib.washington.edu/filmarchweb/index.html

The Ruth and Louis Kirk collection can be found here:

content.lib.washington.edu/filmarchweb/kirks.html

If you click "Browse Collection" (upper right corner of page) you get to a page that includes this film:

"Archaeological Dig at Fort Nisqually"

This page contains textual information and a five-minute video clip. The clip is just a portion of the complete film. I presume that this is how the Mountaineers film collection will be handled as well.

I find that I'm able to view the film clip on a PC using Firefox, but I can't see it on an iPhone or iPad using Safari. This is the same problem I had when I first posted clips on the Mountaineers website. It's completely solvable (the films need to be formatted differently for Safari) but it takes more time and effort.

Lowell, thanks very much for going to the trouble. And it's reassuring to know that they were skiing the same crud with lots floppier gear...

Over in the "Snowmobiles at Artist Point" thread, I posted an old photo by Bob and Ira Spring of skiers touring at Artist Point in the late 1950s:



I noticed today that UW Special Collections has now digitized and posted the movie that goes along with this photo. See the following clips:

Skiing at Artist Point, 1958, Part 1
Skiing at Artist Point, 1958, Part 2
Skiing at Artist Point, 1958, Part 3

These clips are part of the Mountaineers Film Collection, which I helped donate to the University of Washington a few years ago. The entry page for the collection is here:

content.lib.washington.edu/filmarchweb/mountaineers.html

The Artist Point film includes a few good shots of the old Austin Pass rope tow at Mt Baker. It also shows how pristine Artist Point was on a powder day in 1958. But to ski up there you had to use narrow skis, leather boots, and primitive climbers.

In the film, the crew-cut guy wearing a red jacket (the tour leader) is John Meulemans. Meulefire Peak in the North Cascades is partially named for him. I believe the girl in the red jacket and white hat is Peggy Stark. I think the young man with knicker socks, plaid shirt and a thick wool hat is Willy Stark.

Fun stuff.

---

Here are links to a few of my favorite clips:

1928: Like Washington crossing the Delaware, Edmond Meany crosses the Skagit, click here .
1930: Called forth by Ned's bugle, The Mountaineers encircle Rainier, click here .
1930: On Whitehorse Mtn, how not to glissade with an alpenstock, click here .
1932: At the basecamp below Mt Hood, McKee is deloused, click here .
1938: Dwight Watson and Sigurd Hall ski Mt St Helens, Glacier Peak, and Eldorado Peak, click here .
1939: Otto Trott, Andy Hennig, Sigurd Hall, and the Beckey brothers climb Mt Shuksan, click here .
1940: Jim Crooks and Fred Beckey scale The Tooth, click here .
1949: Fred Beckey and Pete Schoening demonstrate tricks of the crag rats, click here .
1955: Bob and Ira Spring go Skiing Above the Clouds, click here .
1956: Chuck and Marion Hessey ski Cascade Wilderness, click here .
1957: Climbing the Daiber way with Ome and Matie, click here .
1959: Chuck Hessey shares skiing at Crystal Mtn, before chairlifts, click here .

Some of the links appear to be broken. "This page does not exist."

Some of the links appear to be broken.  "This page does not exist."

Yeah, all the links to the mountaineers.org site are currently broken.

The Mountaineers rolled out a new website three weeks ago. They've promised that I'll be able to upload the old Mountaineer Archives pages again, but they haven't given me the go-ahead yet. Sorry about that. (That's also why the Northwest Mountaineering Journal is currently off-line.)

You can probably find the films I listed as favorites on the new UW site, but it would take some hunting. The Artist Point film (in three parts) that I linked in yesterday's post is easy to find. Just click the links I provided.

Very cool, thanks Lowell.

Can't wait for the links to be fixed!

The artist point films are spectacular. Very cool to watch them put on their skins I'd say.

I come up with "this page does not exist". Sort of a Luddite...HELP!!!

Stoked to see some of the clips when they get the link fixed. I've seen the Beckey crag rats clip before and it's awesome. Made me want to put the old shoulder stand technique into my climbing move repertoire.

I noticed today that UW Special Collections has now digitized and posted the movie that goes along with this photo. See the following clips:

Skiing at Artist Point, 1958, Part 1
Skiing at Artist Point, 1958, Part 2
Skiing at Artist Point, 1958, Part 3
...
Fun stuff.

Nothing will get me going like seeing a woman ski on 205cm skis!

Some of the links appear to be broken. "This page does not exist."

The film clips formerly hosted on mountaineers.org have been moved to alpenglow.org. Here is the top-level page where you can access all the clips:

alpenglow.org/mountaineers-history/cat/movies-film.html

I met with the Mountaineers this week and determined that their new website platform doesn't accommodate the content that I posted on their old site very well, so I decided to re-host it on my personal site.

The same is true of the Northwest Mountaineering Journal. The journal is now permanently hosted at the following address:

www.alpenglow.org/nwmj/

Earlier today I was able to update the original post in this thread to correct all the video links to point to alpenglow.org.

I tried to update Reply #10 in this thread, but was not able to. The TAY software insisted on deleting the post entirely. Clearing my browsers cookies didn't help. (Marcus?)

By the way, there was discussion a few years ago in this thread about making digital copies of the Mountaineers film collection more available.

I posted in 2012 about the NEH grant that UW obtained to work on these films. The UW has pretty much wrapped up their work based on this grant. They have created an online finding aid at the following page:

content.lib.washington.edu/filmarchweb/mountaineers.html

Go to the page and click on "Browse Mountaineers Collection" near the upper left corner. That will take you to the videos.