1922 Film: 1st Winter Ascent of Mt Rainier

L-R: Jacques Bergues, Jean Landry and Jacques Landry prepare to climb Mount Rainier in 1922.

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In November 2003, I received an email from Steve Turner of Sacramento, California. Steve is the grandson of Charles R. Perryman, the Selznick newsreel cameraman who accompanied European alpinists Jean and Jacques Landry and Jacques Bergues to the summit of Mount Rainier to make the first winter ascent in February 1922. If you're not familiar with this climb, you may enjoy the account in Dee Molenaar's Challenge of Rainier ( google books link ).

Steve contacted me after finding notes about his grandfather's climb on my ski history website here .� He wrote that he had his grandfather's newsreel footage from the climb.� After several emails, Steve offered to donate the film to The Mountaineers in exchange for a DVD copy.� This began an eight year game of email tag.� Long gaps ensued.� Finally, two months ago he sent me the film. It has been digitized and I've posted a digital copy on the Mountaineers website here:

alpenglow.org/mountaineers-history/notes...yman-mt-rainier.html

The Mount Rainier newsreel was accompanied by several other interesting and unusual films. You can see the whole collection here:

mountaineers.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/A...s+Perryman+Newsreels

This is a truly historic film.� It was the first motion picture ever taken on the summit of Mount Rainier.� It shows the first winter ascent of any significant peak in Washington, and the biggest one at that.� It is the oldest climbing or skiing film I know of in this state.� Since the film was made in 1922, almost 90 years have elapsed since it has been seen in public.� This Thanksgiving Day, I'm thankful to Steve Turner for this one-of-a-kind gift to the Northwest mountaineering community.

That is very cool....thanks for sharing Lowell.

Fantastic Lowell this is great!! Thank you for your hard work to share this with us and the mountaineering community as a whole.

Classic humor of the Twenties when the the camera man says: "10 hours of This", as he followed the climbers shooting their derrieres.

thanks Lowell.  love the rarefied chance to look back upon ski mountaineering over three generations ago.

Wow, this sure looks interesting and cool, but I have a small challenge:
Other than being a Luddite, is there some reason I cannot view these films when I try to link to them?

Thank you Lowell for all of your effort in making this available for all of us to share and enjoy.
What a treasure!!!

Wow, this sure looks interesting and cool, but I have a small challenge:
Other than being a Luddite, is there some reason I cannot view these films when I try to link to them?

I have the same problem... just a red x and no action on the linked page for me...??

FYI: Mozilla plays it fine, ie8 does not. wm player won't play the *.ogv file either (at least without add-ons).

Lowell, thanks for posting this it's really interesting history!
PS. I think we ran into you at the top of Alpy today, you cruised by my wife and I after rollen. good turns today!

I have the same problem... just a red x and no action on the linked page for me...??

JibberD and Schenk: Can you tell me what browser you are using (including version)? I've viewed these videos successfully on fairly recent versions of the top four browsers:

• Firefox
• Internet Explorer
• Safari
• Crome

On Internet Explorer 7 the movie runs in a Java applet (because that version does not support HTML5). If you don't have Java enabled, that might be a problem.

I'm not a video or web expert, so if there's anything very subtle about the problem you're having, I probably won't be able to diagnose it.

My main criteria when I posted the Mountaineer films was NOT to host them on YouTube or similar sites. My sense is that people assume that stuff on those sites is in the public domain, and I'm not ready to go there with the Mountaineers film collection.

FYI:  Mozilla plays it fine, ie8 does not.  wm player won't play the *.ogv file either (at least without add-ons).

Thanks for this info. I haven't tried IE8 yet. On IE7, the movie runs in a Java applet called Cortado. I believe the applet loads automatically if you have IE set up for that. Some people have said that they don't like that, but I'm not savvy enough about videos at this point to offer another method. I used the first method I found that worked. I'm open to suggestions.

Yes, I think we passed at Alpental today. Very nice to get out.

They play fine for me on IE9.
Thanks Lowell. These clips are a priceless find.

Awesome video Lowell, thanks for posting!

JibberD and Schenk: Can you tell me what browser you are using (including version)?

IE9 for me.

ron j says IE9 is working for him, so maybe it's something with my security settings.

My main criteria when I posted the Mountaineer films was NOT to host them on YouTube or similar sites. My sense is that people assume that stuff on those sites is in the public domain, and I'm not ready to go there with the Mountaineers film collection.

Interesting.

I see that the video of the 1922 winter ascent was uploaded to YouTube by user "nassstnate" one day after I announced it on the Mountaineers website. The person who uploaded it never asked for permission but did provide a link to the original site.

Very cool Lowell!

At 2:35 it shows the guys climbing what looks like the Gib Ledges, obviously in it's pre-1936 collapse condition. I've never seen film of the route from that time period.

Thanks!