John Sarracino, Mark Felthauser, and other club members on a Blanca-Little Bear traverse trip led by Don Liska, July 1978. Photo by Bob Cowan
By NORBERT ENSSLIN Edited by BILL PRIEDHORSKY Los Alamos Mountaineers
This weekend, the Mountaineers are celebrating their 70 th anniversary.
Throughout the decades, Los Alamos Mountaineers have been important to many in Los Alamos and beyond. The club is a place to meet other people with a love of the outdoors and to adventure together. The Mountaineers have come to know and love many beautiful local areas, as well as mountains, canyons, and climbing areas in the wider region.
Don Liska captured importance of mountains to our lives: “I believe that the mountains symbolize the conjunction of humanity and nature in some very special ways. Always a barrier to expansion, always a challenge to conquest, always a sanctuary for beauty and grandeur, always a test of endurance and acceptance of hardship on nature’s terms, always a reminder of beauty and wonder, the mountains play a crucial role in our collective humanity. Without the mountainous regions of this beleaguered planet, our senses for pulchritude and awe would be diminished, our love of the delicate and eternally enduring would be less developed. Above all, our mountainous environment raises us as individuals to more exalted heights.”
Tom Newton on the highest point of the Organ Mountains near Las Cruces on a climbing trip with John Ramsay and Stan Landeen, April 1955. Photo by John Ramsay
The Los Alamos Mountaineers were founded in late 1952. Tom Newton, the first president, met his wife in the rock climbing section of the Sierra Club in California before they moved to Los Alamos in 1949. They began meeting with like-minded Los Alamos friends to organize trips. Ken Ewing, the first treasurer, kept the treasury in a paper bag.
Founding members Stan Landeen, Liz Gittings (later Marshall), Wally Green, Bob Mulford, Emily West (later Wilbanks), and Ken Ewing on Lake Peak, winter 1957. Photo by John Ramsay
The club has had a formal written Constitution since at least 1962. The club is incorporated as the Los Alamos Mountaineers, Inc., and is registered as a tax-exempt nonprofit organization with the State of New Mexico. In December 1967, the club membership voted to accept affiliation as a Group of the Colorado Mountain Club. Sometime in 1973 to 1975, the Mountaineers voted to break this connection because of concerns about new CMC safety rules that limited how far CMC members were allowed to drive on weekend trips. The majority of the Mountaineers were concerned that such rules would not be feasible for them because of the long driving distances from Los Alamos to Colorado. During the 1980’s the Mountaineers were also affiliated with Club 1663 at Los Alamos National Laboratory.
Originally, the club met in the Newtons 3-bedroom Western area house, since they were the only ones with a place big enough. Over the years, meetings have taken place in member’s houses, the old fire station on Arkansas Street, the LANL HRL building auditorium, the Los Alamos High School Little Theater, the Los Alamos High School Speech Room, Fuller Lodge, and now the Nature Center operated by PEEC.
In the 1950’s, club activities were informal. Newton and Ewing recalled that the members did some short rock climbs at the Back Rocks above the Northern Area in Los Alamos and made a lot of trips to Colorado. Eiichi Fukushima recalled that he and Larry Campbell climbed Battleship Rock (near Jemez Springs) along the prow without particular difficulty.
Mountaineers on top of Middle Truchas Peak: Marvin Tinkle, Mrs. Mulford, Tom Stevenson, Bob Mulford (red sweater), Herbert Ungnade (blue cap), two unidentified persons, and Frank Pretzel, September 1955. Photo by Charles Mader photo
Ken Ewing on Wilson Peak, with the Mt. Wilson – El Diente ridge in the background, May 1957. Photo by John Ramsay
In the 1950s and 1960s, the club had summer outings to major climbing areas. On a trip to the San Juan Needles area, the Mountaineers climbed Sunlight, Windom, and Eolus. On this trip, a porcupine showed up and ran into one of the tents. They chased it out, and Ken Ewing hit it with his ice axe. The porcupine died, although Ken hadn’t meant to kill it, and he felt very badly about that. But since it was dead, they had to eat it … So Liz Gittings Marshall cooked it, which took hours. It turns out that porcupine meat tastes like pine trees, which is what they eat!
Other trips went to the Southern Wind Rivers (Cirque of the Towers) and to the Northern Wind Rivers (where they camped at Island Lake and climbed Gannett Peak via the glacier). There were two early club trips to the Tetons. Ken climbed the Grand Teton on club trips in 1953 and 1955, doing the free rappel using a dulfersitz, which uses a rope without any metal hardware. One early club trip was to the High Sierras, where they climbed some of the Minarets, Mt. Ritter, and Banner Peak. In the night, Ken Ewing and Tom Newton saw a bright flash of light and heard what sounded like a big rock fall. Later they learned that this was a 70 kiloton test at the Nevada Test Site.
George Bell, Dave Brown, Mike Williams, and Don Liska climbed the Kain Face on Mt. Robson in 1968. They were the first climbers to reach Robson’s summit that summer. Don Liska and Dave Brown got hit by an avalanche descending the face and had to be rescued by the Canadian Air Force. Don Liska recalled that George Bell pulled off a gutsy solo walk over the Robson Glacier to turn in the alarm. After the rescue, a Canadian onlooker at the base of the mountain pressed a bottle of whiskey into Don’s hand with the comment, “You need this more than I do.”
By the late 1960s and early 1970s the club had grown to about 50 or 60 members and offered trip schedules featuring a wide range of summer and winter activities. Summer trips included climbs of Colorado Fourteeners, and rock climbing trips to places such as the Brazos Cliffs, Black Canyon of the Gunnison, or the Organ Mountains. The March 1972 issue of “Trail and Timberline”, the Colorado Mountain Club’s publication, was devoted to the “Los Alamos Group”, as it was called by the CMC. The Brazos Cliffs were shown in the cover picture and George Bell’s article on the Brazos (as described in the Brazos section of this history) was the lead article.
As individuals, many club members went on repeated expeditions to wild places and racked up an impressive record of first ascents, new routes, and courageous attempts. One such was Don and Alice Liska’s trip expedition to Afghanistan in the summer of 1969 led by a well-known German climber, Richard Hechtel. The party climbed Noshaq (7492 meters or roughly 24,600 feet), the highest peak in Afghanistan’s Hindukush range. They were the first Americans to enter the region, making it perhaps the most unusual location ever visited by members of the Los Alamos Mountaineers. Alice summited carrying her own gear, climbing without porter support, and using no oxygen. For about 8 years, Alice held the world altitude record for a woman from the Western World. She appeared on the television show “To Tell the Truth” as one of three contestants claiming to be the woman’s record holder. Two of the panelists were fooled, but Kitty Carlisle correctly picked her out.
Alice Liska on the summit of Noshaq, August 1969. Don Liska photo
The 1970s and 1980s were years of great activity for the Mountaineers, with 8 to 12 winter trips and 15 to 25 summer trips every year. In the summer there were sometimes both a technical climb and a family hiking trip.
During the 1980’s, the Club organized caving trips to southern New Mexico. There are many small caves in the Guadalupe Mountains near Carlsbad Caverns National Park. Access to these caves was obtained by permit from the Lincoln National Forest. On these trips club members had the opportunity to practice specialized skills in the dark, such as jumaring or rappelling past a knot in the rope, or jumaring up through a hole only large enough to squeeze through if you exhaled! The rope was the only way out from a very dark place.
During those years Club members also organized a series of “gourmet backpacks”. These were short-distance backpacks that concentrated on carrying in a large quantity of food and drink! The first gourmet backpack was held at the Rio Grande below White Rock, and organized by Jan Iversen in 1978, and continued in the Jemez and southern Colorado.
Many club members have always enjoyed bicycle riding for exercise and for the opportunity to do extended outings in Northern New Mexico. In 1973 the club issued a list of 20 recommended bike trips, including the newly-discovered White Rock loop (27 miles), and the Los Alamos to Aspen ride (300 miles one way!). Don Gettemy and Gracia Coffin led several club mountain biking trips to the Wheeler Geologic Area and to Penitente Canyon in southern Colorado. In the 1980’s two club members, Keith Gainer and Gabriela Lopez-Escobedo, spun off a new club, the “Tuff Riders” Mountain Biking Club.
Colorado’s fifty-four 14,000 foot peaks and its even more numerous high 13,000 foot peaks have always been a magnet for the Mountaineers. Although some of the well-known Fourteeners have technical routes, most are easy walks or scrambles and provide a good introduction to mountaineering as well as a great way to get to know Colorado. What was it like to climb Fourteeners in the 1950s? Chuck Mader said that “The main hazard was the long drives, no speed limits in those days. We would pile into a big sedan for the drive up to Colorado. Then we could rent old WWII jeeps at most service stations. Everything was open — there were no wilderness areas, and lots of mines were still running. Usually one could drive to timberline. In those days the packs were painful, no waist straps, so it was better to do most of the peaks as day hikes even if it meant long days.”
Maps were terrible in those days, and it could take several trips to find a way up a mountain. Many peaks were still being surveyed. The peaks often had lights with batteries on top, to help surveyors take readings at night. Many peaks still had the original registers. The list of Fourteeners was still in flux, and the “hundred highest” wasn’t even a concept.
Charles Mader on top of the Crestone Needle after doing the Peak to Needle traverse, August 1959. Photo was the cover for Ed Williamson’s novel ‘Durango Light’.
Ginny Bell and George Bell, Jr. described a memorable club trip in 1970, when George Bell, Sr. led a group into Chicago Basin in the San Juans. “A 100 year storm hit, and it rained straight for 4 days. We were camped safely above the stream, but as the water got higher and higher we could see tree trunks coming down the streambed. We could hear loud cracks, as sections of the mountains’ slopes let go, and sent mud avalanches roaring down the hillsides.” One loud crack seemed to come from above their camp, so they ran out of their tent, with George Bell grabbing the kids. Fortunately the mud avalanche came down the next gully over from the one they were camped at … “So we never even got above timberline, but we had to use a rope to get the party back across the mudslide on the way out. When we hiked out to Needleton, the train tracks had all washed out. We had to walk out all the way to Silverton, occasionally contouring along the slope to get past places where the tracks just disappeared into the river for a few hundred feet.”
Faye and Dave Brown with their son Nicholas on Humboldt Peak, June 1973. Photo by Bob Cowan
A special destination for the Mountaineers was Shiprock in the northwest corner of the state, in the years that it was still open for climbing. Shiprock is perhaps the most spectacular and mysterious of the many natural wonders within a day’s drive of Los Alamos. When they climbed it in 1959, the Mountaineers were the 43rd party to summit Shiprock. In subsequent years, the Mountaineers probably climbed Shiprock more than any other group, with perhaps 50 to 60 ascents. Shiprock was closed after a 1970 accident in which the Mountaineers assisted in the rescue, receiving a Presidential citation.
Don and Alice Liska atop Shiprock (Ernie Anderson photo, taken from a plane circling the peak, Oct. 14, 1967. This photo also appears in Eric Bjornstad’s book ‘Desert Rock’.
By 1974, a year after Merle Wheeler introduced the Mountaineers to the narrow slot canyons on the Navajo Reservation, he started taking club members on tough one-week trips into some of the most remote areas of the Grand Canyon. The guide books were terse; The trip participants knew only that the route they had selected would “go”, if they didn’t get lost.
The Grand Canyon requires unique skills. One was to learn to navigate vertically by focusing on the location of the party relative to the well-known strata that made up the walls of the Grand Canyon. Another skill was to travel very light on clothing, but carry 4 quarts of water. On a hot May trip even 4 quarts only lasted from breakfast and dinner – by evening it was essential to find a new water source for camp. On the wide Canyon plateaus, the hikers learned to think like the wild burros and follow their trails.
Dennis Brandt, Carl Keller, and Norbert Ensslin enjoy 360-degree Grand Canyon views from the top of Vishnu Temple, May 1977. Courtesy photo
A special destination was Vishnu Temple, a huge tower in the middle of the Grand Canyon whose top is as high as the rim.. The climb of Vishnu Temple is via a challenging route off the North Rim that requires a lot of scrambling and two short pitches of easy-ish technical climbing. A Mountaineers group was the 7th party to climb the tower.
During the late 1980’s and 1990’s the club organized a series of rock climbing trips to Yosemite National Park to do climbs in Yosemite Valley or Tuolumne Meadows. The Mountaineers rented tent cabins or wood-frame cabins in Camp Curry or Yosemite Village. In the evenings, the climbers would gather in the Camp Curry cafeteria to eat dinner, swap stories from their adventures during the day, and plan the next day’s climbs. Jim Straight, Lou Horak, and Roy Lucht were the most ambitious of the group, usually climbing 60 to 80 pitches over the course of a week’s stay in the Valley.
Seven former club presidents and two other scruffy climbers heading off on the first Mountaineers’ trip to Yosemite. From left, Jan Studebaker, Lou Horak, Jim Straight, Norbert Ensslin, Dennis Brandt, Ralph Menikoff, Gregg Brickner, Chris Foster and Dave Barlow, June 1984. Photo by Jim Straight
Mountaineers have been involved in much more. As the years went on, the Mountaineers have evolved into a general-purpose outdoor club, less involved with mountaineering and more with hikes, backpacks, and other less technical outings. These more modern adventures were described in an Aug. 4 Post article (https://ladailypost.com/los-alamos-mountaineers-going-strong-70-years-later/ ). But the spirit of adventure continues, and will be celebrated at the Sept. 17 anniversary party for the Mountaineers 70 th anniversary, to be held from 5 to 8 p.m. at Urban Park.
A full version of the Mountaineers history can be found at https://www.lamountaineers.org/drupal7/zHISTORY.html . This history was written in 2009, when many of the early Mountaineers were still available to share their memories.
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