the summit club

Boulder’s Teenage Climbers, 1949–1953

By Karl Gustafson

The author and John Vickery on Kit Carson summit, 1951. Crestone Needle and Peak are between us. Photo by Jim Vickery ]

Asmall piece on page 10 of the Boulder Daily Camera on August 1, 1953, was titled, “All 52 14,000-Foot Peaks in State Goal of Youthful Climbing Group”. This was probably the only official documentation of a group of pioneering young climbers who had just graduated from Boulder High School that June. The article went on to speculate that The Summit Club, as this collection of youthful climbers had tagged themselves, would remain “very much in business” in the coming years. But such would not be the case.

Sixty years ago marks the end of a unique and unknown chapter in colorado’s climbing history. Almost no one knows that a group of 10 Boulder teenagers spontaneously took up rock climbing in 1949 while in junior high school, became good friends, and founded The Summit Club while attending Boulder High School. i was one of those 10 climbers, having been initiated into the sport of rock climbing at age 13, climbing up Boulder’s Second flatiron in street shoes with two friends, John clark and George Hall. early on the three of us taught ourselves to climb, often practicing at the Amphitheatre Rocks in Gregory canyon. By high school, 10 of us had forged together as climbing comrades, and we decided our group needed a formal name: The Summit Club. our members were cliff chittim, John clark, William (Bill) fairchild, Ralph (Skip) Greene, Karl (Gus) Gustafson, George Hall, Lynn Ridsdale, corwin Simmons, James (Jim) Vickery, and John Vickery. We were all within two years age of each other and graduated from Boulder High School in the classes of 1951, 1952, and 1953. to my knowledge, at this writing eight of us are still alive. Skip Greene died in 2010 and Bill fairchild in 2011.

Although we climbed mainly for fun, we were pretty good climbers. Among our first ascents were the matron north face, the Schmoe’s nose, the West face of the first flatiron, the Amphitheatre West Pinnacle north chimney, the Window South corner on the east face of Longs Peak, the north face of mount meeker, and the capitol-Snowmass Ridge. As soon as we were old enough to drive, we set out to do a bunch of fourteeners, often skiing them in winter. We went up Stettner’s Ledges on the east face of Longs Peak, a stateof-the-art difficult climb at that time, and we wanted to do the Diamond. But that was closed to climbing, to everyone, in that era. When we started climbing in earnest in 1949, we 14-year-olds used the inchthick bulky hemp climbing ropes of that time. But the better nylon ropes became available shortly thereafter. our original climbing shoes were our basketball shoes, but we soon moved up to mountaineering boots with Vibram hard-rubber soles. in this pre-technical fiber era, our climbing attire consisted of blue jeans and cotton shirts, maybe with an extra layer tossed into

Summit Club car camp for our ski climb of Mount Antero, 1952. L to R: Jim Vickery, John Clark, and Corwin Simmons. Photo by Karl Gustafson

our rucksacks. We bought our tents and sleeping bags cheaply at the Army Surplus Store. i began working in the basement of Roy Holubar’s house at 1215 Grandview in exchange for a few pitons or even an ice ax. He and his wife, Alice, were then running a fledgling mail-order mountaineering business from their home. i remember one time Roy paid me for my labor with an incredibly heavy pair of used mountaineering boots laden with those old tricouni nails. i lugged them all the way up the front of Pikes Peak on a Summit Club christmasvacation climb. And down. When we got back i complained to Roy, who took them back in exchange for a carabiner and some sling rope.

* * * There are interesting connections of this Summit Club to the colorado mountain club and its Boulder mountaineering School in its early days. The September 1997 issue of the compass, the Boulder Group newsletter, celebrating the 50th Anniversary of the founding of that famed school, noted that the 1951 rock climbing school had been co-sponsored by the Rocky mountain Rescue Group, Die Alpenisten, the University Hiking Group, and The Summit Club. of course by 1997, no one knew who we were!

Although we were just teenagers, both John clark and i taught for a year or two in that Boulder mountaineering School in the early 1950s. i recently delved into the old Boulder group minutes and found that John, Lynn, and i had joined the cmc in 1951. Those records also showed i was elected a “council member” of the Boulder group for one year. in essence, i was the liason between the Boulder cmc and The Summit Club. Unlike the Denver Group, the Boulder cmc Group in those days had no “Boulder Juniors”. So we were the best approximation. i still remember going up to Henry mcclintock’s house, and to Professor Harold Walton’s house, to have tea with the Boulder cmc council members. At the time, i took all of that for granted. But as i look back, it was really rather gracious of them. my first fourteener was north maroon in 1949, when i was 14 on a cmc trip led by Roy Holubar and Horace B. Van Valkenburgh, cmc stalwarts. i also did the Little Bear-Blanca traverse on a beautiful long day on a cmc trip with Horace B. Van Valkenburgh in 1951. Some of us Summit Club youngsters joined a cmc trip to do the crestone needle-crestone Peak traverse in 1951. By that time, we were mountain goats on the rocks, and once atop the needle, we young hot-shots headed out to do the traverse in some kind of record time. in typical teenager fashion, we tended to regard the older cmc members with a bit of disdain, referring to them as “the old duffers”. But we got our comeuppance on that crestone trip, from a Denver cmcer named Roy Rickus. not only had he gone fishing on the day of the climb before breakfast, on the crestone traverse he kept up with us, and then went on to do Kit carson and Humboldt in the same day. We were incredibly impressed. As for us, we had to go back down there later that summer to get Kit carson and Humboldt on a nice sunny day.

Who were we?

Jim and John Vickery were twins. Their father had been a gold miner in the foothills

Survival on Mount Bross after a night out at near -60 degrees, 1952. L to R: John Vickery, Jim Vickery, and Corwin Simmons. Note our Army surplus parkas (dyed khaki from the Army ski troopers' white and then trimmed in fur) and tents. Photo by Karl Gustafson ]

The author rappelling off the Maiden, after Skip Greene and I made an early repeat of the new Walton traverse route, 1951. Photo by Roy Holubar ]

west of Boulder, and then became a stonemason, layering that beautiful sandstone that characterizes the University of colorado Boulder campus. Jim and John worked as hod carriers with their dad in summertime and developed very strong hands that just loved the feel of rock. The small basement bedroom of the Vickery brothers in their modest family home on 8th Street in Boulder became a sort of clubhouse where we would meet to plot our next climbing adventure. mrs. Vickery, who we fondly called mamoo, was the perfect mother-figure for a rambunctious bunch like us. never a reprimand, perhaps some nice cool or warm refreshments, and when we designed a Summit Club shoulder patch for our parkas, she had them made for us.

Skip Greene’s dad was a brickmason and Skip worked alongside him to develop into a sturdy man of few words. He went on to become a key player and caretaker at the University of colorado’s Arctic and Alpine research station on niwot Ridge. When he died, in recognition of his 50 years of service, including executing tricky snowmobile-aided winter rescues in the high country, Rocky mountain Rescue held a memorial for him at the research station.

John clark, one of my first friends when i moved to Boulder in 1948, came from a prominent Boulder county mining family. John went on to become one of the first Longs Peak climbing rangers. The “clark’s Arrow” marking the route through the cliffs from the Loft to the Homestretch on the back side of Longs Peak is due to John. John and i were almost blown off the top of the high ridge coming back from north to South Arapahoe Peaks by a 100 mph windstorm in late fall 1951. But we made it, sometimes needing to crawl while simultaneously bracing with our ice axes. corwin Simmons climbed mostly with Lynn Ridsdale and is probably the best known of any of us Summit-clubbers due to his name on the corwin Simmons Rock on flagstaff mountain. corwin was an early pioneer of bouldering. to train for that, he would carry around one of those little blue hard rubber balls and keep clenching and unclenching it in one hand and then the other throughout the day. i remember him driving his parents crazy as he worked out routes, climbing all the way around their house. Lynn’s older sister, Jan Waddington, is a famous longtime cmc member, see the feature on her in Trail and Timberline, 1015 (Summer 2012, 32–35). But i did not know her in our high school climbing days. About 10 years ago i happened to sit at a table with Jan and her husband, Dave, at an annual dinner of the Boulder Group and was astonished to learn that she is Lynn’s sister.

George Hall was the first of us to make contact with the climbing world, learning a few of the basic techniques from the cU rock climbers. cliff chittim climbed mostly with the Vickery brothers, as did Bill fairchild. cliff’s mother died when he was a young boy and cliff was raised by his Aunt Latora. Bill’s father was a musician who had played in the Glenn miller orchestra. in his book High over Boulder (1995) with cleve mccarty, the well-known climbing author Pat Ament made readers aware of

Summit Club shoulder patch on the author’s parka on Capitol summit, 1951. Our design admittedly shows some resemblance to the Matterhorn. Photo by Robert Allen

Skip Greene on the Window South Corner, 1953. Four of us climbed the route, on two ropes, in eight hours from Chasm Lake to Longs summit. Photo by Karl Gustafson. ]

early Boulder climbing before his time. on page 6, he wrote: “on the flatiron rocks between Boulder and eldorado, ascents were made that were the beginnings of serious free-climbing. The north face of the matron, for example, done by Karl Gustafson and Skip Greene in 1951, was confirmed years afterward to be 5.6.” Ament also, in his Bouldering at Flagstaff Mountain— The Early Years (available online at http:// www128.pair.com/r3d4k7/amentboulderinghistory1.html), relates his bouldering to the spirit of corwin Simmons, and comments: “As many of the good climbers of the early years around Boulder, corwin Simmons disappeared into obscurity and was never seen on the rock or heard from during the golden age of the 1960’s.” indeed, we left no written record of our own golden age of climbing, then 10 years earlier. one exception is my first-ascent traverse of the capitol-Snowmass ridge in 1951. none of my Summit Club buddies could go, but i was able to talk Bob Allen, a cU student, into driving over and doing it with me. Roy Holubar, who had suggested that climb to me, insisted that i write it up for posterity: see Trail and Timberline, 404 (1952), 119–121.

We Summit-clubbers were mostly from non-wealthy, even poor, families. our summers demanded that we find jobs, which cut deeply into our climbing time. Although climbing was our major passion, we were otherwise typical high school students, engaged in the usual athletics and student leadership activities. cliff chittim, for example, was elected Head Boy of our senior class of 1953.

Boulder in those days was not plush as it is now. The city consisted of 12,000 residents and 8,000 cU students. instead of the 50,000 who now commute into Boulder to work, it was the other way around, with Boulder folks seeking good jobs in Denver. Pearl Street and downtown were full of rundown flophouses for destitute old miners. Those oldsters would come out into the sun and congregate on old wiremesh benches in front of the courthouse. Jim Vickery, always of creative humor, and not derogatorily, coined the name “the waffle-assed gang” for them. now you have the fancy Pearl Street mall, and those old flophouses carry the names of the many fine restaurants and pubs there.

Although it was not our intention, The Summit Club effectively disbanded in 1953. to celebrate our high school graduation in June 1953, eight of us organized an overnight campout on small ledges at the top of the Third flatiron. We also did some nice climbs that summer. But it wasn’t long before real life took over. many of us needed to work our way through college, and others lost interest in further education and began full-time jobs. Some joined the military. Although most of us kept our individual interests in climbing and hiking throughout our lives, there were no further Summit Club climbs after the summer of 1953.

But i think that we had the best of it. Those were fantastic days, days of great adventure, and a unique camaraderie forged up on the rocks and peaks of our youth, days to be remembered forever.△

The author exploring the Diamond on Longs Peak, 1952. Although Rocky Mountain National Park had officially closed it to climbing, everyone wanted to climb it. Photo by Skip Greene. ] Karl Gustafson is a Professor of Mathematics at the University of Colorado in Boulder and a Life Member of the Colorado Mountain Club.