STANDING ON THE PRECIPICE OF INSANITY ... AND A NEW ERA IN CLIMBING

Three Fingered Jack in the 1920s

by Peter Boag

“Friend, we caution you, be sure and leave nothing here for which you must return.” Those were among the words that the first six climbers to reach the summit of Three Fingered Jack recorded in a register that they left on the mountain’s highest point on September 3, 1923. Clearly, these conquering alpinists known in the mountaineering history of the Pacific Northwest as “the boys from Bend,” anticipated that others would follow them. And anyone who has followed them can readily locate the value in their summit advice.

The more forthright among us might further admit to sharing in the feelings that less reserved climbers expressed on the summit of Jack over the handful of years that followed the feat of the boys from Bend. “The peak of this damned mountain,” wrote terrified climbers in 1925, “shakes when the wind blows.” The next year, LaVerne Coleman, who also was a Mazama, shakily inscribed into Jack’s register, “I have been scared the whole way up and now I am more afraid than ever. This is my idea of Hell.” Just a month later, Richard Steinhoff stated more succinctly: “My first and last climb.”

Accompanying Steinhoff in 1926 was Ervin McNeal. He had been one of the boys from Bend who had first ascended Jack just three years earlier. The thoughts he recorded in the register below Steinhoffs are among my favorites, since similar sentiments flashed through my mind when I scaled Jack for my second time. My first ascent was in 2021 when I was fresh out of BCEP. It was actually a two-day affair: we scaled Mt. Washington just the day before. While the former peak provided its moments, I found Jack much more unsettling. When one of my co-climbers on that second perilous day broke down just moments before traversing the notorious “crawl,” we made a pact to carefully watch out for each other as we picked our way along that gravity-defying precipice. The next year, and after having completed ICS, I resolved to work on my fear of exposure and so chose to give Jack another go. I found the experience worse than the first and concluded exactly what McNeal had written in the summit register back in 1926: “Now I know I am crazy.”

Above: Janet Moffat, Edith Peirce, Margaret Lynch, and Emil Nordeen on the summit of Three Fingered Jack, 1929. VM1999.001 Lynch Collection.

Although standing little more than 7,800 feet high, the rotting pile of alpine rock known as Three Fingered Jack is counted by the Mazamas among the 16 major peaks of the Northwest. That list includes world-renowned mountains like Rainier and Shasta, both of which climb to altitudes not a whole lot less than twice the elevation of Jack. It is of course the technical and psychological difficulties that Jack presents that makes that peak such an object of attraction . . . and repulsion. And Jack had and has repeatedly repulsed climbers before and after 1923.

“Unclimbable” was the word that Mazama member John Penland used in 1917 to describe it after he completed the last apparent attempt of Jack prior to Bend’s boys in the summer of 1923. Penland and his two companion climbers, the brothers Art and Ed Peterson, attended the Mazama 1917 Outing held at Mt. Jefferson. They were among those who successfully reached Jefferson’s summit on August 11. The next day, the threesome decided to break off from the larger group to explore the area down around Three Fingered Jack. Their initial intention was not to climb Jack, but that changed the morning of August 13 when, in camp on the shores of Marion Lake, they observed the jagged peak in the distance poking through the hazy sunrise. “Stubborn and bold,” Penland explained, it seemed “at first to beckon us, then to dare us, and upon the next look to say: ‘You cowards!’” And so, off the baited “cowards” skulked at 6 a.m., ultimately approaching the mountain’s uppermost ridges from the southwest, a route similar to the standard track we use today. As they ascended higher and higher, they came across the names on notes that other, earlier climbers stashed in cans and crevices along the way and where those turn-arounds had apparently ended their own quests. After ascending an intervening pinnacle, the trio realized they were more in “need of prayer-books than alpenstocks.” As they “crept along a narrow ledge under the hanging wall on the east,” they spied what undoubtedly is the crawl: “a narrow tilted ledge some distance below us.” They carefully slid down to it and followed it, eventually making their way to the base of the summit spire—farther than anyone was known to have climbed before. There they determined they could go no further. After taking some photos and stashing a small box among the rocks in which they recorded their own names, the three returned by the route that they had ascended.

And that was apparently that until six years later when McNeal and his comrades Armin Furrer, Phil Philbrook, Leo Harryman, Elmer Johnson, and Ernest Putnam, did what had not been done before. The summer of 1923 was already a momentous one for the first four on this list. On August 26, just days prior to conquering Jack, they, plus Wilbur Watkins and Ronald Sellers, had become the first climbers known to reach the summit of Mt. Washington. Officially dubbed at that moment by the local press as the “boys from Bend,” these Washington conquerors told the Bend Bulletin that they had headed to Washington’s summit by way of a route that we would recognize today as the continued on page 35 standard approach. At the northern base of the main pinnacle, they came across a small can containing the names of a fourperson Mazama party that had failed in an attempt on Washington just the year before. The names included those of the intrepid and seemingly ubiquitous John Penland and Ed Peterson who had vainly searched for a route on the upper peak. When they threw in the towel, Penland and Peterson concluded, as the Bend boys would prove the next summer, that a route on the northeast would likely yield the best results. While Bend’s boys nonchalantly told the Bulletin that their “ascent was not difficult,” they also let it slip that Harryman, the last of the climbers on the way up, “lost both his footholds…and was left hanging to a rock by his hands. He managed to recover his hold and to continue, and made no comment when he reached the top…but was as white as a sheet.”

Despite his terrifying experience on Washington, Harryman chose to head to Three Fingered Jack a few days later. Nine boys from Bend in fact set out on that journey. Whether they were among this group of nine is lost to history, but neither Wilbur Watkins nor Ronald Sellers of the Mt. Washington team from days before ultimately summitted Jack on this outing. Of all the boys of Bend, Sellers was the only one to join the Mazamas, though for only two years. He wrote “The Conquest of Mt. Washington” for the 1923 Mazama Annual.

In the 1929 Mazama Annual, Lynch wrote of the expedition that she had spearheaded, explaining that she and Moffat had been thinking of climbing Jack since their camping trip to nearby Duffy Lake in 1928 where they had gazed longingly at the rocky spires of the mountain above. But they had also “been told to stay off this mountain as the rock was of such rotten composition as to be most dangerous for amateurish climbers.” This starkly contrasted with the celebratory support that had cheered on the amateurish teenage boys from Bend during their climbs a few summers before. Wisely (perhaps) Lynch and Moffat ignored the warnings likely made to them because of their gender. And thankfully so, for when she concluded her tale of her feat, Lynch well explained why the pile of alpine rock known as Three Fingered Jack is one that both attracts and repulses the alpinist in all Mazamas: “In elevation Three-Fingered Jack is a small mountain,” she wrote. “Nevertheless its. . . altitude present[s] problems in mountaineering for the adventurous climber which will not be encountered on many of Oregon’s major snow peaks.” And so it has been for all sorts of adventurous climbers—admittedly frightened or not—both prior to and since 1923. Three Fingered Jack, continued from page 33.

At 11:05 a.m. on September 3, only six of the nine boys who had initially set out for Jack had reached the spot that rebuffed the Mazamas in 1917. Their description of what lay ahead compares to what climbers encounter there today. They first ascended a 50-foot chimney that led to a shelf, about 20-feet below the summit. “Finally, at 11:27 o’clock, the mountaineers were perched astride the knife edge of the finger, an edge only about 15 feet long, and so narrow that it could be felt to vibrate as Philbrook knocked out with his knife a shallow groove in which to place the tube containing the names of the climbers and the story of the climb.” Unlike the Mazama party six years earlier, the boys had brought a rope along. McNeal, who had led with the ropes up Washington the previous weekend and was also responsible for recording the group’s sentiments in the register on Jack, was the last to descend. At the bottom of the pinnacle, however, when trying to pull the rope, the loop that they had left in it could not be dislodged from a spire. Heeding the advice that McNeal had left on the summit just moments before—leave nothing here for which you must return—the group did not even try to retrieve what they had left behind, even despite its importance.

The Bend Bulletin first broke their glorious tale as it had the marvelous account of the first climb of Washington just a week before. The Three Fingered Jack report began with the imperious statement, “Again a supposedly unscalable mountain peak has yielded before an attack launched by Bend youths.” And as the article continued, it revealed a reality about the historic nature of this Pacific Northwest mountaineering accomplishment: “Incidentally, feats of the kind. . . have reached their end. Six local boys shook hands with Three Fingered Jack on Labor day [sic], and ‘Jack,’ since the climbing of Mount Washington, was generally credited with being the only peak which still defied all efforts of alpinists.” Indeed, Jack was the last of the Mazamas 16 major peaks to be summitted. When that happened, it concluded an era of mountaineering in the region that had begun 70 years earlier, in 1853, when the first known climbers reached the summit of Mount St. Helens, the Northwest’s first major peak to be scaled.

But the success of the boys of Bend also opened a new era of alpine rock climbing in Central Oregon and their “feats” that the Bend Bulletin considered the last “of their kind,” were hardly so when looked at in other ways. Over the years, other climbers established new routes up both Three Fingered Jack and Mt. Washington. And a variety of people have set out on their own personal quests to reach the frightening summit of Three Fingered Jack. Some stopped with one success. The crazies among us have kept going.

The first women who appear to have climbed Jack were Eleanor Bechin, Mary Ellen Foley, and Mary Conn, who along with four men, reached the peak’s spindly summit on August 18, 1929. None of these climbers appears to have ever been Mazama members. However, just two weeks after them on September 2nd, Mazama members Margaret Lynch and Edith Pierce, along with fellow Mazama

Garry Desiata, and non-member Jane Moffat, made it to the summit. They were guided there by Emil Nordeen. Although not a Mazama, Nordeen had been one of the climbers who composed the second party to reach Three Fingered Jack’s summit in 1925. By the end of the decade, he was a well-known rock climber, Nordic skier, and a member of Bend’s pioneering ski club the Skyliners.