Fred Beckey: Married to the Mountains
by Colin Shanley
A long-awaited message from the Mt. Robson Ranch in British Columbia crackled on Alex Bertulis' radio in Seattle. The weather over the mountain was going to be clear for the next ten days. Bertulis and his climbing partners wanted to make their second attempt to be the first group to summit the ice and snow plastered flanks of Mount Robson. But one of Bertulis' climbing partners, Fred Beckey, was missing.
"I left a message with his girlfriend in Seattle that I was going to climb Mount Robson, thinking he would never be able to make it in time," said Bertulis, a Seattle architect and friend of Beckey's for about 60 years.
When Beckey got the message from his girlfriend in Seattle, he drove from Colorado straight to British Columbia. Along the way, he called climbing partners from phone booths, giving them minutes notice of the upcoming climb. Beckey and his partners arrived barely in time to attempt the ascent.
"A week into our trip, my partners see people coming up the glacier on this unclimbed mountain," Bertulis said. "They asked, 'Who could that be?' I said 'it could only be Fred Beckey.'"
Beckey and Bertulis, along with two other climbers, made the first ascent of Mount Robson in that winter of 1965.
Mount Robson is one of hundreds of Beckey's first ascents.
"Many climbers, after they've done a very good successful ascent, will rest on their laurels," Bertulis said. "Where as Fred, as soon as he's done with one climb, he's immediately talking about the next climb he wants to go on, preferably tomorrow."
For nearly 70 years, Beckey has focused his life on climbing all around the world, especially in the North Cascades. Beckey wrote the definitive climbing guidebooks for the North Cascades and several historical books on Northwest exploration.
The North Cascades mountain range extends from British Columbia to Interstate 90 in Washington state. Interstate 5 boxes the North Cascades in on the west and the Columbia River borders them on the east. The landscape contains more than 1,500 peaks, 700 active glaciers and innumerable lakes and rivers.
When Beckey started climbing in the North Cascades, people sparsely populated the bordering valleys. Native people, trappers, miners and mountaineers had explored the interior, but maps were inaccurate and not much comprehensive history was known. Beckey took an interest in exploring the North Cascades challenging summits and documenting their history.
"Most other people are married and have a family, which adds focus to their life in another direction, but with Fred it's only climbing," Bertulis said. "It's his life and his passion."
In the early 1920s, when he was 2 years old, Beckey's family moved to the Seattle area from Dusseldorf, Germany. At age 13, he wandered up Boulder Peak in the Olympic Mountains, to the worry of his parents, who later put him in the Boy Scouts to learn basic wilderness survival skills.
Eventually, the lure of bigger, snow covered mountains above the tree line landed him with an instruction group called The Mountaineers. They taught he and his younger brother, Helmey, alpine climbing and safety skills. Soon the Beckeys outgrew the bounds of the conservative curriculum and ventured into the unknown mountains that their instructors deemed unclimbable.
"I value the freedom (of climbing) an awful lot," Beckey said. "Climbing unexplored mountains is an accomplishment to me. It's an interesting challenge. It's more of an adventure than following someone else's route. You have to research these mountains - where to go, how to get there, the right equipment, the right amount of food."
Even as Beckey discussed his climbing plans, he was recovering from surgery for a hematoma that resulted from a car crash last spring. Standing about 6 feet tall, he had the disheveled appearance of a stubborn old cowboy.
"I'm trying to take a few months off every summer to go climbing. There's a lot of unexplored places," Beckey said. "There are lots of places that are just as pretty but not as many people go there."
In 1940, a teenage Beckey, with a party of four others, hiked 13.5 miles to Cascade Pass, now one of the most heavily trafficked backcountry areas, and made the first ascent of the mountain they named Forbidden Peak.
Their journey started at Sibley Creek outside the town of Marblemount, Wash. Since then, the Cascade River Road has extended up the valley and Cascade Pass is now a 3.7-mile hike from the parking lot.
"Some places like Cascade Pass now are too close," Beckey said. "The road access and the trail access essentially make them too close."
After climbing many unclimbed peaks in high school, Beckey went to the University of Washington where he earned a degree in business administration. In his spare time, he scaled the walls of the campus' gothic buildings. He also researched The Mountaineers' old publications on mimeographs. With this information and his first hand knowledge, he wrote the first alpine climbing guide to the Cascades and the Olympics. This and the trilogy that followed were called "Beckey's bibles" by eager followers.
"Fred did more than write a guide book, he wrote a history book," said Lowell Skoog, a friend of Beckey's. "He never merchandised the Cascades, he kept them complete and I respect that."
Beckey published his first book through the American Alpine Club in 1949, for a flat fee, and printed about two thousand copies. But he made very little money from it or the later series published by The Mountaineers.
Writing and research helped him develop an interest in cartography, but he did not move to Washington, D.C., where most of the government map-making work was being done. Instead, when he graduated from college, he took a job as a delivery truck driver, to fit with his climbing schedule.
At Snoqualmie pass, Beckey and his friends created new rock climbing techniques that enabled them to safely travel in the mountains. Money was short so they were resourceful. The group scrounged up scrap metal and made pieces they could jam in the rock to protect themselves in case of a fall.
During World War II, Beckey trained for combat in the Alps, but missed most of the action. After the war he returned to his mountaineering.
Beckey's explorations took him across North America and as far away as China and Nepal. In the Himalayas, he used small amounts of gear that enabled him to travel unburdened up unknown peaks well before the mountains became popular.
Beckey might have become as world renowned as Jim Whittaker, who was part of the first American team to summit Everest in 1963, but his independent attitude didn't fit well with the team's expedition style. In that year, 1963, he did 26 first ascents in North America.
As an adviser for the Washington State Board of Geographic Names, Beckey named peaks in the North Cascades such as Phantom Peak, Inspiration and Visiliki Tower, which he named after a Greek woman he loved in the early 1950s.
Beckey said he stays busy in the off-season, utilizing the research talents he developed while writing his climbing guidebooks.
He recently completed a book for the Oregon Historical society about contact with Native American settlements and early exploration in the North Cascades, which will come out at the end of this year.
"I'm trying to portray a sense of history," Beckey said. "Most of this is lost information. Right now I'm working for the Washington state Department of Ecology for about eight months a year. I'm doing a geographic study of the Columbia River."
Today, with more roads and people, traffic in the North Cascades is much heavier than during Beckey's first visits.
Beckey said areas like alpine lakes in the North Cascades are changing. He said the increasing number of visitors could damage the area. While Beckey said he doesn't like regulations, he said he understands that permits might be necessary to protect the environment.
"(Overcrowding) is going to be tough on the environment," he said. "It's going to trample down the meadows and pollute the lakes. It's going to look like a tent city, like they had back in the mining days in the 1900s."
Beckey said the solution to overcrowded areas is creativity. He said he looks for uncommon approaches and peaks. He left some remote mountains out of his climbing guidebooks for future exploration.
Nobody, not even Beckey, has counted all his first ascents since his start in the 1930s. This summer he explored the British Columbian Coast Range where he climbed Rusty, a previously unclimbed peak.
For Beckey, the next adventure is always in the planning.
"If the weather holds, I'm going out somewhere this weekend," he said.
He won't say where he's going, because he doesn't want anyone to be there.
Junior Colin Shanley studies environmental education and fine arts at Western. He has previously been published in Pack and Paddle.
