“88 Years and one mountain”

The first time I thought about climbing Mount Rainier was after I moved to Seattle in 2000. A recent divorcee, I wanted to start over a lot of things in my life. I was getting into shape again through running and was working towards a goal of running a half marathon and maybe eventually a full marathon.

I trained for and ran the 2001 Seattle Half Marathon, the 2002 Portland Marathon, the 2003 Vancouver, B.C. Marathon and the 2004 Vancouver Half Marathon. During this period, I also undertook my most challenging backpacking yet.  I hiked longer trails and climbed some major peaks like Mount Baker, Mount Shuksan, Mount Adams, Mount St. Helens and others.  I also did a multi-year run of annual trips to the high Sierra Nevada range. I walked up or scrambled up a half dozen peaks above 12,000 ft. I even “speed scrambled” up a 13’er one year in a lightning storm.

You’d think this period of fitness and multiple climbing experiences was the opportune time to attempt Rainier, right? Well, Rainier just didn’t beckon me. It was a combination of factors. First, I only heard that the climb was overcrowded. So much so, the main route was often called a cattle trail. Secondly, I did actually hike solo up to the 10,000 foot level of Camp Muir shortly after moving to Seattle. Seeing all of the climbers camping there with their gear made me feel like a green flatlander and I thought I achieved all I needed to on this mountain.

During this period I became  aware of a picture (and accompanying story) of my grandfather that had supposedly been taken before a successful climb of Rainier in his youth. While I thought that sounded pretty cool and gave me a dose of family pride, I never really knew my grandfather. Plus,  Dad was never one to share much about his own father.  You’d think that would further motivate me to climb the mountain but I didn’t feel  any connection there. Grandpa as some kind of mystery man didn’t hold much intrigue for me because the facts about him seemed a little too difficult to track down. Rather, they may have been difficult for those who knew him to share.

This was made all the more ironic because of the extensive family history I’ve done with my mother’s family. It should’ve been a no-brainer to jump right into who John LeBlond was.

While I continued to backpack and did some minor mountaineering, I pulled away a bit from the outdoors and turned my focus to Seattle and getting other things back on track in my life, like finding a social scene. Hiking was a solitary sport for me and fulfilled my need for a break from the day to day. But, I was getting lonely for new friends and was interested in returning to the dating scene by 2003. At this point though, in the back of my mind, I thought Rainier would be a cool climb when I turned 40. What a way to enter my 40s in style!

I met Kursten in 2004.  The woman who would become my wife and I shared the same love of the outdoors. Interestingly, her outdoors resume included bagging Rainier just a couple of years prior. The mountain had gained her utmost respect. My favorite illustration of her feelings towards Rainier involves her preparation for the birth of our daughter in 2008. In order to keep labor pains in perspective, she brought a reminder of something very physically and emotionally demanding that she succeeded in doing.

She brought Rainier pictures.

After many shared adventures with Kursten –  including a harrowing trip to Alaska’s Brooks Range and several trips into the Cascades and Olympic Mountains – Kursten and I married in 2007 and shortly thereafter Hattie was born. Our son Sam arrived in 2010.

The time away from serious outdoors adventuring also led me to think more about my career path and its limits. I then decided to attain another long-desired goal, my master’s degree. In 2007, I earned my Masters degree in Public Administration from the University of Washington.

All of these events were cause for much joy in my life but also resulted in my outdoor pursuits falling further down on the priority list. When Sam was born, I was 38 and still planned on climbing Rainier when I was 40.  After getting used to the new world order of having two kids, the time was closing in to get in shape and figure who would help me get to the top.

Thinking about Rainier then led to the old trailhead picture. The black and white of Grandpa sat in a plastic memories box in the attic for the last 5 years. I pulled it out one day and started putting some serious interest into the story of Grandpa climbing Rainier.

Did he really do it or was it just some family legend?

Grandpa and his climb

John Knight LeBlond, Sr.

I have few memories of my grandfather. My older sister and I spent some solo time with him and my grandmother in their homes in Ohio and their cabin in Indiana. He was just a quiet man. He died in 1980.

What I do know about Grandpa when the trailhead picture was taken was that he likely had some money to spend on traveling. His family owned a large successful factory in Cincinnati, the “LeBlond Machine Tool Company“.  Grandpa’s father was on the board of directors and Grandpa worked in the factory.

My dad said that when his father talked about the Rainier climb, his dad would also say “And I didn’t do anything else the rest of my life”.  Wow. What a crushing thing to say to your son or anyone else who knew you and your family of 3 kids and wife.  My dad and my aunt also mentioned that at some point in Grandpa’s later years, he had was what was called at the time a “nervous breakdown” and “stayed in bed” for a year.

My grandmother, Elizabeth Kinsey LeBlond, lived for about a decade after Grandpa died. I have nothing but fond memories of the good times I shared with her. “Amie” (French for “friend) as we called her, was the one who really interacted with my sister and me. I now wish I had been old enough to ask her questions about Grandpa. I’m sure she would’ve shared much about him.

The picture

In the early 2000s, shortly after moving to Seattle, I visited Dad in Missouri. I noticed a striking photograph on his bedroom dresser. It was a black and white portrait of seven climbers from a long time ago. One of those climbers was a young John Knight LeBlond, a.k.a Grandpa.

A trailhead somewhere in the 1920s or 30s? Grandpa is third from the right.

John Knight LeBlond, a.k.a. Grandpa

Grandpa told Dad he made it to the top of Rainier.  However, once I started asking questions again about the picture, Dad’s older sister Susan said that she thought it actually was not from Rainier but rather from Pike’s Peak in Colorado, a peak also reachable by car and train. She said her father never made it as far west as Washington.

Now, enter into this mystery The Mountaineers, a long standing outdoors club in Washington. After finding out that some members were also historians, I sent them the picture and asked if they could verify whether the picture was indeed taken at Rainier. A day later I heard from a member of their historical committee, Lowell Skoog, who was convinced that the picture was taken at the Paradise Visitor’s Center on Mount Rainier. Mr. Skoog also said the large guide in the picture was one of only a few taking climbers up the mountain in the 1920s and early 1930s. He was a Swiss-born guide named Hans Führer. What a name! (Dad told me Grandpa said his guide was “Scandinavian or something.”) So well-esteemed a guide Führer was he actually had a part of the mountain named after him, “The Führer Finger”. (Führer was possibly outdone in names but another guide who worked at the time named “Joe Hazzard”).

I know nothing specific about Grandpa’s climb. Other pictures taken in the 1920’s of the mountain show large groups of men and women using gear much seen in the picture. The route the guided climbs used back then has since been wiped out by a rockfall.

I asked Mr. Skoog about if and where summit registers were kept for Mount Rainier, he told me they reside in a library only a mile from my home. All this time, the answer lay waiting for me and my family less than a mile from my home in Seattle.

Sleuthing the mystery

In March 2011, I visited the Special Collections room of the University of Washington library system.  In hand were Grandpa’s picture and the suggestions from the Mountaineers. With help from the great staff, the summit registers from 1917 to 1934 were easily located. I knew that Grandpa’s climb occurred before he married my grandmother in 1934. I was only guessing that he made the climb in his adult years before then.

I started looking.

Almost immediately I came across a signature of someone named “John Knight”. Was this Grandpa? Why would he sign his name without his last name? I bookmarked the page and kept scanning the brown and tattered pages.  Signatures in pencil would not smudge as easily as if they were done in pen. I was getting more and more hopeless as I went through the late 20s and early 30s first. No signature.

Then I went all the way back to 1917 and started working forward in a register that ended in the early 20s. This was the last register to look through for this window of time. I didn’t really think Grandpa climbed Rainier in his teens. As I scanned the signatures from 1917 into the early 1920s with no luck. I thought, “It’s not here. When I’m done I’m going through these one more time. I hope I missed it the first time. Maybe ‘John Knight’ was Grandpa.”

I had another shred of evidence to help me identify Grandpa’s signature. It was a copy of my aunt’s report card in 1943 which he signed. Or did he? It was so neat and perfect that I just figured my grandmother signed it for him.

Aunt Susan's report card (1943)

Scanning through the signatures from the summer of 1923 I finally found what I was looking for.

Mount Rainier summit register, August 2, 1923

On August 2, 1923 there were only three signatures. Paul Rice from Ithaca, New York, Ralph Arthur from Los Angeles, California and John Knight LeBlond from Cincinnati, Ohio.

“You really did it, I’ll be damned!”, I whispered through tears of happiness.

August 2, 1923 struck me as ironic. It was one day less than 21 years to the day before my dad, John Jr., would be born. For Grandpa, I’m sure the thought of being a father someday was one of the furthest things from his mind as he topped Rainier.  Interesting, his signature really was that neat even after such a tiring climb! (His son and grandson didn’t carry on the same penmanship.)

Besides shedding tears of happiness, I was shocked that I actually found a record of this amazing thing my grandfather did 88 years prior. Added to that was the fact that this amazing record had been waiting for me just minutes from where I had lived for the last decade. Kind of unbelievable, right?

Many questions flooded my mind as the magnitude of my discovery took hold. What happened to the other four climbers from the picture? What happened to the mighty Hans Führer? Did Führer stay with one or more disabled climbers, then tell the remaining three that it was ok to go on without him? If Führer made it to the top during other climbs, as I saw repeatedly in the summit registers, he signed the register as “Hans Führer, Swiss Guide”. After Grandpa summited, did he and the other two help Führer bring the other climbers down?

In order to glean further insight on what Grandpa’s climb would’ve been like (short of climbing it myself!), I looked further into Mr. Führer’s story.  Mr. Skoog from The Mountaineers suggested I look into Dee Molenaar’s book, “The Challenge of Rainier”. The book was a jackpot of information.  Hans Führer guided more that 3500 climbers up the peak during the 1920s alone. Führer later worked as a guide in Canada and has several major “first ascents” to his credit in that area of the world.

But what caught my interest even more was a picture in Molenaar’s book of a much older Führer with twins Jim and Lou Whittaker in the early 1950s.  The twin Whittakers are probably the most well known climbers in Washington, if not the United States. They embody the term “living legends” in the outdoors world. Jim was the first American to climb Mount Everest in 1963. Lou founded Rainier Mountaineering, Inc. which has guided clients on the mountain since 1969. I sent separate emails to the now 83 year-old Whittakers in hopes of getting some information about Hans.

Here’s what Jim had to say via email:

“Hans was a nice fellow and treated us new guides like gentleman. He was a popular man and treated both clients and other guides with respect. He had to be a good guide because those alpenstocks (the long poles the climbers were carrying in the picture) weren’t ice axes and not made for a self arrest.”

I spoke with Lou by phone shortly after my email exchange with Jim. Lou said Hans was “tough and competent but an easygoing guy”.  Neither knew what happened to Hans in his later years.

To speak to someone who knew Grandpa’s guide 88 years after the climb was very powerful to me. It felt like speaking to Hans Führer himself.

Now with the family history of Rainier confirmed, I moved on with my planned trip in the summer of 2011.

I recruited two close friends, Jesse Burns and Heather Dowey, who both had mountaineering experience and an interest in climbing Rainier with me. In fact, Jesse had climbed Rainier multiple times as a guide for Alpine Ascents International. Heather, like me, would be attempting Rainier for the first time.

Heather, Jesse and me at our Rainier trailhead (2011)

Enough of my writing.

Watch what happened. After you watch the movies, read on below.

During this journey through mountains and my past, I didn’t have any grand notions that climbing Mount Rainier would bring me any closer to Grandpa. I gained so much respect for the 22 year-old from Cincinnati who did an amazing thing that obviously left an impression on him in his later years. Maybe too much based on the things he said to his kids about his accomplishment.

For me, the familial tie to the mountain served to strengthen my focus on the longer experience of being an engaged father and husband. Without a doubt, Mount Rainier is about personal achievement.  Further, I still like challenging myself outdoors but the experience really doesn’t mean much to me unless I do it with people I care about.

The shared memories last years and years longer than the event that sparked those memories.

In the mountains, together.

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