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Disbelief: the first ascent of Ha Ling Peak, By Jerry Auld

Canmore-based Jerry Auld is one of Canada’s foremost mountain fiction writers who recently penned a piece on the first ascent of Ha Ling Peak in the Canadian Rockies.

Our new online column called “Portrait of a Mountain” focuses on the climbing history of different Canadian peaks every week. Our first peak was Ha Ling, the most westward summit of the Ehagy Nakoda Range, which sparked more of a conversation about the name than the climbing.

Jerry Auld contacted Gripped shortly after the piece was published with information on Ha Ling. It has long been known that Ha Ling was named in honour of the first man to climb it in 1896 after he accepted a bet to do it, but little else was known.

Auld had always wondered what day of the week Ha Ling climbed the 2,407-metre mountain above Canmore. He assumed it was on a Sunday, the day of rest, but his curiosity led him to discover something very different, it was climbed on a Thursday.

Auld explained, “Ha Ling came from Hunan province, which is very mountainous. The east, south and west sides of the province are surrounded by mountains and hills, such as the Wuling Mountains to the northwest, the Xuefeng Mountains to the west, the Nanling Mountains to the south, and the Luoxiao Mountains to the east.

“And then I found out that the date in October corresponded to the ninth day of the ninth month of the Chinese lunar calender. Since nine is a masculine number, heavy in the ‘yang’ energy, this date was auspicious for an abundance of energy, and was the so-called double-yang festival. There is an old legend in Hunan that the festival celebrates the occasion that a monster appeared in the province in pre-history and was wreaking devastation.

“A hero told everyone to climb to the top of a nearby peak for safety until he was able to dispatch the monster. So, ever after, on the double-yang festival, young men would climb mountains to commemorate the feat. This was an old tradition that came over to Canada with the Chinese workers, and that is what Ha Ling was doing. It wasn’t the bet that started the whole deal, but the fact that the whites couldn’t believe he was going to do such an asinine thing (in the eyes of the whites, anyway).

“Ha Ling said, ‘Sure I’m gonna climb it. We do it all the time, ya wanna bet?’ And off he went. Anyway, it is interesting to me that some of the deeper history of this mountain wasn’t recorded since it was only written by the white observers at the time,who probably did not understand the Chinese traditions and, in fact, despised the Chinese as inferior. But in a bigger way, there is a real possibility that the act of mountain climbing in Canmore might have had some origins in far off China. Best we not lose that part of our history.”

In keeping with the spirit of Auld’s research, we present to you his story that first appeared in the 2014 Canadian Alpine Journal.

Disbelief: the first ascent of Ha Ling Peak

By Jerry Auld

We were digging for gold that morning the Chinese man came running up past us. This was autumn time and we’d been working that hole for the length of that forgettable summer. Eighteen- ninety-six. Down the broad valley the blunt steel of human progress had burnt past ten years previous and now there was just the smoldering stumps and ash piles and the hard sooty work of rending the black coal from the tunneled ground and smelting the cooling iron of promise into something resembling hope and even just sustenance. Even the Indians didn’t sit their ponies and watch the engines puff into the siding like they once did.

There was no gold there and we knew that months before but there’s a way to tell yourself that and a way to tell your partner that and another way to convince that intermediate thought between standing up on your shovel and throwing it down for good. An hour lost is often a year lost. But finally late October those ways all gathered up into one way and we surrendered and headed down before the snows came for good and in time for the Chinese holiday. It was a warm one with a clean sky and the rock face above us hazy from the fires along the line.

Sven with his big arms and his big hands was slapping Olaf on the back and grinning though he had barely spoken that last month like he was at a loss to do something if he had no pick or shovel or haul-line in his paws. Rarely does such a friendship need words; it is a solitude opposite from the pain of loneliness. Olaf pushed him away, laughing. Go hit Bjoern. He wouldn’t hit me.

We were quitting the western apron of the mountain above the Canmore mines and packing into the town proper to get washed up and enjoy the surprises the Chinese always seemed to have: good food and abundant food like they had tapped a food seam underneath their cookhouse that led right back through the world to their distant orient. And under the crisp stars that evening maybe fireworks. But the ones we imagined were not much compared to what was coming.

With the snow we would down tools and slink back to hold our hats over our missing shirt buttons and take whatever work the company-bosses would give us. They always needed lumber so I was looking at a winter felling trees and stacking them on the frozen Bow ready for the spring float to the Calgary mills. It was the end of our freedom that year after working like madmen picking away at the rocks hoping for a turn of colour, a little touch of yellow to that flat grey of the limestone. But there was no gold.

We had our camp squirreled into our packs and found there wasn’t much there either when out of the green below came little Ha Ling running up like he had a bear at his ass. Aron and Olaf were off-balance and shock-still, perfectly exhibiting the quick reactions needed to survive in the mines or the forest. We watched him and his bright yellow neckerchief prance up into the grey slabs and barely heard him. His breath was so thin and on his feet were the woolen canvas-soled slippers most of them wore. But up he went, right up into the big bowl above us like he was a
goat. It’s the thin mosquitoes that bite the worse.

This was the wager Olaf reminded us. The one bantered back and forth in the Canmore Hotel for the last month and raised and countered repeatedly. The previous Sunday when we’d gone down to church and bread and sat and ate soft chunks of it with black hands we heard the town’s news and how a Chinese cook had bet a summer’s wages on a mountain. Ling was a cook and mostly for the other Chinamen so we didn’t know if he was any good but he had yang to spare. I never knew him well but from what I saw and what I heard he never backed down from nothing never. That’s not the same as being belligerent, mind you. He was quiet and subservient to the whites and he, like most of his ilk, would just bear the ridicule and threats until a horse race or dog fight claimed the attention of their present abuser.

At least the Mounted Police were there then bringing some civility to the proceedings. Yet we should have known something was coming not just because the size of the bet but by the festival. We clocked our days on the sun which in turn set the timetable that governed the whistle at the mine house. The Chinese were on a moon calendar. And that October the moon was looming behind the serrated eastern horizon like God’s own locomotive coming round the mountain.

It was the ninth month according to the Chinese and nine is a yang number. And that day – that October 22 – that was the ninth day of that ninth lunar month. Very yang. Too much yang, Ha Ling would say. A muscular day. A dangerous day. There would be no working in the mines, not for any money.

For us it was just the time we ended our wildcat mining. But we knew this was a big day as it was every year. The Chinese were not citizens but they carried their country with them in their stories and those were good stories. They told us that thousands of years ago in China a monster came to a mountain valley bringing disease and death. There was a man named Huan Jing who told his townsfolk to go hide safe on a tall hill while he battled and overcame the monster. On the anniversary of that day, the day of too much yang, too much male energy, to protect against danger, people climbed mountains. It was called the Chongyang festival, the Double Yang, and in Yangshuo among the high steep hills where the British and French have waged the Opium Wars for the last few generations and where most of the displaced coolie labour like Ha Ling comes from, there they tell us that it’s not just popular to climb mountains, but to race to their tops; winners get to wear a wreath made of yellow dogwood, which the Chinese call Zhu yu. Why yellow I asked Ling. Yellow is earth. Yellow a colour of freedom, from cares, he said. He had cares.

They worked for the railway making a dollar a day before being charged for food and shelter. The bosses paid me twice that and moved my camp for me. They got all the tough jobs, the dangerous ones. They were cheap and hard and reliable. Look down this valley at the scar of the right-of-way branded through the scrub pines, it’s six-hundred miles until tidewater and every mile was 3000 ties and every tie laid through the Rockies a Chinese gravestone.

That foreman that made the bet knows that fifty dollars is more than the Chinese can scrape together as a group. But this happens, of course, at the barrelhouse. When the days were too hot and the streams dried out, we had to hike farther back down to Canmore to haul our water. It’s nothing from there to walk the few miles more around the mine works and across the narrow gauge and the spur line trestle to the Waverly for whiskey. Early in the afternoon the Chinese were sometimes there, playing dominos or checkers with white and black stones they’d washed
in the Bow river and drinking beer. It’s fine and quiet for a man to sit. No music or girls back then – there was the school teachers or an assistant to the mine superintendent – not much else at that time, so you can see how things get pent up. When the mine would let out, in would pour the problems.

Within a few beers the Chinese would be pushed out, hassled for their chairs. Sometimes I would stand up from watching their games and stand in the way. But they didn’t push me. I looked down and grinned. Bjoern? means bear. Don’t think I ever hit many men in my time in the mountains, didn’t need to. Most men are cowards when confronted, but a word spoken is a stone thrown – you can’t get neither back. Sometime in there that summer a claim was made by one of the Foremen that he could beat anyone to the top of the mountain. Empty barrels are the noisiest. How that bet got tossed around I have no idea, but as we started down that last October morning up went little Ha Ling, in his slippers, tip-toeing up out of the trees and onto the flat slabs of grey limestone and past us with a smile that was all animal, the way you think a hound is grinning when really they’re just panting after a fight. We hollered and goaded him on, but in truth our noise died down as he dodged up into the big bowl above us that no one thought could be climbed and soon we turned and came to town.

Ling almost beat us there, passing us on the trestle bridge without his neckerchief and running like he forgot to stamp his timecard. Five-and-a-half hours round. It would be hard to believe he had been to the top if I hadn’t seen him myself, so I understand the how the English were whipped into a lather. When God brings treasure, the Devil bring heirs, they say. The festival was well under way, and the fun on the street Townside out front of the Canmore Hotel and Waverly’s was just getting on. That’s Ha Ling’s Peak someone yelled, goading the Foreman. No way was he paying out on the word of a coolie. So the next morning someone grabbed an unused section flag from the railway division office and pushed Ling to the front and off he and the Foreman and his pals go, hiking up Canmore Creek to see. Took them a good eight hours to get up there resting on every step like mountain goats on a hot day. We watched from the Mountain House next to the station, over in Mineside, with the glasses the station master had, his good German Zeiss spotting scope, while the Chinese brought us juniper wine from their bunkhouse which was more like a spirit of turpentine. And when we saw the exhausted group finally reach the top and unfurl the big scarlet banner as they said they would if they found proof a cheer went up and the mine superintendant kicked the ground and shook his whiskers and said, Well I didn’t believe it but that is the Chinaman’s Peak. Through the glass we could see the Foreman start to argue but there was no mistaking the bright yellow neckerchief flashing between their grasping fists.

We all bellowed with laughter. We’ve all seen those before. Ling dyes them from nightshade and moon flower and thornapple. They bleach out in the sun or tatter from under the sharp limestone chunks pinning them at summits. They all made a fuss as if Ha Ling’s Peak was the first. Hard to say but my own bet is probably there’s not many summits in this whole valley that hasn’t seen one of those flapping at its top, one time or another.

Looking up at the north face of Ha Ling. Photo Paul Zizka
Looking up at the north face of Ha Ling. Photo Paul Zizka

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