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To mark his fortieth birthday, Vancouver-based Trevor Marc Hughes, a former CBC Radio Vancouver arts reporter, decided to undertake a solo exploration of northwestern B.C. on his Kawasaki KLR motorcycle. He visited such places as Stewart, B.C. and its close neighbour, Hyder, Alaska, and the totems of the village of Gitanyow and the Stikine River. He self-published his memoir Nearly 40 on the 37: Triumph and Trepidation on the Stewart-Cassiar Highway (Last Autograph Press, 2013) with an endorsement from anthropologist Wade Davis.
As follow-up, Hughes' Zero Avenue to Peace Park: Confidence and Collapse on the 49th Parallel is a motorcycle journey west into the Kootenays and beyond the Rockies, following close to the US border from Zero Avenue in Surrey to Waterton-Glacier International Peace Park. He's joined for part of the journey by an American friend who rides alongside, adding an American viewpoint to the narrative. "Like Nearly 40 on the 37," he says, "it's a humorous and honest travel story that will take readers through major national parks and fading silver boom towns, sites of natural disaster and places of renewal."
Hughes' third book is Capturing the Summit: Hamilton Mack Laing and the Mount Logan Expedition of 1925 (Ronsdale Press $24.95).
BOOKS:
Nearly 40 on the 37: Triumph and Trepidation on the Stewart-Cassiar Highway (Last Autograph Press, 2013) $18.95 978-0-9918590-0-9
Zero Avenue to Peace Park: Confidence and Collapse on the 49th Parallel (Last Autograph Press, 2016) $18.95 978-0-9918590-3-0
Capturing the Summit: Hamilton Mack Laing and the Mount Logan Expedition of 1925 (Ronsdale Press, 2023) $24.95 9781553806806
Edited:
Riding the Continent (Ronsdale Press, 2019) $19.95 9781553805564. Written by Hamilton Mack Laing
[BCBW 2023]
UNEASY RIDER: The transcontinental diaries of Hamilton Mack Laing finally see the light of day
by Alan Twigg
Hamilton Mack Laing is one of those great British Columbian authors who most people have still never heard of.
Way back in 1985, when Richard Mackie published his biography of the multi-faceted, Comox-based naturalist Hamilton Mack Laing (1883-1982), two paragraphs were devoted to Laing’s account of his motorcycle journey across the United States in 1915.
More than a century later, motorcycle essayist Trevor Hughes has retrieved and edited Laing’s unpublished memoir as Riding the Continent (Ronsdale $19.95).
When we think of motorcycle journeys, Peter Fonda in Easy Rider comes to mind, or perhaps the nine-month journey of Che Guevara at age 23 that resulted in the Spanish biopic, The Motorcycle Diaries. Both adventures were fueled by a thirst for freedom and rebellion.
Having been raised on a farm south of Winnipeg, where his father had first settled in a tent in 1872, Mack Laing’s thirst for the open road was fueled by a love of natural history. As a child, he was the self-appointed “official pest warden” or “game warden” of his parents’ farm, trapping mice, pocket gophers and Franklin’s ground squirrels. At eleven, he was using a rifle to shoot hawks preying on the chickens. He started school in 1888 at age was five and graduated as a qualified teacher in 1900, at only seventeen.
Having bought his first camera, a 4 x 5 plate glass Kodak, in 1906, hoping to become a nature photographer, he sold his first story, “The End of the Trail,” to the New York Tribune in 1907, and first studied natural history at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York, in 1910. Laing was soon selling articles illustrated with his own photos to American magazines including Field and Stream, Country Life in America, and Tall Timber.
He later described his three years at the Pratt, “painting nudes by day and whacking a typewriter by night,” as three of the most pleasant years of a long life. During his New York summers, Mack set up a camp at Oak Lake, Manitoba, at a place he called “Heart’s Desire” where he constructed a dark room made of prairie sod to develop and print his glass plate negatives. He sold so many stories that he was able to buy his first Harley-Davidson motorcycle in the spring of 1914.
On completing his studies in 1915, Mack was in a quandary. Canada was now in the depths of war. Most of Laing’s Canadian friends, contemporaries, and former students would join up and some would die, but the United States would remain neutral until 1917. His parents had moved to Oregon to be close to sister.
“I came to the Y in my way of life,” he later recalled. “Over the left branch was the sign Art. Over the right way there was a very different sign! Natural History – which really meant writing.
It didn’t need a judge of the Supreme Court to decide which branch I would take. Art, though I loved it, had let me down. The other branch had paid my board and tuition for the year and bought me another Harley Davidson motorbike.”
So it was in the spring of 1915 he devised a plan to ride to San Francisco on his second, unflappable “Barking Betsy,” before heading north to Portland. By the time Laing submitted his manuscript to Harley-Davidson for their consideration, in a 1922 reply it was considered a "most interesting narrative" but it was deemed too long to run in serial form in their Enthusiast magazine.
Hamilton Mack Laing would return to Canada in 1917 to join the Royal Flying Corps. From 1920 to 1940, Laing became a natural history specialist with the Smithsonian Institution, the National Museum of Canada, the Dominion Parks Branch and the Carnegie Museum. In 1930, he became the first Park Naturalist ever hired by the Dominion Parks Branch (now Parks Canada) in Jasper and Banff.
*
“After Richard Mackie suggested I read Hamilton Mack's Laing's memoir,” says Trevor Hughes, “I quickly surmised that if I liked reading this tale of what it was like to ride a motorcycle over a hundred years ago, prior to GPS and Google Street View—or, heck, even before reliable maps or roads—then surely others might be equally charmed.
“What fascinated me through Laing's account, is that, no matter how bad the roads got during his journey, and believe me they got bad, he was always taking notes about the surrounding bird life and natural landscape. He was a very meticulous and disciplined individual. He knew he was going to write something of significance after completing the journey.
“I think readers will enjoy Laing's description of the birds he met. He had an ability to give character to every bird he met, to describe their songs with enthusiasm. He always made a point of picking a camping spot at the end of a long riding day near a tree or at a spot that would give him the best opportunities to look and listen.
“After setting out solo from Brooklyn, he would also meet fellow appreciators of the open road, and people in communities from Pennsylvania to Nevada. From his unexpected friendships, we get a sense of how motorcyclists found camaraderie through their mutual love of travel on two wheels.
“Although he set out to have close contact with the bird life he loved to write about, Riding the Continent becomes much more than that. It’s a vivid, candid and light-hearted description of the United States before its entry into the first World War. Now it serves us as a vivid time capsule of 1915, as seen from a motorcycle—as an uneasy rider.”
978-1-55380-556-4
[BCBW 2019]
Capturing the Summit: Hamilton Mack Laing and the Mount Logan Expedition of 1925 by Trevor Marc Hughes (Ronsdale Press)
Review by Mark Forsythe
In 2019 an image of hundreds of climbers ascending Mount Everest went viral. In recent decades Everest has become a hot tourist attraction that lures underqualified climbers who are ushered to the summit by commercial guides. When storms or avalanches strike, the risks are extreme: eleven climbers, from that photo of hundreds, died on the overcrowded mountain.
Wind the clock back one century. Mount Logan, Canada’s highest peak (19,550 feet or 5,959 metres), had yet to be climbed. Its giant massif is situated in southwestern Yukon hard against the US border; a remote, icy fortress that crowns the highest coastal range on the planet. It took two years of planning, fundraising and caching of supplies for the first successful ascent, completed in 1925. That spring, an international team of Canadian, American and British mountaineers boarded ship in Seattle, sailed north, travelled inland by train to McCarthy, Alaska, and then by foot and pack horse to the Chitina River Valley. This was just the start.
Sponsored by the Alpine Club of Canada, the expedition included Hamilton “Mack” Laing, a naturalist, hunter and writer living in Comox. Raised in Manitoba, he became a school teacher and principal, trained as an artist, and served with the Royal Flying Corps during the First World War. He was a crack shot who collected animal specimens for the Smithsonian Institution and National Museum of Canada; he also wrote more than 700 natural history articles for North American magazines and journals.
Always up for adventure, Laing rode a Harley-Davidson motorcycle named “Barking Betsy” across the continental US in 1915. He also learned how to travel light.
Trevor Marc Hughes shares a passion for motorcycles and has written about his own two-wheeled adventures in BC. It led him to edit a previously unpublished Mack Laing motorcycle memoir about his 1915 journey called, Riding the Continent (Ronsdale, 2019). Hughes’ new book, Capturing the Summit: Hamilton Mack Laing and the Mount Logan Expedition of 1925, draws from multiple diaries, journal reports and a groundbreaking National Museum of Canada film that Laing helped shoot on a hand-cranked camera. The Conquest of Mount Logan can be watched on YouTube.
When Laing joined the Mount Logan expedition as naturalist and cinematographer in his early 40s, he was already a wilderness veteran. Contracted by the Department of Mines to collect flora and fauna specimens for the National Museum of Canada, his diaries of the time are filled with highly detailed accounts of shooting, or “securing,” birds and mammals. Most anything that moved was shot. Current sensibilities make this hard to grasp, but in 1925 the Mount Logan region was a virtually unknown biological zone. Orders from the Department of Mines were clear: “Use your time and resources to get as much scientific material as possible.”
Hughes traces Laing’s hunting prowess to life on the Manitoba family farm. “It was with a sense of pride that he took up a rifle at the age of eleven, given the responsibility of pest warden. He learned early on that by getting to know those creatures he hunted, he would be most effective in maintaining this responsibility on the farm. His role as naturalist began with the rifle.”
Once the mountaineering team reached the “edge of timber” at Hubrick’s Camp, Laing handed filming duties off to Allen Carpe, an accomplished mountaineer with the American Alpine Club. Laing stayed behind to collect his specimens and observe animal behaviour, suffering daily windstorms and relentless mosquitoes. His diaries also document individual bird sightings and their calls, including the olive-sided flycatcher with its memorable, “Quick, three beers.” (A bird guidebook is useful to have at hand.) He explored the Chitina Valley area, tracked grizzly bears and mountain sheep, and was on alert for golden eagles known to snatch lambs from nearby slopes.
Laing’s expanding menagerie included Arctic three-toed woodpeckers, porcupines, ground squirrels, pikas and various plants, including orchids in multiple hues. He endeavoured to make friends with a family of young ravens that woke him each morning by sharing offal from skinned animals (the mother already having been collected as a specimen). He oversaw food caches for the returning mountaineers and colourfully called this rearguard role “the tail of the kite.”
Capturing The Summit deftly weaves two compelling stories: Laing’s solo mission as naturalist and the mountaineering team’s attempt on Mount Logan. Archival photos and still images from The Conquest of Mount Logan film help lift the narrative from the valley floor to soaring peaks. We see climbers decked out in multiple layers of wool, snow glasses (to prevent blindness) and snowshoes as they lug heavy pack sacks and drag tons of supplies on sleds to the advance camps. Along the way, the team stab willow wands into the snow every 100 feet to help find their way back, especially difficult during whiteouts. “Thus, the willow wand method was already proving to be beneficial to the mountaineers for finding their way, like the trail of breadcrumbs in Hansel and Gretel,” writes Hughes. It was exhausting work, made all the more difficult as the mountaineers moved into rarefied air. (Oxygen tanks weren’t commonly used at this time.)
Tracing a safe route to the summit and back took 44 days of living on ice and snow. Air mattresses and eiderdown bedrolls helped make it possible. A maze of towering ice blocks and deadly crevasses were constant obstacles as the mountaineers tested the limits of endurance by huddling in tents or burrowing into snow banks to wait out storms, and to endure extreme cold, frostbite, sunburn, and hallucinations. Deputy leader H.F. Lambert of the Geodetic Survey of Canada later described the experience as, “the test of our lives.”
The six mountaineers successfully scaled Mount Logan under extreme conditions, and all returned alive. Careful planning, teamwork and indomitable grit underscored this exceptional achievement, long before satellite phones, high-tech gear and Gore-Tex. Mack Laing’s contributions at the “tail of the kite” as naturalist and cinematographer are notable, too, and later put him on a path to becoming a dedicated conservationist who stalked animals with a camera rather than a rifle. Hughes explores this evolution in the afterword. Laing’s legacy lives on in Comox, where his seaside property is now preserved as Mack Laing
Nature Park.
The book is dedicated to Richard Mackie, author of the definitive biography on Hamilton Mack Laing, Hunter-Naturalist (Sono Nis, 1986), and to the late Ron Hatch, publisher at Ronsdale Press, who encouraged Trevor Marc Hughes in his writing projects. 9781553806806
Mark Forsythe is author/co-author of four books and a former host of CBC Radio’s BC Almanac.
[BCBW 2023]
As follow-up, Hughes' Zero Avenue to Peace Park: Confidence and Collapse on the 49th Parallel is a motorcycle journey west into the Kootenays and beyond the Rockies, following close to the US border from Zero Avenue in Surrey to Waterton-Glacier International Peace Park. He's joined for part of the journey by an American friend who rides alongside, adding an American viewpoint to the narrative. "Like Nearly 40 on the 37," he says, "it's a humorous and honest travel story that will take readers through major national parks and fading silver boom towns, sites of natural disaster and places of renewal."
Hughes' third book is Capturing the Summit: Hamilton Mack Laing and the Mount Logan Expedition of 1925 (Ronsdale Press $24.95).
BOOKS:
Nearly 40 on the 37: Triumph and Trepidation on the Stewart-Cassiar Highway (Last Autograph Press, 2013) $18.95 978-0-9918590-0-9
Zero Avenue to Peace Park: Confidence and Collapse on the 49th Parallel (Last Autograph Press, 2016) $18.95 978-0-9918590-3-0
Capturing the Summit: Hamilton Mack Laing and the Mount Logan Expedition of 1925 (Ronsdale Press, 2023) $24.95 9781553806806
Edited:
Riding the Continent (Ronsdale Press, 2019) $19.95 9781553805564. Written by Hamilton Mack Laing
[BCBW 2023]
REVIEW
UNEASY RIDER: The transcontinental diaries of Hamilton Mack Laing finally see the light of day
by Alan Twigg
Hamilton Mack Laing is one of those great British Columbian authors who most people have still never heard of.
Way back in 1985, when Richard Mackie published his biography of the multi-faceted, Comox-based naturalist Hamilton Mack Laing (1883-1982), two paragraphs were devoted to Laing’s account of his motorcycle journey across the United States in 1915.
More than a century later, motorcycle essayist Trevor Hughes has retrieved and edited Laing’s unpublished memoir as Riding the Continent (Ronsdale $19.95).
When we think of motorcycle journeys, Peter Fonda in Easy Rider comes to mind, or perhaps the nine-month journey of Che Guevara at age 23 that resulted in the Spanish biopic, The Motorcycle Diaries. Both adventures were fueled by a thirst for freedom and rebellion.
Having been raised on a farm south of Winnipeg, where his father had first settled in a tent in 1872, Mack Laing’s thirst for the open road was fueled by a love of natural history. As a child, he was the self-appointed “official pest warden” or “game warden” of his parents’ farm, trapping mice, pocket gophers and Franklin’s ground squirrels. At eleven, he was using a rifle to shoot hawks preying on the chickens. He started school in 1888 at age was five and graduated as a qualified teacher in 1900, at only seventeen.
Having bought his first camera, a 4 x 5 plate glass Kodak, in 1906, hoping to become a nature photographer, he sold his first story, “The End of the Trail,” to the New York Tribune in 1907, and first studied natural history at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York, in 1910. Laing was soon selling articles illustrated with his own photos to American magazines including Field and Stream, Country Life in America, and Tall Timber.
He later described his three years at the Pratt, “painting nudes by day and whacking a typewriter by night,” as three of the most pleasant years of a long life. During his New York summers, Mack set up a camp at Oak Lake, Manitoba, at a place he called “Heart’s Desire” where he constructed a dark room made of prairie sod to develop and print his glass plate negatives. He sold so many stories that he was able to buy his first Harley-Davidson motorcycle in the spring of 1914.
On completing his studies in 1915, Mack was in a quandary. Canada was now in the depths of war. Most of Laing’s Canadian friends, contemporaries, and former students would join up and some would die, but the United States would remain neutral until 1917. His parents had moved to Oregon to be close to sister.
“I came to the Y in my way of life,” he later recalled. “Over the left branch was the sign Art. Over the right way there was a very different sign! Natural History – which really meant writing.
It didn’t need a judge of the Supreme Court to decide which branch I would take. Art, though I loved it, had let me down. The other branch had paid my board and tuition for the year and bought me another Harley Davidson motorbike.”
So it was in the spring of 1915 he devised a plan to ride to San Francisco on his second, unflappable “Barking Betsy,” before heading north to Portland. By the time Laing submitted his manuscript to Harley-Davidson for their consideration, in a 1922 reply it was considered a "most interesting narrative" but it was deemed too long to run in serial form in their Enthusiast magazine.
Hamilton Mack Laing would return to Canada in 1917 to join the Royal Flying Corps. From 1920 to 1940, Laing became a natural history specialist with the Smithsonian Institution, the National Museum of Canada, the Dominion Parks Branch and the Carnegie Museum. In 1930, he became the first Park Naturalist ever hired by the Dominion Parks Branch (now Parks Canada) in Jasper and Banff.
*
“After Richard Mackie suggested I read Hamilton Mack's Laing's memoir,” says Trevor Hughes, “I quickly surmised that if I liked reading this tale of what it was like to ride a motorcycle over a hundred years ago, prior to GPS and Google Street View—or, heck, even before reliable maps or roads—then surely others might be equally charmed.
“What fascinated me through Laing's account, is that, no matter how bad the roads got during his journey, and believe me they got bad, he was always taking notes about the surrounding bird life and natural landscape. He was a very meticulous and disciplined individual. He knew he was going to write something of significance after completing the journey.
“I think readers will enjoy Laing's description of the birds he met. He had an ability to give character to every bird he met, to describe their songs with enthusiasm. He always made a point of picking a camping spot at the end of a long riding day near a tree or at a spot that would give him the best opportunities to look and listen.
“After setting out solo from Brooklyn, he would also meet fellow appreciators of the open road, and people in communities from Pennsylvania to Nevada. From his unexpected friendships, we get a sense of how motorcyclists found camaraderie through their mutual love of travel on two wheels.
“Although he set out to have close contact with the bird life he loved to write about, Riding the Continent becomes much more than that. It’s a vivid, candid and light-hearted description of the United States before its entry into the first World War. Now it serves us as a vivid time capsule of 1915, as seen from a motorcycle—as an uneasy rider.”
978-1-55380-556-4
[BCBW 2019]
Capturing the Summit: Hamilton Mack Laing and the Mount Logan Expedition of 1925 by Trevor Marc Hughes (Ronsdale Press)
Review by Mark Forsythe
In 2019 an image of hundreds of climbers ascending Mount Everest went viral. In recent decades Everest has become a hot tourist attraction that lures underqualified climbers who are ushered to the summit by commercial guides. When storms or avalanches strike, the risks are extreme: eleven climbers, from that photo of hundreds, died on the overcrowded mountain.
Wind the clock back one century. Mount Logan, Canada’s highest peak (19,550 feet or 5,959 metres), had yet to be climbed. Its giant massif is situated in southwestern Yukon hard against the US border; a remote, icy fortress that crowns the highest coastal range on the planet. It took two years of planning, fundraising and caching of supplies for the first successful ascent, completed in 1925. That spring, an international team of Canadian, American and British mountaineers boarded ship in Seattle, sailed north, travelled inland by train to McCarthy, Alaska, and then by foot and pack horse to the Chitina River Valley. This was just the start.
Sponsored by the Alpine Club of Canada, the expedition included Hamilton “Mack” Laing, a naturalist, hunter and writer living in Comox. Raised in Manitoba, he became a school teacher and principal, trained as an artist, and served with the Royal Flying Corps during the First World War. He was a crack shot who collected animal specimens for the Smithsonian Institution and National Museum of Canada; he also wrote more than 700 natural history articles for North American magazines and journals.
Always up for adventure, Laing rode a Harley-Davidson motorcycle named “Barking Betsy” across the continental US in 1915. He also learned how to travel light.
Trevor Marc Hughes shares a passion for motorcycles and has written about his own two-wheeled adventures in BC. It led him to edit a previously unpublished Mack Laing motorcycle memoir about his 1915 journey called, Riding the Continent (Ronsdale, 2019). Hughes’ new book, Capturing the Summit: Hamilton Mack Laing and the Mount Logan Expedition of 1925, draws from multiple diaries, journal reports and a groundbreaking National Museum of Canada film that Laing helped shoot on a hand-cranked camera. The Conquest of Mount Logan can be watched on YouTube.
When Laing joined the Mount Logan expedition as naturalist and cinematographer in his early 40s, he was already a wilderness veteran. Contracted by the Department of Mines to collect flora and fauna specimens for the National Museum of Canada, his diaries of the time are filled with highly detailed accounts of shooting, or “securing,” birds and mammals. Most anything that moved was shot. Current sensibilities make this hard to grasp, but in 1925 the Mount Logan region was a virtually unknown biological zone. Orders from the Department of Mines were clear: “Use your time and resources to get as much scientific material as possible.”
Hughes traces Laing’s hunting prowess to life on the Manitoba family farm. “It was with a sense of pride that he took up a rifle at the age of eleven, given the responsibility of pest warden. He learned early on that by getting to know those creatures he hunted, he would be most effective in maintaining this responsibility on the farm. His role as naturalist began with the rifle.”
Once the mountaineering team reached the “edge of timber” at Hubrick’s Camp, Laing handed filming duties off to Allen Carpe, an accomplished mountaineer with the American Alpine Club. Laing stayed behind to collect his specimens and observe animal behaviour, suffering daily windstorms and relentless mosquitoes. His diaries also document individual bird sightings and their calls, including the olive-sided flycatcher with its memorable, “Quick, three beers.” (A bird guidebook is useful to have at hand.) He explored the Chitina Valley area, tracked grizzly bears and mountain sheep, and was on alert for golden eagles known to snatch lambs from nearby slopes.
Laing’s expanding menagerie included Arctic three-toed woodpeckers, porcupines, ground squirrels, pikas and various plants, including orchids in multiple hues. He endeavoured to make friends with a family of young ravens that woke him each morning by sharing offal from skinned animals (the mother already having been collected as a specimen). He oversaw food caches for the returning mountaineers and colourfully called this rearguard role “the tail of the kite.”
Capturing The Summit deftly weaves two compelling stories: Laing’s solo mission as naturalist and the mountaineering team’s attempt on Mount Logan. Archival photos and still images from The Conquest of Mount Logan film help lift the narrative from the valley floor to soaring peaks. We see climbers decked out in multiple layers of wool, snow glasses (to prevent blindness) and snowshoes as they lug heavy pack sacks and drag tons of supplies on sleds to the advance camps. Along the way, the team stab willow wands into the snow every 100 feet to help find their way back, especially difficult during whiteouts. “Thus, the willow wand method was already proving to be beneficial to the mountaineers for finding their way, like the trail of breadcrumbs in Hansel and Gretel,” writes Hughes. It was exhausting work, made all the more difficult as the mountaineers moved into rarefied air. (Oxygen tanks weren’t commonly used at this time.)
Tracing a safe route to the summit and back took 44 days of living on ice and snow. Air mattresses and eiderdown bedrolls helped make it possible. A maze of towering ice blocks and deadly crevasses were constant obstacles as the mountaineers tested the limits of endurance by huddling in tents or burrowing into snow banks to wait out storms, and to endure extreme cold, frostbite, sunburn, and hallucinations. Deputy leader H.F. Lambert of the Geodetic Survey of Canada later described the experience as, “the test of our lives.”
The six mountaineers successfully scaled Mount Logan under extreme conditions, and all returned alive. Careful planning, teamwork and indomitable grit underscored this exceptional achievement, long before satellite phones, high-tech gear and Gore-Tex. Mack Laing’s contributions at the “tail of the kite” as naturalist and cinematographer are notable, too, and later put him on a path to becoming a dedicated conservationist who stalked animals with a camera rather than a rifle. Hughes explores this evolution in the afterword. Laing’s legacy lives on in Comox, where his seaside property is now preserved as Mack Laing
Nature Park.
The book is dedicated to Richard Mackie, author of the definitive biography on Hamilton Mack Laing, Hunter-Naturalist (Sono Nis, 1986), and to the late Ron Hatch, publisher at Ronsdale Press, who encouraged Trevor Marc Hughes in his writing projects. 9781553806806
Mark Forsythe is author/co-author of four books and a former host of CBC Radio’s BC Almanac.
[BCBW 2023]
