TV documentary tells the story of team's gruelling B.C. expedition
Adventurers try to replicate couple's climb of mountain with vintage gear
A team of adventurers who set out to recreate a 1926 husband-andwife expedition to B.C.'s “Mystery Mountain” — 4,100-metre-high Mount Waddington — had their own pet name for their destination — Misery Mountain.
Just why becomes apparent 10 minutes into filmmaker Greg Gransden's documentary The Mystery Mountain Project. On the first day, the team's meticulously recreated outdoor gear starts to fall apart just 800 metres into a gruelling 50-kilometre trek up the Homathko River in B.C.'s. Coast Mountain Range. It's pouring rain. The mosquitoes are thick. One trekker's foot is already beginning to blister inside his vintage leather hobnail boots. Nerves are fraying and the team is beginning to splinter.
“That caught me off-guard. I really thought all my challenges would be inward: my own stamina, my own headspace,” said Arnprior's Stuart Rickard, one of eight members of the Mystery Mountain Project.
“I totally missed the point that in a group you need conflict resolution. A good group will start to synergize and things will get easier because you have others around you. That's a perfect world.”
“I wanted to quit on Day 1,” Gransden admits. “I told Bryan (Thompson, expedition leader) I was going to go home, that this just wasn't fun.”
Thompson, a Toronto climber and history buff, conceived the project to recreate the journeys of Don and Phyllis Munday, a legendary B.C. couple who spent a decade exploring the spectacular, isolated country around Mount Waddington, 300 kilometres north of Vancouver at the head of Bute Inlet. Rickard, an electrician and experienced outdoorsman, met Thompson through the Alpine Club of Canada. Rickard signed on to the project even though he wasn't keen on using the Mundays' style of wool clothing, wood-frame packs and hemp ropes.
“To be honest, the vintage gear didn't interest me, but Bryan is infectious,” Rickard said. “He was so passionate about that aspect and making sure that everything was as authentic as possible. He can kind of get you hung up on it.”
The expedition, sponsored in part by the Royal Canadian Geographical Society, took place in July 2018. Gransden's film, completed last summer, began screening on Amazon Prime at the beginning of January.
Part Survivor, part Lord of the Flies, the documentary is an unflinching look at the ordeal as the team inches its way up river, along dead-end trails, over treacherous areas of deadfall and nearly impassable swaths of fiendish Devil's Club underbrush. Each night, the team had to cut trees to use as poles for its canvas tents. There was no lightweight backpacking food in the 1920s, so, like the Mundays, the team lugged bags of flour, blocks of cheese and tins of corned beef with them.
“I learned you can't cut corners,” Rickard said. “At night you'd be setting up the tent and you think, `Oh, I'll just use this thin pole because it's easier to cut or I'll use this piece of groundfall and I won't have to cut anything.' But then in the middle of the night your tent will collapse. There were no shortcuts.”
Gransdsen was not part of the re-enactment team, so he used modern gear. But his pack included more than 10 kilograms of industrial batteries needed to keep his camera gear running for the month-long journey since solar panels wouldn't work in the thick rainforest. Gransden's Gore-Tex and his modern tent were envied by the others, who slept in wet wool clothes, huddled against the omnipresent drone of hungry mosquitoes.
“Greg would say, `Oh I didn't sleep well,' and we'd all be looking over at his tent. I think he realized that he couldn't complain or we'd be all over him,” Rickard said.
The scariest moment of the trip didn't even make it to the documentary. The team was travelling through thick brush, laden with berries, when Rickard encountered a grizzly bear.
“He said, `Hand me that bear spray. We've got a grizzly bear approaching,' ” Gransden said. “I wondered, `Should I grab my camera and start filming or am I going to end up like one of those idiots who gets mauled to death while taking a selfie?' Then I hear Stuart confronting a bear. He said, `OK, Mr. Bear. That's as far as you go!'
“I was completely frozen. I didn't know what to do. And the next thing I hear are these giant footfalls as the bear rushed off into the bush. It was the single most dramatic moment and I completely missed it.”
In the end, the documentary is as much about human dynamics as it is about Thompson's Quixotic quest for the summit of Mount Waddington.
At times, The Mystery Mountain Project feels so raw that it's uncomfortable to watch.
“I think we all have mixed feelings about whether it was a success or not a success, and how do you even measure success on something like that,” Rickard said.
Would he do it again? Rickard says he'd consider it, although he has his own projects he wants to accomplish. As for Gransden, he says Thompson has already recruited him for a followup project on Mount Waddington this summer.
The Mystery Mountain Project is streaming now on Amazon Prime Video.