Background
Don Munday was born and educated in Portage la Prairie and moved to Vancouver with his family in 1909.
Don Munday was born and educated in Portage la Prairie and moved to Vancouver with his family in 1909.
In World War I he served in France with the 47th Battalion. In 1925, while on a trip to Mount Arrowsmith, Vancouver Island, Don and Phyllis Munday spotted what they believed to be a peak taller than Mount Robson, the then accepted tallest peak entirely within British Columbia. In the words of Don Munday "The compass showed the alluring peak stood along a line passing a little east of Bute Inlet and perhaps 150 miles away, where blank spaces on the map left ample room for many nameless mountains." While there is some debate as to whether the peak they saw was indeed Mount Waddington (in fact Don Munday himself observed that the feat is impossible, they almost certainly saw a peak in the Waddington Range, and this led the Mundays to explore the area, and discover the mountain in fact.
Over the next decade, the Mundays mounted several expeditions into the area in an attempt to climb the mountain.
Known to them as "The Mystery Mountain", in 1927 the height was measured at 13,260 feet (by triangulation), and the Canadian Geographic Board gave it the name Mount Waddington after Alfred Waddington who was a proponent of a railway through the Homathko River valley. They reached the lower northwest summit in 1928, deeming the main summit too risky.
1922 Parapet Peak 1922 Isosceles Peak 1923 Blackcomb Peak 1924 Foley Peak 1930 Mount Munday 1931 Sockeye Peak 1936 Silverthrone Mountain 1942 Mount Queen Bess 1946 Reliance Mountain.