The Mount Temple Disaster

Mount Temple (3,543 m) is a mountain in Banff National Park of the Canadian Rockies of Alberta. It's located in the Bow River Valley between Paradise Creek and Moraine Creek. Mount Temple is the highest peak in the Lake Louise area. It was named by George Mercer Dawson in 1884 after Sir Richard Temple who visited the Canadian Rockies that same year. Mount Temple was the first peak to be climbed in the Canadian segment of the Rocky Mountains in 1894.
In July 1955, a group of eleven unsupervised youths from the Wilderness Camp of Philadelphia were climbing the tourist route on the Southwest Ridge of Mount Temple.
They were clad only in light clothing and there was only one ice axe in the group. Some of them wore baseball cleats for better friction. They were tied together at 1.5 metre intervals on a manilla rope. The temperature was 24.5ºC and the route was snow covered.
At 4 pm, they reached 2,750 metres, and gathered together to assess the situation as several small avalanches had fallen near them. The most experienced member of the party, Tony Woodfield,
urged them to turn back and they began to descend.
A few minutes later, a large avalanche hurtled toward the group. Tony Woodfield dug his axe in and the rope went taut and then broke. Ten boys, ages 12 to 16 were swept 200 meters down the snowfield and through a bottleneck, smashing into rocks along the way.
Before the day was over, seven of them would be dead in one of the worst avalanche accidents in Parks Canada history.
#mounttemple #climbingdisaster #banffnationalpark
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