Climb the mountains and get their good tidings.
John Muir (p. 277)
The Canadian mountaineering tradition has its layered origins in the role of the CPR and Swiss Guides, and Edward Feuz Jr. (1884-1981) was, without much doubt, one of the most significant Swiss Guides of 1st generation Canadian mountaineering. The beauty and joy of Donna Stephen’s biography of Feuz Jr. is the way she intricately threads together both Feuz Jr.’s compelling mountaineering life and her journey of sorts with Feuz and his wife. This means Edward Feuz Jr. is both a biography of Feuz but also an autobiography of sorts of Stephen’s.
Edward Feuz Jr. is both a companion book and yet takes deeper dives into the Swiss Guide ethos than the earlier, The Guiding Spirit (1986) by Andrew Kauffman and William Putnam. The focus, of course, of Stephen’s biography of Feuz Jr. means such a biographical and focused approach is inevitable. Many of the 1st generation guides are aptly mentioned, some more legends than others in Canadian mountaineering culture. But the evocative beauty of this biography is the way Stephen’s not only highlights Feuz Jr.’s multiple 1st ascents, significant guiding skills and legendary status but also his personal, private, family and unique personality. Stephen’s had access to this side of Feuz Jr. given the fact her family for decades had a maturing and ripe relationship with the Swiss Guides but mostly with Edward and his wife, Martha.
The history of the Swiss Edelweiss Village (a heritage site but threatened by developers) in Golden is told in tender detail and the tensions between many of the Swiss Guides and the CPR is equally recounted in a candid manner. The ample collection of photographs in the book of Feuz Jr. and friends (including many with Donna Stephen’s, friends and family) make for a generous and inviting approach to balance the engaging textual approach.
I quite enjoyed the bounty of a book for many reasons. I lived in Switzerland from 1972-1974 in the Alps and spent much of my time near Interlaken (where the Feuz family is from) and have trekked most of the trails and done many of the peaks Stephen’s mentions and Feuz Jr. led trips to. Many of the mountaineering legends in the Canadian Rockies such as Bruno Engler, Lizzie Rummel, Georgia Engelhard, Conrad Kain and Sepp Renner/Ruthie Oltmann (see photo with Sepp/Ruthie on a trip I led to Assiniboine in 2013) etc have whispered much mountain lore and wisdom to my soul. I have also spent time at the Swiss Edelweiss Village in Golden and chatted with Jean Feuz Vaughan when she was alive (she kindly invited my wife, Karin and I, to spend an evening in the standard and much decorated Feuz mountaineering home).
There is an obvious sense, as the book inches towards its inevitable end, Edwards’s wife has died and Edward, increasingly so, is alone and lonely that Donna and her sister become not only Edward’s daughters but “Edward’s Girls”—a touching and telling tale of lives knit together through the enchantment of the mountains.
There are many reasons for a pleasurable read or browse of Edward Feuz Jr., but there can be no doubt it is very much a story about enchantment and the enchanting world of mountaineering culture and mountains, Edward Feuz Jr. a true guide into such a reality.
