Moonrise over the Black Buttes, Mount Baker, 1978

As promised via my Facebook page on the weekend, here’s a random Kodachrome image. I made this one on my first climb of Koma Kulshan, AKA Mount Baker, in June, 1978.

After a couple of years in the Kootenays, where my passion for mountaineering was born along with my daughter, I’d recently re-established myself on Canada’s west coast, launching adventures from a bachelor apartment on Robson Street, in Vancouver’s west end. After all, I was a bachelor again.

I joined my new best buddy Tom Hocking, met in the Kootenays, and Aussie Chris Trafford to climb the Coleman Glacier route. The photo records our camp on the lower glacier as the sun sets and the moon rises over the Black Buttes. The bone chilling cold can be seen in Chris’s hunched shoulders. Tom is already ensconced in the tent, wrapped in his “mummy bag,” with his headlamp illuminating the nylon shell.

We’d soon be sleeping, or drifting between fitful dream and the rumble of the moving glacier. Just a few hours later — around 3am, as I recall — we’d be strapping on crampons to begin the summit push.

The photograph was made with a Russian Zenit-E camera mounted on a borrowed tripod. Kodachrome is a very unforgiving transparency film with no latitude for over- or under-exposure. This scene is about as challenging as they get in that regard. It was impossible to expose for the shadows while retaining highlight detail as far as the moon. For this kind of shot, photographers would expose a roll of film of the moon (often with a telephoto lens), then reload the film to shoot the foreground landscape. In-camera Photoshop, if you will.

If I’d had the skill of Ansel Adams, a view camera and a sheet of 8×10 black and white film, perhaps I’d have had my Moonrise over Hernandez. Still, as a memento, it ranks as one of the best souvenirs of my life in the big hills.