Mountaineering Club Holds Its First Meeting, Opens Interesting Program

Urging that its membership be limited to those seriously interested in actually learning how to scale the highest peaks, the Mountaineering Club held its first meeting of the year last night.

President over by Colin McClaurin '38, secretary of the organization, the officers thrilled the newcomers with spectacular movies of climbing in the White Mountains to outline the various ways to got up a high cliff.

Ken Henderson showed the pictures, filled with scenes of how to got up a mountain while holding on to a tiny crack in a vertical cliff and letting one's feet dangle out over thousands of foot of open space.

Another way to get up, shown in the pictures, is to grab the crack with one's hands, brace with the feet just below the crack, and move if you can. Then when you get to a vertical niche, you just go right on up.

New members were shown another fundamental way to get up a rock--the layback, a rather novel way of lying back against the cliff while holding on to next to nothing, and hitching along like an inchworm.

Colored slides of climbing in the Canadian Rockies near Lake Louise were shown after the movies, and there was discussion on the club's program for the coming year, including use of the hut on Mt. Washington, and the Sunday climbs nearby to start men out on rock-scaling. The first of these expeditions will be next Sunday.

In his speech on the history of the group, Dana Durand said that the Harvard Mountaineering Club is one of the oldest in the country, founded about 15 years ago, and the oldest such college organization. Dartmouth started one a few years age.

It has proved to be a veritable training school for most of the country's best younger climbers, and Durand pointed with pride to the fact that of the eight men who formed an expedition to climb Nanda Devi, highest scaled peak in the world, six were members or former members of the club. The other were from the British Alpine Club.