Mountaineering Club Expedition Will Leave Sunday for Canadian Rockies

Not juiey steaks, but 50 concentrated food pills a day will be the menu of eight members of the Mountaineering Club for a week this June on a trip they are preparing to make to the Solkirk Rango in British Columbia on which they plan to test equipment for the Army.

Chosen by the Quartermaster Corps to try out prospective equipment for Alpine troops, the Club members will travel west with a bevy of air mattresses, sleeping bags, tents, and packs to be given the third degree under actual mountain conditions. The Army is sending a regular expodition to Alaska to try out Alpine equipment, and the Mountaineering club, through some of its graduate members who are working with the Quartermaster Corps, offered to help out.

The concentrated food capsules, on which several Army doctors have been living for weeks at a time this winter under normal conditions, supply 5,000 calories a day, and with water, are supposed to give a soldier all the emergency rations he needs if he should be cut off from the regular Army kitchens for days at a time. Never tried out before under strenuous conditions, the Mountaineering Club will live on them for a week under actual climbing conditions.

The Selkirk Range, some 80 or 100 miles southwest of Lake Louise and Bauff, offers some of the best rockclimbing in North America. Unlike the Rockies in this country, the Selkirks are hard rock, not shale, and will not crumble under a pick. Mt. Sir Donald, which the party hopes to climb, towers nearly 11,000 feet and is the highest peak of the range, though there are many nearly as high.

The eight climbers of the club, Mal Miller '43, Andy Kauffman '43, Bill Putnam, '45, Wilson Day '43, Dill Latadi, a Tech member of the club, George Wilbur '44, and Tom Furnas '43 are planning to leave this Sunday. Because of the summer session, the trip is scheduled to be over by June 21, but several of the party plan to go on west to take a try at Mt. Rainter.