Media Release
For immediate release
September 28, 2005
Climber, artist Glen Boles receives 2005 Banff Centre Summit of Excellence Award
During five decades as a climber, while he was making 37 first ascents in the Canadian Rockies and summiting 525 peaks, Glen Boles kept meticulous notes on all his climbs. Written in five-year diaries in tiny, crisp notation, each day received five lines. Boles’s records have since become a resource to other climbers looking for first-hand information on routes, conditions, and history. And now Glen Boles, climber, chronicler, and artist, will receive the 2005 Bill March Summit of Excellence Award from Mountain Culture at The Banff Centre.
Sponsored by Canadian Mountain Holidays and One Step Beyond WorldWide and given annually to an individual who has made a significant contribution to mountain life in the Canadian Rockies, the Summit of Excellence will be presented on November 6, the final night of the Banff Mountain Film Festival.
“Glen Boles is a kind of renaissance mountain man; he’s a climber, an artist, a photographer and a meticulous historian. He claims that the mountains have uplifted him and I believe that most in the mountain community would say that he has, in turn, uplifted them.” says Bernadette McDonald, vice president, Mountain Culture, at The Banff Centre.
An easterner who first came to Alberta in the 1950s with the New Brunswick championship curling team, Boles was hooked from his first climb, at Yamnuska on the eastern edge of the Rockies near Banff. “I was scared to death, but two weeks later I was back, climbing again,” he says. He worked for more than 35 years as a planner and draftsman for the City of Calgary, using most of his spare time to knock off peaks throughout the western Canadian mountain ranges. Climbing with Don Forrest, Gordon Scruggs, and Mike Simpson, they called themselves the Grizzly Group, named for a close encounter with a bear north of Golden, B.C., in 1974.
An avid skier, Boles has long enjoyed cross country skiing, ski mountaineering, and downhill skiing over the years. He spent 13 years as a Canadian Ski Patrol and is now a member of the Ski Friends program at the Lake Louise ski area. As a climber and mountaineer, he and his friends would hike or fly into a base camp and spend a week bagging all the peaks in the area. One of the highlights of his climbing career was a week in the Great Cairn Hut near the base of Sir Sandford in the Selkirks, claiming that peak as well as Pioneer Peak, Adamant, and others in 1979.
After he retired in 1991, Boles decided to combine a love of drawing with his experiences in the mountains, using his expertise in drafting to create exquisite pen and ink drawings of his favorite peaks. Treasured by the mountaineering community, these drawings have become collectors’ items. His artistic palette has since expanded to include watercolour and acrylic painting, and colour and black and white photography. He has also contributed to two books, The Climbers Guide to the Canadian Rockies, and Place Names of the Canadian Alps. A book of his black and white photography will be published in 2006.
“The mountains have uplifted me, and made me less complacent,” he says. “They have given me freedom. I lived in an era when freedom in the Rockies was at its greatest. You could go where you wanted, camp where you wanted, climb what you wanted. I was very lucky.”
Given annually since 1987, the Summit of Excellence Award is named in memory of Calgary climber Bill March, an internationally-respected mountaineer, author and educator. Past recipients of the award include: Craig Richards (2004), Willi Pfisterer (2003), Barry Blanchard (2002), Bob Sandford (2001), Chic Scott (2000), Guy Lacelle (1999), John Martin (1998), Sharon Wood (1997), Tim Auger (1996), Brian Greenwood (1995), Kiwi Gallagher (1994), Roger Vernon (1993), Jon Whyte (1992), Don Forest (1991), Pat Morrow (1990), Hans Gmoser (1989), Jim Davies (1988), and Bruno Engler (1987).
Media Contact
Jill Sawyer
Media and Communications Officer, The Banff Centre
403.762.6475
