Climbing Grants Help More Than Just Their Recipients
The John Lauchlan Memorial Award is Canada’s biggest alpine-climbing grant, having funded trips to Patagonia, Alaska, and the Himalaya for 30 years. Apply for this year’s award by January 31.
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Ian Welsted had been climbing for 10 years before his first trip to the Himalaya. Previously, he had lingered around Canmore, hemmed in by the Canadian Rockies, contenting himself with the loose limestone faces that loomed above town and the occasional big-mountain solo, including a fast ascent of Mount Robson’s Emperor Ridge. Then, in 2006, the alpine maestro Raphael Slawinski invited him to try the then-unclimbed Kunyang Chhish East (7,400m), a radically steep mountain in Pakistan’s Karakoram range.
The Kunyang team was a mixed bunch: a tree planter, a stonemason, a mountain-safety expert, and a physics professor who’d received minor sponsorship for his new-routing efforts. But the Kunyang trip was an unlucky bust. Despite Welsted’s training on virgin Rockies choss, and the hours and weeks of largely mindless labor to save up for the expedition, dysentery sidelined the team 1,000 meters beneath the untouched summit. Welsted wasn’t sure that the cost of such a trip was worth the effort and heartache.
In 2009 Welsted caught a break. He won the prestigious John Lauchlan Memorial Award (JLA), a grant for young Canadians embarking on serious alpine expeditions. His memories of diarrhea and hypoxic hazes were hardly forgotten, but the JLA’s cash advance offset his concerns, so he made plans to attempt Pumari Chhish East (6,900m) in the Karakoram. The trip began and ended with Pumari Chhish East still unclimbed, but, compared to 2006, the expedition was a roaring success. Welsted, Slawinski, and Eamonn Walsh [no relation to author] made a strong attempt on the imposing Southeast Face before illness turned them around. And when Welsted and Slawinski bailed a second time, after seeing that the face had started running with water due to heat, they climbed a steep, ice-streaked face (WI 4 M5) to the summit ridge of Lunda Sar (6,300m), and also made the first ascent of Khani Basa Sar (6,441m) via a moderate ridge.
The 2009 expedition buoyed Welsted’s confidence back at home. “I remember the first time I saw Nanga Parbat (8,126m) I thought it was a cloud. It was so big I couldn’t imagine it actually being a part of the earth,” he says. “So, you see that, and you come back to the Rockies and see the North Face of Mt. Temple (3,544m) and think, ‘Huh. That’s pretty manageable.’” Welsted insists that the international perspective gained from these big expeditions isn’t solely reserved for the JLA-awarded recipients. When those young, stoked climbers return home from the Himalaya, or Alaska, or Baffin Island, they talk to their friends and peers, and everyone benefits from the lessons they learned. Once you have experience hiring porters or planning a month-long expedition, you can share your knowledge with everyone in your orbit. And once you’ve experienced mountains like Nanga Parbat or Cerro Torre, suddenly famed venues like the Stanley Headwall feel much more casual. “I remember going to the Headwall with Maarten van Haeren and Pete Hoang for their first times and they were blown away,” Welsted says. “But now those guys don’t think it’s a huge deal—especially after trying the 3,000 meter South Face of Mt. Logan [on a JLA-funded trip].”
Welsted, who is organizing this year’s JLA selection, appreciates that the JLA rewards climbers who are actually out climbing—not merely the ones with a curated social-media feed. “You can be not a ‘big deal,’ but apply with a strong climbing résumé and get the award,” he says. “I’ve been part of these awarding committees before, and I’ve read some incredible applications and think ‘Who the hell is this person? They’ve been climbing all over the place and I’ve never heard of them.’”
The JLA is granted to applicants with an all-Canadian team who have an alpine objective that is innovative, exploratory, and bold. “Those are core tenets of the JLA,” Welsted says. “It rewards big expeditions; big objectives. A lot of alpine climbers nowadays are good at climbing super-hard things in a day and then going home to their warm bed. But these are just long day trips. A big part of this award is encouraging climbers to dream bigger than their in-a-day routes close to home.”
The John Lauchlan Memorial Award’s application period is open until January 31, 2024. Visit the Alpine Club of Canada’s website for more information.
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