by Allison Albright

At the American Alpine Club Library, we’re very fortunate to have quite a few collections of photographs of climbing and mountaineering from the early 20th century. One of these, a collection of roughly 3000 photographic negatives dating from 1900 to about 1930, has been digitized in its entirety and made available to everyone.

**It’s a great feeling to complete a project.**

We’re excited to be able to increase access to this collection through digitization, which also reduces wear and tear on the original negatives and adds an additional layer of preservation.

This collection of photos belonged to Andrew J. Gilmour, a dermatologist living and working in New York who was an avid climber and active member of the American Alpine Club during the 1920s and 1930s. He did a number of ascents in the Alps, the Canadian Rockies, the Cascades and the Western U.S., as well as Wales and the Lake District in the UK. His photos show us a lot about climbing at that time, the techniques, equipment, conditions and the people and places involved. It also provides us with a glimpse of what the world was like about 100 years ago.

We’ve gathered some of our favorite images from this collection in the slideshows below. Enjoy!

To see more of these images, check out our Andrew J. Gilmour album on Flickr.

Climbing and Mountaineering

Photos of climbing parties and mountaineering expeditions from about 1910 to the mid 1930’s.

Climbers on Odaray Mountain

Climbers in a crack near the top of Mumm Peak, Canada

A climber on Mount Sir Donald in Glacier National Park of Canada. Note the use of hobnail boots.

A woman makes her way up a rock face

A climber in the Alps

Three men pause for refreshment while climbing in the Alps. The Matterhorn in the background.

A man making his way through a crevasse on Robson Glacier, Mount Robson

Pausing to admire the view in the Selkirks

A woman roped off and ready to climb

A mountaineer crossing on the ice

A mountaineer on a glacier

A group of climbers setting out for Mount Robson from an Alpine Club of Canada camp

A woman resting against a climbing companion

Climbing group on Resplendent Mountain in Canada

Climbing party before setting out for Mount Rainier, Washington

Climbing group on Mount Odaray

Equipment

Hobnail boots, hemp rope, canvas and silk tents and men’s and women’s climbing attire.

Hemp rope, ice axes and other gear spread out on a glacial table.

Hemp rope, ice axes and glacier goggles. These two climbers are also wearing puttees (leg wraps).

A. J. Gilmour models his sleeping bag

Ice axes and women’s pre-1925 climbing attire.

A striped canvas tent

Men’s climbing outfit.

Tricouni nails - a type of hobnails developed in the 1920’s

Hobnailed boots

Hobnails

Summits

Men and women on top

A woman summits in the Alps

The summit of Mount Sir Donald

A climbing group summiting Victoria Ridge in Alberta.

Men and women on the summit of Mount Victoria

The summit of Mount Edith Cavell

Men and women celebrating at the summit of Resplendent Mountain

A man and woman celebrating on a summit.

Men and women on the summit

Camps and Huts

Huge camps for gatherings with the Alpine Club of Canada, tents and lean-tos in the woods, Swiss Alpine Club huts - many of which are still in use today.

Dossenhütte and Gstellihorn in the background in the Swiss Alps

The steps of an Alpine hut

A hut in the Alps

A lean-to in the forest

Camp in the woods - it was common to use small trees and logs as tent poles

Camp near Cathedral Peak - the large open tent is a mess tent

A trapper’s cabin

Campers gathering in a mess tent

A camp in the Canadian Rockies

A mess tent and a large group of people around a campfire under US and Canadian flags

Morning in camp

Travel

It was harder in those days to get to some of these remote locations. There were far fewer roads, almost no highways and air travel was still in its infancy. Trains, ships and horses were commonly used.

Miss Candace Hewitt arrives in Jasper to climb Resplendent Mountain.

Before the invention of traffic lights, you might have seen men with a sign at busy intersections

The climbing party fording a river on horses, there were fewer roads and cars were less reliable, so travel by horse was common

On horseback in the Tonquin Valley, Canada

Collision between a train and a car

In the first decades of the 20th century, highways were still very new. Most long distance travel was done by train.

A photo taken from the roof of a train car

Early automobiles

Travel by airplane was uncommon before the 1930’s and only a few very wealthy people flew commercially. Most international travel was done by ship.

A crowd on Pier 59 in New York City where ships arrived or left

A cable ferry taking packages across a river

Life and Times

The world has changed a lot since 1900 - these photos illustrate just a few of the differences.

The Margate Cutting in the UK - ladies in corsets and with parasols were the norm

Turn of the last century men’s fashion

Bathing machines at Margate Beach - these carts were rolled into the sea with horses and served to allow women to preserve their modesty when swimming

No cars drive on this road, instead it’s only horse-drawn carriages at the Margate clock tower.

A man winding an armature

An epic moustache photographed through a huge spool of wire

Sledding accident

The Exposition Universelle of 1900 in Paris - very similar to a World’s Fair, but art nouveau themed.

A barbecue in Cody Wyoming

As we’ve mentioned before, women climbed in their dresses.

Places

Some gorgeous photos of some famous locations as they used to be.

A view of the Matterhorn from the Kulmhotel Gornergrat prior to observatories being installed.

Zermatt, Switzerland and the Matterhorn

The Matterhorn, photographed from the North

Mont Blanc from the Aosta Valley, Italy

A hotel in the Alps

Mount Robson

Totem poles at Hazelton, British Columbia

Old Faithful, Yellowstone WY

Check out our Flickr account for more! Or, to view all the photos, head to our archival c ollections site and scroll down to Collection Tree.

Suggested reading:

For details of mountaineering and climbing in the first decades of the 20th century, check out the handbook Mountain Craft by Geoffrey Winthrop Young.

For more about some of the places depicted in these photos:
Mount Rainier a Climbing Guide by Mike Gauthier
Cascades Rock the 160 Best Multipitch Climbs of all Grades by Blake Herrington
The North Cascades by William Dietrich
Mont Blanc the Finest Routes: rock, snow, ice and mixed by Philippe Batoux
Mont Blanc: 5 routes to the summit by Franȯis Damilano
Swiss Rock Granite Bregaglia: a selected rock climbing guide by Chris Mellor
Canadian Rock select climbs of the west by Kevin McLane
Sport climbs in the Canadian Rockies by John Marin and Jon Jones
Mixed Climbs in the Canadian Rockies by Sean Isaac

For more information about the person who took these photos, you can read Gilmour’s obituary in the American Alpine Journal.

by Allison Albright

Nitrate film base was developed in the 1880s and was the first plasticized film base available commercially. It enabled photographers to take pictures under more diverse conditions, and its flexibility and low cost was partially responsible for making photography affordable and accessible to amateur consumers as well as professionals. It was widely used from the 1890s until the 1950s.

An album of nitrate negatives circa 1900

Nitrate negatives also happen to be mildly toxic and somewhat volatile. Because the material is the same chemical composition as cellulose nitrate (also known as flash paper or guncotton), which is used in munitions and explosives, it is incredibly flammable and prone to auto-ignition. It was also used in motion picture film in the early 20th century and was responsible for several movie theater fires during that era.

Below are some negatives in the early stages of deterioration.

As if the danger of combustion wasn’t enough, nitrate negatives also emit harmful nitric acid gas as they deteriorate, meaning that we need to use safety precautions such as respirators and latex gloves when handling these negatives.

HNO3 + 2 H2SO4 ⇌ NO2+ + H3O+ + 2HSO4

Nitric acid is considered a highly corrosive mineral acid.

Nitrate negatives usually deteriorate in just a few decades, making them an extremely unstable storage medium. As they deteriorate, the image begins to fade and the negative turns soft and gooey, causing it to weld itself to whatever it’s stored with, resulting in the loss of the image.

A clump of badly deteriorated negatives stuck together forever

When good negatives go bad - a negative in the process of becoming goo

Like most archival collections containing materials created from about 1890 to the early 1950s, the AAC’s collection includes some nitrate film negatives. For most of their lives, these negatives have been stored in a cold, temperature controlled area. We’re digitizing these negatives in order to capture the images and make them accessible to the public before we put them in deep freeze. The best way to preserve and store nitrate negatives for the long term is to freeze them to slow the process of deterioration and minimize the risk that they’ll start a fire.

Because of the unstable nature of nitrate negatives, some deterioration is to be expected. However, the vast majority of this collection is still in good shape. We've included a few selections below. Eventually, we’ll make all the images from our nitrate negatives available.

These photographs are taken from the collection of Andrew James Gilmour (1871-1941), an AAC member whose surviving photographs help inform our knowledge of the history of climbing and what the sport was like in the early 20th century.

The Andrew J. Gilmour Collection