New History: Bradford Washburn Museum to Open
By M. John FayheeGolden, Colorado, is known for numerous things, absolutely none of which have to do with mountaineering — this despite the fact that the westernmost of Denver’s suburbs is hard up against the lowest reaches of Colorado’s Front Range, which, in short order, climbs to 14,000-plus feet on the summit of Mt. Evans (home to the highest road in the country), the Continental Divide and many of Colorado’s best-known ski areas.
Yet most people, when they think of Golden at all, think of the city’s most famous landmark: the massive, butt-ugly, Soviet Union-looking Coors Brewery, which, if you’re a left-leaning, pinko, tree-hugging skier/snowboarder/mountain biker/hiker/kayaker, was pretty much all you ever needed to know as you sped by on the Interstate toward recreational nirvana.
In the past decade though, Golden has gone through the same sort of metamorphosis that has defined most of the rest of Colorado. Once considered one of the state’s more aggressively blue-collar municipal enclaves (Golden’s other well-known features being the Grizzly Rose country/Western dance/drinking emporium and the Colorado School of Mines) (and let’s not forget the proximate Rocky Flats nuclear weapons facility), Golden is starting to enjoy the socio-economic fruits of its location. Like most things occurring in urban areas actually worth a shit, the coolest things, like the town’s new whitewater park unwinding alongside Clear Creek, are focused on the downtown area.
To wit: In 1996, the venerable American Alpine Club teamed up with the almost equally venerable Colorado Mountain Club to purchase the former Golden High School. Boarded up for years, the school is a proud building constructed back when architects viewed high schools as civic institutions that a community ought to take design pride in rather than depressing facilities that look more like prisons than places of learning.
The process of acquiring and renovating the school came about circuitously. In the mid-’90s, the 4,000-member American Alpine Club began looking for new digs. Since the 1950s, it had been located amongst the metal mountains of New York City. In 1998, I interviewed then-AAC director Charles Shimanski for a little now-defunct weekly paper called Summit Outdoors, of which I was the editor.
“The AAC has always been based in the East,” Shimanski said. “It made sense in the early days to have the group’s headquarters in the East, because the AAC did a lot of lobbying work with land managers, and the East is where most of the land managers were located. It’s no longer necessary to be located in that part of the country. Several years ago, we began exploring the idea of moving our headquarters to someplace with mountains. We looked at Utah, Washington and Colorado. The list was narrowed to Colorado because Denver had a major international airport.”
The relationship with the 10,000-member Colorado Mountain Club, founded in 1912, was a natural.
“We have a lot of cross-over membership, so we knew they were looking to move West,” said CMC executive director John Juraschek, also interviewed in 1998. “We had outgrown our old office, which was located in a church basement. We were also aggressively looking for a new location.”
The timing was fortuitous. The City of Golden had been working feverishly to revitalize its decidedly moribund and even more decidedly unhip downtown area. The city badly wanted the old high school, which was in a state of severe disrepair, to be renovated and put to use in a manner that benefited the entire community. Serendipity transpired when the mayor of Golden read an Associated Press story (penned by long-time Mountain Gazette writer Cameron Burns) about the AAC’s desire to move west. Calls were made. Connections established. The cosmos did its cosmic duty.
Though the land and building were appraised at more than $2 million, the newly established AAC/CMC partnership scored the school for a mere $100,000 — with several stipulations. The membership had to restore the building to its original splendor, and, whatever came of the facility, it had to be open to the public in such a way that it served as an economic generator for downtown Golden. It was a match made in mountain heaven.
Old Golden High School was rechristened the American Mountaineering Center. More than $4 million was raised for the initial phase of renovation. It is now home to one of the planet’s largest mountaineering libraries, which includes books dating back to — get this — the 1500s, as well as a monster auditorium and, of course, an indoor climbing wall. World-class gatherings of mountaineers take place at the facility (featuring folks like Reinhold Messner and John Roskelly), and apparently the powers-that-be in Golden are tickled pink at how the Center has made the town a world alpine destination.
There has only been one piece missing from the facility’s puzzle: the museum, which, from the get-go, has been slated for the old high school’s gymnasium. Ten years later that final piece of the puzzle is about to be completed. The Bradford Washburn American Mountaineering Museum is set to officially open on Feb. 16. (In addition to the AAC and the CMC, the National Geographic Society is also a partner in the museum.)
The facility, according to Museum Director Niña Johnson, will be 3,000-square-feet, but it will seem much larger.
“Because it’s two stories high, it is a very large facility,” Johnson says. “We plan to focus on all aspects of mountaineering, including history, indigenous cultures, climate change, safety, gear, lore and literature. We will have displays on the Tenth Mountain Division and we will have photographic displays by mountain photographers such as Galen Rowell and Todd Caudle. We have a faux wall that includes glaciers and crevasses. This will not be the type of museum where people come just once. We will have displays rotating several times a year and frequent presentations. Our grand-opening displays will include Jon Waterman’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge exhibit and an exhibit of Inuit art.”
Johnson says there will be a grand opening gala, though specifics were still being ironed out as of happy hour/press time.
Dr. Ed Birnbaum, of the Mountain Institute and a noted expert on indigenous mountain people of the world, is slated to give a talk on sacred mountains. The display centerpiece for the opening weekend will be the famous Schoening ice ax, which is on loan from the Washington State Historical Society.
Here’s the poop, according to Johnson: In 1953, an American team of mountaineers was struck by a storm at 25,000 feet on the slopes of K2, the world’s second-highest mountain. While maneuvering an ill teammate down the precariously steep and icy slope, one of the other climbers lost his footing. In the ensuing entanglement of rope and climber, five men began plunging toward their deaths off the face of the mountain. It was Pete Schoening, the youngest man on the expedition team, who instinctually jammed his ice axe behind a boulder — with the rope wrapped around his hip and the wooden shaft of the axe — and instantaneously stopped five men from hurtling to their deaths. The events of August 1953 have become the classic mountaineering tale and a symbol, for many, of alpine ethics at their best: friendship between climbing partners had prevailed above all other considerations. There are more than 30 people alive today because of “The Belay,” as the act has become known. For more museum info call (303) 996-2763.
