The Legend of the Ice Man of Mount Begbie

In 1940, an expedition was proposed to clear up the 75 year old mystery story that told of the frozen body of a climber encased inside an icy tomb on the slopes of Mount Begbie, British Columbia.

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Revelstoke Train Station c.1915

Rosamond Stenhouse Stewart (1924-1922), related a story told to her by her father Thomas Livingstone Haig (b.1866), who in the 1890s had been a magistrate in the town of Revelstoke (known in earlier years as Farwell and Second Crossing), in British Columbia. He described where he had been taken by an Indian fur trapper to see the body of a completely preserved man encased within the ice. The increasing thickness was making it difficult to make out details.

There was little written information to substantiate the story except reports from the town of Revelstoke during the 1890s.

Newspaper reports described one version in which a French Canadian fur trader or a Salish Indian, who acted as an advance scout for the Canadian Pacific Railway which built through the area in the 1880s fell into the crevasse. The glacier on Mount Begbie lies approximately 7 miles southwest of Revelstoke. It's on the northeast slop that rises almost 9,000 feet in altitude.

Could this have been a hunter or a prospector, which would justify why he climbed up the dangerous glacier?

The first known ascent was accomplished in 1907, though it's probable there were earlier ascents of Mount Begbie.

The story of the Iceman resurfaced with the opening of the Big  Bend highway in 1940. Newspapers wrote that the Revelstoke Board of Trade was possibly planning an expedition to find the iceman.

Supposedly many mountaineers vowed they had seen the frozen body, and others claimed it was just a tall tale.

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Revelstoke Post Card c.early 1900s

He was described as a man with a powerful build, with black hair receding from a bald spot, and a beard that almost reached his waist. He was wearing a woolen hunters' coat that came to his knees, and an old flintlock rifle lay across his shoulders.

One legend says the man was a French-Canadian prospector, one of three who worked in the area in the 1860s. This report is similar to other stories floated as to the identity of the man trapped in the ice.

According to local historians the story was told by the late J.C. Montgomery, a British Columbia pioneer who at one time was a crew member of the vessel Forty-Nine, bringing gold miners to the Big Bend gold fields. He said the story of the iceman was told by the local natives.

Skeptics pointed out it would too dangerous for anyone, including an Indian to scale the glacier to the top. Early settlers and miners thought of mountain climbing as a waste of time. 

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Revelstoke Winter c.1915

​In 2007, to mark the anniversary of the first recorded climb, a re-enactment was undertaken. They came to the base of the mountain by boat, then encountered heavy snow the same as the original party. Plans to bury a time capsule at the base of the glacier were ruined by the bad weather, however the capsule was buried at a later date.

So is the story of the Iceman of Mount Begbie just a legend, or was there a man trapped in the ice who for some unknown reason scaled the side of the glacier? Could this be a man that fell into the crevasse since prehistoric times like the famous Ötzi, discovered in 1991, who was possibly fleeing from pursuers? Ötzi was believed to have lived between 3350 and 3105 B.C.  His mummified remains were discovered by tourists at an elevation of 10,530 in the Ötztal Alps.

Perhaps one day the glacier at Mount Begbie will give up her dead.

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Mount Begbie and the City of Revelstoke, c.1940s.

However the story of the Iceman is not the only unusual event to occur around Mount Begbie. Strange lights and weird experiences abound  as reported here.

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Jan Hartley was just a teenager when she saw her one and only occurrence of unusual lights in the sky.  It was close to midnight on a New Year’s Eve in the late 1970s and Hartley was walking away from her home on 2nd street.
“I was by myself, going down to [a friend’s] house to meet them outside,” Hartley remembers. “And… I saw a light go over Mount Begbie.” According to Hartley, the light, which originated in the south before breaking west over the mountain, had no definable shape or color. “It was…a bright light – wasn’t moving very fast but wasn’t blinking either,” she says.  “I just remember staring at it and going, ‘That is a really weird light.’  It was only a few seconds then it was gone.”

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​Standing in the backyard of his daughter’s home, situated in the 800 block of Second Street West, Carol Thompson’s father Harry Hartley was the first of the family to see something strange in the shadow of Mount Begbie.
“It was a sunny day in the summer time, sometime in the late 1970s” remembers Carol.  “I’d say it happened around noon or one o clock, because my parents were over for lunch.”
“My dad was leaning on the fence facing the river,” she goes on to say.  “My husband Ken and I were in lawn chairs facing him.  All of a sudden dad says, ‘Look at that!’”
Following Hartley’s gaze the family observed, across the Columbia River below Begbie’s triple-peak, what appeared to be sunshine gleaming off metal.
The object was not visible in a traditional sense – the Thompson family could not see exactly what was catching the sun; only an outline of the mysterious object was visible.  In fact, Thompson believes what she saw was only a portion of the thing’s true size, a piece roughly ten feet in length.
“I don’t think it was the whole picture,” she remembers.  “Just a glimpse.  I can’t help thinking something caught the sun that wasn’t supposed to.  A ten foot long section of something curved and going so fast…like a bullet.  It went up along the river and past Mount Begbie School.  It didn’t make a sound.  Then it disappeared.”
To date Thompson has never seen the object, or anything like it, again.

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​One winter night in 2004, Alan Grace and Christine Helm were on their way home to the house they shared on Highway 1 when both saw what they described as “a trail of blue sparks” traveling east to west across the night sky.  Grace remembers, “They were bright, neon blue and passed over our car before disappearing behind Mount Begbie. It was hovering there... it was big."
Another report of unusual activity over Mount Begbie comes from Mark Ronson, a heavy-duty mechanic and amateur astronomer who knows his way around the night sky.
“In my first years [after taking up astronomy] I was out every night when it was clear. I got to know the sky, all the stars, the constellations and all the movements,” he says.  “It was so neat…not many people know that’s Jupiter, that’s Sirius, and so on – they think it’s bright lights in the sky and I wanted to go further.”
On a spring afternoon sometime in the 1990s, Ronson would see more than he imagined.
“I was walking my dog down in the industrial park…by the motocross track.  The sun was going down and I happened to glance up right above the ridge of Mount Begbie,” he remembers.  “I saw an object there. I put the binoculars on it and saw it was a brown rectangular shape.  It was hovering there…it was big…and then all of a sudden it took off and vanished in a point of light, heading west.”
Unsure of what he had seen, the first thing Ronson did was to rule out conventional explanations.
“It could have been the Hubble — that’s why I went home and checked,” he says.  “But the Hubble wasn’t in the sky that day, and neither was the Spacelab.”
Even if they had been present, Ronson has a hard time believing either object would be capable of moving at the speed of the object he had seen.
“That thing took off and it was gone — I saw it go from rectangular to a point of light within a second.”

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