One summer day a few decades back, Werner Himmelsbach headed on a solo hike up Singing Pass to Russet Lake.
When he arrived at the small hut near the alpine lake’s shores where he planned to spend the night, he found it already occupied by a pair of young couples. “Somehow or another I felt I wasn’t very welcome, you know, but I couldn't hike back home again,” he recalled in his lilting German accent, during a 2015 oral history interview with the Whistler Museum. “But at the front right hand side, there was a little cavity underneath the cabin.” He grabbed his sleeping bag and mat and crawled underneath.
Werner woke up early and headed inside the cabin, where he quietly made his breakfast and signed his name in the hut’s visitor book before climbing up Oboe Ridge and eventually back down to the valley.
There, he found the two couples from the hut parked nearby. “This one gentleman came over and said, ‘Is this your name on the hut?'" Werner remembered.
To that young man's chagrin, it was.
"He said, 'I apologize that you had to sleep underneath,’” Werner recalled with a laugh.
The distinctive cabin Werner always called the Russet Lake Hut was better known to most as the Himmelsbach Hut. It’s one of several backcountry structures the ever-humble Werner helped build as a member of the British Columbia Mountaineering Club (BCMC), easily recognizable throughout the Sea to Sky by their curved take on the A-frame shape that came to be known as the Gothic Arch.
The Himmelsbach Hut stood proudly beside Russet Lake from 1968 until a few years ago, a few metres downhill from where the spacious, state-of-the-art Kees and Claire Memorial Hut stands today. The first of three such huts planned for the iconic Spearhead Traverse opened in September 2019, carrying on Himmelsbach’s vision of a hut-to-hut route that would allow backcountry adventurers to travel deeper into the Coast Mountains.
Where most of the backpackers visiting the Kees and Claire Hut today carry ultralight camping gear, satellite communicators, and beacons in the winter, Werner was one of the last remaining trailblazers from a generation that helped shape British Columbia's mountaineering community from the ground up, at a time when venturing up to higher elevations was a far bigger feat.
The longtime Whistler local died peacefully at home, on his own terms and surrounded by his family on June 16, four days after heading up Whistler Mountain for one last visit to its peak. He was 91.
At Tuesday, July 4’s council meeting, Whistler Councillor Cathy Jewett recalled her visit with Werner shortly before his passing. From high-stakes wilderness rescues to mountaineering trips with renowned crews, “Some of the stories that I heard from him are legendary,” she said.
Jewett added, “He was definitely a pioneer in the mountains here, and a very interesting person to be able to speak to and to listen to his stories.”
HIGHLY-SKILLED WORKER
Werner grew up in southwestern Germany, in a town called Baden-Baden near the Black Forest and the French Border.
“He was 14 at the end of the war and he wanted to leave Germany,” his daughter Sherillynne Himmelsbach explained. So, in the mid-1950s, when Werner was in his early-20s, “he caught a boat to Montreal, got on a train in Montreal and showed up at the train station in Vancouver with, I think he said, $67. He didn't know anybody and he didn't know any English.”
He soon met his wife, Marie, who introduced him to Vancouver’s fast-growing climbing community. He joined the BCMC, leaning deeper into the passion for climbing he started honing first as a teen in Germany, and later as a young adult in the Swiss Alps. In the Lower Mainland, “We had a heck of a good time,” Werner told the museum, “because we had the whole coastlines to ourselves to do hiking and so on.” However, that freedom to chase new routes led to a few accidents in Vancouver’s local mountains. Werner put the high-elevation rescue skills he learned in Europe to good use, helping found a fledgling Mountain Rescue Group that would serve as the basis for today's North Shore Rescue. He came to B.C. armed “with an expertise that they didn't have in Canada that time,” Sherillynne said.
It was a BCMC friend, Don MacLaurin, who tipped Werner off about the last remaining lot available to lease on Alta Lake Road. A ski resort was due to open on the other side of the lake the next year. Werner drove his young family to Whistler for the first time in December 1965, to the piece of land where he eventually built a cabin and would later buy. “Spent the first Christmas up here, and every Christmas since then,” he said in 2015.
Werner trained as a high-end cabinet and furniture maker in Germany, but ended up working most of his career in Vancouver's construction industry when those trades didn’t prove to be quite as lucrative in Vancouver. They did, however, equip Werner with a set of skills that would prove to be priceless to his backcountry hut-building efforts.
HUT LIFE
In the mid-‘60s, the BCMC’s bank account was fuller than usual after selling off a pair of cabins on Grouse and Seymour mountains. Werner had the idea to use those funds to build a series of new huts in the Coastal range.
“Dad came from an area where mountain huts were very common, and it was a very common thing to hike from hut-to-hut in …. the German Alps and Swiss Alps,” said Sherillynne. “He just thought it would be a natural thing to have it here, so people could hike beyond where they could go for a weekend, and then they would have a shelter so they wouldn't be in a tent while they hiked the peaks around that area. I think it's kind of neat that people sort of saw the value in that and carried it forward.”
He helped conceive the design for the Gothic Arch structure, featuring curved, glue-laminated walls that could withstand the region's heavy coastal snow load. He even made test models to scale. Russet Lake, then a solid day's hike from the valley, seemed to be a good spot for one.
Sherillynne recalls those cabins being built in her family's Burnaby backyard. “He’d prefab them, take them down and put them up,” she explained.
But the Himmelsbach Hut construction at Russet Lake didn’t exactly go to plan when it began in 1967. The crew was caught in a fall snowstorm. The first load carried up in a forestry helicopter made it just fine, but the second load of materials came crashing down somewhere over Whistler Mountain’s slopes. So, Werner and his BCMC mates hiked in, salvaged whatever lumber they could, and bushwhacked their way back up to the Russet Lake build site. They managed to complete the build in 1968.
Werner and his colleagues would go on to apply the same design to the Wedgemount Lake, Mountain Lake, and Wendy Thompson Huts across the Sea to Sky corridor, plus the Plummer Hut in the Waddington Range.
Following the construction of the Kees and Claire Hut near Russet Lake, BC Parks disassembled the Himmelsbach Hut and flew it up Mount Sproatt, on the west side of Whistler's valley, where it was rebuilt at the top of Into The Mystic trail.
“He was really happy to find out that it was being relocated and had a new purpose in life,” Sherillynne said.
ASCENDING STATUS
Werner is as revered in the mountaineering community for his impressive roster of ascents as he is for his more tangible contributions to the backcountry.
He led the first ascent by an all-Canadian party up Denali, then known as Mount McKinley, in Alaska in 1961, the same year his son Dwayne was born. At 6,190 metres above sea level, it’s the highest peak in North America.
Werner recalled encountering -38 degree C temperatures on Denali that May, resulting in two of his four group members losing nearly all of their toes to frostbite.
He was also a member of the Alpine Club of Canada's legendary Centennial expedition to the Yukon in 1967, joining about 60 of the country’s most skilled mountaineers in the St. Elias Range, home to Canada’s highest peak, Mount Logan. Werner led a small group up Mount Newfoundland that July, but a summit cornice prompted the climbers to turn around about 18 metres from the peak.
“I remember him saying something about, ‘Only the fact that we are home with our families proves that was the right decision to make,’” his daughter recalled. “When you're up there, there's a lot of adrenaline and a lot of drive to try and get to the peak, and it's often harder to turn around.”
To date, that summit has never been climbed, said Sherillynne.
LEAVING A LEGACY, EVEN IN HIS LATER YEARS
Closer to home, Werner was known for being among the first skiers on Whistler Mountain every morning. “If he wasn't first in the ski lift lineup, or going up at the very beginning of the day, it wasn't worth going,” Sherillynne explained.
He was a proud season pass holder every winter since Whistler opened for business, clocking more than 100 days on the slopes some years. That feat got easier after he retired to the resort full-time in 1987.
He was involved in the ski racing community, helping prep courses and participating in the Dave Murray ski camps. He continued enjoying those solo hikes well into his 80s, even as they started getting slower and shorter. His favourite hike in the last year or two was a walk up the Lost Lake trails, according to his daughter.
Still, ever a thrill seeker, Werner celebrated his 90th birthday almost two years ago by soaring down the Sasquatch Zipline, and was due to mark his 91st with a paragliding trip last summer, until his co-pilot was injured in an ATV accident.
Asked how she thinks her dad might like to be remembered by the community, “He’d probably say he wouldn't want to be,” said Sherillynn with a laugh.
“But I guess it would be as a role model for people to get out and use the mountains to overcome their adversity—when they've come from bad places, that they can find solitude in the mountains,” she continued.
“Certainly, it was his saviour in life to be able to go to the mountains.”
