They were the Nunataks

The granite spires in British Columbia's Purcell Mountains had a different name first. Surveyors mapped the country in the late 1800s, and climbers knew the towers only as the Nunataks.

A gold rush that wasn't

Prospectors poured into Bugaboo Falls in the 1890s and staked their claims. What they pulled out was mostly pyrite and galena, not gold.

Bugaboo meant dead end

Miners used "bugaboo" for a worthless prospect, and the word stuck to the whole area. Nobody knows which prospector said it first; the record names no one.

Kain arrives, twice

Conrad Kain first came in 1910 with surveyor A.O. Wheeler and mountaineer T.G. Longstaff. He returned in 1916 on Albert MacCarthy's expedition, aiming at a tower still called "No. 3 Peak".

The gendarme blocks the ridge

On Aug. 29, 1916, near the summit, a steep rock tower stopped the party cold. Kain spent about two hours working out a way past it. Edward Feuz had tried before and been turned back by weather.

Six feet of nothing

Kain was in nailed boots on hemp rope, with no protection worth the name. The face gave him no hold and no footing for six feet to the next crack, and the ice axe was useless.

“he was forced to depend entirely upon himself with no certainty as to what position he might find himself in”

A veritable bugaboo

Watching Kain's fingers creep in and out of sight, the party had their name. MacCarthy wrote it up in the 1917 Canadian Alpine Journal, where the peak appears in print as Bugaboo Spire for the first time.

“I'll make it”

His hardest Canadian climb

Kain rated Bugaboo Spire above Mount Robson, which he had first climbed in 1913. He went on to more than 60 first ascents, and the other numbered peaks got their names as later climbers mapped the range.