The Numbers Man: David Jones
And yet it was Jones’s father who helped launch his son’s adventure career, albeit unintentionally. “When I was 13,” Jones says, “I really wanted to go to the Seattle World’s Fair, and I kept bugging my father. He got fed up and finally said, ‘Well, why don’t you goddamn walk?’” So Jones took that as permission to go. He couldn’t find anyone to walk with him, but a friend agreed to bike, and they rode their little three-speed Touring Archer bikes all the way from Revelstoke to Seattle, camping along the route. “There were certainly a lot of people in Revelstoke who thought my parents were nuts, but I just thought I was really fortunate.”
The next year, Jones headed out on his bike again, this time riding with a friend from Revelstoke to Edmonton, then down to the Crowsnest Pass in southern Alberta before turning home again. Despite being ridiculed as one of the least athletic kids at school, Jones excelled at these endurance fests. “Give me a bike, or just let me out to run, and I could go all day. It was nothing for us to get on our bikes and ride 70 kilometres up to Rogers Pass and back that night.”
And then Jones found climbing. Like a lot of climbers at the time, he and his friend Bruce Haggerstone taught themselves, going out with nothing more than an instruction book and some dubious gear, somehow surviving—but never, Jones insists, by the skin of their teeth. From the beginning, Jones has had a knack for the technical problem-solving side of climbing, being quickly able to read terrain, sort out gear, and keep a cool head. According to a long-time friend and partner, the very talented West Coast climber Greg Foweraker, Jones has always been “a master of research, and of understatement,” two stabilizing forces that balance the kind of dark drives that have proven perilous in other climbers who come from difficult backgrounds. “I know Dave has some scar tissue,” says Foweraker, “but it just doesn’t show up the way it does in some other people. He’s not at all crazy. Instead, you’ll never find anyone who’s safer and more stable in the mountains.”
Jones’s office has a number of climbing photos hanging on the walls. One of the most dramatic shows a mountaineer delicately balanced on a razor’s edge of snow, with exposure dropping off into thousands of metres of shadows. When I ask Jones about it, he chuckles. “Oh yeah,” he says, “I look at that now, and I can’t believe we actually did that. That was waaay out there.”
The picture was taken partway up the Warbler Ridge on Mount Logan’s mammoth South Face. Jones and four friends completed the first, and only, ascent of the long and difficult line in 27 days in 1977. Frank Baumann, a member of the Warbler team, wrote that the conditions on the ridge were so bad that they could reduce a climber to “an exhausted blithering idiot after six metres of progress.” But not Jones. Fred Thiessen, a member of that team, said that although it was terrifying up there, he never once saw Jones get rattled. “He got us all up the mountain.”
The Warbler was a huge accomplishment, but Jones already had a much more impressive item on his resumé when he went to Logan. In the 1970s, Canadians had done virtually nothing in the Himalaya, and there were few climbers with the skill, or inclination, to change that record—until Jones was asked to go to Makalu, the fifth-highest peak in the world, with an international team in 1974.
The plan wasn’t just to climb Makalu, but to attempt the hardest line ever tried on the mountain—the enormous South Face. The only climb of comparable difficulty that had been done in the Himalaya at the time was the enormous South Face of Annapurna, and Makalu was harder, higher and steeper. Jones laughs again: “I was awfully, awfully naive.”
Jones’s team ultimately failed, but not by much. Jones and a partner made it to within just a few hundred metres of the summit, and on that push Jones became the first Canadian to have climbed above 8,000 metres.
That near-success propelled Jones to the Himalaya two more times. The second of those Himalayan trips—in 1981—saw Jones become the first Canadian to set foot high on Mount Everest. Because Jones is Jones, few people knew about the trip, but he came very close to being the first Canadian to climb the peak. He was well above the South Col, on the ridge to the summit, when conditions killed the attempt.
As I sit at the dining room table in Jones’s beautiful house, I look out at a few peaks just starting to materialize out of the winter fog that sits so often over the Purcells, mountains that are probably more familiar to Jones than they’ve been to anyone in history. To the left of the window there is a striking photograph of Makalu at sunset, a picture taken during Jones’s summit attempt on Everest.
I ask Jones about his future, and the future of climbing. He is doggedly optimistic about both. He says he has ambitious plans to last him at least until 70, and he says “there’s enough out there to keep people exploring long after I’m gone if they just go looking for it.”
Jones’s friends have told me that he has a particular talent for divining the next great motherlode of climbing. So I ask him: Where exactly are the next treasure climbs that he has in his files?
Jones simply smiles. There’s no way he’s giving that list out. Not yet. After all, he’s only 63.
This profile is part of our top adventurers feature, The Elite, from our Spring 2012 issue.
