There was a gentle northeasterly breeze on the May morning in 2016 when Niall McCann launched himself off the summit of Pen y Fan, the highest mountain in South Wales. The 35-year-old extreme sportsman ran off the peak’s vertical edge, tugged on the canopy above him and swung back toward the slope.
Speed-flying, the sport that McCann was practising, is a subdiscipline of paragliding that aims not for arcing spirals and thermal lift, but terrain-hugging descent: The idea is to fly as close as possible to the mountain, from top to bottom.
“Apparently, I wasn’t very good at it,” says McCann on the phone from his home in Bassaleg, Wales. Within a minute of taking flight, he had crashed back into the rock face, shattering his spinal cord in five places. As he resurfaced from surgery later that day, he recalls the devastation of the realization: He would never be able to climb Mount Asgard.
The twin-peaked mountain on Baffin Island, Nunavut, named after the mythological home of the Norse gods, was the place of McCann’s dreams. In mountaineering circles, it is known for its extraordinary shape – two gigantic tree-trunk summits, rising 2,015 metres out of an Arctic valley. But McCann’s connection to the mountain was personal. His grandfather, Scottish-born geologist and adventurer Patrick Baird, led the first expedition to its summit in 1953, gave the mountain its evocative name and spent much of his life exploring the forbidding terrain surrounding it.
Since they were teens, Niall and his younger brother Finn had fantasized about climbing Asgard. The goal motivated Niall through a recovery that defied all odds. Within a month of the crash, he was standing and gradually, he regained most of his mobility, sensation and bodily function. Nine years later, the brothers, then 44 and 38, decided it was now or never – last July, they set out in their grandfather’s footsteps.
Finn McCann with Mount Asgard in the background.
Baird is widely considered a pioneer of Canadian Arctic research and exploration. While studying geology at the University of Cambridge, he was invited to join a 1934 expedition to Greenland and Baffin Island. Enthralled, he returned in 1936, as part of a three-year Royal Geographical Society expedition to survey uncharted land masses and engage in “intense scientific activity during the short period when the land is unfrozen,” as a Society report put it at the time.
The Arctic exerted a pull on Baird. Employed variously by the Canadian military and the Department of National Defence, as well as Arctic research institutes in Scotland and Canada, Baird spent much of his life in the region. After his death in 1984, his ashes were scattered across Baffin Island by the Royal Canadian Air Force.
Patrick Baird carrying an inflatable kayak during an expedition to Baffin Island in 1953.Niall McCann/Supplied
In 1953, as the Montreal director of the Arctic Institute of North America, Baird led a four-month expedition up the Pangnirtung (now Akshayuk) Pass. The 13 men who took part were “scientist-mountaineers”: geologists, zoologists, glaciologists, geomorphologists, geophysicists, botanists, meteorologists and physiologists on the one hand, and expeditionists on the other. On July 13, four Swiss members of the group – seasoned alpinists – managed to reach the peak of Mount Asgard in what mountaineers call a first ascent.
Baird’s diaries, written in tidy pencilled cursive and now residing in Library and Archives Canada, are largely devoted to exhaustive descriptions of the weather (the Swiss’ insatiable appetite for sugar was a continuing problem).
The field report that was published after the expedition detailed everything from the depths of glaciers to the breeding habits of snowy owls. It also listed the peaks that had been summitted and the 17 new names – for fjords, rivers, ice caps and mountains – that had been approved by the Geographical Names Board of Canada. Mount Asgard was among them.
Niall and Finn’s expedition 72 years later had a very different scope. Their mission, funded by private and corporate sponsors, was strictly personal. As fathers and husbands with day jobs – Finn is a commercial helicopter pilot in Scotland, Niall works on nature documentaries and conservation projects for endangered species – their time was limited. They carved out 28 days in July during the narrow window when Asgard is not completely wrapped in snow and ice.
Flight delays from London to Toronto resulted in a missed connection and an overnight dash in a rented car down Highway 401 to Ottawa International, where the brothers barely made their chartered flight to Iqaluit. From there, they took a twin turboprop via Qikiqtarjuaq, on Baffin Island’s Cumberland Peninsula, to Pangnirtung, a former Hudson’s Bay outpost that is now a permanent settlement of some 1,500.
Because the arrangement with their shipping sponsor, who would have snowmobiled food bins to a cache near their base camp, had fallen through, the brothers had to carry all their supplies themselves. They each had a 45-kilogram pack, along with a day bag and equipment – camp stove, fuel, helmet, crampons, ice picks, footwear – hanging off them like Christmas ornaments. To keep the load manageable, they had budgeted 2,600 calories a day when they were burning multiples of that.
Once they landed on the gravel runway in Pangnirtung, things started to look up. Six days earlier, the sea ice had blown out of the fjord extending northward. Rather than having to walk the waterway’s 35-km length, they were able to hire Peter Kilabuk to take them in his boat.
Peter Kilabuk piloting his charter boat from Pangnirtung to the edge of Auyuittuq National Park at the head of the Pangnirtung Fjord.
A former member of Nunavut’s Legislative Assembly, Kilabuk operates a small business ferrying hikers, climbers and locals into Auyuittuq National Park, the vast tract of wilderness to which Mount Asgard belongs. The brothers showed Kilabuk some of the photos from their grandfather’s expeditions in the 1950s and ’60s; he recognized several of his own ancestors in the group shots from Pangnirtung.
Dropped off at the top of the fjord, the brothers began a 42-km trek up Weasel Valley. The terrain was a mix of bog moss, sand (some of it quick), boulder fields, glacial streams and moraines – “totally knackering,” in Niall’s words. After four days, they reached Summit Lake, where they set up a base camp, as their grandfather had done many times before.
For the first time since their departure, the sun appeared. With their satellite devices predicting 48 hours of good weather, they prepared their kit, slept a few hours and set out. After crossing two glaciers, they reached the saddle between the two peaks.
“It was fascinating to contemplate that headwall. We knew that a route went up there, whereas the guys in 1953, they didn’t know if the mountain would relent,” says Niall. “They were totally stepping into the unknown.”
Finn McCann on the first pitch of ‘proper’ climbing, up through the sopping wet chimneys that lead to the shoulder between the twin peaks of Asgard.
According to the Mountain Project, a crowdsourced online guide for climbers, at least 13 routes have been taken up Mount Asgard since the inaugural ascent. The McCann brothers followed what is now referred to as the “Swiss route” of 1953. Niall calls the seven-hour climb, the first outdoor one he had completed since his accident, “burly.”
They reached Asgard’s north peak at 10 p.m., just as the sun was dipping in the sky. They embraced.
“We took our time to celebrate being there and what it meant,” Niall said. “To take in 360 degrees of the most beautiful mountains on earth.”
The urge to climb a mountain – to see the view from the top, to prove something to oneself or to others – is not necessarily universal. There is no mountaineering tradition among the Inuit of Baffin Island.
The brothers at the top of Mount Asgard after their 16-hour ascent. The photograph was taken at about 11:30 pm, just after the sun had set
According to Julien Cossette, Auyuittuq’s acting community relations and visitor experience manager, residents of Pangnirtung and Qikiqtarjuaq, the two communities bracketing the park, are more drawn to the local fjords and lakes for fishing and hunting, and the berry-laden patches of tundra for harvesting. As Cossette points out, the training and equipment required for mountain-climbing are a significant barrier to entry.
Most of the European names for the mountains of Baffin Island evoke something fantastic and otherworldly, whereas the Inuit names for those same peaks, passed down orally over millennia, tend to be more literal. According to Cossette, the mountain that is identified on maps as Thor Peak is known by locals as Qaiqsualuk, Inuktitut for “enormous bedrock.” Mount Odin is called Ukiurjuaq or “place where it’s always winter,” and Mount Asgard is Qattaujannguaq, which means “looks like a barrel.”
The McCann brothers standing on the summit of the unnamed mountain.
After summiting Asgard, the McCann brothers spent three days at their base camp, waiting for the fog, rain and wind to pass through the valley. Then, they set out again. Like their grandfather, they hungered for a first ascent of their own.
They crossed an ice field riddled with deep, turquoise crevasses toward Mount Loki, a mountain that was first summitted by Baird and others in 1966. Next to it was a similar peak, slightly lower and less spiky, which wasn’t identified on any of their maps. The McCanns reached its top in five hours. They found no cairns or evidence that anyone had been there before.
On returning to Wales, Niall submitted a request to the Geographical Names Board to have the mountain they climbed named Anaana Peak. Anaana means mother in Inuktitut. By coincidence or fate, the word sounds like Anne, the name of Baird’s daughter – their mother. In 1963, she joined her father’s second major expedition into the Cumberland Peninsula: a fearless-looking teen in a sea of ruddy adults which, this time, included some women.
Niall is waiting to hear back. The decision resides with the Nunavut government and Parks Canada.
