Naming rights or naming wrongs? Check out the new Point Allen.

I drove up to Logan Pass today to explore the newly named Point Allen. I got to the parking lot too early. Took a quick nap so I wouldn’t have to start on headlamp. It was dark and stormy. I guess the parking spot next to me was the last one to fill, because I was startled out of my deep sleep by someone slamming a car door and screaming ” KUMBAYA, man! KUMBAYA m***** f*****!!’ over and over.

I sat up, and there was this guy with his face two inches from my car window. So, I rolled it down and gave him a ‘good morning’. After several more KUMBAYA’s, he said ‘hey man, we are making some tailgate breakfast burritos. Gonna do them Burning Man style!! Would you like one?!!’ A really nice offer, but I don’t know what Burning Man style is, so really couldn’t commit. As far as I knew that was his term for getting naked in public.

This guy was on the wrong side of 30 but was confident he was on the right side of 20. He succeeded in getting me awake and going, and as I geared-up while he and his friend talked about climbing both Cannon and Clements this morning. Ugh. Big day. I was going to offer some beta on tying the two climbing routes together, but then I noticed they were having a hard time putting the propane tank on the little gas grill.

The conversation was something like ‘Hey man, I don’t know why it won’t go on. Must be because its a really cheap one. Grandma just wanted one cheeseburger before she died. I know! I know! I bet it’s a left hand thread. Yeah, there it goes, now I can get it on. Got the matches?’

At this point I realized Natural Selection was in progress, and it was not my place to mess with Fate. Clearly the powers that be have destined these two fools to either die by a fiery propane tank explosion or tumble off a cliff somewhere today. I did not want to interfere with design of Father Death, and have any of that bad karma spill onto me. I bid them a good day and walked towards the mountains, never looking back. Sometimes you just have to respect the wishes of nature.

Now . . . . . . as a future tour guide, I’ve got a great book on Glacier Park names. Mountains, lakes, rivers, etc etc. And I’ve notice there seems to be a naming pattern.

To begin with, place names change depending who was there, when they were there, and what kind of a landmark they needed to remember something by. The Blackfeet didn’t actually name much because, well, they were really just a confederation of similar displaced plains tribes which had always followed the buffalo and roamed. Now they were regulated to eking out a living with hunting/fishing in the foothills of the Rockies. Fur trappers threw names out there so they could find the good places to trap again, but would never commit them to maps else some other trapper might steal their honey hole.

It was with the US Army Expeditions that common names started to stick, because if you had to move troops through a mountain pass in the middle of nowhere, you better make sure everyone knew the same name for the same middle of nowhere.

It was when a combination of early explorers, like the hunter turned conservationist Grinnell, who would share their mapping exploits with the US sponsored survey parties that stuff really started to get on the go-forward maps. And other than the efforts to ‘make names more Indian’ in the 1930’s’, most of them made it into print. Be it Grinnell naming stuff after senators who passed NPS bills, or guides and outfitters and rangers naming stuff after Indian chiefs, families, friends, and sweethearts, there is a common theme throughout.

Everyone was naming something for someone or something else. So when I read that Mt Cannon was for a long time called Goat Mtn (I climbed them both this season), I was intrigued. Cannon was known as Goat Mtn for FOREVER, until Dr Cannon was doing a little honeymoon with a sweetie twenty years his junior in the pre-park days of 1901. Cannon was a big Harvard physiologist; he is the actual guy who coined the phrase ‘fight or flight’. So the Doctor hired a famous local guide named Denis Comeau to take him up to the summit of one of the lower points of Goat Mtn. He marked the non-summit by putting a note in a jar under a cairn of rocks. The jar was recovered in 1985 in perfect condition because . . . . . . who climbs the lesser peak of a summit?

OK, Dr Cannon. Pretty cool little outing with the new wife and all, but certainly not a climb. So Cannon starts a word-of-mouth campaign to call it Cannon Mtn. He bumps into the USGS team currently mapping the region and makes them ‘correct’ their survey from Goat Mtn to his name. So now we have a one-time visitor to the park, who bullies his name on a major mountain, of which the tallest point wasn’t even climbed until 1923. And his guide Comeau, is the same guide Dr. Sperry used to go and ‘find’ what is now Sperry Glacier. So it’s clear Denis was getting paid well to provide naming rights.

I’m sorry, this is some East coast big money big ego bullshit. And I refuse to accept it. Whenever I give tours in this park, I’m going to call it Goat Mtn 1.0. I’m going to give Mister Cannon the Fight in his ‘fight or flight’ theory. Better yet, I’m going to take a card from his playbook. After all, history is made by the victors.

I’ve been exploring this summer that long unnamed southeast arm that stretches for close to two miles off the shoulder of Mt Reynold at Logan Pass. It goes all the way to the St Mary valley. I have admired its cliffs, the prehistoric looking plateau (where the dinosaurs hang out), and the well-forested crest for many many years. Today I went out and beyond the rock cairn I set a couple of weeks ago, and fully embraced this fresh terra incognito (still looking for that hat I lost).

As Cannon, I too built a rock cairn marking the most extreme point of the ridge. I too left a message in a bottle in that cairn, claiming the naming rights. Using his case law, as you fine folks as my witness, I give you Point Allen, the terminus of Allen Ridge. (My middle name, as I didn’t want to be a pompous dick like Cannon. And to be honest it, just sounds better than Dave Ridge).

Hell, I might even scatter some of my ashes there just to really seal the deal. Who knows, maybe even get a hiking priest to do a little service for me. If I get the Catholic Church on my side, that name will stick for a couple hundred years (at least until Spain and Portugal become superpowers again). Ah, Point Allen. My Jammer tours are going to be awesome. And original.

Actually, you can petition the USGS to name points on the map that are unnamed. But the backstory I would have to create for my namesake of Pt Allen is still in the making. He will have to be a youth from hardship, with the determination of steel, and the crooked smile. Like Brad Pitt, after he bought his own production company so he could be the leading star in everything.

So this trip was really to document my naming rights claim and where the cairn has been placed. To make sure that I can find it again (oh yes, I can). The real bonus is what a beautiful day it turned out to be. Even the stormy morning was pretty cool. The smokey haze was just starting to work its way back in when I was returning to the car at the pass. And I didn’t see another person on the trail. Love Point Allen!