(joyful music)
- [Narrator] Today is one of the northwest's
most colorful outdoor traditions,
the annual Mount St. Helens' Mother's Day climb.
- It's a classic Northwest event,
yeah, this is one of the classics.
- Yeah, legendary, now.
- Look, if you ski, and you climb,
and you know where Mount St. Helens is,
you've probably've heard of this event.
- Hi, Happy Mother's Day!
Everybody say Happy Mother's Day.
- [Crowd] Happy Mother's Day!
- Happy Mother's Day.
- [Group] Happy Mother's Day!
- [Woman] Yeah it's a party up here, every year.
- Eh!
- [Ranger] You will see all different outfits,
all different designs,
and some pretty interesting sunburns, as well,
by the time the weekend is over, too. (laughs)
(jazz music)
- First wombat at the summit of Mount Saint Helens, whoo!
- [Narrator] All the climb permits are sold out.
Hundreds of folks are here, including Maddee.
She's climbed Saint Helens some 30 times.
She's brought some of her friends up
to experience this tradition for the first time.
- As long as your relatively fit, it's a long day,
and it's hard, but you can make it.
And I like taking new people on Mother's Day,
because it's a party, it's fun,
everybody has a huge smile on their face.
It's not this intimidating mountain environment,
it's a very supportive community.
Especially on this day.
- [Narrator] A few you know when and how this all began.
- Do you think it like started 20 years ago?
Or am I making that up?
- That's what I heard
(laughs) - Yeah!
- I honestly don't know.
- Wasn't the original woman who did this,
her name was Kathy?
- [Narrator] In fact, it was a woman named Kathy.
- [Annette] Kathy was the first one to do it in a costume,
as far as I know.
I mean I would be shocked,
if there was anybody else that day that was wearing
a red chiffon dress, let me tell you.
- [Narrator] Through her unique style,
Kathy Phibbs broke rules and boundaries in the mountains.
She blazed trails for herself and other women,
and did so in a colorful, creative, and inspiring way.
- [Woman] Almost single-handedly,
Kathy has changed the face of northwest mountaineering.
- [Narrator] But to understand the origins
of the Mother's Day climb, we need to go back
to Mount Saint Helens' most famous day, May 18th,1980.
In the wake of the eruption,
Mount Saint Helens was closed to recreationalists.
Climbers like Kathy had to wait seven years
for it to reopen.
- The first day that it reopened after the blast,
- She was there - She was determined
to be one of the first that day to head up.
- [Annette] I was so surprised the next Day
to open up the newspaper,
and on the front page of the paper, in full color,
back in the day when color was not used in newspaper much,
there was Kathy in a pillbox hat and a red chiffon dress.
- And if you were the photographer,
like, who would you photograph on that summit, right?
Duh!
- And, we were like, that Kathy girl,
we would expect her to do something like that.
- [Kristen] She's this amazing force of nature,
she would have these wonderful takes
on the normal things that climbers
kind of like to be more serious about.
- [Annette] She would always talk about how the hard boys,
it was all a destination.
She's like, it's not the destination,
it's the journey, for god's sake, you know?
(laughing)
- [Annette} She and I went rock climbing one time,
and I had a inflatable pink flamingo on my climbing harness,
just for the picture.
(all laughing)
- [Ross] Kathy was very direct,
she had a bulldog kind of personality,
just a force of nature who wanted to get out,
and do things in the out of doors.
And, had identified me as somebody
who had a little bit of climbing experience,
so she sort of said, okay, you're coming on the trip,
let's go find somebody with a car.
- [Annette] She has all this fun loving part,
but she also was a really good climber.
- [Narrator] Mount Saint Helens was not
Kathy's first notable mountain summit.
In fact, she was already an accomplished climber.
She climbed Eynali, scaled peaks in the Andes,
and in the Himalaya.
- [Sally] She had a vision
about how she wanted people to be in the outdoors.
- [Annette] Back in the 80's, most women climbed with men.
Kathy wanted to climb with women,
she thought that that would be more fun.
And so she and some other women,
started this group called Women Climbers Northwest.
So we would go into the mountains, a group of us,
and guys would see us and they would say
"Are you girls alone?".
And we'd be like "Well, no, we're with each other".
It was really cool because
Kathy is such a playful personality,
that, the things that we did we're playful.
We would go on climbing trips with costumes,
and pink flamingos.
- [Kristen] Those of us like Kathy's age, and mine,
we didn't have girls' sports in high school.
And, women's sports in college were just starting.
So a bunch of us, we weren't raised to be athletes,
we didn't have teams to join.
We're that first generation that was going to law school,
to med school, and we're gonna go on the mountains together.
And that was freedom.
(snow crumping)
- [Annette] It became this tradition
to go ski Saint Helens in costume.
- [Kristen] We'd settle on the last Sunday,
before you had to get a permit.
Because we were dirtbag climbers, right?
We didn't want to have to pay for permit,
we didn't wanna have to deal with that.
And the last Sunday before permits was Mother's Day.
And every time we went, people were like,
"Oh that's great! I love seeing you all dressed up!"
And we would invariably say, "You can do it too!
"Come, join the party!"
(guitar music)
[Narrator] Kathy was coming into her own,
realizing her dreams of creating a community
of women climbers.
Taking on challenging routes, with pluck and panache.
One of the most note-worthy,
is when she led a group of some 30 women,
to the summit of Mount Rainier,
on the centennial anniversary of the first woman summit,
made by Fay Fuller, a Tacoma school teacher.
To commemorate the centennial ascent, Kathy wore a dress.
- The first woman mountaineers
did go up in dresses and skirts,
'cause they weren't allowed to wear pants.
- [Narrator] This wearing of dresses in the Alpine,
was an homage to the pioneering woman of mountaineering.
With a love of history,
Kathy looked at the past for inspiration.
She wanted a female mountaineering mentor,
and since she couldn't find one, she invented one.
- [Annette] Kathy was a really good writer,
and she created this alter-ego, named Miss Dish.
- Women are the hope of climbing,
- My protege, that spineless Kathy girl,
had what her generation calls a freak out,
when she read this essay.
- "You're gonna ruin me in the climbing community,"
she wailed.
- Tsk
Young people are so conservative these days,
don't you think?
- [Annette] Miss Dish is ready to expound
on the future of climbing,
and on the wonderfully positive things
that women bring to climbing.
A role that is growing each year.
- Why the single most prevalent influence in climbing
over the next years, will be the greater,
and greater numbers of women.
- [Annette] This is more than exciting,
this is big news, this is a trend.
- [Rachel] My dears, that Kathy girl is moaning again
about radical feminist stigmas,
and renegade little old ladies.
Poor dear thinks she will be tainted forever
by our association, hah!
Miss Dish does not particularly welcome
rebuttal to her statements.
Miss Dish knows of what she speaks.
A toast is always welcome, of course.
- (laughs) Isn't that great?
- [Rachel] That was a little example of who she was,
this amazing sense of humor
that comes out through the page.
I mean, she's got this great skill.
(snow crumping)
She saw, in all of us, something that we didn't see
in ourselves at the time.
- [Sally] She got me to perform at a higher level,
and to take more risks, and to be successful,
where you feel like you're capable of doing more
than you've done in the past.
Not a role model, it's deeper, it's more internal than that.
- [Rachel] She was out as a climber,
as a woman lead climber.
A scarier, (laughs) objectively more dangerous, thing to be.
To be an out lesbian.
- [Narrator] In the expansiveness of the mountains,
Kathy found a freedom to be herself.
- [Rachel] For us as lesbians,
we just really valued who Kathy was,
and how she was able to be her full self.
- [Annette] Part of Kathy's thing was to be an old goat,
I mean she started using hiking poles
before anybody else I knew,
because she wanted to save her knees,
cause she intended to do it forever.
(wind wailing)
(snow crunching)
- [Narrator] In 1991, Kathy and a close friend
went ice climbing on a peak called Dragon Tail.
- [Rachel] It was a cold, clear, weekend.
End of January.
It's a good time to do an ice-climb.
The conditions seemed really good.
- When it is stable conditions, it is a joy to climb.
But it could avalanche.
- And, all we really know is, they were high on the root.
And then, something went wrong.
(snow falling)
- [Narrator] Kathy was 33.
- I think she was just getting rolling, yeah.
I mean, bringing these women together,
and giving permission to be outrageous and funny,
and high spirited, and physically competent
in the out of doors.
You know, she launched that for us.
(snow crumping)
- [Narrator] She was never able to see
today's generation of women in the outdoors.
Or to witness the popularity
of the Mother's Day tradition she started.
- [Ranger] Mother's Day has really been growing a lot
over the last five or six years,
it's just really kind of exploded.
- [Narrator] Now, more than thirty years
since Kathy Phibbs stood on the rim of Saint Helens
in a red chiffon dress and pillbox hat,
her friends have reunited in tutus, dresses,
to honor the memory of that Kathy girl.
Kathy's parents, Phil and Gwen come to support
this tribute climb,
and join Kathy's old friends at the trail head.
- It's a very moving experience
to see and kind of recreate
the kind of life and spirit that she had.
Everyone seems to be imbued with that spirit,
that enthusiasm, excitement, and lots of good humor.
And that makes it the kind of day that she would do,
so it's very moving for us to see, to have this chance,
to relive a bit of her life.
I think it gives the sense of closure
to what happened to Kathy.
That's weighed upon us all these years.
- [Kristen] When people die young,
it is really up to those of us who went on to live,
to go back and bring their history forwards.
And so, being able to have something
like the Mount Saint Helens ski, gives us that window.
And so much of who she was is right there.
- [Ross] For me it's always
a little bit of a ghost mountain,
because when you get to that rim,
and you look into the giant crater, it's beautiful,
but there's also this sense of loss, of what's missing.
A double sense of loss
because of the strong associations with this great friend
who put a stamp on it.
- [Annette] Whoo! (laughs) Flamingos!
- All right!
(laughs) That is pretty cool.
- [Narrator] And now, here at the summit of Saint Helens,
hundreds of others celebrate.
- [Crowd] Happy Saint Mother's day!
- [Narrator] You know about Kathy, but Kathy's story
at Mount Saint Helens itself,
is not simply about what is no longer there,
but what remains.
And what remains of this day is simple,
do what that Kathy girl would do.
Ski down, in style.
(Calm music)