What Happened to the Iowa Mountaineers? (2 minute trailer)
A film by John Richard and Aaron Woolf
Historical 16mm film footage is all from the Ebert family collection and many others.
With its clubhouse in a small town, a thousand miles from the nearest mountain, The Iowa Mountaineers welcomed the irony of being midcentury America’s 4th largest climbing club. Alongside the more famous Sierra Club, Mazamas and Appalachian Mountain Club, they pioneered wilderness education standards and took thousands of Midwesterners to explore and learn outdoors in a safe way, with enjoyable companions.
In the mid 1990s, the club disappeared and it’s meticulous records of 16mm films, Kodachrome slides and hand-drawn maps were nearly lost to fire. Now we are working to stabilize, digitize and preserve this extraordinary archive of first ascents and early alpine travel for people to study and inspire future generations.
The capstone of the project will be a feature-length documentary film that will explore the experiences of Iowa Mountaineers members and the club’s unheralded role in the early history of wilderness education, mountaineering technology, and leadership development. In addition to thrilling audiences with their outings, stories and travelogue films, the club was an early advocate for environmental activism, gender equality and changing perceptions about people with disabilities. Club members would go on to found Climbing Magazine, start the National Outdoor Leadership School (NOLS), and participate in the first successful American expedition on Mount Everest.
But it was their distinctly inclusive approach, perhaps somehow born from their midwestern origins, for which they should be remembered, an outdoor philosophy whose cultural value may be more apt today than ever.
Original audio recordings made by The Iowa Mountaineers in 1954 with slides from the collection. Presented at the American Alpine Club Museum’s National Museum Day event in 2019.
Earl Carter climbs with renowned alpinist, Joe Stettner, on Mount Rainier in 1949.
Iowa Mountaineers members pose for a photo on the University of Iowa Pentachrest and Old Capitol on their way to Colorado in 1942.
Ede Ebert (second from right) leads a bicycle ride from Iowa City to Devils Lake, Wisconsin in 1943.
Stereo slides from the collection of Joan Cox from the Maligne Lake expedition in 1957. Includes Ken Jones, a Canadian guide who was deaf, as well as Dan Doody who would be a member of the first successful American expedition to Mount Everest.
Paul Petzoldt, before the founding of the Iowa Mountaineers. Petzold would use techniques refined by his experiences guiding the Iowa Mountaineers to start the National Outdoor Leadership School, (NOLS).
