It may not have been in a galaxy far, far away, but it was certainly a long, long time ago when Richard "Dick" Culbert first scrambled up the Shannon Wall. Culbert recently returned to the area to climb the same route, now called Skywalker.Back in 1967, Culbert and climbing partner Mike Warr did whatever they could to make an ascent up Shannon Wall, one of the many first ascents in the area for Culbert.After a 40-year hiatus from climbing, on July 28 Culbert came out of retirement to climb the Shannon Wall again, using the same route. Only this time he didn't need to use brush, bush, and moss as climbing holds."It certainly looks a lot different. It's a real rock climb now you're not hanging off bushes and trying to fit your fingers in cracks and scraping things away to fit a piton in," Culbert said.On his most recent climb, Culbert used the rope to climb most of the way, but what's most impressive was that he was able to do it with a knee replacement while wearing regular hiking boots."I mostly climbed the rope; I couldn't do that much on the rock. I was in boots and when you're in your 70s with an artificial knee, you're not going to do anything spectacular. It was pleasant. Things couldn't have been much more different from when I did it in the beginning," Culbert said.Culbert never really got into traditional climbing. He was dedicated to the sport of mountaineering, but like many mountaineers he climbed at lower elevations in the offseason."We usually just climbed in the winter and in the spring when there was too much snow on the mountains, that's where you get names like the Forks Flume and the Weeping Wall. Some of the things we named because they were pretty grungy, but of course now they're cleaned up and it really looks nice. It looks more like Yosemite all the time," said Culbert.A lot of that changing look is a result of the work done by route developers like Jeremy Frimer, who spent nine months cleaning Skywalker to allow people to climb both Culbert's original route and others on the same climb.Frimer was the one who initially extended the invitation to Culbert in hopes of sharing the experience. Both have had a significant impact on the route."I thought it would be a really neat idea to bring him out of retirement in any way that he's able, given his knee replacement and so on, and just be able to share the scene with him having spent nine months of work up there by myself. The whole purpose was to be able to share with people later on, and he's an important person in our region in terms of the mountains and in particular for that route," Frimer said.According to Frimer, Culbert did pretty well considering the circumstances."He's incredibly nimble for his age and he's tough. There were some situations that he had to work through and pull through and he did it, he's really fit," Frimer said.Culbert originally set the route in 1967 and called it Forks Flume, but years passed and it wasn't until recently that Frimer was able to unearth the original climb and add new pitches to the route to make it one of the most popular multi-pitch climbs in Squamish.Things might have looked a lot different back when Culbert first climbed the Shannon Wall, but it's because of pioneers like him and route developers like Frimer that the climbing industry is continuing to grow and evolve."It's always good to see that rock climbing and mountaineering have become major items," Culbert said. "One looks back at the beginnings of these things and it was so different, but that's the way things should go. Every generation should be doing new and more difficult things."
