Gertrude Benham

Gertrude “Truda” Benham arrived in the Canadian Rockies in 1904 at age thirty-six and began climbing everything in sight. She’d spent years at home in England, nursing first her father, who died in 1891, and then her mother, who died in 1903, leaving her a modest inheritance. Benham stepped off the train in June and immediately began bagging summits with a pair of local guides, brothers Hans and Christian Kaufmann.

They began in the Valley of the Ten Peaks, a postcard cordillera surrounding Moraine Lake in Banff National Park. At the time, the peaks were simply numbered one through ten in the language of the Nakoda people. Number One, or Heejee, was a 10,613-foot crest of glaciated granite rising above Moraine Lake. When the Geographic Board of Canada asked the eminent American climber Charles Fay to select a peak to be named in his honor, the professor chose Heejee, and he, too, soon arrived in Banff to make the first ascent of his mountain.

Benham, however, had her eye on the same spectacular peak. On July