A Life Lived Vertically
The Legacy of Wally Joyce
"My passion for the mountains must have been bred in my bones, for I never approach them without an exaltation of my spirit." — Wally Joyce
Wally didn’t begin serious mountaineering until he was forty years old. In 1955, he attended his first ACC General Mountaineering Camp at Mount Robson, and the mountains took hold of him completely. By the end of that two-week camp, he had paid his full life membership dues. It was, as those who knew him would recognize, a typically Wally move: decisive and wholehearted.
Over the next 45 years he attended at least 29 GMCs, rarely staying for less than the full two weeks. He climbed more than 400 peaks in total, including at least 20 first ascents and 20 new routes. He scrambled up Bugaboo Spire on his 75th birthday. He scrambled up a route above Sapphire Col in the Selkirks at 86. When kidney failure finally forced him off the big routes in 2000, he simply found other ways to stay connected to the mountains he loved.
What made Wally exceptional wasn’t just the numbers, though they are staggering. It was the way he moved through the world. Twenty-five to forty years older than most of his climbing companions in his later years, he adapted effortlessly to new styles, new camps, and a new generation of friends. He was known for his humour, his intellectual conversations, and his insistent calls for photo stops at the most inconvenient moments on a climb. A fellow climber once paid him the backhanded compliment that became something of a tribute: “Dave proceeded to click off photos like a latter-day Wally Joyce.”
His annual solo drives from Toronto to Canada’s western mountains became the stuff of ACC folklore. He lived out of the back of his station wagon with a sleeping bag, and the open road, logging more than 15,000 kilometres each summer visiting ACC friends and artists. The mountains were just one part of his life. Wally was a mathematician, a devoted theatregoer, an art collector and a traveller who visited more than 100 countries. Wally didn’t distinguish between the life he lived in the mountains and the life he lived everywhere else. It was all one life, lived with the same passion, attentiveness, and generosity.
His generosity of spirit extended to all his interests, including the ACC. Over decades, Wally contributed to the Toronto Section’s Bon Echo Hut — now honoured with his name as the Bon Echo (Wally Joyce) Hut —, to two generations of the Toronto Section Cabin in Canmore, to the Alpine Centre in Lake Louise, and to the Whyte Gallery and Archives in Banff.
Wally’s final act was one of quiet generosity. When he passed away on December 9, 2010, in his 96th year, he left an undesignated major gift to the ACC, one of the largest the Club had ever received. It transformed the Club’s Endowment Fund, growing it to a size where its annual earnings could make a real difference. It continues to quietly shape the future of Canadian mountaineering, much like Wally himself.
He also left his 20,000 Kodachrome slides of Canada’s western ranges to the club, a photographic archive of historical and scientific value, including an incredible record of glacial change.
In 2011, a group of his closest Toronto Section climbing companions — Don Chiasson, Paul Geddes, Willa Geddes, Bill McKenzie, and Roger Wallis — set out to honour Wally the only way that felt right: they climbed an unclimbed peak and gave it his name.
The expedition required months of planning and a helicopter into a remote corner of the Clemenceau Icefield Group. They endured miserable weather, waist-deep postholing, and a steep snow face flanked by a massive avalanche crown. An expedition Wally likely would have liked.
On the summit of Mount Joyce, in the clouds, they scattered his ashes, carried up into the mountain winds, somewhere between the Clemenceau Icefield and the sky.
It was exactly where he belonged.
The Alpine Club of Canada is proud to honour Wally Joyce as a founding member of the Alpine Legacy Circle. His gift to the ACC continues to support the club’s programs, camps, and facilities for the next generation of Canadian mountaineers. Learn more about leaving your own legacy to the ACC.
The full story of the Mount Joyce first ascent was published in the Canadian Alpine Journal, 2012, written by Paul Geddes.
