Harvey T. Carter Profile

Check out this profile of Harvey T. Carter written by Dave Philipps in the Colorado Springs Gazette newspaper. Dave also posted a lot of photos of Harvey T at the Gazette Out There blog.

Harvey, a long-time Colorado climber, started climbing in the Pikes Peak region, my own home turf, back in the 1940s when climbing definitely was a fringe activity. He’s a direct link to some of the first Colorado climbers, including Albert Ellingwood and Bob Ormes, both of whom climbed around the Pikes Peak area long before Harvey. Ellingwood, a Rhodes scholar and professor at Colorado College, climbed here in the late teens and twenties, and Ormes beginning in the thirties when tennis shoes, hemp ropes, and over-the-shoulder belays were still in vogue.

I first met Harvey Carter back in the late sixties when I was a teenage climber in Colorado Springs. I would see him climbing horrendous looking routes up in North Cheyenne Cañon. Even then the guy was a legend. Later he moved to Aspen so I rarely saw him around until he moved back to the Springs about 1990. As Dave relates in the article, Harvey and I had a few ethical tiffs but put that behind us. Last week Jim Dunn called me and said, “Hey, we oughta go up and see Harvey T and see if we can get him out climbing again.” Sounds like a good idea.

Photo above: Harvey Carter atop Montezuma Tower in the Garden of the Gods, Colorado in 1982.
Photograph © Ed Webster