Soundtrack: Don't Stop Believing

The cathedral of Mt. Gimli’s prow rises straight from the Vahallan highlands, proud and defiant against the sky. Sheer gneiss walls shine marbled in deep gray upon light tan, layered in countless sheets of stormswept flakes. Gimli’s peak bends near the top, leaning ever so slightly to the east, as if bracing for battle against an unseen opponent or the upcoming winter wind. Although, the winds and weather in these mountains arrive from the west.

The graceful line of the South Ridge runs straight up the mountain’s most prominent, exposed fin. It’s a line I’ve fantasized and dreamed about climbing more than any other: I’ve Googled it constantly, stared at its images, at the red and blue and pink lines overlaid on the rock, read descriptions over and over and over.

Arriving here hasn’t been easy. After leaving the Bugaboos, now solo, I found my way to Nelson, a small town on Kootenay Lake reminding me strongly of all the best parts of Bend and Portland mashed together, including a killer food co-op. I was blessed with the incredibly gracious hospitality of Dom, who I’d met in the Bugs, and his wife Lisa, who offered me unlimited snap peas, raspberries, tomatoes and cucumbers from their garden. While Lisa worked in the morning, Dom and I scrambled a few hours to a peak above the ski resort where he patrols by winter, bullshitting about the mentality of trying and failing, and life lessons, and the meaning of partnerships. From the top of our hike, Dome gave me a visual tour of the region, pointing to where I’d see various peaks and ranges in the absence of BC’s August wildfire haze. He also answered my longstanding question of mature trees growing primarily on ridges, pointing to repeated avalanche paths among drainages.

That afternoon, I walked into every outdoor store on the main drag, asking employees whether they knew of anyone in need of a partner to climb Gimli. I found success on my fourth try: the manager of a small ski shop, wearing a tight, white sequined shirt, put me into contact with one of her husband’s employees whose partner had just broken his wrist. Two days later, after making a massive number of “energy balls” (load oats, cashews, almonds, dates, honey, peanut butter and chocolate chips into a food processor and mash the outcome into a compact mass), Phil and I drove out for Valhalla Provincial Park.

The drive was a terror. When they claimed the road to Gimli required high clearance, they should have specified a quarter-width tank. It’s probably good that I drove in the dark, unable to watch the sheer drop playing next to me as I maneuvered half-cleared landslides, slightly adjusted rock fall and massive soft ruts and ridges. Teenage winter lessons in ascending my own gravel driveway on snow and ice were the only reason we made it to the parking lot.

I am now even more officially in love with my car.

_______________

And so our hike Saturday morning has landed us on the flats at Gimli’s base, equipped with a few stone windbreaks, a backcountry toilet and metal food canisters, practically close enough to sneeze on the mountain. A bleating family of mountain goats heralds our arrival.

We pass a lazy afternoon snoozing in the sun and exploring paths and slabs around Gimli’s west side, arriving atop a ridge that ends in an abrupt drop hundreds of feet to a snow field and deep blue lakes below, marking the upper reaches of a deep green valley guarded by erratic, jagged peaks. As the sun sets in the evening, and the full moon rises blazing in the south, and the macho, muscly goats with their short, sharp horns bleat and stare at me as I pee before bed, I take it all in and smile.

I wake Sunday morning to the bleating of goats, exiting my tent in the early dawn to five pairs of entreating eyes. The goats follow us as we make breakfast and gather our gear, and spectate as I belay Phil on the day’s first pitch. We swap leads after every anchor as we climb, working our way up the arête. My first pitch on lead takes me up and around a block, stepping over a wide gap to hug the ridge’s crest as I work my way horizontally above a slight overhang, battling instinct that screams to me, telling me I stand on absolutely nothing… to either side or below me. I trust my hands (mediocre) and my feet (solid), and toy with the trade-off of placing lots of gear or reducing rope drag (always a tenuous mental puzzle). I get a grand ego boost when we pull out the guide at the top of the pitch and I realize I’ve just climbed a much harder variation than I expected. We climb a lot of relatively relaxed rock, using some finicky techniques of counter-pressure called “laybacking” to grasp flakes and lean backward, bracing our feet against the same wall to keep our bodies upright. We dance around the fin as the wind picks up out of a clear blue sky, wildfire haze in the atmosphere blending surrounding mountains into the distance.

The sixth pitch is my lead: I hug and shuffle over an awkward block in a closed corner, arriving beneath a very intimidating roof. Even on stellar gear it takes me three attempts to override my apprehension, making moves leftward beneath the overhang. Wind whips as I reach my left foot far out to try and brace on something, my right toe still jammed in a crack spiderwebbed from the corner and my right fingers braced on a knob as I reach blindly up and around the roof with my left hand, groping for the monster hold that I’ve been assured lies in wait. The overhang’s dark lip stretches above me. I can’t find the hold, anywhere, I’m slightly terrified, and I have no intention of falling. And so I pull the smallest piece of gear I carry from my harness, cram half of the cam’s lobes into a tiny crack and grab its stem, “French Freeing,” using it as a handhold as I wrench my stuck right foot out of the crack, hiking myself up to see over the edge.

In exasperation, I find the jug straight in front of me, overhead, rather than to the side where I’d been grasping in vain. And it is massive, and it’s in reach. After grabbing hold of the jug I lower myself, remove my cam and yard myself over the thing properly, rocking up onto my foot to stand atop the roof, breathing deep before moving upward to build my anchor.

The remainder is an extended scramble. We reach the top of the ridge, passing atop the curved, leaning fin before making our way down, around, and up to Gimli’s true summit at 9,100 ft on the adjacent peak. The cairn marking the summit is taller than me. Tucked beneath is the register, a black plastic watertight tube containing a small pad and pencil. I pen our names and date, taking in the adjacent peaks and valleys, and I recognize that I’ve accomplished the first really big goal I set for myself in the world of rock.

Now I get to downclimb.

Trust and Judgement

My first-ever descent down a technical glacier involves a 1:30 AM rappel into a yawning 40ft wide crevasse with lightning on the horizon.

I return to the Bugaboos in a climbing partnership matchmade by mutual friends in Squamish. Chris, a Kiwi fond of the phrase, “Cheers, Mate!” has extensive alpine experience and has dreamed for years of a trip to the Bugs. What I lack in alpine experience (I have virtually none) I make up for with confidence and familiarity on granite. Together, we compliment each others’ weaknesses, communicate well, and share similar philosophies regarding safety and gear placement. Our biggest challenge on the wall boils down to interpreting accents.

In addition to the usual backpacking gear, we bring close to ten days’ food supply and our climbing gear probably totals over 25 lbs. Luxuries for the stay include my trusty sarong, a ratty thrift-shop cribbage board ($.50), a novel and soap. My pack is f’n heavy.

_______________

The Kane Route summits Bugaboo Spire, the park’s namesake and second-highest peak. It’s accessed by crossing a glacier and ascending the Bugaboo-Snowpatch Col, a pass that involves mid-grade technical glacier climbing and the very real probability of injury in case of misstep. Chris guides and teaches me the basics of spotting unopened crevasses, properly utilizing ice axe and crampons, and travelling as a roped team (he’s especially excited that Freedom, our “mountaineering bible,” includes a variation of classic Kiwi technique). We navigate through areas of rockfall and cross a high bergschrund (an area where the glacier’s main body has pulled away from the headwall, leaving an ever-widening crevasse in its wake). At this point in the season, the crevasse spans almost the entire col.

Once on rock, the route requires primarily convoluted route-finding and scrambling as we avoid scree fields and the possibility of triggering rock fall. Although the climbing is easy, it’s also extremely exposed and contains huge risk– in many places, slipping or falling is not an option– consequences lie on Crescent Glacier thousands of feet below. Toward the top of the route we rope up for a few easy pitches of climbing. As I lead the “money pitch,” working my way up a crack system on a sharply pointed, free-standing outcrop “the Gendarme,” I chance a look down. Oddly, I feel more comfortable here, with nothing but air below me as the spire drops away to the distant basin below, than I have on numerous (much) smaller climbs at home. The scale of everything around me is just so incomprehensibly huge that features register in my mind as closer than they really are.

From the summit at 10,512 ft, hundreds of peaks extent out of sight in every direction. Glaciers, spiderwebbed with crevasses and spotted with turquoise pools, envelop every peak in the vicinity in a singular sheet of ice ribboning and flowing in multiple directions. Beyond the valley from which we approached the Canadian Rockies rise, barely visible through the haze of a nearby wildfire. I cannot remember ever feeling so remote.

The descent is slow-going. It takes eight rappels, several hours of downclimbing and a slightly sprained wrist to arrive at the top of the col. My mind has switched to auto pilot, my movements feel uncoordinated. Sleep will wait until we return to camp, so I continue to move. We rappel the top half of the col, tying two topes together to double distance lowered. Our second rappel takes us to bolts straight on the side of the bergschrund’s gaping maw below us– we lower and take a slight pendulum in, snow cascading down our backs, until we catch our crampons on a rock buildup and hike ourselves back out and up to the rappel station. From here we lower ourselves into a second crevasse until we can step across to the receding snow shelf, pulling ourselves back onto the glacier to begin our downclimb. Throughout the night Chris leads, teaches and guides me, correcting my movement, trading a quick descent for safety.

We return to our sleeping bags utterly exhausted, yet safe and content, and fall asleep as lightning flashes on the horizon.

_______________

The next couple days are spent snoozing and acclimating, and watching the sky darken to deep gradients behind the spires as thunderstorms build. They’re also prime opportunities to improve meal quality: since no one wants to pack out extra weight, leftover food is offered up– in a single day, I score a packet of smoked salmon, BBQ-flavored beans and a tub of sundried tomatoes, olive oil and all. We also wage ferocious wars against marmots and ground squirrels as they shamelessly attempt to commandeer said food.

_______________

Monday is not supposed to be an epic. That’s hilarious.

We rise early, leaving camp by 4:00 to ascend the col before the sun begins to soften the snow. We head a short distance around the back of Snowpatch Spire the Buckingham Route, which proves to be incredibly fun, on good rock, with interesting movement for the grade.

Throughout the day in the warmer temperatures, we watch rock fall increase from Bugaboo Spire’s scree-covered lower ridge, hurtling down the col across the path of ascent. The clack of boulders tumbling and smashing echoes up to my position, repeatedly puncturing my mindset as I place gear. Two pitches from the top of our route, somewhere below us and out of sight, a woman screams. When she wails again, and again, and again, and then whistles and shouting begin, we bail. By our third rappel, we can see someone lying in the bergschrund. A slide mark begins 200 ft up, close to the top of the col. By the time we reach the col close to two hours after her fall, two other parties have reached her, extracted her from the crevasse, and begun the process of lowering her down toward the ice field beyond. She’s extremely lucky: a guide on the Kane Route has called in a rescue chopper with a sat phone, which swings in as the party nears the flats. Within another half hour, she’s gone. The few hours the whole process takes is fast. Had she been anywhere else, with fewer people in the vicinity, she would have been on her own.

Chris and I mutually decide that descending the col at this time of day is Stupid, with a capital S. We rope up to head around to the other side of Snowpatch Spire, where a series of rappels and a roundabout glacier/scramble descent will allow us to bypass the col.

Skies darkening to the west, we reach the rappel route. The ledge at the top overlooks the Pigeon-Snowpatch icefall, a deep blue cascading section of glacier comprised of whorls and waves, deep crevasses, towering erratic seracs, spiraling pits into which water cascades and others out of which flowing streams eject. Slim dark lines mark dust laid down between yearly layers of snowfall, long since compressed into ice. Above the whole Pigeon Spire rises to an elegant, slender, dark pointed apex.

As we thread rope for our first rappel, thunder cracks and peals around us, reverberating between spires. As we work to set our second rappel, the sky opens in a deluge of hail. The ice piles onto tiny ledges around us, ricocheting off the wall and cascading down to pool at our feet and on our collars as sun-warmed rock melts the bottom-most layer instantaneously. Chris is, in a word, not pleased. I laugh with the hilarity of it all. We continue downward as hail turns to rain. In my concentration as I double-and triple-check my systems, the deafening thunder recedes to the back of my mind, becoming almost commonplace in the situation, and I almost forget about being cold (in my utter brilliance, I’ve left my gore-tex in my tent. My trusty soft-shell simply isn’t up to the job).

The moment we reach the ice, the storm ceases and the sun breaks through in a pure azure sky. The mountains are laughing at us. We then realize that, where we could have leapt on rope from the wall to the surface of the glacier, we’ve instead rappelled straight into another crevasse. From the point where we stand precariously on rock, the bottom is out of sight. We make out way to a show shelf, throw on crampons and climb out of the crevasse before disconnecting from the rope, pulling it from our final rappel, and finish our roundabout return to camp.

_______________

After two days of climbing in the Bugs, it’s time for a reality check. Chris and I have some conversations about safety, and he is brutally honest. Our days climbing have progressed extremely slowly. Foregoing weather, it’s simply unsafe, mentally, to be at it for that long. If Chris were to fall into a crevasse, I lack the necessary skills to rescue him on my own.

And we are, in essence, Alone.

The col is out of condition. The bergschrund has opened almost the full breadth of the pass. Unpredictable large rock fall occurs throughout the day and has begun to occur during the night as well, making descent extremely precarious. Even if our bodies escape the fall path, rocks can still strike and shred the rope we rappel upon. Concrete evidence hangs on the camp’s central message board. That particular individual was lucky: on a double-rope rappel rock struck the rope that was on the side knotted at the anchor, so the knots where ropes were joined lodged in the rappel ring and allowed him to finish his descent. The brand-new chartreuse rope, however, is shredded.

In essence, I need rescue skills on snow and ice. Although I’m confident on rock, I tend to take my time in movement. I need to be able to move faster and retain that confidence. “Speed is Safety” is probably the most well-known tenet among alpinists. Speed beats weather, and it beats fatigue.

It’s a really, really hard conversation to have, especially considering the forecoming beautiful weather. It takes me a solid day to process. It’s so hard to be here and turn back, letting go of, or delaying, aspirations that have grown so prominent in my mind. The harsh reality stings, and I must remind myself that the Bugs will still be here when I’ve gained the necessary skills and experience to climb safely in the remote alpine. On rock, I’m solid. On snow and ice, I enter an entirely different world requiring an entirely new skillset… Although in the alpine there’s always inherent risk, there’s no need to increase the degree insensibly.

The next day, as I begin the walk down from camp, the sun burns deep orange through a gray-brown haze signaling nearby wildfire. Lush mossy ridges, raised among countless cascading runnels carrying glacial melt, blaze red, orange, purple and yellow with wildflowers, Snowpatch Spire rising stolidly above.

Photos to come...