Entering the Alpine

 Looking over the gear I planned to take north spread out before me, my brain decided it was high time I owned a car. Three days later, I drove home a rusty-colored Honda Element. Actually, consensus in camp leans toward “Burnt Cinnamon.” Its name is Blaze, and I am in love.
 
I promptly removed the back seats and spent a solid day and a half building a system of storage boxes and columns in their place, all of which have removable lids. Boxes got linoleum tops, windows got curtains covered in Mt. Fuji, an old weight-lifting mat got repurposed into a sleeping pad running behind the passenger seat, and I got a personalized home on the road.

After a few stops to stock up on beer and food (BC has a 15% sales tax and booze bleeds even more) I drove to Vancouver via a solid interrogation by border control, met up with a friend and headed straight out for eastern BC.
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The approach to Bugaboo Provincial Park covers approximately 50k of heavily potholed dirt roads winding up out of a valley and into a steep river gorge fed entirely by rushing glacial melt. Along the way, a bear cup gamboodles onto the road in front of us and topples back onto his butt in surprise, exposing a light tan chest patch, before hightailing it back into the woods. Dark, angular peaks jut forth above, impressing the feel of titan guardians. When at last we round the final bend to the parking lot, glaciers pour down the valley in front of us, punctured by massive dark spires and flanked by bowls and ridges streaked in dense, deep green conifers and brilliant alpine shrubbery.
 
We hike in early the next morning, after surrounding Blaze with chicken wire held in place by dozens of giant stakes and rocks to protect its tires and brake lines from rubber-eating porcupines and monster marmots. The approach to Applebee Camp climbs approximately 3,050’ in 3.4 miles. I leave behind vegetation and swarming mosquitoes (and oxygen), climbing the ridge adjacent to Bugaboo glacier and feeling more drunk by the second. My relatively light pack presses my shoulders and quads into the rock. I can’t decide whether I want to eat or puke, so I do neither. The flat stone top of Appleby Dome embraces me with splattered tents and bear boxes.

 We spend the rest of the day relaxing, crossing a small snowfield to climb a couple of shorter routes and bask in our current unreal reality. My sense of perception is completely distorted. Among the glaciers, divided by name but ultimately a single ice field, granite spires rise thousands of feet around us. I have no idea how massive they truly are until I see people crossing the glacier at their base, barely specks on the ice. To the south, the Purcell Mountains spread before us in a continuous snowcapped field of peaks. The sky is pure, cloudless blue– almost unheard of in the Bugs. The sun blazes down upon us, glancing up off the snow. We reapply sunscreen religiously. On the way back to camp we stop to refill water and wade in alpine pools. Crisp, clear turquoise water takes on a milky sheen in places where the glacier intrudes beneath onto the rocky bed, and in places where the surface remains frozen (it’s early enough in the year that smaller pools freeze over on a nightly basis). A huge, flat sloping stone edges in on the pool, providing a snooze spot that puts any other to shame.

In the evening we hang our packs from racks designed to protect our gear and ropes from pack rats and take advantage of the rare cloudless skies, laying our sleeping bags out under the stars. The full moon rises perfectly centered over the mountains to the south, bathing them in an ethereal white sheen as we go to sleep.
 

As the moon sets between spires in the early morning, we cross a snowfield and skirt lakes to approach a formation called the Crescent Spire. Although we plan to climb a relatively mellow route to the summit, we soon discover we’ve started up an unknown line. While the granite is solid, the spire seems composed of thousands of blocks all waiting to topple over… so we continue up, testing rocks before we pull or step on them and making careful choices as to where we place the gear and anchors that hold us. Throughout our climb the sounds of snow and ice cracking and caving in the alpine heat reverberate up through the bowl below us. As we rejoin with our intended route, avoiding the possibility of cliffing ourselves, we climb beautiful corners and traverse around and up sloping slabs, ending our roped ascent on a small, airy arête before scrambling up an incredibly exposed block next to a thousand-plus-foot drop to gain the summit at about 9,300’.
 
The view takes my breath away.
 
After scrambling and rappelling the majority of the adjacent gully we save time on the descent, abandoning our attempt to step down through rotten snow and simply sliding down the snowfields on our butts.
 
We hike out later in the afternoon and spend the next two nights at our companion’s farm. We meet the mammoth donkeys her father breeds and laugh as she sets up a trio between her piano and collie and German shepard as thunder storms move through the valley. And finally, after a half-day of climbing at a local crag, we drive back across BC to Vancouver, crossing multitudes of mountain passes and spending the night in the hot, humid Okanagan, where we buy nectarines and cherries and peaches and blueberries sold by dozens of farms along the roadside.
 
I suppose the Bugs qualify as my first experience in alpine climbing. More exploratory, with less advance information and less certain rock, taking more care to stay safe during approaches and descents to and from camp as we cross snow and ice with ever-changing characteristics. It’s tough, remote, peaceful and exhilarating. And we got damn lucky with the weather.