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I wasn't sleeping. Perhaps it was the
viewing of local
filmmakers I'd been to earlier that evening. Nothing like watching a half dozen
vignettes of folks from your home town accomplishing to make you feel your age
and question what you're doing with yourself.
The event was staged at Will Gadd's house and
featured a mix of satire, adventure sport athletes inventing new ways to emulate
birds and flying fish, and a clandestine piece from our buddy A, the heli-attack
firefighter, trying to bulldoze a firebreak against the towering nuclear
mushroom clouds and hundred meter high walls of flame that had devoured
half of Kootenay National Park last summer. It had been the worst fire in
over one hundred and twenty years and the Park
bureaucracy had embargoed A's 10 minute film until they could all vet it and
declare it fit for the public. Will had ordered multiple pizzas and stocked his
fridge with cold beer. I'd brought my wife's 4 minute film, "The Dance of the
Sugar Plum Hairys" and a hip flask of double distilled single malt scotch.
The Sugar Plum Hairys was a comedic piece featuring 16 hard-bodied male climbers
dancing shirtless in a ritualistic male equivalent of the maypole, exception
being that our circle convened on a brisk day in a meadow below Cascade Mountain
late last March. My wife squeezed out more humor by contrasting my middle aged
wobbling mono-ab against
some of the young gun's octo grids of abdominal briquettes ... I drained my hip
flask and coated up and shuffled out, a little liquored, to Will's garage where
I mounted his girlfriend's bike, which I was borrowing for the morrow's climb.
It was minus 15 Celsius and my face was puckered by the time I'd coasted the two
blocks downhill from Will's place to mine.
Will and I had bought houses at about the same time one year ago and he'd
recently said to me, "Dude, we are so glad that we bought our houses when we
did. The value has sent." "Will I intend to move from that house into a pine
box, six feet under, so it could be worth 10 million for all I care. I just need
a place to live." In truth our town, Canmore, has mountain-town-itis: an
inflammation of wealthy mountain homes, seldom lived in yet swelling the land
prices. I'm
disheartened to see the number of young climbers and mountain people, who would
love to live here and do things in the mountains, moving west because they can't
afford to buy "in". Guess that I am now "in" and it is another reason why I
wasn't sleeping, as the bank account sucks down in the shoulder seasons of my
mountain guiding ... what if I can't make the payments and lose the house?
kicked "out"? On the other hand I surely did a hell of a lot more climbing in
this range when all I worried about was making rent. "Fuck em, the rich
shouldn't be getting richer and the poor shouldn't be getting poorer. Its just
fucking wrong", I whispered to myself at 3:37am, then I got up and started
packing my pack.
My friend Phillipe Pellet was visiting from France again. Last year he and I and
Eric Dumerac had spent four magnificent
days putting up a line on the Emperor Face of Mt Robson. I had started out for
the Emperor in winter seven times in the last thirteen years and it had been a
very sweet experience to have stood on the summit at midnight one year ago.
Given the large number of days I had dedicated to getting up the mountain,
Eric and Phillipe named the route "Infinite
Patience" and though I may possess that quality in the long term, I know that I
need to do more to cultivate it in the short term.
Phillipe has about a two hundred word vocabulary in English and I have roughly
twenty in French. Most people would site this as a reason not to go climbing but
both Phillipe and I have been guiding full time since our early twenties; being
that we are both now in our mid forties that creates a rout competency between
us with any situations solved by shouting in the affirmative, or negative. Eric
had been our
translator on Robson but he was off in Cuba trying to mend a broken heart with
salsa lessons, rum and frivolous sex. "Good morning Bahrree!" beamed Phillipe
when I picked him up at the ground floor walk in that Eric rents, and then there
was little to say so I cranked the Essential Steve Earle and bellowed along to
"Copper Head Road". It was early, but not obscenely so, just coming on dawn.
Phillipe and I were off to repeat a strikingly linear and seldom formed mixed
route called 'Ten Years After'. The climb demanded only two real pitches and
formed relatively low on the Northeast Flank of Mt. Rundle and I'd reasoned that
it could be climbed in a normal eight hour day.
The polished tourist town of Banff is 15 miles to the west of
Canmore. Used to be that all the money was in Banff and Canmore was a depressed
little town trying to get over its coal mining history after the last mine
closed down in the seventies. The population of Canmore was 3500 when I moved
there to help open a mountain school in 1982 - it is
now 14,000 on the weekends and although there is still a lot of money in Banff,
we may have caught up and passed them. The tourists were all fast asleep when
Phillipe and I wheeled through town heading for the road barricade at the Banff
Golf Course, fully expecting to haul my black bike, and Kim's red one, out of
the back of my truck there. The first
little surprise of the day was to see the barricade open and no sign telling me
that I couldn't drive in there, this would save us a half hour of biking.
"Holy shit Phillipe, the road is open", I stated mostly for myself, knowing that
Phillipe would understand the "Phillipe" and little more. This was at the second
barricade, a road that the Park Administration had blocked with concrete pylons
for the last decade so that elk could winter graze on the golf course and dog
teams could haul Japanese tourists through the timber on a road that the golfers
drove their cute little white carts on in the summer. As an ice climber, I hadn't
been able to drive this road since the early eighties, this would save another
half hour of biking! and there was a sign pointing -CONSTRUC--> and no sign
telling me no. I hopped out and clicked my front hubs in and four wheeled down
the snow covered road all awash in the downy dreams of yesteryear when we drove
into the trees here always. Steve
Earle sang of remembering "all those nights down in Mexico". "Ahh yess, Mexico.
I have been Mexico", said Phillipe. That moment, gliding through the tall
timber, was pretty much perfect.
Then all went into the crapper when my bike pump stuck to the valve on the red
bike's front tire and I pulled the whole valve off in frustration because it was
cold and that task demanded bare hands and my hands were now frozen and I wanted
to be moving and warm. "Fuck it, we won't need the bikes anyway", I
declared grabbing at the red bike and ramming it flat into the back of my
campertop, never an easy
task and more of a challenge when you try to stack two in there, kinda like
trying to coax one lawn mower on top of another inside a dog house. "No
biciclettes?" Phillipe blinked, his eyes opening and closing like an owl's. I
shoved hard at the black bike and metal on metal defeated my
mortal efforts and I breathed out like a horse blowing and thought of the Dali
Lama and strove for bike compassion. I didn't hate the bikes, I just didn't like
them. The words of a doctor whom I had cycled in there with several winters ago
came to me: "If you're planning on having kids, I wouldn't recommend riding those
bikes with an ice climbing pack on anymore". Taking in that sage advice I'd
rigged my bike with a milk crate on the back and wire basket on the front
(mountain bikers laugh at me at the grocery store), Kim's bike had nothing and
Phillipe would have had to ride with his pack on. "He doesn't know what he's
getting out of", I thought, "He's got three kids anyways", and I smiled to
myself and eased the tail window down to rest against the protruding bike tire.
We'd walked not one hundred feet when I saw it. A 400 meter strip of grey to
blue ice etching down the grey limestone like inlaid sapphire and silver in the
pewter hand piece of a sword. "Holy sweet mother of pearl!" I spat. "What ees
thees?" asked Phillipe. The third surprise of day, I thought, a line that I'd
never seen before, probably a first
ascent, a pearl for the plucking. I dropped my pack and trotted back to the
truck for my binoculars. Five minutes later we'd abandoned our attempt on 'Ten
Years After' and I was following Phillipe into the timber looking for gems.
I was so psyched, I even motored by Phillipe, and this was another of the little
surprises -I was going strong, strong like I use to go all the time, strength
that I don't feel as often now that I am in my forties and I lose sleep worrying
about a mortgage. We shot up to the base of the climb in under an hour.
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Up valley, the squat pyramid of
Cascade Mountain was being heated by the first rays of the new day.
A pastel pink warmth had planed down from the pale and icy sky and the
summit point glowed in it and contrasted so abruptly with the shadow
locked black stone below that both Phillipe and I paused and watched
wordlessly.
The tone of the climbing was established in the first ten feet. A crusty
patina of grey ice sheeted over water-worn and off vertical slabs smooth as
the fender on a Ferrari. If I swung hard my tool would 'dong' like I'd
just smacked a parking block with an aluminum baseball bat and an ashtray
sized dinnerplate would shear leaving a window onto the underlying slab of
rock. Standing in any one place for more than five minutes trying to
outguess the ice and figure out where it was thickest and most attached
under the camo-snow would strain my calf muscles towards failure and press
blood backwards from my toes. I lost all feeling in the fronts of my feet,
and in my fingers, a half a dozen times and that was five times more than
I'd endured while climbing on the South Face of Mt McKinley earlier that
year. Ice screws ... I carried ten on the first pitch, five of which
were shorties, and I didn't place a one. Every 30-40 feet I got close to
the rock and built nests of pitons, cams and nuts. Falling before reaching
one of these nests would have been horrible at best, lethal at worst.
I led a pitch, Phillipe led two.
"It ees vehry sir-ree-bruhl", Phillipe said, tapping his finger to his
helmet and handing me the rack below what looked to be the crux pitch.
Forty feet above the ice ended for a body length of gray stone capped by a
one meter roof over which ice draped down like a dirty grey bath towel. I
got three shorties into the ice leading to the roof -cool- nice nest of
rock gear under the roof and then a high step onto a fist-sized blob of
ice and a lock off and reach and I pulled into a
delicate balance with my heart thumping like a rabbit's foot. I have
always found fear that nudges against the edge of panic to be strong
motivation to climb and I made the next few frantic moves profiting from
my fear even as it dried my mouth with a feeling akin to breathing warm
sand (My wife has always commented that I look cool and controlled when I
am gripped, wouldn't climbing be an incredible spectator sport if there
was some way to externalize the kaleidoscope
of angst that the climber presses through?). Above the roof ice glazed the
slab in a meter and a half wide strip, most of which was 1/2" thick and
some of which was 1" thick. The trick was to speculate where the water had
backed up onto something in its freezing ... and to speculate right. I
made numerous errors and revealed a patchwork of rock that must have
looked like the pockmarked plaster of a Balkan house. I tried to set my
frontpoints onto the lower 'window ledges' of
the dinnerplates reasoning that the ice must be bounded in that several
square inches otherwise it would have plated with my axe smacks. Thirty
feet above the roof, the slab angled up by five degrees and I had to pull
on my tools and I knew if they sheared that my fall would be horrible, or
lethal. I stood. My calves began to twist into stone and throb like they
had been skewered. I searched the crust above, then doubted the tool I'd
locked off on -what if the weight of hanging on it was gradually defeating
the structure of the matchbox sized piece of ice that supported it? -I
might die is what. I rehooked my other tool in its last matchbox and
stepped down a move and looked back down to Phillipe, he looked like a toy
soldier way down there. "This is too Dangerous Phillipe!", the words
were in my brain straining to be bellowed out of my mouth, then I thought
hard about
the down climb and decided that it was probably as hazardous as climbing
up. Another little surprise: I wanted to cast on out there ... farther, go
for it some more. It was like I'd tapped into an overlooked reserve of
testosterone within myself, yet it didn't have the metallic taste nor the
urgency that I remembered from my youth. Perhaps I'd found a new
hormone, oak-casked and carefully aged, mellow-testosterone.
Twenty feet higher I got a screw in the the frothy mushrooms that bubbled
out from the base of a slender sapphire pillar. The ice looked like frozen
flotsam and I doubted that the screw would hold much but it gave me the
confidence to pull up and nest two finger sized cams and a matchstick long
spanish piton into the overlap of stone just left of the ice. 1500 hundred
feet higher, the prevailing westerlies racked snow from the shallow
backside of Mt Rundle and plumed it
out to the Northeast. The snow had the consistency of finely ground glass
and occasionally the wind would turbine and tube down the wall and wash
waves of crushed crystal onto Phillipe and I. Balanced on the frontpoints
of my left foot, my right tacked out into air because there was not room
for both in the 8 inch wide pillar, I listened to spindrift sift over my
hood and it sounded like fine rain and I worried of it gaining weight and
taking me off.
Thirty feet higher I scraped at ice glazed to the bottom lip of a fist
crack with my right tool, and reached over my left shoulder. My left tool was
hooked into the next narrow pillar and my calves burned as I worked away
trying to remove the ice and with it the fret of having the cam skate out
if I fell. I scratched some of the ice free and stuffed in the purple cam
and clipped one of the half ropes directly into it because I'd run out of
slings fifty feet ago. A polished shoulder of limestone had concentrated
the ice above and I speculated that there would be sticks there. My picks
hooked through a pane of
ice stretched from the shoulder of rock like lace lingerie filigreed over
firm buttocks. It just never got any easier until I pulled through and
scampered left across 2 to 4 inch thick ice that would have normally given
me pause but was such a thickening here that I veritably danced up thirty
feet of rising traverse to a rock foothold squished under a stone overlap.
I knitted together five pieces that spanned eight horizontal feet and
bellowed down to my frozen French friend, "OK!".
Phillipe climbed up. "Verhy nice Bahree", he said, "verhy
commitment. POO-TAHN!, I am cold!"
All of the pitches had taken time. Rundle's shadow had long
reached across the valley cloaking the highway on the far side of the
river. The air felt like icy water and I tried using yoga breathing
to keep me from shivering at the belay but my yoga practice sucks and I
trembled still. Phillipe and I thought that the bluing in the ice would
mean he could move faster and he charged at it, but soon downshifted into
the slow methodical pace of tenuous climbing. Arrogantly I pushed on
him in my mind, "C'mon man go, just go. Go
Phillipe, go ... maybe I should have taken this pitch." One half a rope
length above, we could see the last pitch and it was blue and fat and we
knew it would take screws.
Dusk descended with a metallic cold, my jaw and shoulders
shuttered of their own accord. I feared dropping my medallion-sized
headlamp and was relieved when I managed to synch it to my head and put my
helmet back on over it. An aquamarine glow funneled out from my headlight
and
illuminated more hooking and fragile climbing, I knew why Phillipe had
taken his time ... I was glad that I had not taken the pitch. I wondered
if, after all these years, I was finally managing to get frostbite in my
right foot. At the anchor Phillipe offered to belay me so that I could
climb the last pitch and then rappel to him. "No, no, merci Phillipe, for
me it is enough." I replied through frozen teeth.
Two hours later, while softly plunging down frosty moss on the forest's
floor, my right foot blazed back to life and did it ever feel special,
kinda like it had been Dairy Queen dipped in napalm and lit on fire. Warm
tears rolled down my face and I dropped back because I didn't want
Phillipe to see me crying.
Back in my appreciating mountain home, in our mountain town, my wife
Catherine made Phillipe and I a fine dinner. I tinked my glass of red wine
to Phillipe's toasting what had been a great day, "Yes, thank-you Bahree"
said my French friend and we went on to polish off the whole bottle.
EPILOGUE: Two days later, the temperatures had climbed back towards the
inhabitable and I was once again driving towards the polished tourist town
where the 27th annual Banff Festival of Mountain Books and Films was
kicking off. I was slated to do some MCing and on my way to attend
the MC's meeting when I pulled over to the side of the road
across from the route and dug out my binos because I'd heard that the
young guns -Steve Holeczi and Rob Owens- and old-hand Brian Webster were
going for it. It was 1pm and I could see someone pulling the crux roof
while the others waited below, they were going to get it and I was jazzed
for them. I left both Rob and Steve messages on their
cell phones declaring that it was about time the youth scooped a route on
the grey hairs (I'd earned a couple more on it). Will Gadd was at the
meeting when I walked in and although I had no film to show, I had a story
to tell.
THE ORACLE, 450m, IV WI4+, X, M4. FA Stephen Holeczi, Brian Webster, Rob
Owens, Nov 6, 2003
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