That Moment in the Mountains
Spending time in the wide open spaces of the mountain valleys and even in the more enclosed spaces, when I feel myself right up against the rock, I feel this sense of “this is the only place that I belong”. Being in the mountains, pushing my body to its physical limit, leaves no room for any other thoughts in my mind than just putting one foot in front of the other. I love this detachment from my “real” life, this detachment from the thoughts that usually cause me unneeded and undesirable stress in the “real” world. The petty thoughts that don’t really matter but seem to crowd my mind at work or at home, now have no meaning out here. My mind is free and clear to think about staying warm, safe and attaining that desired summit. My physical needs are all that matter now. It’s this stripping down to basic needs that appeals to me. We have become so used to being distracted; to having our senses dulled that we sometimes forget how alive we can feel by feeling the bitter cold on our face, by feeling the rush of fear that forces us to focus on holding on tighter or by feeling a thirst that causes to crave water so bad that you can literally smell water vapor in the air. It’s these raw and very real needs that make me remember how simple life actually is. In these wild places I feel so small. I feel this comforting sense of insignificance, like very little of what I do here out here will actually change this wild place. The rivers will continue to carve the land and the mountains will remain still and cold. I am calm. There are no requirements out here, the wild places demand nothing of me....
Crown Mountain: Powder Pushers
Mid last week we got wind of a planned trip to investigate and possibly climb Crater Couloir on Crown Mountain. It’s been on our radar for a while so we immediately put our names down to go along. Some details changed and due to a few of us needing to be back in the city earlier 4 of us, Spring, Leigh, Dean and Adrien ended up planning to start hiking at 4:30am it meant a 3am wakeup alarm on a Saturday but c’est la vie. We approached via the Grouse Grind trail, a leg burner that stops for most at the Chalet at the top where they check their watches, record their times and never venture further into the backcountry beyond. For us, the Chalet would be our first pitstop. Starting in the dark, and trudging up this trail that turned from soil, to ice, to snow it was a novelty to burst out into the open and be surrounded by the fully lit up Grouse Mountain Resort. We refilled our water bottles in the Chalets restrooms, changed some gear around then headed out on the corduroy groomed trails towards Crown Mountain, where we left the groomed and broken trails behind. We made good time from here and passed Dam Mountain, Little Goat Mountain and then continued down to Crown Pass. As our plan was to do the Crater Couloir we started descending towards the Hanes Creek Valley at this point. About half way down we noticed a rather large and wide runnel that had been formed recently by a slide released from the bluffs above to our left. It was enough of a pause to question whether we should attempt the Couloir at all. Conditions weren’t good and we all knew it would be a heinous snow treadmill up the couloir so we decided to leave it for another day. We decided to attempt the summer scramble route instead. Once we regained Crown Pass we began following the Tree Markers that lead the way along the summer trail. Simple sections that I’m sure are easily bypassed when there isn’t any snow ended up taking considerable amounts of time. An ice layer about a foot or two beneath the snow caused numerous problems in steep sections as the snow on top of it would slide and would also not compress to allow us to make footholds. To add to this, due to the snow, the runouts in quite a few sections of sidehilling were pretty bad. Nevertheless, we pushed on, swimming and plowing through the powder. We gained the final ridge to the summit and decided to don our...
