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...
Get your nose against it
The pleasure of risk is in the control needed to ride it with assurance so that what appears dangerous to the outsider is, to the participant, simply a matter of intelligence, skill, intuition, coordination… in a word, experience. - A.Alvarez I can’t remember when I first heard the maxim: “get your nose against it”, but it stuck. I repeat it as a mantra to myself, primarily in the mountains. Sometimes I’ll be standing at the base of a mountain and the terrain ahead will look steep, exposed, dangerous and complicated. The first few times I encountered situations like this I turned back and quit. Looking up at everything I’d have to deal with to summit this mountain was overwhelming. Mountains can make you feel very small and insignificant if you don’t understand how you need to approach them. The ethos behind getting your nose against it is simple. When you force yourself to stop standing back and touch the mountain or obstacle with your nose you see that it isn’t this large, ominous hulk of a thing, but it’s rocks, and soil and ledges and ramps and snow and ice and before you know it you’ve passed it. It’s a philosophy akin to the idea of “baby steps”. When attempting something, anything, don’t quit or give up before you’ve started because you imagine the goal is too lofty. Just forget about the end result, and keep your nose against it, concentrate solely on the immediate next step. Sure you might have to quit anyway, but let it be when you’re right up against it, touching it. Understand why it is that you need to stop and don’t just assume you aren’t good enough to tackle it. The mountains for me are like a microcosm of all life experiences. You, and everyone else, climb mountains daily, figurative mountains. It’s the literal mountains though that really shine a light into what drives us as humans. We get to see a literal representation of how we deal with our problems and goals day to day and what we need to change to become better. Like with everything though, you need to temper this maxim with some common sense. Sometimes you can evaluate that the terrain ahead is too dangerous from afar, like during avalanche season for example. But, if you take anything from this, have this idea of getting your nose against it always in your head. It will lead you to try new things, meet new people you may have avoided, have new experiences and above all else, make you more competent and rational as you move in the mountains and the wild, which is, after all,...
Mt. Baker, N. Ridge: Anatomy of an Attempt
“At one point or another we’ve all cited percentages or experience levels and shrugged away risk. Given reasons for why it can’t happen to us, why it won’t happen…” I lay awake, semi in and out of my sleeping bag. It’s hot. I’m trying to sleep as I know I need to be awake and alert again in a few short hours. I want so bad for the temperature to drop, so that I can sleep, so that the snow underneath my tent and for miles around me will firm up. But there’s no wind, no sound, just dry, dead air and the dying light of the day. I’m listening to a podcast called “The Dirtbag Diaries” on my mp3 player. This episode is called “Anatomy of an Accident”. In it the author details a near fatal accident he had high in the mountains in a steep icy gully, he examines the simple mistakes he made during that trip early on that had a domino effect eventually leading to his accident. “Geez, this is the last thing I need to be listening to right now!” I say to myself. I hear a serac calve off Colfax in the distance, the impact shatters the silence across the entire mountain. It’s not the first serac we’ve seen or heard fall this day. “Maybe this is exactly what I should be listening to right now…” I let this episode finish and then try to get some sleep. It’s fitful, it never seems to get dark outside, the temperature is always uncomfortably hot and before I know it, it’s 2am and time to get up and ready. I give Dean and Adrien a wake up call. Spring is already up. Everyone moves in silence, boiling water, eating whatever calories we can paw at in the dull light, getting our harnesses on, prusiks dressed and checked, clipping all our gak where ever it will fit. We split into two rope teams of two and head out into the eerie glow of the near full moon to cross the Coleman Glacier. Only minutes have passed and we’re already jumping the first of a plethora of unavoidable crevasses, ice axes at the ready to arrest any sudden snow bridge collapses. I think to myself “I didn’t even need that coffee this morning, this is enough of a wake up”. At times it feels like tiptoeing past sleeping giants. Huge pillars of broken ice the size of houses, yawning crevasses the depths of which my 100 lumen headlamp can’t even attempt to see to the bottom of. As I inch across one of a few 3 foot wide...
