Early Season Ice Climbing
Since our week long trip to Canmore last Winter, Ice Climbing has become a passion of ours. This past season has seen us put a lot more effort into Climbing in general. Climbing is not just a full body sport, it’s a full everything sport. It’s physical, mental and emotional. It’s the perfect activity in my opinion. I can understand why people give up everything to live in a van and climb full time as a dirtbag. Climbing gives you almost everything you need to feel a sense of living fully. Ice Climbing, however, tends to not have a huge following. Even within the climbing community only a small subset of climbers will learn to climb ice and stick with it. For most it appears to be a novelty activity to do once, take some photos of and then never do again. Not for myself. Something about the aesthetics of it appeals to me. Swinging sharpened Ice tools and kicking serrated barbs of steel into walls of frozen water. Seeing layers of ice shatter and explode or feeling the ice tool make a satisfying “thunk” as it bites solidly from a perfect flick of the wrist. All ice is not made equal either. Time, weather and location can have a dramatic effect on the properties of the ice you will be climbing. The type of ice you climb in the morning can be completely different to the type of ice you climb that same evening. To rock jocks that have never been on ice I try to use this analogy, “Imagine going to your favorite granite rock climbing area only to discover when you get there that the rock has now changed to limestone with bands of gneiss running through it, and instead of a 5.10b crack you now have a 5.11a face climb. It’s that kind of flux that you have to be prepared for with ice” Or put simply by a friend of mine as we geared up at the base of a climb: “Ice Climbing is just badass, that’s it, everyone knows it” What follows are some accounts of the Ice Climbing trips I’ve been on in the past few months and what I’ve learned from those experiences. Mount Baker Seracs: Spring wrote about our experience at Mount Baker here: “Mount Baker: Ice Climbing“, so I won’t labor the details. I was really psyched to get out on glacier ice. From all my glacier experience the number one rule has always been to avoid going anywhere near crevasses but on this trip our goal was not only to find the deepest, darkest cracks in the glacier...
10 Trail Running Lessons
Here are a few trail running lessons that I have learned over the past year. I thought I would pass them along to see if you can relate to any of them! Don’t eat eggs before you run. They will make you feel heavy and make you even gassier than running normally makes you! This can be a huge problem if you are ahead of your running partner; you may actually lose a partner on this one. Keep your kit tidy! Meaning don’t have earphone wires hanging down so they can swing aimlessly while you gallop along. Tuck those stray wires in your sports bar or in your shorts waist band. You will tire quickly of having to adjust laces, wires, straps…everything needs to be in it’s right place or else 2 to 3 hours down the trail you are going to have a meltdown. I have so I know. Take the right music. Music that sounds great at the beginning of the run can become very annoying hours in. How do you know you have the right music? For shorter tempo runs I always like a few sick beats to get dropped and for longer runs I like something a bit more emotive, nothing that will make me cry mid-run, but soothing enough that it helps me keep on pace. Fight the urge to sit or lie down when you see a soft mossy patch along the trail. you won’t get back up. Always bring toilet paper. Let’s not beat around the bush, because you are eventually going to have to poop in one, so be prepared! There will be slow days and there will be fast days. There will be days that you love it and days that you swear you will never run again. It’s all a part of the process…embrace it! Learn to love walking. That’s right, I have let the cat out of the bag, the key to running for a really long time is learning when to walk and when to keep running. There is no shame in walking a chin scraper of a hill, it’s probably more efficient and energy-saving in the long run; unless you are kind of a big deal like some of the pro’s out there. I am not therefore I am not ashamed to walk every now and then! Running solo is a beautiful thing! Don’t be afraid to head out on the trails by yourself, even for the long runs. Running in a group is a beautiful thing! Learn to run with a group, especially people who are faster than you. You won’t believe how motivating it can...
Mount Baker: Ice Climbing
“Did you see the BCMC call out for a trip to the Mt Baker seracs to do some ice climbing? Do you want to sign up?” This was the question I received in a text from Leigh one morning in October. I texted back within seconds saying “Anniversary at Baker!” It just so happened that the Thursday before the trip we would see our 8th year wedding anniversary come and go. This seemed like the perfect way to see in another year of adventure together. We signed up for the trip and started dreaming about climbing ice again. The only type of ice that Leigh and I have climbed before has been waterfall ice, some in the Rockies and some in the Coastal Range, so climbing glacier ice was going to be a new experience for us and it was going to take some time to knock the rust off of our recently acquired ice climbing skills. We set up top-ropes at the first wall of ice we could walk up to on the glacier. These first climbs proved to be more difficult than anticipated, and everyone, albeit 1 or 2, had to shout “take” more than once on their way up. There were several bulges and overhangs to contend with and the density of this ice was proving to be very hard and made for some very ginger tool placements, as no crampon or ice pick was really sinking in. All part of the learning process and also part of the beauty of ice climbing, no two walls of ice are ever the same. Once we had our fill of these climbs we decided to make our way over to an area where 2 from our group set up a few more ropes. We had to weave around gaping crevasses, jump over cracks in the ice and down-climb some sections just to get to the climbing area. It was unnerving but so much fun at the same time. It was really starting to feel like we were on another planet with such an other-worldly almost eery feeling. The only sounds apart from the odd shout of “on belay” or “climb on” was the groaning and cracking of the glacier. I walked the final narrow ice bridge towards the crevasse where the top-ropes were set up to see that you had to rappel into the hole if you wanted to climb. I felt a reluctance at first, as my first instinct is to always avoid being inside a crevasse, but I had to find a way to push through it and I joined Leigh and our friend Scott down below. Did someone say...
Tantalust, Part V: Epilogue
< Tantalust, Part IV: Risking Adventure The roar of the propeller blades and engine was deafening. As we lifted suddenly off the ground the Haberl Hut, where we’d lived for 3 nights, became a speck on top of a rocky ridge below us. “Want to check out the Rumbling Glacier?” We’d met this Helicopter pilot before. He had flown Ron and his friends up to the Cabin to do maintenance on it. While he waited for them to finish we talked to him about our plans. We had mentioned the heavily crevassed “Rumbling Glacier” on the East side of Mount Tantalus and how we had hoped to see it up close. Even from afar the huge, jagged seracs and crevasses that make up most of its mass can be made out. Now that we were flying out, he remembered our wish and offered over the intercom to take us on a close flyby of the glacier. This was a surprise to us as we had only booked a flight directly down to the Tantalus Hut, but we both instantly nodded “Yes” and gave him a thumbs up. To see this immense, fractured glacier up close, as we hovered above it, was amazing. I’ll likely never set foot there and this glacier will likely disappear in the next few decades so I felt privileged for the experience. After a few moments we were whisked back to Lake Lovely Water and after a brief detour around the lake we got dropped off on a rocky bluff near the Tantalus Hut. As the Chopper took off again and left us behind I understood the energy and stoke those climbers had exuded when they were dropped off up at the Haberl Hut. That short flight in the Helicopter had felt like a shot of adrenalin right in to my chest. We grabbed our heavy packs and began to make our way towards the Tantalus Hut. We’d packed our last day pretty full. After effectively resting at the Haberl Hut for the past 2 days we felt itchy to get moving again. The plan was to dump our unnecessary equipment in a storage container in the Hut, then hike up and scramble to the summits of 3 peaks nearby; Iota, Pelops and Niobe. After that we’d hike back down, retrieve our stashed gear, hike down to the Squamish River and then float our Canoe downstream for several kilometers and take out near the “Watershed Grill”, a restaurant that sits above the banks on a wide bend in the river, where we’d meet our friend who was going to pick us up. Back at the Hut...
Tantalust, Part IV: Risking Adventure
< Tantalust, Part III: Finding Jim I stirred awake. I could hear Spring outside, in the kitchen area of the Cabin, preparing breakfast. I hadn’t really slept, the sleep I did get was restless and fitful at best. I woke up periodically and looked around to remind myself that I wasn’t out sleeping somewhere on those glaciers. My shoulders felt stiff and knotted, from bearing the weight of a heavy pack and a stressful day. I joined Spring outside. The clouds still hung low beyond the large windows, dulling the morning light. There was an unease inside me that wouldn’t abate. The previous day had been hard, really hard. The mental fatigue from it still lingered. An Alpinist I met while ice climbing in Canmore last Winter, and subsequently added on Facebook, did some serious climbs in Alaska this past Spring. When he returned he posted online about how amazing his trip had been, and mentioned the obstacles he had overcome in a very matter of fact way. Weeks later though he posted a picture of the journal he had written on that trip which told a very different story. A story of fear, of exhaustion, of doubt. In retrospect he could only remember how much fun the trip had been, but his journals kept him honest when reflecting. I took inspiration from him and kept my own journal on this trip. Reading over it now is like looking at the scrawlings from the mind of someone else. It would be easy for me to gloss over the trials in hindsight and make light of them. In retrospect, they weren’t that difficult. In retrospect I know that we left the Tantalus Hut and arrived at the Jim Haberl Hut 12 hours later and successfully navigated some heavily glaciated terrain. The experience of that day was very different though and merely stating the facts would be disingenuous. I didn’t know if the fringes of snow that I’d step onto would hold, I didn’t know if the choices we made would work, I didn’t know if we’d have to sleep out there, if we’d find the Hut, if we’d get trapped by a dead end and an irreversible route, if we’d get injured by any one of the objective hazards we had to contend with, or worse, die. That constant uncertainty and worry whittled away at my core all day until nothing was left but a shell. I sat in the Hut for most of the morning, looking at old, tattered magazines but seeing nothing but the events of the preceding day. Sometime in the afternoon on our first day in the...
