4 Years, 4 Summits
Four years ago today, April 14th, 2014, myself and Spring finished our journey from Ireland to Canada and set foot in our new home in Squamish. Spring was returning to her home country after living away in Ireland for 6 years and I was moving somewhere completely new and foreign. The trip to Canada was not enjoyable. We ended up on a 9 hour flight in the middle seats of the middle isle of coach on the plane, wedged between an individual on our left who drank himself into a stupor within the first 45 minutes of the flight and an older, spindly lady on our right who packed the area around her seat with bags and clothes and then fell asleep in a ball on top of them. To add to this, in the seats in front of us were two mothers with newborns. They fully reclined their seats into our laps in the first minutes of the flight and they stayed that way for the duration. The crying and teething stopped us from being able to sleep through any of this. When we finally, wearily arrived at Vancouver airport, made our way through immigration services and went to pick up our rental car they told us that we could not have it. Spring had a driving license and I did not. But the credit cards we had were all in my name. The rental car company insisted that they’d only allow us to take the car if we provided a credit card in the drivers name. Without options, we got a taxi to the nearest Hotel and decided to figure this all out in the morning after sleeping off the day. The next morning, my first morning at my new home, I opened the curtains and the day was glorious. Blue skies and sunshine. We turned on the TV and switched to the news. Our jaws instantly dropped. Breaking news was coming in of the eruption of Eyjafjallajökull, an Icelandic volcano, and European airspace was shut down. Had our flight been a day later we’d likely have been stuck in Ireland now. This delay may have also impacted my chances of getting my permanent residency in Canada. The permanent residency application insists that I be in Canada within 12 months of taking the medical exam that it requires. That 12 month deadline was on April 15th, my first day in Canada. The qualms we’d had with the previous days flight and being refused our rental car washed away. We were at least here, our 3 meager suitcases of clothes had arrived with us and we were fine....
3 Types of Fun
“Aw man, this is totally a Type 2 fun kinda day” I can’t remember who said it, or what I was doing when I heard it, but I remember I was suffering. My body was aching, I was a little scared and I just wanted to be back at home, safe, curled up in bed trying to forget about this day. After that experience was over I remember a while later reading something, in a blog post or article online, where somebody categorized their adventure as definitely “Type 3 fun”. It was said in passing, almost with the expectation that if I was reading this article I should already know about the types of fun. At the time I had no clue. I thought fun was binary, you were either having it, or not. To hear people talking about scales of fun seemed odd, so I did some research. I couldn’t find a lot of information at the time although more people seem to be writing about it now. Most of the actual information I got about it came from talking to people on the trails. What I found out is that there are a total of 3 types of fun. Most people only recognize Type 1 fun, but if you push yourself to go on adventures, and try to find the edges of your comfort zones you will likely experience the other two kinds of fun also. Here’s how they are defined. Type 1. Fun to Do. Fun to Remember. When most people think of fun, they think of this. Some examples would be: Eating out at a good restaurant with friends. Spending a day at a water park riding the slides. Beach holidays in the Sun. Personally, I’d add mountain biking and trail running near town, bouldering near the parking lot and skiing at the resort. These are Type 1 fun for me because the commitment is pretty low. While they might all be scary depending on the difficulty, the physical investment of time and effort is pretty low. I find it can’t become Type 2 fun for me until I’ve completely left civilization behind and entered the wild. Type 2. Not Fun to Do. Fun to Remember. Most people likely have experiences that fall within this bracket, but they likely don’t actively put themselves in positions frequently were they will experience them again, some examples would be: Anything that pushes you out of your comfort zone. Learning a new activity that makes you feel clumsy and awkward in comparison to others who are adept at it. Planning something that you imagined would be within your abilities...
Quotes for the Untamed
When I’m not scouring maps and reading up about new places to explore I love to read the thoughts of fellow mountaineers, climbers, adventurers and explorers. There is a certain kinship to be found when I read words, centuries old, that could have been taken from my own mind. Alan Bennett puts it best. “The best moments in reading are when you come across something - a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things - which you had thought special and particular to you. And now, here it is, set down by someone else, a person you have never met, someone even who is long dead. And it is as if a hand has come out, and taken yours” - Alan Bennett This feeling is so true. I first felt it strongly when I read these words: “From the moment my eyes rested on the snow-clad alps I worshipped their beauty and was filled with a passionate longing to touch those shining snows, to climb to their heights of silence and solitude, and feel myself one with the mighty forces around me. The great peaks towering into the sky before me touched a chord that all the wonders of my own land had never set vibrating, and filled a blank of whose very existence I had been unconscious.” - Freda Du Faur Freda Du Faur was born in 1882 in Australia and became the first woman in history to climb Aoraki / Mount Cook, the highest Mountain in New Zealand. I have never been to Australia, nor am I from her era, yet, her words, at the time that I read them, were like seeing my own thoughts laid out in front of me. I read her words in the months after I first moved to Canada from Ireland and while I loved the rolling farmland of my original home, the snow-clad mountains, of which Ireland has few to none, that I was now surrounded by in Canada, truly did fill a blank inside me that I had been unconscious about before. Reading the thoughts of others I’ve found has a way of turning an intangible feeling into an idea with form. Here are a few more quotes that I’ve been inspired by and feel will inspire you also. “When we get out of the glass bottles of our ego, and when we escape like squirrels turning in the cages of our personality and get into the forests again, we shall shiver with cold and fright but things will happen to us so that we don’t know ourselves. Cool, unlying life will rush in.” - D.H. Lawrence...
