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....
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 II: Dreams and Reality
< Tantalust, Part I: my little Everest *pop* I screamed out in pain and shock as I looked down and watched my left ankle collapse and roll underneath me. I heard an odd popping sound come from my ankle and felt a weird crunching sensation. I dropped to my knees… Thoughts from the events of a year ago were circling through my mind. Pain, it seems, is the bodies way of reminding the head of that which it hopes to forget. My ankle was twinging from the weight of my heavy backpack that was burdened with food and equipment for 8 days of Mountaineering. I propped my hiking pole in my side, below my rib cage, and put my weight on it to give my ankle a rest. The aching began to subside and I exhaled. As I did a lone wasp landed above my sore ankle on my shin and stung me. Through gritted teeth I swatted it away, but it had done it’s damage. The ache from my ankle had now been replaced with a piercing throb from this sting. “Why don’t you want me here? “ I heard myself irrationally ask inside my mind. Who was I asking? The Mountains of this Range? It’s not unusual for people to anthropomorphise places and things, but I usually don’t. My history with the Tantalus Range had skewed my usual high tolerance to apophenia however. I’ve written about this history before (see: Tantalized by the Tantalus) and I’d be lying if I said it hadn’t played at least a small part in my decision to turn around when attempting to push into the heart of the Tantalus Range from the North this Spring (see: When Sisyphus met Zeno: Tantalus Digressions). Curiously, I’ve never written a post about the events of last year though, about my injury and the ramifications of it. I suppose that is telling. Anyway, this history of trying to push into the Tantalus Range and feeling as though it is constantly trying to push back was wearing on me. As I continued to hike, I tried to reason with myself. My ankle was weaker than usual and causing me more pain as, the previous weekend, I had run in the Squamish50 trail race, completing the 23km variation of the course (see: Running the Arc’teryx Squamish 50 23k). Wasps were everywhere this year, so getting stung was not unusual at all. The Tantalus Range is known for being difficult to access and for having complicated terrain, the weather here is also known for being gnarly at the best of times. I remembered a quote, by a...
Animal House II: The Tenquille Invasion
“Are you guys all from Whistler?” I asked. He finished chugging another Pilsner and shouted out: “Yeah buddy, how’d you know?” I smiled as a reply and kept walking, past the Canadian Tire Queen sized inflatable mattress floating in the lake with somebody passed out on top of it, the shotgun and shells, the brewery worth of beer cans, the frenzied pack of dogs, the bleary eyed girlfriends wearing swimsuits that might have originally fit them some time back around ‘95, the Brahs tomahawking hatchets at the nearest tree trunk as if training for Z-Day, wearing board shorts, 5 dollar shades and baseball caps with comedy sized flat brims (still nonplussed by the sticker) Yes, yes, we had arrived, along with approximately 60 other people, 3 babies, 10 dogs and 8 mountain bikes at the Tenquille Lake Recreation Site to bask in the glorious death throes of Summer, long may she rest in peace. Getting here had been no mean feat for our 2WD jalopy. It had developed a mean cough in its muffler somewhere along the 4WD section of the Birkenhead River-Tenquille Creek Branch FSR. As we crawled through the water bars, giving the belly of our steed a good scratch I thought the lady doth protest too much. Eventually though we realized that she was hobbling along slower than we could actually walk this road, so we parked about 3km’s back from the Trailhead. Indeed, we walked at the same speed or faster than other 4WD vehicles on the road, overtaking them at the waterbars. Do yourself a favour, bike the road. Unless your truck is seriously jacked, you will be crawling it. A bike would be faster on the way in, and way faster and more fun on the way out. We made short order of the trail itself. It looks like somebody is trying to reroute the old trail away from all the muddy sections that have become hilariously braided. This rerouting is creating a bit of chaos as there are now branches off the main trail everywhere. We talked to some guys who had tried to hike in the previous night, took a wrong branch, and ended up back at their trucks via a different trail a few hours later, wherein they decided to camp instead for the night. Another aside, cross to the other side of the lake outflow on the way in for the shorter and easier trail to the cabin. Over the weekend we summited Tenquille, Finch Ridge, Copper Mound and McLeod. All nice, hands in pockets, rambles in the Class 2 range. Views were pleasant. Some MTB’rs got heli-dropped onto...
Tszil Mountain & Mount Taylor: Photo Essay
“Halo, Halo! At a place called Vertigo!” It seemed apropos that being a U2 fan (comment if you got the reference), being high in the mountains and being completely awestruck by the Sun Halo above me that that variation on those lyrics would come into my head as we ascended an airy, narrow moraine to gain a col. between Tszil Mountain and Mount Taylor. Myself, Spring and Ben had plans to explore some peaks in Joffre Lakes Provincial Park and did just that. If conditions were in we planned to also visit Slalok Mountain as well. Ultimately we ascended only the peaks mentioned in the title of this post but will be back to visit Slalok Mountain under drier conditions. This Park is justifiable so. It’s simply amazing and photos and words cannot do it enough justice. However, if I had to choose, photos do a better job than words in my opinion so I’ll let them do the talking. Have you been to Joffre Lakes? Which picture below is your...
