Tantalust, Part III: Finding Jim
< Tantalust, Part II: Dreams and Reality “Spring… we have a problem…” I slowly inched my way back from the edge, my body stiff, my heart beating up out of my throat. I turned to Spring and I could tell that she understood from my body language that something was wrong. I scanned around for options and couldn’t see any, today was not supposed to be like this. “Thanks Ron” I whispered in reply as I came down the ladder from the sleeping area in the Cabin that morning. Ron was gesturing towards a fresh pot of coffee he had brewing, instructing me to help myself. It was some time after 5am. Myself and Spring had been lazy stirring awake, but when we heard Ron in the kitchen getting coffee ready for us, we got up quickly. We got our breakfast ready and sat down to eat it. I couldn’t tell yet if it was still dark out or if there were just dark clouds low in the sky. As we ate breakfast, relatively slowly, Ron shared a little anecdote with us, he said “You know, when I used to climb Mountains, the time we set to get up at, was the time everyone got up. There wasn’t any waiting around either, we got going right away”. I understood the moral of his story. There is a maxim in mountaineering that goes “It’s later than you think” and Ron was right. If we had a hope to accomplish our lofty goal of summiting Mount Alpha today and then traversing to the Haberl Hut then we needed to get moving asap, but I was stalling as I still wasn’t sure about the weather as it was too dark out. As the dull light of the morning spread I could see across the lake that the clouds were still hanging low on the peaks that rose above it, obscuring their summits from view. Ron returned from a trip outside and said that it was raining now. Myself and Spring made the decision to forgo our attempt on the East Ridge of Alpha. The rock would likely be slick from the rain and the low ceiling of clouds would mean that visibility would be poor, similar to the conditions we had encountered the previous day. We still needed to make the Haberl Hut by that night though so we set out as soon as we’d finished breakfast. After a few minutes of hiking away from the Tantalus Hut we paused at a fork in the trail. Turning right would put us on the route to the East Ridge of Alpha. We took one...
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...
What motivates you?
I can’t believe I almost didn’t get out on the trails today. Let me tell you how the morning started. The alarm went off at 5:30,which thank goodness for the end of daylight savings time, was actually only 6:30. Nonetheless the alarm was set early as Leigh was heading out on a hike/climb with some friends and I decided to take a day to myself (yes sometimes we do things separately). I thought I may as well make the most of the day, get up with Leigh make some breakfast and coffee and then head for an early morning training session at the bouldering gym, as I would probably have the gym to myself at that hour of the morning. Where Jack-o’-Lanterns go to die? How I would have felt if I stayed home. The bouldering gym. Sunlight beams through the trees. This is exactly how it played out as well. I seen Leigh off and was at the gym by 7:45. I played around for an hour, and I say play because it is way too much fun in there to call it training, and then decided to call it after I started to feel a bit sore and too pumped to stay on any of the holds. Made it home by around 9:00 and decided to have a second breakfast, which ended up being a little more leisurely than it should have been, but hey it’s Sunday! It’s always good to take some time for reflection. After a little perusing on the computer I came across an article (check it out here) by a local ultrarunner about staying motivated during the dark, rainy winter season of the PNW. Now today was nothing but sunshine but it was a good thing I read it when I did, because at that moment I was contemplating a nice long nap! I was starting to lose motivation fast, my mind was trying to convince me I was too tired and that I should be kind to myself. This is the oldest trick in the book though, my brain was trying to convince me of something I knew I would deeply regret later, and I almost fell for it. I read through the article and it smartened me up right quick! “The less you do, the less you’ll want to do. The more you do, the more you’ll want to do.” Those words kept buzzing through my head and as I lay on the bed feeling sorry for myself I firmly decided to get up and just put my running gear on. “You know you’ll feel better after you run.” “Just take...
What gets us Stoked, IV
BOOM! A few more videos that inspire us to get out and experience the Wild. What’s inspiring you lately? Comment and let us know. ...
The Shoulder Season Shuffle
Before moving from Ireland to Canada I had never heard the term “shoulder season” before. Largely because Ireland only has 1 Season, which is that it’s rainy, a little cold, a little warm, sometimes sunny, all year round. Whereas Canada, more specifically, Southwest British Columbia where we live, definitely has 4 distinct seasons, well, that isn’t entirely true, it’s more like 2 seasons with 2 shoulders abutting them. The two main seasons are Winter and Summer, or, colloquially for outdoor enthusiasts, Snow Season and Bug Season. Spring and Fall feel like blips on the radar, as soon as they start it feels like they’ve already ended. Which is why they’re known as the shoulders, Fall is the trailing edge of Summer leading into Winter, and Spring is the trailing edge of Winter. They’re periods of transition and flux, before the relatively stable conditions of Summer and Winter settle in. This flux creates, predictably, unpredictable weather. You can have daytime highs in temperatures that feel like Summer and nighttime lows that feel like Winter. Trusting forecasts even a day in advance is usually a fools errand. At this time of year, personally, I try to look at the forecast the morning of a trip and even then I take it with a pinch of salt as the weather can vary, dramatically, in the mountains from valley to valley. At this time of year, in the Fall, if you want to continue experiencing the outdoors, you have to be flexible and zen about it. You have to be mentally prepared for the fact that, even though the forecast is for sunshine it may in fact start snowing on you on the top of a mountain. As the song goes “Que Sera, Sera…” Last weekend, the first weekend of October, was a typical Fall weekend. The preceding weekend had seen the mountains in our corner of British Columbia turn, almost overnight, from Summer to Winter. A large storm had rolled in and dumped massive amounts of precipitation on everything. People sometimes say to me “You’re Irish, you must be used to the rain”, I can tell you, we don’t get rain like that in Ireland. It was “biblical” as the expression goes, with curtains of rain coming down. We were signed up to run the Rubble Creek Classic that Sunday, a ~25km trail race through a high mountain pass in Garibaldi Provincial Park. By early on Saturday though the organizers postponed it to the following weekend. In typical fashion, we shuffled things around with word of the postponement and went for a run locally. This weekend the forecast looked good and I...
