by Rob Wood
In the midst of all this upheaval while working on our projects in the middle of the night, smoking cigarettes, drinking black coffee and listening to Gordon Lightfoot’s “Canadian Railroad Trilogy,” a Canadian flatmate asked me casually, “Wanna go to Expo 67 in Montreal this summer?”
“What the hell for? There’s no mountains there, are there?”
“Well actually, yes there are, and it would also be fun and it might change the world.”
It also just happened that both my big sisters were living in Montreal at the time and raving about Expo 67. So (with apologies to Ian and Sylvia), “Out on runway number nine, the jet plane that I was leaving on, not knowing when I’d be back again,” was heading not south to the Alps but west to new horizons.
Trudeaumania and Expomania offered exciting and hopeful times, full of promise for a better world. The Beatles’ Sergeant Pepper album was released the day I arrived in Montreal, and later that night I had my first toke of marijuana. Welcome to Canada!
-2-
ALLEGIANCE TO NATURE
“Why did you choose to come to the BC west coast?”
AFTER WORKING IN MONTREAL ALL winter and then spending the summer climbing in the Rockies, I just had to make a pilgrimage to the rock climbers’ Mecca, Yosemite Valley in sunny California. After I’d spent a few weeks of soaking up the staggeringly powerful natural ambience of “the Valley” and the equally powerful social vibrations of the hippie movement at its peak, a synchronicity occurred which resulted in the most extraordinary experience of my life.
In Camp 4, the climbers’ campground in Yosemite, seemingly quite by chance, I met an old acquaintance from the Lake District climbing scene in the old country. Mick Burke had a reputation as a “hard” climber, with several significant ascents in the Alps and South America. He made it quite clear he was intending to climb the Nose of El Capitan, an approach to the summit which at that time was surrounded by an aura of impossibility. Only the very best local Yosemite climbers had succeeded in climbing this, the most famous and iconic rock climb in the world. The 3,000 ft. vertical granite wall took five days of supreme physical and psychological effort in the blazing, hundred-degree California sun.
Mick had already made seven false starts with different partners, all of whom had “psyched out” and had to “back off,” so I was not altogether surprised when I noticed his beady eye focused on me. I had precious little in the way of prerequisites, other than being fit and having done a lot of relatively easy climbs, but Mick assured me casually, “It’s just a matter of wanting to do it.”
Even though I suffered prolonged and debilitating periods of doubt and fear during the first couple of days, Mick’s indomitable and infectious willpower kept us going. Then in the middle of the third day, after a series of giant pendulum swings, we passed the point of no return, with all possibility of retreat cut off. Committed as we were, I remember that third bivouac as being the turning point in my life. Gone was all the stressful nagging fear and doubt, replaced by a profound sense of calm and peace. We took the time to look around and absorb the incredible drama and beauty of our situation. Empowered by this new-found confidence, we completed the rest of the climb without undue difficulty. After five days and four nights of unrelenting verticality, we staggered over the top onto flat ground and were greeted by a crowd of cheering fellow climbers who had hiked up the back, loaded with fresh fruit and beer, to help us celebrate the historic event.
I wrote an article about the climb, under the title of “Sorcerer’s Apprentice,” in which I attributed our success to psychic phenomena rather than conventional technical skill and expertise. A combination of Mick’s ability to focus his will and positive intention, my allegiance and bonding to a fellow countryman a long way from home, the incredible generosity and support from the local climbers, the background aura of love and peace of the hippie movement at its peak and our awesome respect for El Cap and the beauty of Yosemite Valley all conspired to induce a remarkably high degree of synergy which dramatically enhanced our capabilities.
Proof that we had broken through the “aura of impossibility” that had previously kept El Cap in the domain of the gods was quickly supplied by the fact that right after our ascent all kinds of people started doing it.
“If those two bozos can do it so can we!” And they did: the four-minute mile phenomenon.
As the fall progressed and the rock climbing season in Yosemite wound down, along with a love affair with a California girl and my finances, some fellow Brits from Calgary invited me to join them in the basement of a favorite hangout for climbers in Calgary.
“It’s a pretty rowdy scene. You’ll fit right in!” they assured me.
Every weekend without fail the Rockies were invaded by crazy climbers from Calgary. As winter closed in, the rock climbing activities were curtailed, and while the bears were bedding in the backwoods, the beer in the bars of Banff continued to flow all the more. Paying for beer was one thing, but paying for outdoor recreation such as downhill skiing went against the grain of dedicated climbers, especially if there happened to be other fun to be had for free. As it turned out, there was an abundance of it: steep ice – virgin waterfalls – glistening in the pale winter sunshine right beside the highway, just asking, in this land of opportunity, to be seduced.
During my first winter in the Rockies, together with some of the other members of the Calgary Mountain Club (CMC), armed with new state-of-the-art ice climbing tools, in desperately cold but often sunny conditions, we pioneered the new sport of frozen waterfall climbing. We made first ascents of some of the more obvious falls that were close to roads, and then some of the longer, steeper and more remote ones were reconnoitred. Inevitably lessons were learned the hard way about survival in winter in the Canadian mountain wilderness, with its immense scale, its temperatures of thirty or forty below, its deep, dry powder snow and, of course, the dreaded avalanches. It was classic mountaineering adventure, exploring and pushing the internal and external limits. Clinging to these vertical pillars of glassy, hard, green ice with sharp ice picks and crampons like tigers’ claws, way high up off the ground, was very primal and exhilarating but also extremely scary. Nobody knew for sure if it was possible to even survive such extreme conditions, never mind succeed.
One Sunday night four of us young climbers from Calgary sat around a bivouac camp on a precariously exposed ledge high up on a ridge, just below the summit of a big mountain. We had just completed a strenuous and scary ascent of its north face that had taken longer than expected and prevented us getting down off the mountain and returning to the city in time for work next morning. We were physically exhausted and had no food, but, far from feeling guilty, we relished the opportunity to savour and prolong the exhilarating sense of relief and release we were now feeling. The brilliant, sparkling stars and surrounding moonlit peaks accentuated our bliss. Our continuous stream of hysterical laughter pierced the profound silence of the deep mountain wilderness as we relived the more desperate moments on the climb.
“I was really gripped. Just about had brown britches a couple of times.”
“It wasn’t the fear that got me. It was the fear of fear!”
Gradually the peaceful environment calmed our emotions, and as we relaxed the conversation became deeper and more philosophical. We discussed how, after pushing the limits of hard climbing on the dangerous rock and ice faces of the Rockies, the price for fame, glory and ego satisfaction was getting higher and higher – especially when friends were being killed – and the rewards of questionable lasting value.
At the same time, I was noticing that the more time we spent in the pristine wilderness the greater was our enjoyment from simply being there, at peace with the magic of the landscape. The undiluted energy and pristine beauty inspired deep feelings of allegiance and love. Sometimes, as on this occasion, we became so engaged with the wild mountain environment that it seemed we had become part of it. As well as a heightened awareness and a shift of perception –
no doubt inspired by adrenaline – that was conducive to increased performance and survival capability, we felt a deeply satisfying sense of connectivity with something larger than ourselves. This euphoric “natural high,” which is now referred to as “being in the Zone,” is what the three of us who were recent immigrants from Europe found so exciting and special about the Canadian wilderness experience.
When the subject of guilt about not showing up for work finally reared its ugly head, Bill, the one bona fide, laid-back Canadian, with his amiable sparkling eyes and his willing smile shining through a bushy beard and mop of dark curly hair, remarked, “There’s nothing special about my job. I could probably easily get another one if I had to.”
Bugs, the gaunt and wiry Scotsman, with typical, caustic humour added, “Going back to Calgary on Sunday nights, followed by Monday mornings, makes me puke.”
Then the always positive and cheerful George, who grew up in the same Liverpool slum, with the same accent and exactly the same looks as George Harrison, and who had come to Canada to escape from work slavery in the factories of a big city, chipped in, “Wouldn’t it be great to just stay out here in the mountains and not bother going back to Calgary? Maybe we should try it sometime.”
I was not at all thrilled by my job at the City of Calgary Planning Department, which I considered a necessary evil to keep me close to the mountains, and was desperately looking for a way out. Sensing that Canada had much more to offer, my woolly-headed idealism seized the moment to ask, “Why don’t we quit our jobs in the city and find ways to live permanently somewhere out in the wilds?”
As our minds gradually caught up with our weary bodies, but still sharing the heightened awareness of the pristine environment, we all agreed that weekends and holidays were no longer enough. A yearning we shared was to make being in the mountains part of our daily lives.
We made a pact.
And we made it happen.
Bill bought first a bow and arrow and then a kayak. With the first he took off into the Rockies. With the second he became Kayak Bill, spending the rest of his life travelling the BC coast, living completely off wild edible plants of the land and gathering wild food from the sea. George bought a 10-acre piece of raw land in the Columbia Valley near Golden and built himself a family homestead. Bugs moved out to the small town of Canmore in the Rockies.
Propelled by the still-undefined quest for freedom, I headed farther west until I reached the BC coast, where I found even more powerful satisfaction and romance to be waiting.
It may have taken a few years to detach ourselves incrementally from society’s umbilical cord, but each of us, in our own way, succeeded in fulfilling the pact.
An interim step along the way was meeting Dick Parsons, who lived most of the time in a tipi in a remote spot on the eastern slopes of the Rockies. He ran courses on survival and wild edible plants for the University of Alberta. Being far too proud and poor to pay to go on a course, a couple of us learned a lot from his lifestyle by hanging out at his tipi.
A few years of office work in Calgary had further exacerbated my disenchantment with the system to the point of being well primed for the encouragement the pact presented to opt out. Before I left Calgary I chanced to cross paths with a psychologist. Being pretty bigoted in those days I felt obliged to razz this guy about the importance of his vocation. His reply surprised and shook me a bit at the time, and much more later.
“Let’s take you, for instance. What’s your problem?”
“Me? I don’t have a problem!” I assured him.
“Sure you do. What happened to you when you were about seventeen or eighteen?”
“Nothing much, played rugby, climbed, got ready to go to university.”
“No, something really important.”
That night I woke with a startling thought. “Oh yes! My mother died.”
The psychologist smiled when I told him. He asked me a few questions about my mother and soon discovered that I could remember precious little about her. In fact I had never even thought of her once in the ten years since her death.
“That’s your problem,” he said. “When a teenage boy loses his mother he invariably develops a super-masculine persona to protect himself from the emotional trauma.”
Searching a bit deeper, he discovered I had an older sister living in Vancouver. He recommended that I pay her a visit and talk with her about our mother. When I finally followed the free advice and showed up in Vancouver, my sister, Rachel, reminded me that mother was from a seafaring family. In fact, our grandfather had been an officer in the Royal Navy.
“That might explain why mother always took us to the seaside while dad always took us to the mountains,” I realized, “and here I am arriving, at last, at a place that has an abundance of mountains and sea.”
From then on, not only was I more open to psychology, I was much more open period, especially to all kinds of previously hidden connectivity in nature and life. I never looked back.
-3-
SETTLING DOWN
“How and when did you find a place to settle down?”
IT DID NOT TAKE ME long after arriving on the BC coast to realize that I had to have a boat. Boating, especially sailing, would obviously be fun in itself and would also provide access to the beautiful and largely roadless mountains that could be seen on every horizon, an explorer’s paradise. My first boat was a 21-foot sloop affectionately named Shadowfax after Gandalf’s horse that magically conveyed him to safety from the teeth of disaster in Lord of the Rings. Soon my old pal Bill showed up from the Rockies, and after a brief look at Shadowfax he suggested, with his usual mischievous grin, “Gee, that’s great. Now we can sail up the coast and climb Mount Waddington.”
“Good idea. Where is it, anyway?”
“Dunno. Must be up there somewhere.”
We had heard Mount Waddington referred to as one of the world’s great mountains, “a mountaineer’s mountain,” which was the polite way of saying it was bloody difficult to climb. Whereas this casual attitude of ours may have been justified, as far as reaching the top of a mountain was concerned, we were about to find out it was sadly out of whack in terms of what was required to get even to the bottom of this one.
With only a smattering of marine savvy, learned in Sea Cadets at high school, and a few elementary preparations that included looking on a map, we cheerfully boarded Shadowfax and took off up coast on what seemed the most direct route to the mountain: up Bute Inlet and the Homathko Valley, approximately 150 miles north of Vancouver.
During this exciting voyage the full range of hazards and difficulties that can be encountered by a small underpowered boat on this big, oh so big, coast was introduced to us the hard way. While storm-bound in a coastal pub we heard some old-timers arguing about the greatest coastal threat. Was it the tidal rapids with their 15-knot currents, three-foot overfalls and huge whirlpools? Or was it the southeaster with its hurricane force winds and mighty smoking waves turned chaotic by opposing tides? Or was it getting lost in the fog, going round and round in circles, running out of gas and freezing to death?
“Nah!” said one particularly crusty old fisherman, deliberately taking his time for maximum effect, “It’s the rocks … It’s the effing rocks that get you.”
So far we had managed to elude the “effing rocks,” but on our recent adventures there had been some scary moments. Sailing north out of Powell River, up the open strait toward Desolation Sound, for instance, with a freshening southeaster on our stern quarter the boat would not stay on course and under our control. Even though we pulled the tiller as far as it would go to turn her downwind away from the increasingly alarming swells, she kept on wanting to swing back up to windward and into the waves. This, we later learned, was due to “weather helm,” a safety feature built into every good sailboat causing the wind to spill out of the main sail and so reduce the risk of capsizing. Inadvertently, more by good feel than good judgment, we did the right thing, which was to reef, or reduce, the ma
in sail. This elementary difficulty was typical of what is politely referred to as learning the hard way.
Another example of this learning style, which became our specialty, occurred when arriving after dark at one of the few-and-far-between anchorages. As Shadowfax nosed cautiously into the back of a large bay at the mouth of a large river, Bill was up on the bow making soundings to tell me how deep the water was.
Our desire to be close in against the shore for as much shelter as possible had to be balanced against the need of having enough water under our keel at low tide in the middle of the night. We figured that the ideal depth was 15 feet, but it needed to be that deep within the whole arc of swing of our anchor point. Just when it should have been about right, Bill yelled, “Five feet!” and before I had time to go in reverse he yelled, “Twenty feet!” This same pattern kept repeating, and eventually, having failed to make any rational sense of our measurements, we gave up in exhaustion and, hoping for the best, threw the anchor out and went to sleep. At low tide, early in the daylight hours, and after a luckily trouble-free night, the situation was explained: as the river flowed out through the tidal zone at the back of the bay it formed a “spit,” or raised embankment, either side of its main channel. The mind boggles at the complex array of possibilities of what might have happened.
It turned out that Bute Inlet and Mount Waddington were too distant for such a slow, light boat and probably also too serious for her crew. But Shadowfax did make it to the head of Toba Inlet. The crew climbed a 9,000 ft. peak right out of the boat and were initiated, inevitably the hard way, into steep, rugged, trail-less terrain, impassably thick coastal bush, fiendishly prickly devil’s club, horizontal-leaning slide alder and clouds of man-eating mosquitoes in otherwise idyllic, pristine alpine meadows.
