Date: Sun, 8 Aug 2004 16:12:21 -0500
From: matthew@matthewhollingworth.net
Subject: Addendum - a Canadian epic
Hi all. One final dispatch from the Canadian climbing front! :) I've spent the last week climbing with Madeleine, who was here for a conference. Suffice it to say, we had an "interesting" trip. Actually it was fantastic.
Our primary destination was the Bugaboos, but on our way we stopped off at the Valhalla Range (in the Kootenays) to climb a little-known classic on Mount Gimli. As you will see from the photos, the peak is a bizarre and spectacular one. The climb follows the obvious ridge lines for eight or more fantastic pitches on solid granite. The supposed crux, a roof high up on the climb, was an anticlimax after some more difficult and sustained climbing lower down. The grade is about 5.8. We hiked up on Saturday and camped in a beautiful alpine meadow on a saddle directly beneath the climb. We completed the climb in ten hours, hiked back down to the car that evening, and drove part of the way to the Bugaboos. All in all, a wonderful climb, one of the highlights of my trip.
Monday saw us arrive in the Bugaboos parking lot at around 4pm. A little problem of Madeleine's lacking an ice axe (essential for the Bugs) was solved by some last-minute car-park borrowing from a team coming out. For this trip we elected to forgo the Kain Hut in favour of the Applebea campsite, another few hundred meters higher up. With the extra camping gear, our pack weights were borderline silly. But it was worth it; the campsite is a rocky platform surrounded by a beautiful alpine landscape.
On Tuesday, with tempermental weather threatening, we headed up to Pigeon Spire to climb its West Ridge. This is a scramble along a narrow, low-angled rock ridge, with a pitch of 5.4 climbing at the very end. Going up was fun, but the weather closed in at the top and a light drizzle fell as we descended the way we cam. Luckily, the climbing was easy enough that wet rock was not a problem. We headed back across the Vowell glacier and down the Bugaboo-Snowpatch Col in swirling clouds, and were at our campsite at 3.30.
Wednesday brought morning rain and a welcome rest day. In the afternoon we hiked out to Brenta Spire, but the supposedly easily-accessible peak shrugged off our attempt, as the saddle beneath the route appeared quite inaccessible.
Thursday's forecast, relayed by the warden that evening, was for "chance of afternoon thunderstorms." Since Thursday was our last day in the Bugs - we needed to drive back to Vancouver on Friday for Madeleine's Saturday departure - we decided to go for the main prize anyway - the North-East Ridge of Bugaboo Spire. The morning dawned clear, and we were on our way by 4.30am. A mostly benign morning saw us climb the majority of the route's ten pitches by lunchtime, including some pretty amazing, steep sections low down before the ridge slackens off a little bit.
A couple of easy pitches from the top, at around 1pm, rain started appearing off to our right, and thunder sounded ominously. As I belayed Madeleine up the eight pitch, a quiet buzz began in the air around me. It would pick up gradually before suddendly stopping. This repeated a number of times with increasing volume, and I felt my hair begin to jolt as the static discharges occurred. The thunder and lightning came closer, and one particularly bright strike was followed instantaneously by a loud crack. Madeleine shreaked, cried "It got me, it got me!," and huddled in a chimney, weeping. Carrying a pack with two ice axes attached, she'd been struck by a discharge, and had felt it go through her foot. I belayed her to the anchor and we cowered as the stormfront passed. Thankfully, it was short, and after some hail and rain, the skies became clear again. Until a few hours later, it was the most scared I'd been on a climb!
We continued on the two final pitches to the north summit, by which time drizzle returned and the peak became ensconced in cloud. From the summit, one scrambles along the summit ridge for several hundred metres to the south, in order to descend the South Ridge (the Kain Route) via a number of abseils. This we hurriedly commenced as the weather deteriorated, with cold winds picking up and hail accumulating on the rocks. I mistakenly dropped off the west side of the ridge onto a ledge lower down, and lowered Madeleine down from slings to join me. We began to worry that we'd gone the wrong way, and I was quite upset. Luckily, we were able to walk along the ledge, do another abseil, and then climb back up an easy slab to reach a notch beneat the south summit, much to my relief. All the while it snowed and blowed, and the sun failed to make any appearance.
We abseiled from the notch to a ledge, and came to an abrupt halt. Although we could see the gendarme, a distinct landmark on the descent route, off to our right, we had no idea how to get there. Madeleine began to get very cold, and both our feet were becoming numb from our sodden climbing shoes. Madeleine was becoming hypothermic - blue lips and fits of uncontrolled shivering. Scary stuff! I do not suffer from cold so much, as was still OK (though be no means warm). We screwed around aimlessly for a while, trying to figure out what to do. Madeleine is a rock, so hearing her crying and saying we'd have to spend the night scared me to the core. We spotted another abseil anchor off to our left, and decided a traverse to the anchor would be our best shot.
I pulled our abseil rope only to have the rope's end jam somehow at the anchor. This pretty much freaked both of us right out - things seemed to be going out of control. What a disaster. I started leading back up to the anchor, using our stuck rope to climb up and hoping the jam wouldn't come undone while I did so. Pretty dodgy stuff, but we had no time to lose. I could soon see that there was a knot in the rope - one I'd neglected to untie before pulling the rope, no less - which was jammed in the anchor. I got to the anchor, tied in and lowered off.
Luckily the traverse to the next abseil anchor was OK, and from there we appeared to be back on track. An abseil lead down to the gendarme and a bona-fide set of abseil chains. Thank god! Now that we were moving again, Madeleine began to warm up. Closely following the instructions in our book, we negotiated the abseils (about six in all), and arrive at the broader part of the ridge, from where a walk-down descent was possible. (I recognised it as the high point of Patrick's and my day on the Kain Route, a month ago.) Much relieved, we hiked down to the Bugaboo-Snowpatch Col, reaching it on dusk. The final menace - the gaping bergschrund on the climb down to steep snow below the col - kept us on guard until the end. We reached flat snow at about 10pm, and it was dark. We bumbled our way back across to the moraine to arrive at our camp at eleven pm, having been on the go for over eighteen hours.
Whew! So I finally get to have an epic. Not something I'd like to repeat in a hurry. Had we been stuck up there overnight, we could have been in a pretty bad way. But I'm pretty pleased with how we handled it. We each had periods of despair, and were comforted by the other during them. We each took control when the other was scared, and managed to think our way through and back to solid ground. Suffice it to say, I won't be tackling another grade IV climb without a lot of thought beforehand.
So there you go, my final week of climbing in Canada. Madeleine flew out yesterday morning after our long drive to Vancouver on Friday. I drive down to Seattle tonight to catch a flight to Boston tomorrow. After some time in Boston, I'll climb at the Gunks with a friend, and hopefully I'll visit Bernard and Helen Pfeil in Ithaca too. Then back to Seattle to attend my friend's wedding. I've even lined up a buyer for my car, so I might be able to fly out of Vancouver on the 24th for a 26th arrival in Melbourne. It's been a pretty good trip all up - I've had some pretty amazing climbing experiences. I still haven't decided if I'm quitting climbing yet, thought it's on my mind quite a bit sometimes. :)
See you all soon,
Matthew.
