It is hard to believe it is a decade since I wrote a post that ostensibly detailed the purpose of my blog, but was really just another rant about something that was on my mind on one particular day. And, by the way, as far as I can remember, the photo is from the Valkyr Range and the skiing was epic.
In the early days, I put most of my mountain trip reports up on the Bivouac site. They are all still there, all 206 mountain trip reports. They span the early days of scrabbling around chossy peaks and thin snowpacks in the Rubbly Mountains, right through to 2019 when we managed a good number of mountain trips on a five month visit back to the country that will always hold my heart.
My blog, from the beginning, was mostly a place where I expressed my opinion about things mostly mountain related, but sometimes not. My very first entry, for example, was a story about the New World Order film night that used to run Monday nights in my old home town of Nelson back before Nelson become a trendy place to hang out and was a somewhat scruffy old mining town inhabited mostly by alternative people who were living simply off the grid and smoking copious amounts of dope. In fact, I took my mother to one of the New World Order film nights where the dope was so thick in the air that she spent the whole evening wondering what that strange incense was.
Over the years, my blog changed and became more a chronicle of my adventures, interspersed with the occasional rant about the latest social media horror, but mostly a bland recounting of this paddle or that bushwalk. I was busy, and just keeping up with trip reports took all the time I was willing to spend sitting staring at a screen, and so the rants, which still rattled around my brain got more and more infrequent and the boring "we went here, we did this" posts became more common.
These days, I always have a rant topic festering away like a boil on a butt, but I rarely seem to get around to writing them. The other issue that keeps those rants stoppered up is a fear of offending someone. Perhaps we have entered the age where everyone is offended, or triggered as someone said to me the other day, by everything. And, by the way, stop saying people are "triggered" because they disagree with you.
Of late, I have even begun to carefully scrutinise and edit my trip reports for fear of saying something that will offend someone who was on the trip. Which is, to my mind, a bit of a shame. My writing has always been a way for me to process the world around me and to reflect on lessons learned on my many outdoor adventures. None of us are perfect and the truth is that we all make mistakes, some big, some small, some consequential, some insignificant. For me, a mistake is only truly an error if I did not learn anything from it. My increasingly sanitised trip reports frequently omit errors and incidents which were instructive to me, if not to anyone else.
PC, J.W.
All of this rankles some. I have always been one of those brutally honest people who will answer "yes" if that dress does make you look fat and the stylist really did a number on your hair. I appreciate the same honesty. And, if you read over some of my posts, it is clear that I am pretty sincere about my own failings, of which there are many.
Years and years ago, almost a lifetime, we did a long ski traverse with a friend of mine (since killed in a climbing accident) who wrote the trip up for the Bivouac site. Some of his comments on us, his companions on this trip, were pretty hard to read at the time as they were, in many instances, rightly scathing about our abilities. Compared to Rick, we were nervous novices, and, given that Rick had a pair of cojones that would make an elephant proud, doing a big, committing traverse with people who dithered over every decision was no doubt frustrating. But, I appreciated his honesty, no matter how difficult it was to read at the time. And maybe that is the point, we need to do hard things and confront things that make us uncomfortable, because, the end of your comfort zone is where the real life begins.
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