Adapting Up: Mount Tate

With skis and boots on our packs, we are walking down the gravel road from Guthega ski area to the dam wall across Guthega Pondage. The wind is draining down the Snowy River valley and, although I have three layers on, I feel a bit chilled. I’m not adapted to these temperatures, even though it is probably not even below zero. We do adapt. When I lived in Calgary, Alberta, I rode my bicycle to work right through the dead of winter on days when the northerly artic air blew down and it was 20 below zero. I wore a strikingly similar amount of clothing. Long underwear, a fleece jumper, and a lined fleece jacket that I made myself, tights on my legs and goretex pants if it was really cold. It was cold and dark in mid winter, the days barely seven hours long, so I left by headlamp, but I adapted, as we all adapt.

Across the dam wall, we pick up a faint foot pad that runs up the east side of the Guthega River to a funny metal bridge on logs. I often expect this bridge to be underwater, but it never is, the run-off never the full spate that Canadian mountain streams grow to in spring. But the foot pad is wet and swampy and I am trying to keep my feet in running shoes with more holes than shoe dry. When my foot slips off a tussock and one foot plunges into the mud and the other leg folds under wetting my trousers to the knee, I give up, and splash through the rest of the puddles to the bridge.

Across the bridge, a bit of bashing through thick shrubs and 10 or so metres of elevation gain and we are at a tongue of snow that will take us all the way up to Tate East Ridge 300 metres above. At ridge top, we weave together patches of snow, but Gills Knobs is stubbornly snow free and we have to carry skis a distance until we can join together patches of snow that lead to a low angle hanging valley, the east tributary of Pounds Creek where snow lies in deep drifts and we can skin all the way to Mount Tate, an unassuming pile of rocks (like all the mountains here about).

It’s perfect spring corn snow on the way down, and after descending 170 metres into the valley, we skin back up to the ridge of Mount Tate for another short run down. Then it’s back past Gills Knobs for a second lunch behind boulders on Tate East Ridge and a delightful 300 metre run down to the Guthega River. All but the last 50 metres or so delightful corn snow. Boots off, sneakers on, skis and boots on packs and back across the little bridge, splashing carelessly through the puddles on the foot pad now, up to the car park, and coffee brewed fresh from our van (The Floatel).

We adapt but we can choose where we adapt up, or adapt down. My favourite, most inspiring story of adapting up is Mark Twight on the VK Run the Rut course in Montana. A VK is a 1000 metre (vertical kilometre) timed hike, usually over a short distance (in this case 4 km) for maximum steepness. In 2025, with two artificial hips, a fused ankle, and floating fibula (also known as missing a piece of bone), Twight completed the VK in just over one hour. That’s adapting up.