This Day In History

Doug got the idea for “this day in history” from our friend Kim Kratky who could always remember what peak he had climbed on “this day in history” but not where the car keys were. Being a computer keek, Doug built a function into our trip database (accurate since around the year 2000) whereby we can look up “this day in history.” As there is nothing much exciting going on in my life right now, unless you call daily workouts, scrabble games and endless chores, exciting, I thought it might be entertaining – at least to me – to look back at this day in history. 

On March 29, 2006, Dave, Roland and I, along with Dave's two dogs (both since sadly deceased) skied up to a peak at GR930742 on mapsheet 82F6. We always called this peak North Qua (for no good reason except it it is north of the peak we call Qua and above the Qua Creek drainage). My notes indicate that we took what was likely a silly route up to the ridge between Ymir Mountain and White Queen, trundled across the “death traverse,” crested the Half Dome ridge, skied down an east aspect under Ymir Mountain, then skinned up to North Qua and had an excellent 450 metre run down into the head of Kutetl Creek. According to my notes, after clocking 1200 metres vertical, Dave was tired so went home. 

North Qua From Ymir Mountain

In 2007, Dave (different Dave) and I skied the Seven Summits trail/route from Strawberry Pass to the Old Cascade Highway in the Rossland Range. I actually remember this trip reasonably well as I recall having some trepidation about setting off on such a long ski day (30+ km, 1500 metres of gain) with only one other person. However, with multiple easy bail-out points and no-one else interested in skiing so far in one day, it all seemed reasonable enough. I remember we lost the trail at the beginning when Dave went ahead and I wasn't paying enough attention to where he was going. After that I took the lead and made sure we took the most expeditious route possible. You can't muck about making route finding errors when you have a long way to travel. Snow conditions were probably about average for the Rossland Range – that is, scanty, icy, facetted, and isothermic in differing degrees. I can't remember us having a single decent turn on the entire 30 plus kilometres. The final ramble along the lower section of Record Ridge was a bit tedious as it was slow with skins on and impossible (we had no wax) with skins off. After I reported on this trip, a whole bunch of other people got the idea to ski the Seven Summits, but most of them did it over one or two days breaking the trail up into sections and returning home at night. 

Overlooking Mount Plewman on the Seven Summits Trail

Micha, Jen and I skied from the Hummingbird parking lot up the Whitewater Road out to Mountain Station in Nelson in 2008. This trip is significant in that it is the only “this day in history” trip when another woman was along. We did an extra run on a west aspect of north Mount Beattie as the day is too short otherwise, and, my notes indicate we had excellent ski conditions with no solar effects. I actually like this trip rambling along the ridge before bombing out an old road to a suburb of Nelson and I've done it twice. Lots of people think it's a waste of time, but I like traverses, no matter how short and easy and there is some nice wilderness back in the West Arm Provincial Park. We did the last part down the ridge to the west using a rough compass bearing and came out exactly where the old road starts. Most people use a GPS and still get lost. 

View from North Mount Beattie

In 2009, I drove north to Nakusp and met my friend Bill and we rode his snowmobile up the Wensley Creek FSR and skied up Summit Peak in the Nakusp Range. Before we went home, we also had a couple of sweet north facing runs down into the head of Harlow Creek. A year or so later, Doug, myself, Robin and Betsy skied the length of the Nakusp Range over four days, a trip I had not heard of anyone doing before. You can read a route description of that trip in the new Columbia Mountains ski touring book by Chic Scott. Hopefully more people will ski this route as it is stays high and crosses the entire Nakusp Range. It is probably too much to hope that people will do it all on skis as we did.

Mount Cooper From The Nakusp Range

Finally, in 2011, we were overnighting at Pendleton in Oregon in our little Boler trailer on the way to the Sierra's for a ski traverse. We stayed away about six weeks, had some great skiing in the Wasatch and Sierra Ranges and got in lots of early season climbing on the east side of the Sierras (Bishop, Owens River Gorge, Clark Canyon, etc.) and at Red Rocks in Nevada. I frequently remember the six days we spent travelling through the Sierra Mountains on skis. It was a trip I had wanted to do for years and it was fantastic. 

Doug Looking Small In The Sierras

That's it for this day in history. I think what stands out for me is how infrequently I go on trips with other women. Maybe I'll write about that in another blog post.

What Would You Do?

I hadn't been paying much attention to what has been going on in Canada this year until my friend got caught in an avalanche near Kaslo. After that, it seemed like every few days I would hear of some calamity or near disaster befalling one group or another in the mountains of Canada. 

Around mid-March a party of three on the Wapta traverse triggered a SPOT beacon and thus began what might possibly be one of the most protracted rescues in the Canadian Rockies. Details of the incident have yet to emerge (if they ever will), but, at 7.30 pm during what would turn out to be a lengthy winter storm, one member of the team fell unroped into a crevasse. The remaining party members “dangled a rope down” the crevasse then dug into a snow cave and awaited rescue. 

A week or so later a skier was killed in an avalanche near Mount Sifton in the Columbia Mountains. Apparently, the skier was checking the stability of the slope while his two companions waited at ridge top. This was one day after a snowmobiler was killed by an avalanche near Hell Roaring Creek in the Purcells. Around my old home town of Nelson, a snowboarder took a 500 metre ride when his “intentional ski cut” down a steep, wind-loaded, unsupported convexity in a chute released and he could not ride out to his planned “safe spot.” 

When I hear about incidents like these I always wonder if I might have done the same thing in the same situation. Some times, I feel I can say categorically “no, I would not have done that.” I certainly would not have tried to ski cut the slope that caught the snowboarder in the Bonnington Range. In my experience most people have no idea how to safely ski cut a slope and their supposed “safe exit strategy” is an illusion that disappears when the slope rips on them. Ski cuts should be done on short, low consequence slopes which allow you to ski across the top of the slope and quickly back up out of danger. No chute can be safely ski cut.

In other situations, I find the answer much less clear. Would I have been wandering around the Balfour High Col (off route, it turns out) at 7.30 pm in a blizzard? Unlikely, but, I have found myself on two notable ski traverses in the past blundering around big glaciers with big crevasses in white-outs, due to what was eminently clear to me at the time was just plain bad decision making. Both times I was with groups that were impervious to any of my arguments that would have avoided us being in that place at that time. Yet there we were.

Last year a friend of mine, within five minutes of setting out on her first ski touring day from the Kokanee Glacier Cabin, managed to trigger an avalanche from above that buried two members of the party (one to neck, one to waist) of four. Bizarrely enough, it turned out that one member of the party had no backpack (hence no shovel, etc.). Again, I feel confident that such an incident would not have happened to me, but, not because I am some kind of avalanche guru, merely because I wouldn't ever put an uptrack where my friend was breaking trail. A safer and easier route exists perhaps 50 metres to the east. 

Similarly, I can honestly say I would never have got caught in the Kaslo avalanche that injured my friend in early March. I think I would never have skied that slope given their snowpit test results, but, I'm not 100% confident about that, having been lured on to dangerous slopes in the past by ambition. I only feel certain in the Kaslo case because the skiing would have been shit on a southwest facing slope, and, while I may not be an expert on snow stability, I do know enough to pick an appropriate aspect to ski to get the best snow available at the time. 

We all have a tendency to explain the mishaps of others as being due to personality factors, while our own mishaps are judged to be the result of situational factors. Perhaps this is how we maintain a feeling of our own competency in the world, or maybe we just like to gloat over others misfortunes.

I have to honestly admit that, looking back on my own multitude of incidents, almost all were my own fault in some way or another – usually the culmination of poor planning and poor decision making, but sometimes from pure ignorance. As Alfred Sheinwold said “Learn all you can from the mistakes of others. You won't have time to make them all yourself.” In order to do so, however, we must honestly ask ourselves whether we might not have done the same thing in the same situation.

Oops

Random Ramblings

There is no real unifying theme to this blog post; just a bunch of somewhat garbled thoughts and activities from recent days. Unusual for a self-confessed concrete sequentialist but these are unusual times.

My seven days at the globo gym ended on Monday. I actually took Tuesday off as I felt kinda like I'd been run over by a road-train. I've been doing AlpineCenter workouts these days. Today was AMRAP in 50 minutes (as many rounds as possible):

• 15 kettlebell swings (I used the propane tank as usual),
• 10 weighted sit-ups (yup, propane tank again), 
• 10 box jumps (the only available step here at the Cave is way too low), 
• 5 Curtis P's (the only dumbbells I have are 2.5 pounds which is clearly way too light - you can probably sense a theme here), 
• 60 second plank,
• 5 ankles to bar (which I did on my rock rings). 

I thought I'd never make it through this one particularly as it was about 30 degrees Celsius and humid when I started, but, I mentally chunked it up into 10 minute segments and just plowed through. Definitely a grind not a sprint for me. My repetition number was pretty sad though at only 10. The guys at the Alpine Center got almost 15 repetitions done, which (I'll save you the rudimentary math) is 50% more. 

My ankles to bar on the rock rings are improving. I'm able to use the two and three finger pockets instead of the jugs, and, while every A2B seems wretchedly hard and painful, persistence is paying off. It's probably time to up the ante again and start doing staggered A2B and pull-ups on the three finger pockets instead of the jugs. Something to look forward to. 

I can only hope that all this translates reasonably well to rock climbing as the season approaches (at least our self-declared season). I'm looking forward to getting back on the rock, but, most days, it still feels too hot and sticky yet. 

We brought our new (to us) caravan home today and Doug immediately began taking it apart to work on wiring in some solar cells and a battery. Getting out of the city is getting closer – I totally agree with Will Gadd that spending time in the city is bad for your health.  

And, finally, I just finished reading a great book “Psychobabble.” It's a quick read, I finished it in one day. I'm sure I have an affinity for the things I agree with – I don't read “Buttheads, Hoons and Red-Necks Go Hunting” for example, but it sure reinforced my suspicions about all those shiny happy people out there with their trite sayings posted over glossy photos. 

 A Couple of Shiny Happy People Holding Hands

More On Decision Making

We bought a caravan yesterday.  It is a nice little 13 foot van, 2002 model, never (really NEVER) used.  It is the lightest caravan we looked at, and has the best storage and layout for a 13 foot caravan, and we are happy with it.  Although it is in near new condition (husband bought caravan at show, wife refused to go camping, caravan has sat ever since), we still need to do a few things to it before we leave the Cave and travel north.  It needs a battery and solar panels so we can bush camp, a couple more LED lights (the van already has some LED lights), an awning, and some modifications to the storage area under the beds to make that space more readily accessible.  

As we were driving out to look at the van, Doug and I were chatting about whether we would buy it or not.  We had already looked at this caravan the week before and really liked it.  We drove over fully prepared to buy it, but, not really believing we would.  The words “past behavior is the best predictor of future behavior” kept going through my head, as, despite looking at a dozen caravans, and being prepared to buy a couple of them, we had always ended buying nothing.  

It also occurred to me that not making a decision was far easier than making a decision.  We could endlessly go on looking at one caravan after another, never actually deciding on one, and thus saving ourselves the repercussions of making a poor decision.  

I think this is how people become stuck in life; whether it be stuck eating a poor diet, or wasting their time on a useless exercise schedule, stuck in a dead-end job or relationship, or just doing the same old things every day, every week, every year, and never exploring anywhere or anything new.  Reluctance to make a decision for fear of being wrong and having to accept the consequences of being wrong might lead people to waste the only life they will ever have.

A thought that can either empower you to make changes, or paralyze you with fear.  You choose.  

Mountain top some where in the Kootenays,

trying to decide where to go next 

Decision Making

We are currently embroiled in a search for a used caravan to become our new home on our travels around Australia.  This is a time, energy and motivation sapping endeavour which seems to involve great amounts of either sitting at the computer searching out caravans for sale, or driving all over the country side to view any such caravans.  Both activities are injurious to one’s health as both involve way too much time spent sitting and too little time moving.  

 Yesterday, we drove all the way to Port McQuarrie – I don’t even want to talk about how far that is – to look at a caravan that we thought was going to be “the one.”  We had looked at all the available, checked all the specifications, asked the owner dozens and dozens of questions, thought and thought about the caravan, and, decided in the end, that, although the van was a bit heavier than we would like, it had everything we needed at a good price.   

After five hours on the road, we finally drove down the street to view the caravan and I felt incredibly nervous as I had an – I presumed - irrational fear that something we hadn’t thought of would be wrong with the caravan and we would have driven all this way for nothing.  My nervousness evaporated as we looked at the caravan.  It was in very good shape, as described, and had everything we were looking for.  As part of our checking process, we pulled out the tape measure and measured the caravan – advertised as 14 feet long – at over 15 feet!  Both Doug and I felt as if we had been hit by a brick.   

In some degree of shock, we went down to the local beach, went for a swim and then tried to think rationally about buying the caravan.  We had driven over 400 km to view this caravan which made us feel some degree of commitment towards buying the caravan.  On the other hand, we had previously decided that 14 feet was the absolute maximum length caravan we wanted.  Had we known this caravan was actually over 15 feet, we would never even have considered it.  Yet here we were, considering it simply because we had put so much effort into researching and viewing it.   

The decision making process reminded me of my mountain days.  When you ski or hike a long way to get to the top of a slope or the bottom of a climb and when you get there, find that conditions are such that descent or ascent is overly dangerous.  At those times, it is hard to turn back as you already feel committed to the ascent or descent.  You have travelled a long way, convinced friends to come with you, passed by other objectives, scored good weather all to get to this one spot and achieve this one goal.  Yet all those things are irrelevant to the decision at hand, which should be made on whether or not the descent or ascent is safe under the conditions you have and not on extraneous factors. 

In the end, we decided against the caravan, realizing that all the extraneous factors influencing us – such as the many extras that came with the van, the price, the distance we’d driven and the time we had invested – while persuasive, were actually irrelevant.  

In the clearer light of morning, while I still feel physically wrecked from yesterday, I know we made the right decision.  

Our old caravan, a 30 year old, 9 foot Boler

Globo Goodness

Like most people who work out with Crossfit, Mountain Athlete, Alpine Training Center, or some other similar functional gym, I'm snobbish, suspicious, even scornful of the workouts prescribed at regular globo gyms. Since we've been back at the Cave, I've been working out everyday with my rock rings and a propane tank (the heaviest thing to hand, but still way too light) doing Mountain Athlete workouts. Better than nothing, but definitely not as good as having a full set of free weights and a bouldering cave.

My niece, however, works at one of the local globo gym franchises and happened to mention I could get a free 7 day pass. The catch was, that you must use the 7 days consecutively. No worries, 7 days of beat downs while I am stuck in the city is just what I need to stay sane, so I downloaded my 7 day free coupon and walked up to the local globo gym. It's actually a pretty good gym. As usual, there are too many machines taking up valuable space that could be stocked with more free weights, but it does have a reasonable selection of free weights, medicine balls (too light, but better than nothing) and pull-up bars.

As usual, there is some weird, useless, or maybe both stuff going down. Like the people texting while they lift weights, or the stick thin woman who was using the Smith Machine for squats and leaning back, back, way back. It even strikes me as bizarre to walk on a treadmill when you live in an area where, most days, the weather outdoors is perfect for walking, there is an abundance of bush tracks nearby where you can walk outdoors getting the benefit of fresh air, different scenery and, most importantly perhaps, engaging your proprioceptive ability on uneven terrain.

All the usual globo gym nonsense aside, today is my third day working out, and, although my muscles are stiff and sore, I feel great. There is just nothing like a hard workout, or a few hard workouts to bump up the endorphins and make you feel good. 

Better views when you walk outside

Motivation

There seems to be a plethora of kitschy sayings attached to photos floating around the internet these days. You know the ones. There is a picture of someone climbing a long rock route, skiing a big mountain, running a marathon, kayaking a huge rapid, or some other “ultra-extreme” sport and some supposedly inspiring quote such as: “Every day is a chance to change your life,” or “There are plenty of difficult obstacles in your path, don't allow yourself to become one of them,” or perhaps “The greatest danger for most of us is not that our aim is too high and we miss it, but that it is too low and we reach it;” or even simply “Go, do,” is emblazoned across the photo.  

I assume these photo/quote combinations (so called “motivational posters”) are somehow supposed to inspire us to achieve great things, or at least greater things than we are actually doing right now. Apparently, studies have shown that motivational posters can actually affect behaviour. At least, Wikapeadia quotes one study that reported an increase in stair climbing when motivational posters encouraging stair climbing were prominently displayed by escalators and steps.  Disappointingly, or perhaps tellingly, the motivational effect gradually regressed to zero after the posters were removed.  

Achieving big goals, however, (or even little goals) requires planning, dedication, discipline, sacrifice, hard work, and motivation followed by more hard work, discipline, sacrifice and motivation. You must be prepared to push doggedly forward through set-backs, often alone. That kind of single-minded purpose does requires motivation, but I'm pretty sure it’s not the motivation that comes from a kitschy saying inscribed on a pretty picture.  

The people who go on to become great climbers, skiers, paddlers, tennis players, chess masters are the kind of people who are out doing what they want to do – have to do, even - regardless of what anyone else is doing or saying.  If you are so easily swayed that a trite saying on a second rate photo influences your actions, you’re hardly likely to have the stamina to keep going when the going is anything but easy.   

Personally, I approach with scepticism all those folks that surround themselves (or post and repost) motivational posters. It seems to me anyone whose motivation comes from such a flimsy source is likely to be as motivated to reach their goals as a politician is to fulfil campaign promises once elected, and we all know how that turns out.