A Grain Of Sand

You have to know the past to understand the present. Carl Sagan.

Back in the days when backcountry huts were really backcountry huts without running water, indoor plumbing or electricity, and we used to, literally haul water and hew wood for drinking and heating, we organised annual ski trips into backcountry huts in British Columbia. These were the days when we only got a guaranteed week of good powder snow, the rest of the year spent in the shallow and unreliable snow pack of the Rocky Mountains. As such, we always left the hut at dawn and returned at dark, the time in between spent skiing up and down mountains and valleys covering as much distance as we could in the time available.

Some years our companions whined about having to get up at 5.30 or 6.00 am in the dead of a Canadian winter so we could be out the door by 7.00 am, as the sun was just rising, other years, we hit the lottery with companions, people who gladly suffered dark, early mornings and eerie descents back to the hut at dusk.

On one such trip, a friend brought a friend from Vancouver along. Marcus was young, fit, strong and incredibly motivated, and to our soft Rocky Mountain eyes he came to embody all Coast Mountain skiers. Marcus was from Surrey, which is much like being from Mount Druitt, and an average ski weekend entailed a long drive across the city, an even longer drive up the Sea to Sky Highway, a grind through thick forest on a cement like snow pack with a ton of elevation gain, and finally, if everything aligned, some dry powder snow might be found near the very tops of the mountains. If the temperatures happened to be warm, it was elephant snot all the way.

Of course, this was all done on skinny telemark skis with boots that lacked adequate stiffness to control the skis while carrying an overnight pack. Further east in the Rockies, we drove to 1,500 metres on a paved highway, and casually skied open forest to dry powder slopes, and repaired back to the local hostelry for refreshments after a day of skiing.

So, years later when our own planned traverse of the Lillooet Icefield fell apart because our fourth man pulled out, and I found a trip, just like the one we had planned, advertised on the Vancouver Alpine Club website, applying to join the trip was an easy decision. After all, we would be with a Coast Mountain crew of hard men and tough as nails women. My friend, Rick Collier, an original hard man of the Rocky Mountains, had done the Lillooet traverse back in 1990, his party of four which included some big names of the time - Bob Saunders and Reg Bonney - had spent 15 days on the traverse and had climbed 20 peaks! Twenty different summits did seem too much to hope for, but with a crew of elevation eating Coast Mountain skiers, 10 or even 15 peaks was surely possible.

I remember compiling a resume of all the ski traverses we had done, all the peaks we had climbed, and sending this off with an email to the organizer of the trip, and hoping that we would be deemed qualified enough to join. Turns out, that was complete overkill and the organizers had reached the stage of anyone with a pulse could join. Despite that, we were a reasonably qualified crew, the two leaders - a long married couple - a few years older than Doug and I, and a couple of blokes, a few years younger than Doug and I.

Doug and I were fresh off an eight day traverse of the Pemberton Icecap so we were not only reasonably fit but had perfected the art of towing crazy carpet sleds (this will be a complete enigma to Australian readers, but, basically, this is a sheet of tough plastic used by children to slide down snow-covered hills and available from Canadian Tire for about $5) using our friend, Bob's patented "jerk-o-matic" system. I had even made light weight rip-stop nylon bags to lash onto our sleds.

If terrain warranted - which it often did - we could take the gear off our sled, pile it into our packs, and lash the sled to our backpack. The others in our group had distinctly less sophisticated options. S, a fiery red head, strong as the proverbial ox, simply lashed his entire pack to his sled, but S could drag a tractor across an icefield without breathing hard. D, who lived up the road from John Baldwin, one of the original Coast Mountain hard men who had perfected the art of crazy carpet sledding across massive icefields, had a Baldwin design sled, but lacked the light weight nylon bag to ride on the sled, and finally, L and M, the trip leaders, and also the least strong members of the group, had devilish concoctions. M towed a hockey bag complete with wheels - that is as bad as it sounds - and L carried two backpacks, one of which, she occasionally strapped to a sled, only slightly less bad.

It was a 15 day trip but we did not climb 15 peaks, or 10 peaks, we climbed a lowly 5 peaks, and we did 4 of the 5 during a two day rest period. It turned out that our heuristic about Coast Mountain skiers was all wrong. L and M loved the mountains, but they also loved leisurely starts in the mornings, rest days, long breaks during the day, and making camp no later than 5.00 pm. Doug and I loved the mountains in a race around and ski up as many peaks as you can kind of way. We were completely and utterly unsuited for a trip together, particularly one of this duration. A weekend trip might have worked but 15 days was a disaster.

And this should have been obvious from the beginning. We took 16 days of food for a trip that was under 100 kilometres in distance. Even allowing for weather days, that is a remarkably slow rate of travel. L and M's style of travel is perhaps perfectly encapsulated in this statement from one of their earlier ski traverses: "This was pretty much the pattern for the whole trip: off [i.e. leaving camp] by about 10:00 am, quit for the day at about 4:00 or 5:00 with a long lunch and other breaks." Nothing there about trying to beat Collier's record of 20 peaks in 15 days or get up with the dawn and ski until dusk.

Remarkably, it took at least two-thirds of the trip for Doug and I to finally realize that the speed we were going - slow - was the speed we were going to go and no amount of prodding, pushing or pulling was going to change that. In fact, it's likely that the more we tried to move the group along, the slower we got, such is the human psychology.

Now you might be reading this thinking we were complete tossers who berated our trip companions morning, night and all the day through about how slow they were. But we weren't. We waited mostly patiently, quite a lot. One day I tallied up the amount of hours I skied versus the amount of hours I waited and I skied for three hours and waited for five. It was not so much the hours we spent waiting that grated away at me as the lost opportunity. Even back then, when I could not see myself ever leaving the mountains, I knew I would never pass by this spot again, and so I did want to climb all the peaks I reasonably could.

We had discussions with L and M attempting to find a solution that would satisfy their desire to relax and our desire to climb pointy things and ski down them. But it didn't work. No matter what we agreed on the night before, the next day we would be back to the long slow start to the day, longer rest periods than ski periods, dragged out discussions about decisions, and general frustration all around.

The reality, it seems, is that who we are is pretty indelible and we cannot change that on a whim, particularly if we have no motivation to change. I have always been, and likely always will be, the person who wants to go a little farther, a little faster, a little harder, to get a little more tired, or a little more scared, to see over the next hill and into the next valley.

And that's okay, we need people in life who don't settle for the ingrained path, but I never felt good about this traverse. Until the very last day of the trip, I chafed against external constraints which I could not change. The daily angst was all for nothing; it did not change me, it did not alter the trip, and it certainly did not suddenly cause L and M to bound up mountains like baby goats.

Some would argue that we should "accept the things we cannot change" which would certainly lead to less aggravation, but I am not sure that we should all go through life choosing the easiest option available. It's hard to argue that group dynamics are better when everyone in the group is at roughly the same level with about the same goals. But homogeneity can go too far. I've actually had my best trips in mixed groups when there were one or two strong and ambitious people in the group who pushed us all to go just a little bit further. After all, it takes a grain of sand to make a pearl.