My goal for June is to walk or run at least eight kilometres every day. It’s taken a bit of wangling; for example, when I drove to Sydney recently, I had a short break on the way there and walked four kilometres, and then did the remaining four kilometres at dusk, which was the only other time I had. I certainly did not feel like going out today in heavy rain and strong wind, in fact, as I got prepared to go with rain jacket and rain pants and woolly hat, Doug commented that it would be like that time at Clemencaeu Icefield going to the outhouse. I’d forgotten all about the storm, the dunny, and the toilet paper, but, on a rainy day perhaps it’s worth recounting.
As a generally friendly chap and the only dentist in the small mountain town of Golden, BC, our mate Jeff knew everyone for kilometres around. Part of the everyone Jeff numbered among his acquaintances was a bloke who had recently bought a Beaver. Not the sort of beaver with a thick pelt and big teeth that chews down trees and dams streams, but a Beaver single engine aircraft. This Beaver was equipped with snow skis for landing on glaciers and the bloke who owned it was a keen pilot and offered to fly us into the Clemenceau Icefield one spring for a week long ski mountaineering trip.
We were a small group, about six I think, but it’s a while ago and one young lass on the trip I never saw again. But the group included Jeff and his wife Joan, our mate Marvin, an Alberta farm boy born and bred, strong as a moose from a youth spent tossing hay bales on trucks, Doug and myself.
One sunny spring day we loaded up the Beaver with people and gear and flew into the Columbia Mountains. We had hoped to be put down on the Cummins Glacier near the Laurence Grassi Hut which was at the head of the precipitous Cummins River valley, but the Beaver pilot was not confident to land there so he dropped us off some 10 or 12 kilometres away at the acme of the Clemenceau Icefield. It being a sunny day, a rare occurrence in that part of the world, and, the hut only a short distance away – and all down hill we thought – we were in no rush to move our gear down to the hut. Instead, we went skiing, summitting a couple of the nearby peaks, likely Mount Morrison and Mount Sharp but it’s a long time ago now and I can’t quite remember. I do remember it was gloriously sunny and warm, and Marvin, a pale red-head, was even skiing with his shirt off.
Anyway, eventually, it seemed like time to ski down to the hut with all our gear. Doug and I had packed sparingly and had just one large backpack each, but Marvin had brought a sled and a backpack. We were all on very rudimentary ski equipment, that being the only thing available at the time, so we had lightweight skis with throw bindings and we were all telemarkers. Lightweight alpine touring gear was still a decade or more away.
It turned out to be challenging skiing down to the hut because it had been a hot day and the slushy snow had now frozen solid. The hut, a one roomed affair, was very hard to find in the gathering dusk as it was not only completely buried by snow but our only navigation devices were a topographic map and a compass. Such were the times. It was the proverbial hunt for a needle in a haystack but in this case we were hunting for a suspicious hump in the snow.
Somehow, after a lot of struggle, including a dodgy climb up an eroding moraine we found the hut and set about digging out the windows and doors. Almost the entire hut was buried so this took a long time. Marvin, who was strong as a moose in rutting season, was somewhere back on the glacier struggling with the sled on side-hills, while the rest of us dug and dug and dug. Eventually, I went back to find Marvin as it was near pitch dark and I found him cursing, swearing and even sweating in the cold as he fought with his rudimentary sled on the moraine.
I took the sled while Marvin continued with the pack and somehow we wrangled every thing to the hut and collapsed inside where there was a small fire going and some home dried dinner ready to be served. Both Marvin and I were starved having worked up quite an appetite wrangling the sled about, but the dinner was chewy to say the least. Home dried food with inadequate rehydration time can be a bit chewy. Marvin who was as tired as I had ever seen him made the classic remark that we never let him forget “I chew and I chew and I chew and nothing happens.”
The next few days were spent skiing and having adventures until the night before the big storm. This was a small hut in a deep snow area so both windows and doors were well below the level of the height of snow. In other words, we had to descend down steps made of snow about two metres to get into the hut. The incoming storm with blowing snow and strong winds would blow so much snow into the two metre tunnel that led to the door that we would never be able to open the door from the inside (the door opened out). We would literally be buried alive. Marvin’s brilliant idea was to prop the door open but cover the entrance way with a tarp. Some snow might come inside but at least we would not all suffocate to death and die.
After a day of skiing, we sacrificed a snow bucket (we melted snow to get water) to use as a pee bucket overnight and rigged up the doorway so we could exit the next morning. The demoralisation of urinating in a bucket over night for a group of young healthy folk was intense, although these days I would probably embrace not having to go out on a dark and stormy night to visit the “pee tree.” Night fell, the storm moved in, but, in our hut buried in snow, we barely noticed except for visits to the pee bucket in the ante-room of the hut where the wind was noticeable.
Morning came slowly in the hut as the windows wells had been filled with snow and barely any light entered. At the doorway, we managed to clamber out one by one digging our way over a big snow drift. The weather was still awful, low level cloud and wind driven snow, but we were healthy young folk with lots of energy so we set about digging out the door and window wells. Eventually, we turned our attention to the outhouse track, completely gone. The lads set about stamping in a track and someone – probably Marvin – suggested we install a handline to help folks get to the outhouse. If you are sitting at home in a warm house with a nearby toilet this might sound extreme but the outhouse was perched on the very edge of a precipitous slope and with poor visibility and strong winds it was easy to imagine that someone might wander out to the outhouse never to return.
After a time, I needed the outhouse so kitted up for winter weather and clinging to the hand-line I trotted out to the dunny with my roll of bog paper. I was glad of the hand-line as the wind was blowing such that a mis-step might send you all the way down to a snow covered lake over 600 metres below and the stamped in outhouse track was gone already. Using the dunny was a scouring experience. Blowing snow was coming straight out of the loo and “air-brushing” the butt. But (pun), what doesn’t kill you right?
The problem arose with the use of toilet paper. The used bog paper went down the dunny and immediately blew back out of the dunny. Snatching the paper out of the air as it blew around my head, I stuffed the paper back down again, out blew the paper, cycling once again round my head, seizing the paper I stuffed it down the tunnel again, and, yet again, the paper blew out. This went on for some time until with a last frustrated scream I stuffed the bog paper down and slammed the lid shut. There were more adventures over our ski week, most of which are only dimly remembered now, but the episode of the dunny, the paper and the big spring storm is one of those timeless stories that you never forget.
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