Gnarly Climber Dude Style Writing

I ran around the Dam Loop this morning. There was one bicyclist: a true aficionado of analog. Old school bike on an old school trail and he was rocking it. When I got to the Dam wall, there was a big gaggle of blokes chatting but not riding. What is the correct collective for a group of males? I jogged past, they eventually rode past, at the far end of the Dam, I passed them yet again chatting, perhaps a chorus of males? In any event, there were a lot of fancy bikes, fancy helmets, fancy shoes, fancy everything, not an analog to be seen. Apparently, it’s possible to spend $22,000 on an electric bike. $22K!

Humans seem to have this innate desire to increase complexity and gear requirements beyond the bounds of reason. Take endurance sports, the easiest and most basic of sports to master. Do roughly 80% of your volume at your aerobic pace, the remaining 20% is sprints, threshold, and intensity work. Eat protein, drink water, sleep. Boom, 98% of your results are right there. So simple, so cheap, so easy. Instead, endurance athletes consume nutty amounts of refined sugar individually wrapped in annoying little wasteful packets, drink slurries of goo, strap their legs into air compressor powered sleeves, breathe hyperbaric oxygen, and have special running packs and shoes, even sunglasses.

I am currently delving into the ultimate analog experience which is reading Barry Blanchard’s autobiographical book: The Calling: A Life Rocked By Mountains. Blanch, or Bubba as he came to be known, is a few years older than me, and I would often see him out guiding groups of novices up on the Wapta Icefields. One of the world’s leading alpinists in his day, known for putting up bold ascents in the purest style on some of the world’s largest alpine faces, Bubba was both an outstanding climber and every-man. Friendly and welcoming to every outdoor adventurer he ever encountered, a world class climber with zero ego. An older, now wiser, but no less rash as a youth, Marc Andre LeClerc.

It’s an engrossing read and the story of an extraordinary life. Blanchard truly knew the meaning of passion. With equipment and clothing prehistoric by modern standards, Blanch pushed his personal boundaries from his very first climbing days, from climbing Takkakaw Falls in winter, in a single day, approached on rental skis with ice axes wrapped in rubber inner tubes, and only a handful of ice screws to spending a night stuck in the polished and ultimately unprotectable chimneys of Mount Yamnuska. At the time, of his Takkakaw Falls climb he had less than a half-dozen ice climbs under his crampon points. By the time he was in his early twenties, he had endured multiple unplanned bivouacs under the harshest conditions, including a mid-winter night over 11,000 feet after climbing the classic and dangerous route Slipstream on the east face of Snow Dome in the Canadian Rockies. There is no doubt, Blanchard’s passion involved enormous suffering.

The irony of the alpinist versus the ultra-runner is that the alpinist works several times as hard and consumes only what he can carry along, often running out of food long before the epic is over, while the ultra-runner, who has honed their efficiency consumes calories like a fat lady at an all you can eat buffet.

I’ll close with the two one star reviews on Amazon, because one star reviews are always a belly full of laughs. And yeah, when shit gets real out in the mountains people use the f word!

I usually like these adventure books but this was not good literature. I stopped reading after a few pages.

This could have been a much better book if he had stuck with his meaningful and introspective parts: "each of us were at work on Monday morning, swollen hands, faces bloated and sunbaked, tired feet labouring to gain stairs, but hearts as light as feathers." Instead, half the book was laced with f--- this, and f---that. I guess this is meant to appeal to gnarly climber dude style writing, but I found it totally unnecessary and off-putting.