It Was Always The Decisions

Most of my sea kayaking is solo these days. I’ve strangely come to enjoy it because the tempo is entirely my own. Following the requisite jug of coffee, I trolley my kayak down to the beach and head out to sea in the early morning. Some days, the ocean is steaming because the sea is warmer than the air. Frequently, the bay is full of fish and dolphins and occasionally seals, always cormorants. If the wind is coming from the south, I go south, if from the north, I go north, very infrequently, maybe once a year, I go west, although I have seven kilometres of ocean paddling before I get to the bridge over the Clyde River and the start of the truly sheltered water paddling.

By yourself, you get a lot of time to think and I think more carefully about ducking through slots and gauntlets, but I still do, I just watch the timing and conditions because it’s winter and cool on the water and even cooler if you are wet. The only time I’ve ever capsized in one of these slots was in winter and resulted in me always carrying a spare set of paddling clothes in a dry bag during the winter. I rarely stop, mostly paddling on at a steady pace, sometimes doing some sprint training, until I reach my minimum paddle distance (20 kilometres in winter), although sometimes I will go further.

Yesterday, I did 24 kilometres, down to Jimmies Island, through the gap between the island and the mainland and back home. As I often do, my outward journey followed the coast into all the little bays but coming back north, it was a straighter line. Strangely, I found myself thinking about an incident that happened in June 2011, a year before Doug and I left Nelson, BC for Australia. Here is the story (long) of that incident which happened while I was a member of the SAR unit at the centre of the incident. It was only after leaving Nelson that I had any real idea what happened as the SAR members involved kept the details private until they had to testify over a year later in the Coroners court.

To my knowledge, SS, is the only non-professional to have been killed during a Search and Rescue (SAR) mission in British Columbia. There have been other fatalities but, crazily enough, these fatalities occurred during training exercises. Given that I think getting injured while training in the gym is wrong-headed, getting killed while on a training exercise is a true tragedy.

SS died in a “rescue” gone wrong on the (at the time) flooding Goat River in the east Kootenays. Although I was a SAR team member at the time, I did not go on this call out. For a start, I had sprained my ankle the previous day walking off an 8 pitch rock route (Megawatts) near Castlegar and was sitting at home with my leg elevated. However, even if able-bodied, I would not have been on the call because the “mutual aid” was for the swiftwater rescue team and I was not on the swiftwater team. I had been asked but declined because it had been a half dozen years since I had done any significant whitewater kayaking and I, naive to the ways of SAR, thought that members of the swiftwater team should have swiftwater experience. Similarly, I thought members of the rope team (which I was on) should be climbers, although I was the only active climber on the rope team at that time.

I did a bit of whitewater kayaking back in the day. I ran a few rivers in Australia, and used to spend summer afternoons paddling on the whitewater course on the Bow River in Kananaskis Country. I was never very good, and never got a solid roll, but I did manage to get down the grade three rapids upright. In 2019, I followed Wildey (as faithfully as I could) down the Snowy River from Willis to Buchan and managed to limit my bail-out and swims to three, but I portaged a couple of the harder rapids. Whitewater or swiftwater - whatever you call it - moves fast with a tremendous amount of power. Much like surfing a sea kayak, you cannot fight a breaking wave and you can’t fight a fast moving river, you have to work with the power of the water. A moments inattention and the kayak is upside down.

Back in 2011, it seemed to me that anyone joining the swiftwater team should have a deep understanding, preferably gained over years of running whitewater rivers, of river hydraulics because things happen fast on whitewater rivers. A mere second of leaning the kayak the wrong way on swiftwater and you’ll be upside down. It’s the same principal as riding a breaking wave into shore, you have to lean such that the moving water holds the kayak up rather than flipping the boat over. The lean has to be instinctual. In any fast moving situation you must react rapidly and instinctively because by the time your brain runs through the logic of the manoeuvre it’s too late. Whitewater kayaking, kayak surfing, these are skills you have to learn by doing. Watching videos, reading books, even training under controlled circumstances does not imbue the paddler with the instinctive skills to react correctly and quickly.

What happened to SS is the ultimate boiled frog phenomenon whereby the risk of the mission gradually increased until the additive effect of multiple errors added up to equal tragedy. Backcountry skiers in avalanche terrain know this all too well. The skiing is so good that the group keeps pushing into riskier and riskier terrain, propelled forward by a lack of negative feedback until one or more skiers ventures over the convex roll, out onto a wind slab, or down a loaded gully and an avalanche results. The situation is so classic that it is amazing that humans continue to repeat it.

Here’s what happened briefly.

• Two SAR units from two different jurisdictions responded to reports of a vehicle submerged in the Goat River. There were 21 people in all, 11 of whom had some swiftwater training.

• The Site Leader was the owner and operator of a company which provided swiftwater training to various SAR units including one of the responding SAR units.

• SAR units have a fairly rigid chain of command but Site Leaders may consider input from team members when planning the mission. The word “may” is doing some heavy lifting here because a lowly GSAR team member is unlikely to be heard by the higher ups even if their experience is relevant.

• The Goat River was in flood and the vehicle was in a particularly deep pocket of water. The RCMP (Royal Canadian Mounted Police) Dive Team refused to assist in the mission as they deemed the conditions too dangerous due to deep, cold, murky, fast flowing water and the possibility of the vehicle shifting in strong currents.

• A woman had gone missing some days earlier but there was NO evidence that the woman was in the vehicle and NO chance that this would be a live recovery even if someone was in the vehicle. The body of the missing woman was subsequently located down river some days later by an RCMP helicopter crew.

• A tension diagonal was rigged across the river (two ropes had to be tied together as the river was so wide at the time) and another two tag lines were attached to the Cataraft to enable the Cataraft to be manoeuvred into position. A second Cataraft was positioned downstream as a rescue boat. This is a pretty standard swiftwater rescue technique but the teams in the Catarafts should be prepared and capable to self rescue if required. In this instance, that means you can cut the lines and pilot the Cataraft down a flooded river safely.

• Two people would operate the rescue Cataraft. SS who was designated Team Leader for the Cataraft and another team member (who had never operated a Cataraft). SS wore a helmet mounted camera as the mission was being filmed for a TV series. Other cameras were filming the mission from the shore.

• SS and the team member entered the Cataraft and, with much difficulty, the Cataraft was finally moved to a position above the submerged vehicle. Due to the force of the water, this took multiple attempts and it was not possible to use a pole mounted waterproof camera as planned to look inside the vehicle due to the force of the water.

• A tow truck was brought to the scene and the various pieces of steel towing equipment were provided to the Cataraft crew including a chain, a J hook with chain attached, several shackles and a 15 metre coil of wire cable. 15 metres is 50 feet, the length of my sea kayak tow. That is a lot of cable to keep organised on a Cataraft.

• The Cataraft, now equipped with the chain and wire cable, (placed on the floor of the Cataraft) was again positioned above the vehicle. An attempt was made to attach the chain to the vehicle but due to the current and water depth this was not possible.

• The Cataraft returned to shore and the chain was replaced with a J hook attached to a chain along with the wire cable which remained on the floor of the Cataraft.

• The Cataraft and two team members were positioned again above the vehicle and this time the J hook with chain attached was successfully attached to the vehicle by the crew member.

• The crew member held onto the chain attached to the J hook which was hooked to the submerged vehicle while SS began to uncoil the steel cable preparatory to attaching it via shackle to the chain and J hook. It is unclear from the Coroners report whether or not the cable was ever attached to the J hook and chain. Regardless, in essence, the Cataraft was now attached to the submerged vehicle via the crew member.

• The Cataraft shifted and turned sideways to the current likely in response to being effectively tethered at the rear to a submerged object in fast moving water.

• Immediately the Cataraft turned perpendicular to the current it began to sink. This is because the force of the water flowing downstream piles up on the baffle of the Cataraft and drives it under water. Once this process has begun it is extremely difficult if not impossible to reverse.

• The tension diagonal was now under extreme load and subsequently broke which sped up the sinking of the Cataraft.

• The cable became wrapped around SS’s leg and she was pulled from the Cataraft as it began to sink. The team member attempted to hold onto SS but the force of the water was irresistible and he was forced to let go.

• SS managed to hold onto the ropes of the sinking Cataraft for a time but was eventually unable to hold on any longer and was dragged downstream by the current but remained tethered by her entrapped leg to the vehicle. SS subsequently drowned.

• Attempts were made to effect a rescue but the force of the current rendered this impossible. Neither of the Catarafts were able to reach SS, throw ropes did not reach her (not that a throw rope would have helped anyway), and the one team member who attempted to swim out to SS was carried downriver by the current.

• SS was retrieved the following day by which time the water level had dropped so much that the rescue team could basically walk across the river. The vehicle (empty) was recovered at the same time.

So many things went wrong and so many signs were ignored as the teams gradually escalated the risk of the mission until the ultimate catastrophe shut the entire exercise down. I remember at the time that the primary emotion I felt was anger, not sadness. So many people’s lives risked for nothing and this was evident from the very outset. The first rule of SAR is do not endanger the rescuers, and yet, 21 people under the command of a long time SAR member, got involved in a highly technical rescue in a very fast flowing river with no potential for a live recovery even though water levels in the river were predicted to drop significantly over the coming days.

There was ample opportunity over the course of the mission to pause, take stock and call the entire mission off until the water levels had subsided (which they did very rapidly). The exercise proceeded over many hours with the Cataraft returning to the river bank multiple times. Each time the Cataraft went out and returned the Site Manager and the team members were gathering more and more information about how challenging it was to operate with the river in flood. One team member on the Cataraft had never operated a Cataraft and the Team Leader (SS) on the Cataraft while confident (?over confident) was inexperienced in this type of mission. It’s impossible to know in retrospect, revisionist history is real, but it appears that the information gleaned from repeated deployments of the Cataraft was never integrated into the overall risk mitigation strategy (if there was a risk mitigation strategy). Put simply, personnel did not appear to understand the feedback that the river conditions were providing.

The Site Manager and other personnel, including the investigator from Work Safe BC, concluded that filming the incident for a television broadcast did not influence the decisions made on site, but I think anyone with a skerrick of knowledge about human behaviour knows that the “kodak” effect is real. There is very little drama to be had from a SAR crew arriving at a search scene then turning around and driving back home because the conditions are too unstable and too uncontrollable for reasonable management of risk.

There were four other major confounders to the accident which are impossible to “prove” in a Coroners court (which is not designed to assign blame) but which are present in virtually every outdoor accident that occurs. The first is that each previous decision influenced the next decision downstream. Once a decision was made to rig the tension traverse and deploy the Cataraft, the possibility of calling the entire mission off became more and more difficult. Each step forward, which in this case was each launch and re-positioning of the Cataraft, psychologically drove the team further and further down the tunnel of continuing the mission until the ultimate end. In reality, options are not necessarily limited by previous decisions, but, the foibles of the human mind make it very difficult once we have made a series of decisions to recognize that there are still a multitude of different options available, including turning back or aborting the entire mission.

I used to see this when travelling the backcountry with ski and climbing buddies. If we made a route decision mistake, it was incredibly difficult to pull the group back and reverse course to get back onto the right route. People would justify all kinds of crazy decisions to avoid turning around and route options often veered into the outright lunatic.

CAA Photo

The second confounder is personality and (over) confidence. There are some people, we all know them, and I knew the people involved in this incident, whose confidence in their ability far outstrips their actual ability. These are the folks that seem to make the same or similar errors of judgement again and again and yet never take a step backwards and assess their ability fairly. If you are like me, you eventually start avoiding trips with these folks because they are incidents looking for a place to happen. Over confidence and hubris makes reasonable feed back impossible.

The third confounder is very closely linked to what a mate of mine used to call “agendas.” Most people on a SAR mission or an outdoor adventure trip are out there to achieve the goal and go home safely, but some people, almost always the over-confident, have agendas. These are the folks that make trip management and SAR missions difficult because, although they are ostensibly there to work as a team member to meet a goal, they are really there to prove themselves the strongest, the fittest, the most competent, the hero of the day. I’ve done dozens of trips with these folks and the challenge is to enable them to feel as if they’ve met their agenda while maintaining group safety and enjoyment. The entire day revolves around group management and it’s a skilled operator indeed who can run the mission or the adventure without an unexpected incident when there are hidden agendas involved. If the lead operator is the person with the agenda, reasonable and rational decisions become impossible.

The fourth confounder is situational awareness or lack thereof. The only way to develop situational awareness is by experience yet experience itself is inadequate to achieve high levels of situational awareness. It is very difficult to develop situational awareness if the environments (which includes people, places, weather, etc.) under which the individual operates are unvaried and appropriate – which must mean critical – feedback is not given. Debriefs must highlight mistakes, errors of judgement and mistaken decisions, and can usually only be worthwhile if coordinated by someone who themselves has a high level of situational awareness. People just don’t know what they don’t know. In this tragic incident, better situational awareness might have given both the Team Leader (SS) and the Site Manager the insight to realise that when the Cataraft was anchored to the submerged vehicle, the dynamics of river hydraulics were pretty much guaranteed to turn the Cataraft across the current and result in rapid submersion. The team member holding onto the J hook and chain attached to the vehicle would have had less than a second to recognise their error and release the cable. Swiftwater is unforgiving and its force operates faster than the human brain can process.

So many errors of judgement, so many decisions adding up to a calamity, but there is one thread that ties the entire episode together and that is risk mitigation is very poorly understood. I’ve often heard people say “I’ve done risk assessment.” In this exact incident, the Site Leader believed he had done a risk assessment, but most times, what people have actually done is develop a plan. Sometimes, more by happenstance than thought, the plan introduces some elements that might mitigate the risk, but in the overwhelming majority of cases, even among supposedly highly trained individuals what people have is a plan. Risk assessments and the corollary risk mitigation means I’ve looked at the situation and the people and I’ve identified the most likely things to go wrong and I have developed strategies to reduce or eliminate the possibility of the most catastrophic events from occurring. Risk assessment and mitigation is iterative, every new piece of information must go into the model to refine the model. True risk mitigation goes one step further and positions personnel and resources in a position to effect a rescue when the unexpected and unpredictable (most things aren’t truly unpredictable) happens.

Adventurers are drawn to dynamic environments. We love mountains and glaciers where avalanches and rock fall and mountain weather result in challenges, we love moving water whether on the ocean or on a river, but the very dynamism that draws us in has the capacity to overwhelm our ability to make reasonable decisions. We must learn to think carefully indeed and realize that a plan is not a strategy to reduce risk. Primarily, accidents such as this one are not the result of the environment, or the people, or the weather, or the topography, they are the result of decisions. Decisions which are infrequently revisited or critiqued.

The Obscure Tour

Adaptation and not giving in is central to the thriving Masters athlete. .Howard Luks

Our little south coast town has been surprisingly busy this winter. By busy I mean there are a handful of people on the beaches over the weekends and you might meet a few people on the mountain bike trails. Sometimes I avoid mountain biking on the weekend because the E-bike riders can be annoying! This is, of course, ablist, because only able people ride analog bikes, except, like most of the isms, that’s nonsense because the people riding E bikes are between 30 and 40 years younger than me and certainly will not be able at my age because they are taking the easy way out in their youth.

On Saturday I rode what I am now calling The Obscure Tour because I rode the trails that are rarely ridden. There’s no shuttles on these trails and shuttling yourself would be time consuming because they run all over the place unlike the trails that run off the Trig or Mitchells Road and are much more compact.

I always ride from the Curtis Road trailhead because it is 15 minutes cycle from my house. Mostly, I alternate: if I head up the northerly trail one ride I’ll head up the southerly trail the next time, but as I was off on The Obscure Tour I took the northerly trail and rode all the way up to Round Hill, which is modestly obscure. On the way, I stopped to let a group of four E bike riders pass, but caught up with two of them in under a minute and eventually rode past, giving out a good natured cheer for analog bikes – strangely they didn’t seem to appreciate the sentiment. That’s the problem with E bike riders, the lack of endorphins makes them cranky!

After Round Mountain I cycled along a variety of tracks to RU12, one of the old trails from before the new Mogo build out. I love this trail as it’s the closest trail we have to cross country as it goes up and down small hills before the final descent. The cycle out, on an old and increasingly eroded Fire Trail is, however, a bit of a grunt on an analog bike; certainly the steepest up track in the network.

Some trail angel(s) have been tidying up the old Dam Loop which had got severely overgrown, rutted, and covered with sticks and leaves when the new trails opened but is now really rideable and it provides an excellent way to ride between the south and north ends of Ridge Road without having to get on old fire trails or circuit around the full trail system.

It’s been almost three weeks since my last ride. I feel like that is a confession worth of several Hail Mary’s recited while fingering a bicycle chain instead of rosary beads, but I’ve been doing other stuff. I was very pleased to find that all the leg and glute training has paid off and I rode faster and harder than normal. It’s rare at my advanced age and hormonal state to actually get stronger (not for new trainees but I’ve been training for going on 45 years so the easy gains are long gone). The thrill of being stronger was way more rewarding than the days riding.

Satisfaction

Satisfaction is the joy of an accomplishment with struggle. If you don’t have to give something up for what you are doing you will get no sweetness from it. Arthur Brooks.

Here’s a great short clip from the North Face on an adaptive climbing festival held in the Red River Gorge in Kentucky. The Red is known for long hard pump fests that challenge even very good climbers. This is climbing culture at it’s best: getting people together to pursue a mentally and physically demanding sport that rewards a committed try hard attitude. The sort of attitude that stands you in good stead for all of life’s challenges.

What is so brilliant about this festival is that differently abled people get to test their own limits and take real risks. In a world obsessed with safetyism, the ability to take risk is often only afforded to the healthy, but risk is essential to a healthy, productive and fulfilling life. Without struggle there is no joy, and we are all entitled to a little joy each day.

In a world of negative media, where there are people like this, whose entire purpose in life is to denigrate anyone who fails a false moral purity test, it’s redemptive to know there are a huge cadre of normal people out there trying, in some small way, to make someone else’s life a little bit better, if only for a weekend.

Ten Men Went to Row

Here’s a video from Rab of Tom Randall on his epic adventure to run 142 kilometres, climb 42 mountains and complete 15 classic Lakeland climbs (solo) in under 24 hours. This achievement makes my 63 kilometres (which took me 10 hours) on the 2026 winter solstice look paltry but, as Randall says, the process is the pursuit.

While I manage to get between one and three people out for my Sunday paddles, Wildey got 11, 10 of whom were men! It was the calmest day I’ve paddled in a long time and the only day I didn’t see any dolphins! We lapped around the Tollgate Islands, where there were four female and one much larger male seal hanging out completely undisturbed by humans.

Anyway, with only 9% of the paddling pod being female, I thought I should start an equity campaign to get more women involved but I’m not sure how to go about it. There must be a government grant I can get which would fund a committee to look into an equity program. Failing that, the men will have to start dressing as women, which, is increasingly popular so possibly that would be the easier option.

Climb Then Walk: Little Forest Plateau

Sometimes I feel like the last person alive who has not been infected by an epidemic virus which affects the brain and turns all thoughts to mush. Theodore Dalrymple. If Symptoms Persist.

I can’t believe that just a few weeks – or was it months – ago, I thought I might not get back into climbing up and down rocks. Thankfully, this patently absurd idea disappeared almost as quickly as it appeared. True enough, the first few days out were akin to the first time you try anything new, mostly uncomfortable both physically and mentally, but, if you persevere past the initial gumbyism phase, everything always gets better.

My first couple of years in Canada whilst learning to backcountry ski, I spent most weekends and some week long tours, chasing after a bunch of men, who had grown up on skis and ice skates, around the mountains telling myself that one day I would enjoy this sport that left me so tired I frequently had to walk down the ski run because I would fall over as soon as I put my skis on, because everyone else was hooting and hollering with joy. In those days, we all used skis so skinny they could qualify as tooth-picks, we had floppy, single leather boots with primitive throw bindings, and it was minus 30 degrees Celsius most ski days. It’s reasonable to conclude that the novice phase was accompanied by plenty of discomfort.

We just had a couple of days away in our van. Climbing at Nowra, on deliciously fun ring bolted clip-ups marred only by the fact that the westerly winds, notably absent this winter, were absent no more. The wind reached almost 40 knots at Nowra airport! Our plan had been to climb two days and bushwalk the third day, but, the problem with being old and not having closer access to climbing (either indoor or outdoor) is that a hard climbing day leaves us feeling pretty stiff and sore the next day. When we got down to the river side crags and the 37 knot wind on the second day, we both felt our ligaments tear off our bones simply looking at the routes.

The answer was to bump everything forward a day, so we drove up to Little Forest Plateau and did the two easy walks up there out to both Rusden and Florence Heads. There’s also a third track that goes out to the cliff line near Mount Bushranger, but we had done that one a few years previous when we walked up Mount Talaterang. As we stood buffeted by wind on Florence Head, I reminded Doug of a previous trip in the area when we attempted to walk up Rusden Head from Wombat Ridge fire trail. Interestingly, he had completely blocked the entire trip from his memory which, perhaps, gives some credence to the idea of “trauma repressed memories.” Something which otherwise seems akin to the circular logic of the trans-gender movement. Question: “What is a woman?” Answer: “Someone who feels like a woman.” Question: “Is your mental health disturbed?” Answer: “Yes.” Corollary, you must have repressed trauma.

Anyway, I remember most of my trips, traumatic of otherwise, while Doug remembers few, also painful or pleasurable. But, to give Doug his due, his head is full of many other things whilst mine is mostly “what training or other activity will I do today?”

The Trouble with Equity is it Always Gets Worse

It’s much easier to equalize by deterioration than by improvement. Theodore Dalrymple.

If classical liberalism once favored equality of opportunity, progressive liberals now favor equality of outcome, otherwise known as equity. This is generally illustrated by the cartoon below. The disadvantaged are raised to the level of the advantaged based on an underlying assumption that any discrepancy between individuals is due to multi-factorial oppression, not individual behavior. Recently, in a discussion about rock climbing, an anonymous individual posted this very illustration with the comment that she believes in equity; not that there was any doubt in anyone’s mind from her previous comments that this was the case. Everyone but the equity poster knew this implicitly. There is a certain simplicity of thought, frequently accompanied by talking in slogans (which reflects thinking in slogans), which readily identifies the equity believers.

The funny thing about equity is that no-one wants equity when there are real stakes at play. There is no-one alive who needs delicate, intricate and potentially devastating brain surgery who opts for the equity brain surgeon, at least not willingly. Neither does anyone want their house built by the equity builder, or their finances managed by the equity accountant. When real outcomes are at play, outcomes that we are forced to experience not play act on social media, we all want the best man or woman for the job, not the equity candidate.

The hypocrisy of the equity position notwithstanding, equity is simply impossible to achieve. If I give four people $1000 all four people have parity (assuming no-one had any money to start). Person A, puts their $1000 into a term deposit and earns 5% interest. In one year, person A will have $1050. Person B starts a business with their $1000 and the business is quite successful. In one year, their $1000 business investment has been built into a business which can be sold for $2000. Person C pursues a Hunter Biden strategy and snorts cocaine off sex workers breasts (I hope I have used the politically correct language) and within one week is completely broke, while Person D invests in some stocks which rise in value by 10% resulting in a value of $1100 after one year. What started as equity is now completely inequitable because people are not the same. We are all biologically and psychologically different. Some opt for instant gratification and immediate but fleeting pleasure while others chose to delay gratification and work towards some larger goal.

In order to return to equity, we should give Person A $950, Person B nothing, Person D $900, while Person C hits the jackpot and gets $2000 which would enable Person C to snort double the amount of cocaine off larger breasts. Unfortunately, within two weeks, the situation would again be inequitable, and we would have to begin the cycle of equalizing outcomes all over again.

It has to be clear to anyone who understands even a modicum of economics, not to mention human behavior that there is simply no-way to achieve equity. Equity drifts off over the horizon like an over-turned kayak blown by an off-shore wind. The more resources you throw at equity the less equal things become. The cocaine snorter begins to consume an ever larger share of resources which benefits only the cocaine dealer and the pimp. Person C certainly doesn’t benefit, and it’s debatable that even the sex worker benefits. The sex worker would probably rather get $1000 to start a different business!   

Drive Don't Cycle

The cult of the expert with the hegemony of bureaucracy. Father Robert McTeigue

Back in the 1990’s I worked as a registered nurse in a series of Calgary hospitals. My first job was on the gastrointestinal surgical floor at the Holy Cross Hospital which was on the southwest side of the downtown area. In those days downtown was pretty quiet, especially in the early morning, and I loved riding through the centre of the city on my bicycle on the way to work dodging and weaving across traffic lanes as the wind blew through the deep valleys created by high rise buildings. Soon enough the wards and patient treatment areas at the Holy Cross Hospital were moved and the entire series of buildings was given over to the bureaucracy that managed the regional health department. Bureaucracies have two jobs: the first is to maintain the bureaucracy and the second is to grow the bureaucracy.

Cycling to work at the Holy Cross was a continuous juggling game as I worked shifts. Night shifts I drove both directions being too tired to cycle home at the end of the shift and unwilling to ride to work at 10:00 pm at night. Day shifts were easy, I cycled both directions, while afternoon shifts Doug and I had a system worked out whereby he drove to his office job downtown with his bicycle in the back of our wagon. He would park near the Holy Cross Hospital, unload his bicycle and ride across town to his office. After work he would ride home, while I would ride to the Holy Cross for my afternoon shift, throw my bicycle in the back of the wagon, and drive home at midnight when I finished work. So we both carried changes of clothes in panniers on our bicycles as well as massive amounts of food to get us through our respective work days.

From the Holy Cross, I moved to work in the Multiple Sclerosis (MS) Clinic at the old General Hospital which was on the east side of the city down in the Bow River valley. There was no more shift work so I could cycle everyday, which I did, rain, shine, winter storm, minus 30 degree Celsius days, through afternoon thunder and hail storms and along the unplowed and frequently icy streets and paths of Calgary. I could make it to work in about an hour if conditions were reasonable, but I had days when it took me at least 1.5 hours to get to work due to icy and snowy conditions (this was before the pathway along the river valley was plowed in winter and studded bicycle tires had not been invented).

Coming home I almost always had to ride into the Chinook winds which blow through Calgary year round. These warm winds (warm is relative) sweep down over the Rocky Mountains to the west and generally blow at a steady 25 to 30 knots. Getting home to my house, which was uphill from the river valley and to the west was almost universally into a steady head wind. I had days when it took me 1.5 hours to ride home as well, and, as I frequently ran out of food, I often had hypoglycemic attacks while riding that made me vulnerable to falling off the bicycle into the road traffic.

My clearest memory of the craziness of my bicycle commute obsession was falling into the bus trap between Scenic Acres, where Doug and I lived, and Silver Springs, the next suburb to the east. Bus traps are big trenches dug in the ground that can be spanned by the wheels of a full size bus but a car or regular vehicle does not have a wide enough wheel base to span the trench which is about a half a metre deep. They are used to stop cars and private vehicles from zooming around urban neighbourhoods. I was riding to work on my usual route which took me past a bus trap on a road between Scenic Acres and Silver Springs on a snowy day in the early morning. As I rode past the bus trap, my bicycle hit black ice and slipped sideways. I fell into the bus trap and the bicycle landed on top of me. At that moment, the number 37 bus which I took on occasional days when even I wouldn’t cycle, chose that exact moment to come rumbling along the road, and I managed to get both my self and my bicycle out of the bus trap just seconds before the bus drove over the trap. I had given serious thought to trying to lie flat in the bus trap because buses, like trains, are slow to stop, particularly if the driver is not expecting to encounter a human and a bicycle at rest in the bus trap. I can still remember clearly the look of extreme consternation on the drivers face when he realised he had almost run over a cyclist.

There were lots of other crazy days. One day, riding up the penultimate hill on my way home, I hit black ice again and flew off the bicycle out into two lanes of traffic. Another day, after a terrifying ride down icy and snowy roads to gain the bicycle path that ran along the river valley I found the entire pathway covered by a glassy, solid 5 centimetres of ice, as smooth and slippery as the local ice hockey rink. The Chinook winds had melted the snow on the path but the banks on either side of the path had prevented the melted snow (in other words, water) from draining away and, as night fell, the entire pathway for at least five kilometres had frozen solid with 5 centimetres of hard water ice. Crampons would have been more use than a bicycle. I pushed the bike all the way to work. I was a bit late that day.

Multiple days were marked by thunder, lightening and hail during the summer months. Sometimes I just kept riding, other times the hail was big enough that I would have to seek out shelter until the storm passed over. Strangely, I never really worried about being hit by lightning perhaps because I had been hit by lightning on a climb of Mount Athabasca already.

Winter riding required multiple layers of clothing such that moving was difficult. I had lined lycra tights which had a goretex layer stitched to the front (a unique item made by Mountain Equipment Coop which were absolutely brilliant but of course disappeared from their inventory when the bureaucracy took over and the only thing MEC reliably sold was yoga clothing). On very cold days, I wore another pair of full goretex pants over the top of these, and put shoe covers on my leather hiking boots (sneakers were too cold) which MEC also made at the time. The shoe covers also were a genius item but they too disappeared once MEC became a store that sold almost exclusively barbeque clothing (a term coined by my mate Robin Tivy). On top, I wore a long underwear (prolypropolene at the time) long sleeved top, a lightweight fleece, then another jacket (home-made) that had a thicker fleece layer with a windbreak layer stitched on as an outer. A muff for the face (otherwise you would get frostbite), a homemade beanie (called a toque in Canada), my bicycling helmet, a headlamp (plus lights on the bicycle), and two pairs of mitts, an inner fleece layer and outer wind break layer. It took me about half an hour to dress and undress at either end of the commute. Ski goggles were sometimes useful to prevent your eyelashes from freezing.

The most batshit crazy thing I remember about this time was an online survey tool that MEC developed and published on their website. This was, of course, the early days of the internet, so it was a pretty rudimentary questionnaire which purported to measure your environmental impact. Mine, disturbingly, was rated high. You might wonder, how it could be high considering I never drove a single kilometre during the week and prepared all my own food. I even did my weekly shopping on foot, carrying a large backpack up to the local store and bringing it home loaded with the weeks groceries. It was big backpack (80 litres – I still have it).

I don’t remember the exact wording of the quiz or the summary response but the gist of it was I was an environmental disaster because I was using up too many calories riding my bicycle to work and walking to the shop, and the recommendation was, unbelievable as it might sound, that I should drive to work! Such is the madness of bureaucracy and the environmental movement. Interestingly enough, within a year of my starting work at the old General Hospital, that group of building also became the home to more bureaucracy and our entire clinic moved to the Foothills Hospital. This had the inadvertent effect of lowering my environmental impact because I could cycle to work in a mere half hour.

Keep Climbing

You should never, ever be understood completely. That's like the kiss of death, isn't it? It's a full stop. I don't ever think you should put full stops on thoughts. They change. John Lydon (Johny Rotten, The Sex Pistols).

2026 was the year I wondered, fleetingly, if I would give up rock climbing. Each passing year, it just seemed to get harder and harder to drag myself back into climbing shape after taking the summer season off. But I put a stop on that thought, and started climbing again, and I’m so glad I did. The movement, the challenge, the effort to keep trying substantiated by small improvements is still so satisfying even on a crag that is barely 20 metres high.

It may be the year I have to recognise I’m not going up in the grades anymore, and that’s hard, but I think it is harder still not to climb at all. That would be dying a small death before the final death and in no way a measure of the joy of a life. Fred Beckey kept climbing (or at least trying to climb) for decades after his prime. I’ll never be a Fred Beckey, but perhaps there is some kind of crazy dignity in continuing the struggle for improvement long after the physical ability to improve is gone.

Beckey used to roll into Nelson occasionally when I lived there and my mate Hamish would hook up with him to go climbing. Sometimes at the local crags, sometimes the local gym, but often on some hare-brained scheme to carry a ball busting pack deep into the remote BC wilderness to climb some obscure peak. Often, the walk in (trackless) was enough to render Beckey incapable of completing the climb and the youth who had accompanied him would climb the route instead. Beckey was the prototypical eternal optimist, busting his arse getting way into the remotest wildest mountains long after his ability to string long hard climbing days together was gone.

I like to think that Beckey carried an unquenchable flame for climbing that age and wisdom never dimmed. A dreamer spirit that found solace and quietude on high mountains after extreme effort. These days, he would be diagnosed with autism or ADHD. He would be drugged up and/or convinced that his extreme focus was the product of a “neurodivergent” brain that needed assistance and accommodation. That never happened, because it was a different, and in many ways, more tolerant time. Beckey didn’t want accommodations, and neither should we. The beauty of life is in the struggle to improve not in the dismal acceptance of fading ability.

No Hands Climbing

Johnny Dawes is a year younger than me, but climbs far harder. These days, not many people have heard of Johnny Dawes because he is old (62) and unfashionable among the rainbow lanyard, inclusive (but really exclusive), feminist kill-joy, everything is a trauma, words are violence climbing crowd. Plus, of course, he’s a white male and therefore the symbol of all that is wrong in the “grape-culture” of climbing. As an old white female.  I miss the days when we could just go climbing without needing to make a statement about colonisation or climate action or gender-wangery. If you were a climber, you were judged by how hard you climbed, and it was more common to down-grade your achievements than over-hype them. We all had a finally tuned bull-shit metre and the climbers gratuitously talking up their big sends were greeted with apathetic disdain.

Johnny Dawes is known as both a master of movement and an enigmatic thinker. He started “no hands” climbing after injuring a hand and became known for both hard and bold traditional ascents along with no hands climbs. These days, he runs a coaching business, unlike any other climbing coaching business, where in his own unique and eccentric style he teaches “declumsification.”

I’ve noticed myself becoming increasingly clumsy when climbing. Struggling with precise footwork and also those ultra-common moves where you have to step up onto a small hold with – what feels like – no good grips for the hands. Strength training was not improving these issues, so, I thought why not try Dawes’ declumsification. My home wall is overhanging so way too steep for no hands climbing – even for maestro Dawes – but I do have any number of easy featured slabs sitting on the rock platforms at my local beach.

No hands climbing is – at least for me – surprisingly hard, even on terrain where it shouldn’t be. I’ve got a good two metre high boulder just 7 minutes walk from home which I was using. It has holds, much bigger than Dawes uses, so good for someone who needs to start at the beginning of declumsification. You can watch Dawes no hands climbing here, here, and here but not me, because I didn’t shoot any video. Declumsification is not something you can do one time and assume you will have improved. Dawes mastered the art of using any and all surfaces to declumsify including urban surfaces, much like the OG of parkour before parkour was a thing.

Sharks and Rocks

Today was the first day that it actually felt like winter paddling. It was supposed to rain a bit which isn’t conducive to rock climbing but is appropriate for paddling. In the end, it didn’t rain at all, though I was pretty well wet through by the end of my requisite 20 kilometres as, because I had got tired of fighting with my dry spray deck, I had reverted, on the coldest day of the year so far, to my worn out and leaky Electric Water spray deck. Electric Water custom makes their spray decks to fit both your waist and your cockpit whereas of the shelf spray decks can be a bit of a bitch to get on.

As I was passing Circuit Beach on my way to Lilli Pilli Bay, I noticed the Joonga shark boat speeding towards one of the drum lines. It’s always interesting to see what they have pulled aboard – no sharks are injured, they are photographed, measured, tagged and released – this time it was a bronze whaler that the men on the boat thought was about 2.5 metres long. It had a very thick square head and it took a bit more wrangling than I’ve seen the lads engaged in before.

The ocean has been hopping with activity this winter. The water is clear a lot of the time as we have had a long periods of calm winds with few or no big storms coming through. In our home bay, I’ve paddled out multiple times into massive schools of fish. So many fish that as they swim near the surface they create a wave. The dolphins are always there, sometimes just swimming, other times feeding, and a few seals have moved in as well. The only shark I’ve seen, however, is the bronze whaler today although the buoys are reporting great whites and other big sharks around.

My Big Day Out: The 2026 Winter Solstice Edition

In 2022, I organised a Tollgate Islands paddle out at sunset followed by dinner and pictures at our house. Nine people paddled out and we had 13 for dinner. I would be lucky to get two mosquitoes and a blowfly now! I had an ignominious failure in 2024 as my plan to walk from sunrise to sunset ended in an emergency pick up when some incipient connective tissue injuries blew up. Last year, was a roaring success as I led an overnight trip for NSW Sea Kayak Club along the Murramarang Coast and culminating in a paddle into the Blue Cave at the Tollgate Islands.

This year, I decided on a multi-sport day. I haven’t done one of these days since 2020 when I did the 50 kilometre project which turned out to be 53.5 kilometres and should have been 57 because then I would have done my age. I decided to complete my age in self-propelled kilometres, hoping to complete the effort in the daylight hours. This would mean 21 kilometres each biking, hiking and sea kayaking. Doug suggested I cycle the nearby paved cycleway which is almost flat but I thought that would be cheating.

Here’s how the day unfolded. I got up about 5:15 am and drank two big mugs of coffee. By 6 a.m. (an hour before sunrise) I was on the bike. I used my climbing helmet instead of my bike helmet because climbing helmets are formatted to hold a headlamp. Familiar trails feel strangely unfamiliar when you are riding up with just a circle of light to guide the way. I wanted to get a photo of the sunrise but our bike trails are in the trees and the best I got was a couple of bleary shots over trees. I was able to turn the headlamp off before I got to the top of the first long ascent which I reached about 7 a.m. It was another race weekend and there were people about even two hours before the event was due to start.

The sun cleared the ridge on my first descent. Then it was ascent, descent, ascent, and the final descent to the trail-head and the short cycle back on roads. At home, I changed into kayaking gear and had a large cup of milky tea. I’m pretty much fuelled by tea (I had an egg and turkey sandwich too) and then trolleyed the kayak down to our local beach for the kayaking leg.

Low tide and a very low swell meant it was an easy launch and paddle south for about 10 kilometres to Jimmies Island. Just as we got to Jimmies Island the forecast southerly blew in and we had a light tail wind for the paddle home. I was 750 metres short of 21 kilometres so while Doug retrieved the trolleys which we leave at the house of a friend who lives right beside the beach, I paddled up and down the bay until my watch ticked over the magic number.

Back at the house I ate three chicken meat patties and a handful of sultanas and had another jug of milky tea! At the last minute, I decided to switch packs and throw in a windbreak (jacket) but within half an hour I was off to walk the Munjip Track. The Munjip Track goes up and down, up and down, the entire length as it climbs over a series of headlands to small sandy bays. I had debated walking north which means I could stroll along long flat beaches instead of following the undulating trail but that felt like cheating too, so I went south, up and down, up and down. I felt slow on the hills and I had a couple of incipient tweaks which meant I had to keep my stride short to make sure my gluteal and quadricep muscles were fully engaged but apart from feeling a bit slow, the walk segment went well. This was, as expected, the slowest segment.

Sunset, also was over trees, so there was no sudden splash of colour just a gradual deepening of the dusk and under the trees I needed my headlamp. At the beach near my house I was again 750 metres short of 21 kilometres so I walked the beach until my watch ticked over 21 kilometres.

It was about 5:45 p.m. when I got home so, overall, just shy of 12 hours, although with breaks and switch overs taken out, my moving time was pretty much spot on 10 hours. I wasn’t sure I could do this without my hip blowing up and I certainly wasn’t going to risk tearing further my already jagged femoral labrum so I was pretty happy to finish in a reasonable time with no real bodily aches or pains.

Here’s what I didn’t do:

• Taper. I did my usual training and activities right up until Sunday except for dropping my usual aerobic activity on Saturday. But, I still did all my usual physiotherapy exercises, core and gluteal work and climbed on my home climbing wall on Saturday.

• Eat any special foods or gels. I did the bike ride fasted, and thereafter I ate regular food with a bit of extra carbohydrate, but, mostly I ate animal protein.

• Drink any electrolytes or special energy drinks: Milky tea and water did the job.

• Rest on any of the segments. The key to long endurance efforts is to keep moving. People burn through so much time resting, starting, stopping and generally faffing about. A body in motion stays in motion.