East Face Bugaboo Spire; Northpost, Brenta, Crescent Spires with Cobalt Lake, 1980

“… up I go — but [the gulley] is iced, full of treacherous sugar snow. I get about thirty feet up it and gripped as hell. Hey, you’re alone — no room for misjudgement — back off — no I’m OK — up another ten feet, jam the pick into an icy crack, haul up — another 30 feet to go — grey cold light, grey cold rock … ice and snow down my neck — bang my toe into a hole, snow sliding off verglas. Hanging on my axe. If you go now it’s whoosh! bounce off that chockstone and wheeee! out over the East Face.

“Hand over hand down my wedged axe, get a bomb-proof (?) foothold, wiggle the axe out until I’m close enough to slide down to the chockstone. A couple of barrow-loads of the sugar snow go cascading down and over the edge with a dull, rustling sound.” 

~ Golden Ears Mountain, November, 1979

I finished 1979 with a solo winter ascent of Golden Ears, the prominent massif east of Vancouver, and greeted 1980 with a climb of Squamish’s Shannon Falls, its waters turned by a rare cold snap into a pillar of ice. Both adventures might have ended in disaster but for luck, fitness, technical proficiency and not a small helping of audacity.

While my personal life was adrift — I was essentially a homeless couch-surfer — my passions and obsessions led to pinnacles of achievement and personal development. I was, my journal records, thankful and happy.

I celebrated the New Year at Elfin Lakes Hut, in Garibaldi Park, skiing out and along the ridges of Columnar Peak. I can’t count the number of times I returned to explore the area that season, with a mind to climb a new winter route on Mt. Atwell. 

I had snagged a dream job with White Rock Parks & Rec. as a Nordic ski instructor, spending weekends across the border in Washington State, at Mt. Baker, or in Manning Park, teaching the fine arts of herringbone climbing, track skiing and telemark turns. 

Vancouver’s outdoors grapevine presented another opportunity in the adventure gear trade. I accepted a position at Carleton Recreation on Kingsway. In between selling skis and climbing equipment, I cycled a hilly 40 kilometres back and forth to work. Taking a couple of weeks off in the summer, I joined friends on the Third Annual Perissodactyl Expedition to the Rockies.

Highlights included climbs in the Purcell Mountains’ Bugaboo Spires and an ascent of the sublime ice route on Mount Andromeda, appropriately named Skyladder. Autumn included a return to Golden Ears in fine weather, with my father and brother, Adrian. In October, during a clear but windy spell, Bryan Beard and I, having survived Shannon Falls, took on the steep, north face route on Mount Baker known as the Coleman Headwall. The following weekend, I accompanied a group into the Tantalus Range. The coastal “monsoon” hit, confining us to the Alpine Club’s Tantalus Hut to tell stories over endless mugs of steaming tea.

“The trees on the hillside above me are wreathed in mist. Snowflakes drift on the wind like white insects.” ~Leavenworth, Wa.

In between, numerous weekend excursions included rock climbing at Squamish, Cheakamus Canyon and Lighthouse Park in North Vancouver, skiing numerous downhill resorts and backcountry destinations; a 28th birthday escape in April to Leavenworth and Peshastin, where under a frosted tarp, my only protection from the bitter winds outside my torn, feather-leaking “mummy-bag,” I came down with pneumonia; a return to Vancouver Island and Mount Arrowsmith in summer, climbing with Tom Hocking and friends in swirling cloud to the summit — a cake-walk compared to a winter attempt, two years before, pinned on the ridge overnight in a howling blizzard. A late August attempt on the Grande Wall of the Squamish Chief was cut short on “Psyche Ledge” with my Andromeda rope-mate Frank Weiler, felled by a migraine attack, retching into a billy can.

Nineteen-Eighty was a banner year in the mountains. It was also the year I bought my first “professional” camera, a Nikon FM. With it I made thousands of photographs documenting adventures and producing illustrations for outdoor catalogues and ads. Many remain in my filing cabinets, especially those recorded on Kodachrome, the most stable colour process of the day.

Those will likely outlast me and stories associated with my name. The mountains exist in another realm measured in eons; a dimension mountaineers are lucky to glimpse in transcendent moments outside of personal plans and dreams.

Forty-years later, as I face the first month of 2020, I no longer seek thrills on ice-rimed rock and insubstantial footholds — comforts beside the arrows of age and malignant social conflict. Still aroused by the search for beauty in mind and matter and a crazy urge to circumscribe the ineffable in art, even in the rawest of seasons, I remain forever awestruck.