The Bugaboos, August 2010

Summary: we sent that shit.

Bugaboo Spire, NE Ridge

It was my first trip to the Bugs, and Neale's first that oughta count. As is often the case, I was pretty out of shape when we went. At least out of rock climbing shape. Neale, as is often the case, was in shape and was like a border collie after a tennis ball. This created drama nearly from the start - for example, the day we arrived at Applebee Neale couldn't help but notice that it was still early afternoon and the sun was shining. I couldn't help but notice that I was exhausted from the hike in. Neale soloed the tower right near camp, and I rested.

The next morning dawned partly cloudy. Neale thought we should climb. I thought we should sleep. We were both right, but we succeeded in climbing the NE Ridge of Bugaboo Spire anyway.

I say we were both right about sleeping in, because it was socked-in up high.

And the summit shot. The whole time we were in the Bugs I was obsessed with making this face in every photo. Get used to it. Sometimes it worked better than others. Neale, unfortunately, wasn't posing.

The Next Day: Snowpatch Route on Snowpatch Spire and the West Ridge of Pigeon Spire

The next day Neale didn't see any reason that we shouldn't launch directly out of my sleeping bag and onto Snowpatch Spire. I grudgingly agreed that he was right.

Our new friends Don and Garrett followed us up the route.

Neale ran the five or so pitches of slab around in the snow patch together in about half and hour.

Neale on the summit ridge, as seen from the summit.

This is going in the Stupid Summit Photos Hall of Fame for sure.

Rapping down the Kraus-McCarthy

The same day: the West Ridge of Pigeon Spire

Then we walked over to the West Ridge of Pigeon.

...in excellent style.

We got there as the masses were leaving.

You've gotta go down in order to go up.

I wasn't brave enough to stand up and walk.

I was straddling the ridge over huge exposure, but does Neale get that in the photo? No.....

Japanese tourist motif.

Summit.

Don and Garrett followed us up this, too.

The Day After Next: The Beckey-Chouinard on South-Howser Tower

The day after we walked over to East Creek and slept. In the end, we didn't need the extra time, but we didn't know that. Based on reputation, I thought that the Beckey was gonna be real, real hard. But its actually pretty moderate. Of course, Neale led every pitch over 5.8 - wanna make routes easy? Get a rope gun.

Looking down at our camp from the start of the difficulties on the Beckey.

"What's up there?"

"Oh god!"

"Well Seth, only one thing to do."

There were four parties on the route that day - we were number 3. Party number 4 got benighted real bad - they were good climbers, but as soon as I saw them belay I knew they were gonna sleep on the route. Party 1 was 2 people that are on a quest to climb all the 50 classics. They were nice people, but I doubt make their quest. Notably because the routes that they're most likely to die on are the ones that are least worth dying for, and I think they know that, too. There are four people climbing this beautiful 5.8 corner.

Mark on the crux, Janelle belaying and photographing, me and Neale napping in the sun (for about an hour).

Looking back down.

Chris and Ryan from Squamish. I was bonking, but Chris had just had one of those 5-hour energy things and told me about it 1,000 times. Ryan was freeing (rather that A0ing) the traverse. If he fell, he would land on me.

I have some summit photos, but I have food in my teeth, and I don't want to look stupid on my own blog. Well, I have one good photo. I'll post it later. But we did a team rappel - all six of us leap-frogging down with our ropes.

Me, on the walk back into East Creek, soaking in the views from the Pigeon-Howser Col.

The next morning, looking up at the route. You can see two people bailing (thunderstorms came in in the afternoon - Don and Garrett were on the summit when they came in and they both discussed the experience with an almost-religious reverence. Apparently the boulder they were hiding under got struck by lightning twice.

Me, packing up. The next day we climbed the McTech Arete (no photos - camera died, if I remember right) and then hiked out to climb in the Rockies. Post to follow.

How do you convince someone who’s never been anywhere else that the place that they’re from is special?

“It’s beautiful here” you say, meaning it.

“I wish it was flatter” they say, also meaning it.

When you’re a farmer, life in the mountains is hard. And when you plow the steep slopes with a bull, dress in traditional clothing, live in an adobe home and eat boiled corn three meals a day, every day, the white people that come to visit you seem exotic. You, after all, are very, very normal. Everyone you know is also a poor farmer, barely scraping out a life on a mountain top. Pumas, Andean Foxes, Oncillas and Spectacled Bears are nuisance animals that threaten livestock and crops – the fewer the better. And why worry about them, there are tons in the forest out there. And there is a lot of forest too - just look over there, can’t you see it?

We, with our money and our lily-white skin, seem very important here. We can go anywhere in the world, and see more of Ecuador than these same Ecuadorians ever will. They’re too polite and grounded in the unfairness of life to let escape more than the tiniest traces of envy. Though our importance might be overstated, our privilege cannot be. In fact, their assessment of our privilege is much more reliable than our own – we tend to only compare ourselves to other enormously privileged people.

I brought my laptop into one of the stores fronting the soccer game in Colepato on Sunday to show our friends Don José, Raúl, Ramiro, Wilfredo and a few others the photos we had taken with the camera traps. Someone commented on my computer, saying “this is one of the new kinds, isn’t it?” “No,” I replied, “es bastante viejo, ya tiene cuatro años.” “But,” the person protested, “weren’t the old ones much bigger? With the monitor así?” using his hands to indicate one of the older tube-style monitors. “Oh,” I replied, realizing my arrogant stupidity, “yes, those came before this kind.”

I pulled up the photos from the camera traps to show. My excitement over the photos of the Oncilla and the Puma was shared. “Grand-OH-te es” they observed of the Puma, with the typical exaggerated emphasis on a vowel to indicate the extent of the situation. “And fat, too.” It should be, it ate a whole alpaca the day before and another the night that photo was taken.

I showed them photos of the other animals, too. Don José and others rattled off the local names as soon as the photos flashed onto the screen.

“Cuchuchu.”

“Zhulpo.”

“Venado.” “No, venado es otro. Este es Zhibri.”

“Pavo de Monté.”

“Llamala.”

“Have you eaten this?” I ask Don José of the Mountain Paca.

“He’s eaten everything.” says one of the others.

A Mountain Paca is a small animal. It’s nocturnal but common, and rarely seen due, I suspect, to the fact that it’s reportedly quite tasty and evolution has selected for skittishness. And here we are, rich important people from far away, spending our time and money hiding cameras in the woods taking pictures of it. It, and the Oncilla, which is known locally almost exclusively for its ability to kill oodles of chickens in a single night. And Round River groups have been doing this sort of thing here for years. Gradually, I think, word is out in Colepato that their part of the world is, actually, quite special. We don’t think of ourselves as rich, naturally, but in terms of where we can go and what we can do, the world really is our oyster. Not admitting that would be unappreciative of it. And out of all the places in the world, we come to their little forest at the top of their too-steep hill. And so people in Colepato have begun to draw the only logical conclusion, which is that their home really is something very special. Which, over the course of six months, is the very same conclusion that I have come to.

I would like to acknowledge the role that Stuart White had in shaping my thoughts on this subject.

Playing Catch-Up

I know that my blog has been pretty thoroughly ignored, but I have been doing stuff and writing about it - I've just posted it in other places.

Here is a trip report I wrote for Cascade Climbers back in August for Joffre Peak after Nick and I climbed the Flavelle-Lane.

Here is a quick list of blog posts that I wrote for [my employer's] blog:

The camera trap photos (this is a really good post - all cool pictures)

A post with (not very good) writing by one of my students, but I included my pictures, so I'll include it here.

How do you convince someone who's never been anywhere else that the place that they're from is special?

This is by far the best (in my opinion). I'll likely repost it on this blog.

A post of photos

and another

Paragliding

“Yeah, how much do you weigh, anyway?” Shawn asks me as an afterthought in his living room in Whitehorse.

I lied.

He laughed. “Yeah, right.”

So I told the truth.

“Oh fuck. That is a lot. That’s a fuckton. Huh… ”

“Is it too much? Can we still go?”

“Yeah, we can still go. We’re just not gonna stay in the air very long.”

I met Shawn on the ferry from Juneau to Skagway this summer. I was asking around for a ride to Whitehorse, and got a ride with him. In a burst of generosity on the part of a nearly complete stranger, he offered to take me paragliding. In a burst of faith, I decided to sit on a perfect stranger’s lap and have him fly me around in a nylon diaper.
Paragliding seems to involve more guess-work and driving than even climbing. We were gonna go from a hill right behind his house, but then for some reason conditions didn’t look good. So we drove pretty far to a launching point on the way to Dawson. We went with a younger friend of his as well, who’s name I’ve forgotten. He was apparently from Whitehorse, but he had a look like Shawn had pulled him out of a discoteque in Bratislava, complete with a hangover. He didn’t wind up flying (he had his own wing), since he felt rotten, but he was a nice guy.
Shawn unfolded the wing in the grass at the top of the hill, but not until after he’d made me sign a waiver that included the hand-written sentence “I am fully informed that Shawn LastName is not a certified pilot” (I didn’t forget his last name, I’m just not sure that he’d necessarily appreciate being outed on my blog – FoG, and all that). The thermals, coming off the empty highway below, were apparently pretty good. I stood around trying to strike a balance between being a smart, helpful guy, and acknowledging that I didn’t know shit about what we were doing. I could more or less take directions like “don’t let this blow away” or “keep these lines from tangling”. Those two directions are pretty much all there is to alpine climbing, so I was not useless.
Shawn and I got strapped in. “When I say go! turn to the right and run downhill as fast as you can.” Normally these directions would be easy for even me to follow, but strapped to another person I was worried about being a clutz. “When we get airborne, just keep running. If we come back down its better to be running.” Okay.
So the gust came up, Shawn said go, and we took off running. We got airborne, and I kept running, dutifully. 40 or so feet in the air Shawn said “uh, you can stop running now.”
And we were flying! Shawn battled to keep us in the updraft, but we seemed to be climbing a bit at a time. We flew out away from the hillside over the valley. Everytime the kite sunk a little bit I came to a newer and more profound realization of how dangerous one of these things could be. We were flying over a burned spruce forest, and there would be little chance of walking away from a crash into the cris-crossing logs.
But Shawn wasn’t worried, so I relaxed. After a while we lost the updraft and just began sledding down, drifting back and forth. The flight lasted 10, maybe 15 minutes, and I soaked in the views. I should have taken a self-portrait, but oh well. As we approached the landing I began to realize that I couldn’t imagine a scenario where even a controlled landing didn’t end in a broken leg. I figured it must not always end that way, but I’m a realistic enough person to person to acknowledge that either way, I was going to find out.
As we came in we were just a little too far right of where we wanted to be, and crashed through a small stand of aspens. They arrested our speed perfectly, and I ended up sitting on my butt on the ground laughing, just past the aspen patch, more gently than if I’d sat down. Ah, that must be how to avoid a busted leg – hit some trees.
Anyway, thanks, Shawn.

Did I Ever Tell You About The Time That Smoking Saved My Life?

Its true. Next time someone tells you smoking is bad for you, you tell them this story.

It was my one and only ski tour. I refer to it as The Ski Tour. It taught me that I don't particularly like ski touring, and it taught Heidi Rader that she doesn't particularly like me. We all learned a lot.

Skiing up the Nelchina Glacier

It was the first real day of the tour, and we were side-hilling above the moraine of the Nelchina Glacier on our way to getting on the glacier. The four of us stopped to take a break. At the end of the break Yoshi pulled out the pipe.

A bit about Yo: Yoshi lives to ski tour and smoke dope. Frank claims he can tell when Yoshi runs out of pot because the pace of the trip changes so dramatically. At the time he was in his mid-thirties, lived with his mom, occasionally drove around Japanese tourists for work, and was generally more fulfilled by his life than either you or I. When Yoshi began to grow his own he effectively removed himself from the western economy as we know it. I saw him last week and it didn't seem that much has changed. We did discuss this story, though.

Yoshi

"Hey Yoshi, can I have some?" "Yeah, bro" came the rhetorical reply. Frank and Heidi were, as usual, re-packed before us and started skiing off. Yoshi and I sat a bit longer, smoking and procrastinating putting my shit back into the bag.

What came next was more of a surprise. Through now-glassy eyes, Yo pulled a big, beautiful bud out of his bag, and tossed it into the snow. "One for the spirits."

Laughing, "Yoshi, man, as soon as you ski away I'm gonna go get that."

With as much alarm has his fish-bowl eyes could muster "no man! Don't!"

I shrugged and laughed, and then turned myself back to attempting to pack my bag. I have problems getting organized enough as it is, and getting stoned was probably a passive-aggressive attempt to make myself slower. I hate ski touring, I just didn't know it yet.

Then Yoshi and I heard Frank shouting for us and sounding agitated. We responded, but we were downwind, and he couldn't hear. Finally Heidi saw us and settled Frank down.

"DID YOU SEE THAT???"

"guess not?"

"There was just a HUGE avalanche!!" and he gestured up the hill with his ski pole. Sure enough, there was a pretty big crown line on the hill above us.

"did that just happen?"

"yeah, it was right behind us! totally silent!"

"huh."

The slide path was quite big - at least 100 feet wide. I don't know how deep the debris was. Frank said it ran right behind him. Generally, I finish a break at least a minute behind whoever I'm with. If I hadn't stopped to smoke pot with Yoshi, I'd be a dead man.

Thanks, marijuana.