My First Bike

During my first years of elementary school, we lived on an air force base in Vancouver (the base no longer exists). I couldn’t wait to move beyond my tricycle and get my first two-wheel bicycle. My father finally agreed to get me one, but on a corporal’s pay with 4 kids to feed, all he could afford was a second-hand CCM bike. It was no 3-speed like some of my luckier friends had (it just had the one speed), but I guess I was lucky to get anything at all. It served me well, and I used it there until we moved to Montréal, where it saw plenty of use for the next 4 years. When we finally moved back to BC, to the small town where I attended high school, it was used regularly until I finally moved away to another city to attend university. I lost track of it after that – my mother probably gave it away to Goodwill.

Three Amigos

During my last 2 years of high school, I had to walk a total of 8 blocks to get to high school each day. Once I started out, one block after leaving my home I would meet up with my friend Price. He and I would then walk 4 more blocks and pick up our friend Sandy at her home, then the 3 of us would walk the final three blocks together to arrive at the high school. This was an enjoyable ritual we performed every school day. One thing the three of us had in common was that we were growing up in homes without fathers. Mine had split at the end of 10th grade, and the fathers of both Sandy and Price were deceased. Out of the hundred of us who graduated from that high school in 1964, we were the only ones growing up without fathers. It was interesting that the 3 of us fell together like that, quite by accident.

Starry Silhouette

Andy and I met up in a quiet spot in the desert in order to do a climb together. There was no town nearby, so the night sky was as dark as could be. Our peak was very steep and technical in nature and we knew we’d be challenged. There was no moon that night, so the peak was completely dark, and none of its details were visible. In fact, the only way one could tell that the peak was even there was because it blocked out all of the stars behind it, leaving a sort of ghostly imprint against the Milky Way in the background. It was kind of eerie, and exciting too.

***Broken Bones ***

When I think back on the 3,000 peaks I’ve climbed since 1962, it is nothing short of a miracle that I have never broken a bone, lost any digits from frostbite or been diagnosed with skin cancer. I mean, I’ve always tried to be careful, but even so, statistically it would have been so easy to have had any of those things occur. Just lucky – maybe. Grateful – absolutely.

Friends of Hoover

The first climb I ever did was in 1962, a small peak north of my town in southwest British Columbia. Part of the fun of going there, which I did several times, was that there was a small lake near the mountaintop. I enjoyed going there so much that one weekend I talked a group of friends from my high school to go there with me. Together we walked up an old logging road, gaining a thousand feet in the process, then dropped down a bit to Hoover Lake. An old raft sat at the edge of the lake, and we enjoyed paddling around for a few hours. It was a great day, marred only by the fact that one of the boys decided to take a short-cut on the way back down and got lost in the thick bush ( we found him again after a short while, fortunately). It felt good to introduce some friends to my favorite mountain and share it with them..

Failed Rock Climb

On one of my trips down to Seattle to the REI store, I bought some climbing hardware. It wasn’t much – some hexes, a few pitons and some carabiners. I’d decided it was time to get serious about learning something about rock climbing. On the hundred-mile drive back north to BC, I stopped at a well-known spot where climbers practiced their craft. When I arrived, there was no one else there. I spent most of the day just hanging out, hoping that some rock climbers would show up and I could team up with them and they could give me some basic instruction in rock-craft. Alas, it was not meant to be, so that evening I drove the rest of the way home with my new gear and no further idea how to use it.

Snowy Winter

Back in the early 1980s I lived in a city in northern British Columbia. Winters were harsh there, but the last one I witnessed really took the cake. It snowed and snowed, and the city set new records for total snowfall. Cars that were parked in neighborhood streets were buried and weren’t even visible. The city broadcast warnings that cars had to be removed from the streets so that plows could clear them. Huge machines with a rotary plow in front would move down the street, clearing the snow that was 6 or 8 feet deep or even more. If there was a car buried under the snow, it would be damaged by the plow, and the plow itself could be damaged. Most streets were lucky to have barely one lane clear, with high walls of snow on both sides. The plows would shoot the snow into a string of waiting dump trucks, which would then take it downtown to a big parking lot the city had set aside for that purpose, and it would be dumped there. Other machines would then move the snow around to keep things orderly, and the pile of snow grew to monumental proportions. There was so much of it, in fact, that it didn’t all melt until August. That was enough for me – I had had it with all that damn winter, and I moved away to warmer climes.

Snow Contammo

When you are camping in cold wintery places, you will need to melt snow or ice for water. Ice works better, as you don’t need as much of it. Melting snow is an arduous process – it takes a lot of time and you need a lot of it to get not much water. If you are winter camping in a place where others are (or have been) doing the same, you need to be really careful about contamination. Human waste could be lurking in the snow, and even a trace of it in what you are melting for water can make you really sick.

Roches Moutonnées

Many of the terms we use today in mountaineering are French in origin, due mainly to the fact that the French had such a strong influence on the early days of climbing. One of the more obscure ones is roches moutonnées, which, truth be told, is actually more of a geological term. It describes a certain type of rock formation. I have seen these in the field in northern Canada. This link will give you a better description of what they are than I can, along with a few photos.

Distant Booming

Three of us had just spent the night camping out in a forbidden area of the Yuma Proving Ground. Early in the evening, while settling in for the night, Mother Nature had served up a doozy of a thunderstorm, so severe that we were forced to shelter in our vehicles. Things calmed down, and we spent a quiet, restful night. The next morning, although the sky was clear where we were camped, we could see a solid bank of clouds lingering miles away to the west. As we prepared for our day of climbing, we heard a loud but distant boom, then shortly after another one. Uh-oh, it sounded like we were in for another thunderstorm. We were reconsidering our day of climbing. More distant booms – as these continued, we started to wonder if it was actually thunder we were hearing. After due consideration, we came to the conclusion that the booming was caused by the US Army firing artillery pieces. We were, after all, on their land, and the sounds were coming from the direction of an area where they held such practice. Even though they were many miles away, the wind must have been favorable to carry the sound of the explosions to us. Okay, problem solved. We went ahead and had a great day of climbing while the distant booms continued for some time, but we were no longer concerned.

Double-Ride

When I was a kid, we lived in Québec for 4 years. My old man was in the Royal Canadian Air Force, and that’s what took us there. I had an old two-wheel bicycle which I used every day, as did every other kid I knew. Sometimes a situation arose where two of you needed to ride on one bike – we called that double-riding. Back then, a boy’s bike had a crossbar, which ran horizontally from the seat to the frame just below the handlebars. Where I lived, it was the custom that if you wanted to give a passenger a ride on your bike, they would sit sideways on the crossbar with both of their legs off to one side. This worked okay, but wasn’t very comfortable for the passenger. If the two people on the bike were really clever, a stunt you could pull was to build up some speed, then through a series of acrobatic moves while the bike was coasting along, driver and passenger could change places. You had to be really careful, though, or you’d end up as roadkill.

Funny Earlobe

I always noticed that my Dad had a funny earlobe – the one was quite different than the other. The story he told was that when we lived in the Yukon in the early 1950s, he had gone on a winter hunting trip with some friends, and in the extreme cold he had frostbitten that earlobe. He said the doctor had to remove the part of it that could not be saved. It was his badge of courage.

Riders On the Storm

In December of 2016, two of us were forty miles deep into the bombing range. We had just finished climbing the last of our 3 peaks for the day, and were starting back to our hidden camp on our bicycles. We had 9 miles to go. The evening before, we had managed a phone call to my wife – she had checked the weather forecast on the computer, and told us that a storm was predicted to hit us around nightfall of that 3-climb day. Well, the forecast came true – it must have been around 5:30 or so when the first drops hit. Then came a strong wind, blowing the raindrops horizontally in front of us. Darkness fell and we turned on our climber’s headlamps. We had to push hard to power through the wind hitting us from the side – it was a struggle, and we had to work for every mile. It was close to seven o’clock by the time we rode into our camp, soaking wet but otherwise none the worse for wear.

Shovel Hornets

When I was 10 years old, I lived in a small town not far from Montréal. It was a quiet place, surrounded by a lot of farms and wooded country. At the edge of my town was a small mountain, elevation 715 feet, called Mont Saint-Bruno. Low down on it sat a gravel quarry, no longer active. One day, a couple of boys and myself rode our bikes up to the quarry and were delighted to find an old steam shovel. It had sat there for God-only-knows how many years, rusting away, just waiting for us to come and have some fun. We climbed up into the cab and started playing with the handles and levers, pretending we were operating the machine. Unbeknownst to us was an active hornet’s nest in the back of the cab. Well, as you might imagine, it didn’t take long for the hornets to become agitated by the commotion we were making. In a matter of moments, they had attacked and landed on us, stinging us about the neck and face. You never saw boys move so fast, screaming and panicking and jumping down and running as if their young lives depended on making a getaway. They didn’t chase us very far, but they got us good, each of us getting stung several times. We whimpered our various ways home, crying to our mothers for comfort and relief. You can bet we never went near the quarry again.