For a more factual accounting please see the Canadian Alpine Journal
I was hardly a climber in 1978, but I sure as heck wanted to be one; I still do as a matter of fact. One of my main partners at this time was Doug Kasian, the guy that went on in later years to become known as the Desert Mountaineer. This cat was (and is) prolific and driven. If you have ever heard the term ‘Peak Bagger’ this guy was the poster child. He has more climbs than Carter has pills. In some circles today that term is used somewhat derisively, incorrectly, and in poor form to indicate a non-technical climber; that shouldn’t be the case, but sadly it is. This guy however did not fit that bill and had plenty of ‘decent’ climbs under his swami-belt as well, and not just the NTD ones. You really don’t want to be in difficult backcountry without this man. When you get a chance stop wasting your time reading this and check his blog out and you will see what I mean.
So without getting diverted any further, let’s get back to the story. Doug and I had been climbing together for about a year. I had not much more experience than that either, maybe two years at most. Doug had ten years on me in age and probably close to half that in actual climbing. But in that year of climbing together, we had really packed a lot in. I look back on those years as an apprenticeship of sorts.
Somewhere along the way Doug comes up with this grand scheme to go into this remote area called the Lillooet Range. Mostly unknown stuff, unlikely to have ever been visited except in the extreme southern end, and at Cairn Needle about halfway through the traverse. Real ‘here there be tygers’ kind of stuff. I should have really known better, but I agreed to go along. We never trained for anything in those days. Never really needed to; we were climbing every week, sometimes two and sometimes three times a week, so we were very fit. There was some serious planning needed for this one however. This was expected to be a three week trip. We were going to start at Harrison Lake and end up coming out in the Fraser Canyon via the Nahatlatch Valley. There was no possible way that we could carry enough food for this trip considering that we needed camping and climbing gear as well.
We came up with a solution for this… all we would need, would be to air-drop some supplies en-route. Okay now that was taken care of…. Wait a minute how were two jamokes like us going to arrange for air-drops? As it turns out a close buddy of mine was an accomplished pilot. He wasn’t actually a bush pilot, and didn’t really have his mountain endorsement, but he did have an honest to god, laminated n’ all pilots’ license, and he could rent a Cessna 172 for the whopping sum of twenty six bucks an hour! We measured the door and window openings on the plane to ensure our boxes would fit through; the plan being to open the door over the drop site and push them out. We constructed double boxes and filled them with our spare food and what we hoped would be suitable packing material. No parachutes here. We were expecting to fly ‘low’ over some snowfields and let them rip, hoping for some forward momentum to let them tumble and bounce upon impact as opposed to just cratering, and exploding.
We had poured over the topo maps and new exactly where we needed our two drops to be. Everything was in order. The day came for our drops and the weather was perfect. We had absolutely no problem flying and navigating to the drop zones; the issue became about how low we could safely fly in the mountains and not come into any trouble. I think we were flying much lower than Terry felt comfortable at, yet much higher than we thought we needed for a successful operation. But this was it, and we were giving it our best and only shot. The aircraft had ‘photographer’ windows in that they could be opened vertically. One box would actually fit through the window, and the second we had to open the door for. Pushing the door open at one hundred and twenty knots was a challenge in itself, but we got the job done. One slightly humorous, yet potentially serious incident that happened was that the wind caught Doug’s glasses and they were gone…
In a few days the glasses got replaced, the packs were loaded, and we were ready to go. We caught a ride to Harrison Lake where we secured spots on the water taxi. The water taxi dropped us off at an abandoned logging camp; that turns out wasn’t really abandoned; nor was it a logging camp. Yes you guessed it; it was a Prison for Women. Although we did not know that at the time. But more on that later.
If you recall this is 1978. So we have gear from that era, and as I am your struggling young climber without any real job, (or prospects) I am also broke as a joke, so I certainly can’t even afford to look at the state of the arc 1978 gear. All of this is leading to the fact that our stuff was mostly old and heavy, real heavy, and not especially functional. We didn’t have all the fancy schmancy lightweight stuff that we have today. With all the miracle fibers, and gadgetry that abounds in the gear shops; heck, we didn’t even have proper gear shops. Doug actually had a sort of job that paid real folding money and he could buy stuff. He had an internal frame pack and this wiz bang new Gore-Tex stuff, both first generation, but light years beyond what had been available. I was envious. My pack (yes it was an external frame pack) fully loaded must have tipped the scales at sixty pounds easy. I was strong and fit, but even so, my svelte one hundred and forty pounds was being unduly taxed as I sagged under the load. We hoofed right through the P4W without a notice… The first part of the trip saw us slogging up severely and increasingly overgrown logging roads. It’s amazing how nature can actually reclaim this kind of stuff. The going was tough, and by the end of the day we had only managed to make the end of the logging spur we were on. The next day soon got to be a lot tougher as we had to leave the relative luxury of the roads and start bushwhacking proper. Steep uphill and typical west coast bush, were the order of the day for hours on end. But as we knew it would, the vegetation eventually began to thin and the views began to open up. By the time we reached the alpine and found a suitable campsite we were totally shagged out and spent.
That didn’t stop us however, from tackling a couple of small easy summits west of Breckenridge before the weather turned.
And man did it turn. This is the end of July and it’s totally socked in and snowing; almost whiteout conditions. The storm is worsening and the wind is blowing about fifty KPH. We were stuck in the tent pinned down by the weather. Time passes. Our food is total crap. I think I am catching a cold. And in spite of the food being crap… it is diminishing, and we are unable to do anything constructive. Doug had constructed a miniature Monopoly game that fit into a 35mm film canister, and the board was drawn on the back of one of our maps; so we played that to relieve the boredom; as well as fantasizing about what foods we would eat if we ever got out of that place, and back to civilization. But other than that it was pretty much just mind numbing misery. I lose track of time. We wake one cold morning to find the clouds are below us and nothing but blue sky above and in all directions. Totally fantastic. We can move again…
You Sir, are awesome, but crazy. But awesome 🙂
No, just crazy.