Taking A Chance

On the second day of the climb, I finally reached the summit after having climbed 8,000 feet through forest and alpine country. Was it worth all the hard work? You bet. Now I had to get back down, but not by the sure way of retracing my steps. The grand scheme was to traverse the peak and head out by a different way in order to return to civilization. None of the country was familiar to me, so I was making it up as I went along.

The first order of business was to examine my escape route. From the summit, I could look down on to a huge bowl that filled the entire south side of the mountain, and I saw that it was filled with a glacier. There were no shortcuts, I would have to cross it. It was almost mid-August, and that late in the season the snow had already melted off much of the ice – however, there still remained large areas that were snow-covered. I had my ice-axe and crampons to help with glacier travel. The parts of the glacier that were bare ice didn’t worry me, since the crevasses were exposed and I could avoid them or jump across them if they weren’t too big. It was the snow-covered parts that I would have to cross that were the most dangerous, since I was traveling alone and didn’t have the security of being roped to a partner.

As I started down, I couldn’t help noticing that the sky was lowering – some weather was moving in, my window was closing – typical Coast Range crap. Now it was a race against time. It took a while, as I needed to drop a full 3,000 vertical feet to be finally clear of the glacier. My luck held, though, as I didn’t punch through any hidden crevasses. I was still in for a big surprise, though. Once at the toe of the glacier, I discovered a band of tall cliffs that circled around the entire bowl, cutting off escape to the valley below. Shit, I knew that my good luck so far was too good to be true.

As I sat and scanned the rock below, I decided on a route down through the cliffs that seemed the least of all the evils. Once into it, though, try as I might, I got cliffed-out and had to climb back up to the toe of the glacier. It took a bunch more looking, but I finally found a route that allowed me to downclimb, just barely. A drop of a thousand more feet through open country took me down to tree-line. Once I disappeared into the relative safety of the old-growth forest, I found a spot to bivi for the night that was not-so-worse. Wouldn’t you know it, though, the heavens opened and it rained all night. The next morning was spent descending another 3,500 vertical feet through sopping forest until I finally stumbled out onto a logging road and could think about bumming a ride home.

Tiny Radio

Many years ago I bought a tiny radio. Made of plastic, it’s not very heavy. With batteries in it, it only weighs 5.0 ounces. It has no external speaker, so you have to use earphones. I have a small stereo pair which weigh 1.9 ounces, so altogether the total weight comes to 6.9 ounces. It is a Panasonic model RF-444. I just now installed new batteries and it still works like a charm, and it gets AM and also FM stereo.

Anyway, what I’m getting at is the fact that because it is so lightweight and small (3″ x 4.5″), I have taken it with me when climbing in a number of places. Once when I did a bivi (no tent) at 15,100 feet in the Andes, I got good reception of FM stations from Mendoza, Argentina. But the best of all was when I was on Aconcagua, camped at 19,500 feet, I got crystal-clear reception of good music stations from Valparaiso, Viña del Mar and Santiago.

Canyons

The Sauceda Mountains in southwestern Arizona are a favorite destination of mine. Over a period of years, I climbed all 105 peaks in the range, and what a pleasure it was. They cover an area 35 by 15 miles, but in all that space there are only 2 named canyons. Cougar Canyon is just under 2 miles in length and only drops 80 feet in that distance. The peaks that hem it in rise 800 feet from the canyon floor. It feels more like a canyon than the only other one with a name.

Ryans Canyon is the other one. I left out the apostrophe on purpose, because there is none. For some reason, the USGS leaves out a lot of apostrophes on official names. Ryans Canyon starts high on slopes near Tom Thumb and drops a full thousand feet along its course. The peaks that hem it in also rise about 800 feet from its floor, but that is the maximum – usually, the rise is only a couple of hundred feet. This canyon runs a full 18 miles through the mountains until it dies a natural death out on the desert floor to the south of Hat Mountain.

First Real Bike

I had long since outgrown the tricycle of my childhood and had passed it on to my sisters. More than anything, I wanted to get a two-wheel bike like all my friends had, since I was 9 years old. My parents must have grown tired of my begging, so one day my Dad said he’d get one and bring it home that very day. True to his word, he did, but I was so disappointed. For some reason, I expected a shiny new bike but it was an old second-hand one he bought for 5 dollars. There wasn’t anything wrong with it – he had ridden it home and it worked just fine. All my friends had 3-speed bikes with hand brakes, but mine was an old CCM one-speed bike with pedal brakes. Instead of appreciating what I had, in my arrogance I felt like I had been cheated. Our family was poor, and in retrospect my parents had made a sacrifice to get me that bike. It all worked out okay in the end, though, because I used the bike until I finished high school.

Given Up For Dead

It had been 24 days since I had left the last outpost of civilization. All of that time had been spent near, then on, Cerro Aconcagua. I had acclimatized to the elevation only poorly, and had taken forever to claw my way up through various camps along the way. Even then, I never got higher than a thousand meters from the summit. The weather had been most foul, trapping me at Berlin Camp for almost a week.

During the many days I’d spent at the base camp at 14,000 feet, I had gotten to know several of the guys who were staying there in support of one of the companies that offered guided climbs to the summit. When I finally called it quits and decided to abandon my climb, I had made it most of the way down when, maybe 2,000 feet above base camp, I met a couple of them. They were climbing up and recognized me while I was still a few hundred feet above them. They called out to me and we met and embraced. They said “We thought you were dead, that you must have died somewhere high on the mountain”. It had been a full 2 weeks that I had been above base camp, and although we knew each other only in a passing way, they had wondered what had happened to me since it had been so long since they had seen me. They grabbed my huge pack and carried it down for me, and all I had to do was stroll down unhindered. They and I were glad I wasn’t dead, although several others had died while I was on the mountain.

Ice Climbing

Climbing up steep ice is a specialized type of climbing which only a tiny percentage of climbers ever try and even fewer master. It involves the use of specialized ice tools, crampons and hardware. I only ever tried it a few times, and I found it required physical strength that I was lacking, as well as special technique. You need nerves of steel as well. Unlike rock, which is very stable by comparison, ice can be rotten and unstable. It can break off while you are on it, making the entire enterprise very dangerous. My hat’s off to those who mastered the craft and lived to tell about it.

Tomyhoi Peak

One fine day in late August many years ago, I decided to climb a peak in far northern Washington state. I was in a hurry, though, so I left my home in BC and drove to the border, then crossed, and 45 miles later I was at the turnoff where the dirt road began. A few more miles and I was parked by 6:00 AM. I lit out of there like a bat out of hell and stood on the summit of Tomyhoi Peak (elevation 7,435 feet) by 9:30 AM. Not bad for a 4,000-foot gain over 3.5 miles and a stiff Class-3 climb. Now that I knew the way, I made the return to my car in 2 hours flat. I was all the way back home in Canada in time for a 1:00 PM viewing of the Star Trek rerun while I ate my lunch with James T. Kirk.

Ones That Were Saved

The first one was a young man who was crossing the desert solo. A group of us were climbing and encountered him when his path crossed ours. It soon became obvious that he didn’t really know where he was or how much farther he had to go to reach safety. I guess you could say we helped him out of a jam, enough that he didn’t die.

The next was another young man that Paul and I found as we were going in to do a long day climb. We gave him one of our quarts to drink and sent him on his way with instructions. The Border Patrol found him and he was evacuated by helicopter to a hospital a hundred miles away, and he lived to tell about it.

More years passed, and late one day in the summer heat I found 2 young guys dying in a remote wash. I told them to stay put, then a while later I was able to phone the Border Patrol who came in and rescued them.

All of the above were Mexicans who had crossed into the US. The first guy was in good shape, the others were far-gone and wouldn’t have lasted another day. There were others over the years, not so badly off. The strangest one, though, was on the edge of Tucson. Three of us were coming back down a trail in the dark, the lights of Tucson fast approaching. We encountered a young woman just off the trail, alerted by her calls for help. She was completely naked, even barefoot. My friend’s wife stayed with her while we called 9-1-1 and the Sheriff’s department arrived to take her to safety.

Grandpa’s Garage

My father was born at home in a little house that his father, my grandfather, had built around 1920. That was in a little village in rural Saskatchewan. I only met my grandfather one time, back in 1980, when I drove out from British Columbia. Grandpa Harry had lived his entire adult life in that little house until cancer took him in ’82, and he was an interesting character to be sure. With no formal training, he had become the village mechanic, and had developed a reputation as a guy who could fix just about anything that was broken. I have a little book in which he kept track of the income he received for doing watch and clock repairs – tiny little entries, like this one:

July 16, 1941 Bill Lawchuk – repair pocket watch – 30 cents.

He was better known as an automotive mechanic, though. He put up a sturdy wooden building that he used as a garage, which still stands today a hundred years on. The way that he set up that garage always struck me as so clever. He dug a deep hole in the center of the garage floor, then covered the hole with long, sturdy wooden planks which could easily support the weight of a vehicle. When he needed to work on the underside of a car or truck, he would remove the middle planks, leaving the ones on the side still in place to drive on. He could then step down into the well below and, standing at a comfortable height, reach up to work on the vehicle. When finished, he’d back the vehicle out of the garage and replace the middle planks, and once again have a normal floor to walk on.