by Rob Wood
At the halfway point I took advantage of the shelter offered by a small bay tucked in behind a point to stop, make a brew of tea and change my icy, wet clothes. By the time we reached our dock, there was at least an inch of solid ice over the whole boat and the helmsman, who had been fighting for some time to stay warm enough to function, using as much willpower as on any of his toughest winter ice climbs in the Rockies.
It was now pretty well dark, so rather than unloading the building supplies right there and then, we accepted the welcoming gesture of a neighbour who lived close by the dock. “Looks like you could use a hot toddy. Why don’t you come on in to my house? I’ve got some old barrel whisky.”
Trouble was that to get the hot water for the toddy he first had to get his old hippie wood stove cranked up, and it turned out he did not have any good dry firewood. Being already so deeply chilled, instead of getting warmer I was actually getting colder by the minute, so after watching him struggle unsuccessfully for ten minutes without any progress, Laurie and I drained our whisky cold and neat, turned our head lamps on and headed back to the dock to unload the boat.
Even though our bay was largely sheltered from the howling Bute wind, there were still occasional gusts that would have made carrying sheets of plywood particularly challenging even for a sober, sturdy man. Now, I was not only lacking in mental concentration from hypothermia, I was also tipsy. When I arrived at what I thought was the top of the ramp, a gust of wind caught the sheet of plywood I was carrying and spun me around backward. Instead of backing straight up onto the landing, I staggered to keep my balance, took a sharp left turn and fell ten feet down off the ramp, banged my back on the slippery rocks below and rolled over into the chuck. I managed to crawl out, soaking wet, with sharp pains shooting down my legs, crawl up the bank to the landing and limp back into the neighbour’s house.
“Here! Have some more whisky!” he cheerfully offered.
This time I was smart enough to decline, but I was shivering uncontrollably and feeling pretty sorry for myself. The neighbour had managed to get the fire going but only just. The wood was sizzling and smouldering without putting out any heat. He and Laurie helped me strip off my wet clothes, bundled me on to a couch and covered me up with a down duvet before taking off to finish unloading the plywood, leaving me shivering to death on the cold couch.
Now I realized things were getting really serious. I thought of running on the spot but the shooting pain in my legs was enough to discourage any movement. I was familiar with both the symptoms and the consequences of hypothermia. I knew it saps the very thing you need for combatting it, mental acuity, so I had to concentrate really hard to prevent losing focus. I also knew that to reverse the process of decreasing body core temperature, insulation is not enough; a victim needs heat, preferably direct contact with another warm body. At that moment the neighbour’s daughter showed up and tried poking around at the fire. Well beyond politically correct decorum at this point, I asked, “Would you mind lying on the couch and snuggling up with me for a while to warm me up?”
I immediately felt the difference her body heat made and was soon able to pull myself together enough to make my way back home.
In recent years the outflow winds have not been as intense as they used to be because winter temperatures in the interior Chilcotin Plateau have not been as low. That’s why the pine beetle infestation of the forests has been so extensive. Traditionally, long periods of −25°C temperatures used to kill the beetles and stoke the outflow wind on the coast. This pretty obvious manifestation of global warming means the Bute wind may not be as extreme as it used to be, but the outflow influence is still there and the battle in the sky still continues. Folks round here all know the Bute could and probably will come back with a vengeance any time it chooses.
-18-
FLIGHT OF THE IMAGINATION
“What has been your greatest inspiration?”
THERE HAVE BEEN SO MANY in the past, but perhaps the most inspiring experience of all for me happened recently.
In August 2011 a top class American rock climber and base jumper, Dean Potter, scaled the big rock face of Mount Bute at the head of Bute Inlet. He then jumped off the 9,200 ft. summit in a wing suit, making a three-minute, world record–breaking human flight, like a flying squirrel, and landed in the valley 7,000 ft. below. National Geographic was there to sponsor and film this elite achievement. The beautiful film, called The Man Who Can Fly, was aired on American TV in March that year but was not shown to the Canadian public until August 2012, when we had the honour of presenting it our local community centres.
I was lucky enough to have been invited along as a local guide and storyteller on this exciting expedition because of my knowledge and experience of the history and geography of this relatively unknown wilderness area. Over my many years guiding in the area, I have enjoyed the extraordinary hospitality of the old Homathko logging camp located two kilometres up the river from the head of Bute Inlet which we had used as a base for our Ocean to Alpine wilderness expeditions into the Waddington Range. There have been many polite but skeptical loggers who have endured my cookhouse ranting and raving about the place in which I apparently was heard to say, “One day the world will discover this place and jumbo jet loads of people will be coming to see the awesome beauty and climbers will be lining up to climb the 6,000 ft. near-vertical granite face of Mount Bute.”
As it turned out, one of those loggers was also a keen young climber from Squamish who returned a few years later with two buddies and made a very fine first ascent of the big face. Then another one of the three, Jimmy Martinello, heard, through the climbing grapevine, that National Geographic and Dean Potter were looking for bigger and better mountain faces to film their climbing and wing suit base jumping. He suggested they team up on Mount Bute.
Quite a bit of the 45-minute film is devoted to Potter developing the wing suit and preliminary training exercises for the Bute expedition, including spectacular ropeless climbing on the big rock walls of El Capitan in Yosemite and breathtaking tetherless high-line walking. The expedition team that assembled at the road end on Quadra Island, less than one kilometre from our home, included as well as Dean and Jimmy two other world-class climbers, two film directors and cameramen, another cameraman, a rigger, a sound man, Dean Potter’s girlfriend, his dog Whisper and me.
For the 10 hour, 50-nautical-mile voyage up Bute Inlet, we boarded Misty Isles, a converted fishing schooner run by Michael Moore from Cortes Island. In perfect weather, the visitors were suitably primed by the increasingly spectacular scenery, climaxing with their goal – Mount Bute, towering dramatically 9,200 ft. above the mouth of the mighty Homathko River at the head of the inlet. Finally, at the first sign of human habitation they had seen all day, the team stepped onto the dock at their base of operations, tired but highly stoked by the long exposure to the powerful elements.
A warm welcome and hearty refreshments awaited their arrival in the reinvented, industrial/tourism Homathko Camp. In the morning, and for the next four days, bad weather prevented any progress on the mountain. Though it was a test of their patience, the team used the delay to pay respectful dues to the dramatic mountain and ocean environment, and to ground themselves, both individually and as a group. It was impressive to witness how much affectionate camaraderie they generated among themselves and how much interest, respect and admiration they showed for the local environment, history and customs, including me. They even took their hats off, as loggers were expected to do, when they came into the cookhouse. This pause in the activities provided ample opportunity for the team to hear about some of the rich local history and folklore as well as some of my own climbing and ski touring explorations of the Homathko country. Even more special for me were the intimate conversations about the deeper motivations and passions that drove their extraordinary achievements.
When the weather finally cleared, because of the bad weather delay they had no time for practice or trial runs. So, organizing entirely on
sight as they went along, the cameramen filmed the four climbers making a very fast ascent of the upper part of this impressive near-vertical granite wall, set against a background of blue sky and a magnificent expanse of peaks and glaciers at the heart of the BC Coast Range wilderness.
Then they had to rig a platform for Dean to make his sensational historic jump and breathtaking three-minute flight to a meadow in the valley far below. The other jumper, Wayne Crill, in an emotionally charged moment of decision, that for me was a highlight of the film, declined to jump. This scene, providing authentic, intensely moving human drama, accentuated just how refined and carefully considered Dean’s performance was.
“What do you think was Dean Potter’s essential motivation in making this film?”
EVEN THOUGH THE FILM IS ostensibly about extreme sport, in the film Dean answers that question by saying, “The film is not really about breaking records. It’s more about shifting perception, heightened awareness and extraordinary human power.” In private conversation I heard Dean say he was interested in conveying the message that we all have the potential to extend the limits of our capabilities and get more out of life simply by letting go of the psychological and cultural constraints that prevent us from doing so. He wanted to share the sense of freedom that he experienced and encourage other people to stretch the limits of their own possibilities.
“Does he have any suggestions about how to let go of the fear that holds us back?”
IN THE FILM, WHILE WALKING a tightrope hundreds of feet above the ground in training for the Bute expedition, with no safety tether, confronting the limit of his own capability, he says, “I focus my attention on breathing, especially exhaling deeply from the abdomen, like meditation and yoga.” Presumably the exhaling helps dismiss the fear. While climbing without ropes thousands of feet up on the vertical face of El Cap he also tells of how “I used to climb with aggression and fear. That only got me so far. Now I climb with love and passion.”
The film also dramatically showcases the rugged beauty and unmatched scale of the mountains soaring high above the turquoise mix of glacial rivers and ocean waters at the head of Bute Inlet that, as I’ve said earlier, I once heard described as “one of the world’s best kept secrets, Canada’s Grand Canyon, except bigger and better!”
It was this extreme verticality that attracted Potter as a suitable place to push the precarious and breathtaking limits of three extreme sports. So finely and with such intense drama and emotion is the line being drawn between life and death that the film also challenges the audience by stretching the limits of human perception in what Potter, very articulately, refers to as a “flight of the imagination.”
In addition to all of this, the film succeeds in capturing what struck me so vividly from my experience of spending time with these world-class athletes, which was the extraordinary manifestation of the power of love. It showed in their camaraderie, their respect for local people, their overt passion for their chosen vocation and its wilderness environment and the sheer joy of living and, ultimately, in their truly remarkable stretching of human capability.
A tragic sequel to this story is that Dean Potter was killed recently during a squirrel suit flight in Yosemite. Although I don’t know the details and can’t be sure, my guess is that Dean’s attention was distracted by the possibility of the park rangers waiting to arrest him on landing in the Yosemite Valley floor, where base jumping is illegal. To be less conspicuous required jumping at dawn or dusk when there are unfortunately more erratic up and down drafts. As well as facing a possible jail sentence Dean had taken on the political challenge of fighting to have the law changed, which must have entailed a significant load on his subconscious mind. In the high stakes game Dean was playing, there was no room for the slightest intrusion of subconscious distraction from absolute focus of consciousness in the moment.
-19-
THE LEGEND OF KAYAK BILL
“What happened to Kayak Bill?”
WE HEARD ABOUT BILL’S TRAGIC suicide in a surprise phone call from his ex-partner Lori Anderson in Sointula on Malcolm Island. She told me she was organizing a memorial service in their community and asked me to spread the word to as many of Bill’s old climbing friends in the Canadian mountaineering community as possible and invite them to the wake.
When the wake was in full swing there were more than a hundred people present, which was not altogether surprising, because in spite of his hermit lifestyle, Bill had lots of friends. What was surprising and very mysterious, however, was the fact that very few of these people knew each other. Bill’s ex-wife, Lori, had loosely facilitated a formal process in which she invited various people that she knew had known Bill well and asked them to tell their stories of their friendship with him in a somewhat chronological order.
A definite pattern soon emerged showing that even though Bill, being such a lovable guy, always made friends wherever he went, he also kept moving on and leaving old friends behind, just like he did with me. Furthermore, he never told his new friends very much about his previous life, so none of approximately half the people present who were from the coast had any idea who all these other folks from Calgary were, or that they represented the cream of Canadian mountaineering. “Billy the Bolt,” as he was known to them, was a living legend on the other side of the Rockies. Of course, these Calgarians knew very little of the details of the west coast legend of “Kayak Bill.” Even his more recent friends on the upper coast knew few of us old lower coast friends from earlier times.
This dramatic saga was heroic and tragic right from the start. Bill’s childhood friend Perry Davis told how he became close buddies with Billy Davidson in an orphanage in Calgary where Bill’s mother had dropped him, aged 9, and his younger brother and sister off on the steps and walked away from them. They never saw her again. They kept in touch with their father but he was unable to cope as a single parent. Something similar had happened with Perry and his sisters. Apparently, the orphanage encouraged the kids to follow their own interests. This explained why Bill could barely read or write but was a genius with electronics. In his early teens he built a robot that won a national award. It required him to go to Ottawa and have some VIP put his medal into the hands of the robot. The robot then walked across the room and delivered it to Bill.
Perry and Bill soon started hiking in the mountains together, and Perry described how Bill took to mountaineering right away and soon left him behind as he quickly became a very good climber and made all kinds of new friends, including members of the elite hard-climbing and hard-drinking Calgary Mountain Club. Prominent among these was the next speaker, who described how Bill soon developed a high degree of proficiency in the specialized skills required for climbing extremely steep and scary rock faces. His forte was solo climbing, which is particularly serious and scary. Another younger Calgary Mountain Club member told how, at a still very young age, the two of them went down to the rock climbing Mecca, California’s Yosemite Valley, where Bill became the first Canadian-born climber to reach international fame by doing a very early ascent of the hardest and most scary big wall rock climb in the world. Soon after that, I met them there in those hazy, crazy, lazy days of warm California Indian summer.
When it was my turn to speak, I told the story of our pact, how we spent increasing amounts of time living out in the mountains and how after spending a large part of a day up a tree at Dick Pearson’s tipi, talking to the birds, Bill sold all his climbing gear, his motorbike and all his filming equipment and bought himself a bow and arrow and a leather outfit and took off into the Rockies to live off the land. Soon after I moved to the coast, Bill came out for a visit and we did our big trip up Toba Inlet together. On that trip I introduced him to painting and drawing. When I bought into the land co-op, Bill bought himself a kayak and paddled off into the wilds of the BC coast.
Others then picked up the saga of how Bill committed himself to the coast and managed, with admirable ingenuity and discipline, to support himself for the rest of
his life living off the land and sea. He shunned the use of money and motor cars and trained himself in the use of wild edible plants, learning a lot from the Native people. His unique and total absorption in the coastal landscape was reflected in his paintings, which he used as trading items for the few trappings of civilization he needed such as tobacco and peanut butter. He moved farther out up coast each summer and set up primitive temporary driftwood base camps as he went. He was extremely strong and fit and could paddle phenomenal distances in a day if he cared or needed to. In winter he would retreat to remote communities and build a beechwood shack in someone’s yard and work and play on his home synthesizer made from used radio parts. Otherwise he carried all his possessions in his kayak.
One person told us about Bill’s enthusiasm for eulachon grease, a foul-smelling concoction made by the First Nations from rancid fish. He claimed it was especially helpful in combatting the cold coastal damp. One time he paddled his kayak up to the top of Knight Inlet to score some grease from the Natives. He was hoping to make a trade for some berry leather he had made and was giving his sales pitch to an elder, explaining how the berries would provide all the vitamins they needed for the winter. The old Native looked at him and smiled.
“Why don’t you just make wine?” he asked. “Then you get your vitamins and you get pished as well.”