17TH SEPTEMBER 2011
The weather cleared today and I finally made it up to the wall with the rest of my gear. I even had enough energy left to do the first pitch.
Think I’ll make this my last trip where I carry a 50-kilo haul bag up a neverending scree slope.
First pitch (v) was a horrible slimy waterfall, and I ended up aiding half of it. Climbing above looks very steep and less wet.
I’m doing the route capsule-style (fixing some ropes from three camps) as this is much safer on such a nasty wall, and it allows me to zip back to my bivvy without getting caught out in a storm with no bivvy set up.
I’m sleeping under a slight overhang on the ground tonight, just under the wall, and have set up a tarp to keep the drips off, so pretty comfy. Tea was tomato soup with leftover bread dunked in. I’ve got ten days food with me, but I really hope the climb doesn’t take that long!
18TH SEPTEMBER 2011
Climbed two more pitches today—slow and careful (much of the rock is pretty fragile), a mixture of easyish aid and free climbing, but all done with ice falling from the summit, dripping water, loose rock everywhere. I would not recommend this route (or the Troll Wall) to my worst enemy, but it’s not dull—I’ll give it that.
Being camped on the ground is so much more civilized. Rapping my ropes and getting back to my bivvy (climbing kit off, into sleeping bag, book and tea and chocolate) was almost worth it in itself. Maybe I should just go camping more often!
19TH SEPTEMBER 2011
Will keep this short as my back is killing me from carrying too much gear, plus my cup of tea is getting cold on the stove.
Had a bad night because the tarp was flapping, so I ended up having to get out of my sleeping bag to put it away. (Of course I only did that after having been kept awake for several hours trying to ignore it.)
Today was my big day—the goal was to haul all my gear on the wall. But it didn’t quite turn out like that.
Hauled gear to the pitch 2 belay, then set off to climb the fifth pitch, which would put me on a sheltered bivvy. I spent all day climbing one bloody pitch—the last party to do it took ten days and I can see why. Ended up going off route (scary) and then finally got into the right groove system.
20TH SEPTEMBER 2011
Weather looked like it was taking a turn for the worse, and with my haul bags yet to make it to pitch 5 (my first wall bivvy), I’ve headed down off the mountain till Wednesday.
I’m set up in a little camping cabin with a bunk bed, kettle, and a table (even has a tablecloth)—and it feels like paradise. I was only camped out at the base of the wall for three nights, but it felt like a couple of weeks. The Troll is a strange place, where time and the intensity of most things is greatly magnified.
The best way to describe the experience is that it’s a bit like going into a war zone. At any moment something bad could happen, but like a good soldier, you make believe it won’t happen to you. Sleeping, climbing, just being there—you’re always somewhat on edge. There is always the danger of being hit by a “bullet,” a little stone tumbling down from the summit Trolls, not to mention the prospect of the BIG ONE, the nuclear option—a falling, hundred-metre pillar or flake that would probably get me with the impact blast alone.
But I’m a good soldier. I keep my helmet on tight and stay behind solid cover as much as possible.
I’m a little tired, and so coming down has been a good chance to rest battered hands, sore knees, and aching back, as well as get all those bits I forgot in the first place (watch, glasses cord, more pegs).
Also got to talk to the kids today. In a way I didn’t want to, as I knew they would undermine my resolve. But I did, and they didn’t.
21ST SEPTEMBER 2011
Been a very relaxing day—a bit too relaxing—spoiled by the fact the weather has been quite nice (think of a cold but clear autumnal day). Anyway, have spent the time well, sorting out gear and drying off my camping stuff that was festering in my car (although I am feeling a bit dizzy after gluing rubber dry suit cuffs into the sleeves of my jacket with seam grip). Last job was boiling all my eggs to take with me on the wall, so all very domesticated.
Cycled into the village to clear my head and bought a cup of tea (still have no idea about exchange rate, so it either cost 20p, £2 or £20). Åndalsnes has all the get-up-and-go of a Sunday in Cleethorpes, and seems to have closed down for the winter already. The number one fun activity is having a hot dog (they have three meat flavours) in the train station.
21ST SEPTEMBER 2011
Yesterday was by far the toughest day yet—and I came within a whisker of bailing—but now I’m lounging in my portaledge on the wall. I’m glad I didn’t quit.
What made yesterday so hard was the hauling. It’s always tough even when there are two of you, but alone it can turn into a real nightmare. The problem is that the terrain is very irregular, and every time the bag got stuck I’d have to rappel down and free it, then jug back and carry on. I seemed to spend all day jugging and rapping and hauling.
To make matters worse, just before I’d reached the ledge I watched a ship-container-sized block fall down the back of the Troll, 500 metres away. I heard it falling—imagine the sound of a small house tumbling half a mile—then saw the huge detonation as it hit the rock slabs. Very impressive, but it didn’t inspire confidence.
23RD SEPTEMBER 2011
A good day today: two pitches climbed, no rain, and I finished in the light.
Woke up feeling as only a big-wall soloist can (I’d forgotten this part), with throbbing hands, tired muscles, but knowing you have to get up and get moving anyway. When you’re soloing, if you’re not climbing, you’re not going anywhere. Had a nightmare that I was being crushed to death—which, considering yesterday’s traumas, doesn’t surprise me.
The first pitch should have been easy, but I found it all pretty scary, due both to the bad state of the fixed gear and because I’m still not very confident about the rock.
Next pitch began with something I hate, a traverse under a small roof. The weather had also turned cloudy, and the route went up another big wet slimy patch. I really wanted to call it a day, intimidated both by the climbing and the weather. In the end, I told myself to get a grip. And I did.
25TH SEPTEMBER 2011
As usual it’s been a long day on the Troll wall.
Had to haul my bag from pitch 5 to 10 allowing me to set up camp to climb the next eight pitches, and then descend.
Amazingly all the hauling went really easily, two 60-metre hauls, and a 30-metre one bypassing two belays.
The rock quality has suddenly improved dramatically, and is up to El Cap standard. Let’s hope it lasts. The bivvy spot is good (four good bolts).
Really look forward to the end of the day, when I can sit on the edge of the ledge, take off knee pads, Russian aiders, boots, waterproofs, harness leg loops—shedding each little piece makes me feel normal again. After that I stick on my parka and fleece trousers and get a brew on.
My daughter Ella emailed and texted today, asking how long I’m going to be away, and so I’m feeling the pressure to get home. I was meant to be away for three weeks. Another limiting factor is that I only have a small amount of water left, and I’m using two litres a day.
The effort to stay safe up here is all-consuming; it’s a relief to get back to the ledge at night and just let go of the paranoia that grips me every second when I’m leading. Only did two pitches today and don’t think I can move much faster while staying safe.
Six more pitches to go and I have three days’ worth of food and water left—so it could be close.
27TH SEPTEMBER 2011
Pulled out all stops today, alpine start in the dark, and climbed three pitches—including what was probably the crux.
The sound of the rain was amazing—the whole wall came alive with rushing water, and waterfalls, not to mention lots of rock fall. The mist also came in, and although it was very atmospheric (you could forget you were
sky-walking 500 metres up), it also made the wall a lot spookier. Climbing up to the crux, the whole thing felt as if it could collapse at any moment. The rock became really strange—like alien, plastic rock.
The rain stopped by the time I got to the crux, which was only 15 metres. I’m glad it’s over.
The worst thing about climbing capsule-style is all the jugging and scary abseiling, with my two static ropes spidering up five pitches—most without touching anything. It’s funny, but after a while you can just switch off fear. You sort of say “Nah—can’t handle being scared right now—I’ll think about it later.”
Keep waking up with a mind full of thoughts and memories and ideas.
Highlight of the day was getting back to the ledge and crashing out and listening to Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks.
28TH SEPTEMBER 2011
Back in the ledge after a fraught descent. It took a brew, the rest of my chocolate, and the last of my couscous (plus a bit of Arcade Fire) to remove a mask-like grimace that had taken hold of my face all day. On reaching the ledge I was just utterly wasted—especially mentally.
Did I get to the top?
I free-climbed it up a pillar with good footholds and lots of loose flakes for hand-holds. I reached the top of the pillar, a little pedestal, expecting to find two bolts, like every other belay. Instead, all I found was a rusty wire clipped to a carabiner, sitting on the ledge. I stood there with the whole face below me and looked for a belay. There was nothing. Worse still, the climbing above didn’t look easy, so I thought I must be off route. I stood there and didn’t know what to do. The only thing I knew was that I wanted to get it over with, even if it meant climbing in the dark. I hadn’t spent ten days only to get up here and fail on the last pitch.
But where was the belay?
I climbed back down a bit and looked around some corners, feeling increasingly rattled; you can’t solo without a very good anchor. My options were to pull up my bag and try to create a belay with the gear at hand—which would take too long—or to just keep looking.
I climbed back up the pillar again, feeling very lonely, and sat on the top. Then I heard a voice.
As I’d been climbing up, my camera in my chest pocket kept switching on and off and beeping. I suddenly heard my son Ewen’s voice, and thought I was going mad until I realized it was coming from the camera. It was replaying some film I’d shot before leaving, footage of my son as he was emptying bottles of lemonade in our car park, and spraying it at my feet. What I heard was Ewen saying, “Dad—get away.”
Hearing his voice right then was pretty emotional.
It’s best to try to block out such thoughts, as it just makes you weak. For three weeks that’s what I had done. And it had worked. I was strong. But this morning I’d made the mistake of checking my emails and got this from Ella:
What day will you be home on? Realy Realy Realy Realy missing you
Xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx xxxx love ella
I switched off the camera. I climbed down again and looked at the same limited view.
Why did my camera play that clip just now? I wondered, looking for some guidance. Why now and never before on this trip? I took stock: I was wasted. Probably off route. Out of water. Out of food. Out of time. One more pitch hadn’t put me on the top—just one more pitch away from the ground. Why did I want more?
I knew I’d found what I was looking for, and started making my way down. No regrets.
Karsten Heuer
FINDING FARLEY
A TATTERED PAPERBACK copy of Never Cry Wolf lay open on my lap as I steered our canoe across Nueltin Lake, which straddles the Manitoba-Nunavut border. Behind us, tucked into the twisted spruce trees along the shore, purple fireweed grew from the ruins of the trapper’s cabin where Farley Mowat, then a young writer and naturalist just home from service on the battlefields of Europe during the Second World War, had stayed for two summers sixty years ago. Ahead, somewhere on the “yellow sand esker. . . winding sinuously away in the distance like a gigantic snake” was the Arctic wolf den he’d written about. We were paddling toward it to see if it was still in use.
Getting to Nueltin Lake hadn’t been easy. Since leaving our Canmore, Alberta, home two and a half months earlier, my wife, Leanne, and I had paddled with our two-year-old son, Zev, and dog, Willow, across the prairies of Mowat’s childhood. We had then dragged, lined, and otherwise struggled with our canoe up the northern Manitoba river he’d followed, humping loads over the same overgrown trails Mowat had portaged with his Metis guide in the late 1940s, and we’d negotiated the same “roaring torrents” of the Thlewiaza River down to Nueltin Lake.
But pilgrimages aren’t meant to be easy. And a pilgrimage this was. Mowat’s books were serving as our maps across Canada, and our purpose was to revisit their narratives as we travelled through the prairie, northern, and maritime chapters of his life. En route we’d write letters to Mowat, and the journey’s end on the east coast would be an encounter with the author himself.
Like many Canadians, I grew up reading Mowat. Owls in the Family, his memoir of his childhood in Saskatoon, was the first chapter book I ever finished. I then dug into Lost in the Barrens, one of his first novels, and The Dog Who Wouldn’t Be, a tender but lighthearted account of the Depression years on the prairies told through the eyes of a nature-hungry dog and kid. Under the tutelage of Mowat’s carefully crafted sentences, my reading improved, as did my understanding of my own country. I learned about Canadian wildlife and threats to them in Never Cry Wolf and A Whale for the Killing and was exposed, through his encounters with starving Ihalmiut around Nueltin Lake, to the history and mistreatment of aboriginal people in People of the Deer and The Desperate People, both published in the 1950s. Few other Canadian writers were paying attention to such issues at the time.
These stories were, I suppose, part of what propelled me to study ecology at university and to become a wildlife biologist, working for Parks Canada in Banff and Ivvavik on the Arctic coast. Before long, I, too, began writing books about my experiences with wildlife and wilderness, telling stories that couldn’t be shared through scientific data alone. The second of my books, Being Caribou, helped complete the circle. On the eve of its Canadian release, I sent a copy to Mowat, who was then eighty-six, along with a letter explaining the influence he’d had on my life. A month later, a one-page response, composed on a manual typewriter, arrived in our mailbox. “One of the best, most evocative, and hard-hitting accounts of man’s inhumanity toward life,” he said of my book, and then extended an invitation that would shape the next year of our lives.
I think Mowat expected that we would fly to Cape Breton Island to visit him at his farm, but given the adventures he’d had, jetting across the country in a few hours to meet him didn’t seem right. So we decided we would do it in the style of the Viking Norsemen, old Newfoundland fishermen, inland Inuit, Arctic explorers, crusty sailors, and other characters that people his thirty-nine books. We would paddle and sail across the country to see him, covering its daunting distances in five months.
Such slow and deliberate travel has its challenges, of course, which were not made easier by the demands of twoyear-old Zev plus a hyper border collie, along with our decision to shoot a documentary for the National Film Board as we went. What was barely manageable as we crossed the prairies in May and June became overwhelming in the boreal forest in July. No sooner had the river currents switched against us than the bears became numerous and more curious. Portage trails were elusive. Re-supply points grew farther apart. When the wind was blowing, it blew against us, and when it wasn’t, the bugs made us wish it was.
Oh God, the bugs.
Three months after leaving Canmore, we finally had a little breakdown on the night we camped within sight of the old log cabin on Nueltin Lake. White-crowned sparrows trilled from the few spruce trees brave enough to poke north of the treeline, and in the distance a family of loons called from a tundra pond. Linking the two we
re the trails of the Qamanirjuaq caribou herd, smoothing an otherwise ragged transition between the forest and the barren lands with their graceful, curving lines.
In a state of cumulative exhaustion, we were eating dinner, a meal that was more blackflies and mosquitoes than beans and rice. Suddenly, the swatting and the gymnastics of dining with headnets on became too much. Grabbing Zev, we stormed off to the tent in a cloud of bugs, hurling curses that echoed through his two-year-old lips: “Ship.” “Fruk.” “Buggah oft!”
This episode lasted the two hours it took to kill the thousands of insects that came into the tent with us, and oscillated wildly between horror and glee. Then, a little more calmly, we began the nightly routine of doctoring the worst bites. In spite of our head-to-toe “bug-proof ” clothing, all three of our bodies were covered in welts, including our crotches. Leanne didn’t utter the question but it was certainly on my mind: Why had we embarked on this journey?
I reached for my bag of books, pulled out The Desperate People, and began reading aloud. It was a powerful passage about starvation, about true suffering in that very landscape only a few decades before. As images of dying Ihalmiut babies and contorted adults lifted off the page, what had seemed horrific a few minutes before suddenly became trivial. Throughout our journey, such Mowat-inspired moments helped us across the high points as well as the low. Once, while re-reading Owls in the Family halfway across the prairies, Zev and I climbed into a giant cottonwood tree and hooted so convincingly that a great horned owl alighted on a nearby branch. A crossover moment of timelessness. A gem held out to the pilgrim. It was the kind of moment we were searching for now, as we paddled our way down Nueltin Lake.
IN A LAND dominated by bogs and rock, we had no trouble finding the only sand esker for miles. And within minutes of coming ashore, we knew we were in the right place: the shoulder blades, shin bones, and vertebrae of wolf-killed caribou lay strewn across the old glacial riverbed, along with piles of hair-filled wolf scat. The signs were recent but not fresh; most of the scat had been bleached by sun and rain, and the few threads of sinew still attached to the bones were as brittle as twigs. By the time we found the entrance to the den we already knew what the lack of fresh tracks had told us: wolves still used the area that Mowat had made famous, but hadn’t denned there that year.
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