Rock, Paper, Fire

by Marni Jackson

  Not all our attempts at civilization have been successful. For instance, we have tried on three different occasions to improvise a portable sauna. The first one, a gas stove in a tent, nearly asphyxiated us with carbon monoxide fumes. The second was safer, but produced about as much body warmth as an aspirin in Coke. The third one, also dangerous, worked well enough, but the real danger arose in the two inches of liquid brume that condensed in the bottom of the tent after a couple of skiers had steamed away a day’s sweat and effort and filth—a shallow but burning lake into which you could not help but slip. This juice fetched up brilliant red calluses on our behinds, resulting in the worst case I have ever experienced in three decades of outdoor life of what I like to refer to as Baboon Ass. Painful? Imagine your fundament as a rusty and poorly performing ratchet bolt: that begins to describe the sensation.

  I imagine Byron Harmon, the first great photographer of the Rockies, felt the same way when he was hired by a mountain tourist named Alan Freeman to photograph Mount Columbia. They required two guides, a string of pack horses, a radio, a typewriter, 8,000 feet of movie film, and a flock of carrier pigeons, just in case. (Mountain tourists tend to overpack.) Harmon and Freeman took seventy days to travel 800 kilometres to the top of the Saskatchewan Glacier, a pace even slower than ours. On the seventieth day, their last, their food spent, the clouds finally cleared for the first time, and Harmon caught his celebrated photograph of Mount Columbia.

  I wasn’t there, of course, but because of the sauna, and the way the mountains look skeptically down upon any outrageous human ambition, I imagine I know how Harmon felt. The human history of these mountains is so recent that it feels inclusive in that way, and (once again) personal.

  Certain landscapes embed themselves in my memory. I remember some of the places we’ve gone in the mountains the same way I remember favourite paintings, even if it’s only a vast rock face with snow blown into every crack and fissure and cranny—a Jackson Pollock painting on the most massive scale imaginable. (That was just below Castleguard Meadows, on the long way up onto the Columbia Icefield, the year I got so scared—we had a new baby—that I turned back.) And I imagine that the mountains remember us, too. I always want to assign consciousness to the mountains at times like that, as if they know what they are displaying for us, and why—as if the uncaring silence of the high winter wilderness is a message, a warning not to become too ambitious or too prideful.

  I know this is irrational. Nature has no intent. But something in me—the tourist mountaineer, the environmental romantic, maybe even the Canadian living in a country that is still so wild and spread-out that it never feels like much more than an idea—something in me wants the mountains to be alive, to make sense, and to speak to us. It may just be the effect of all that churchy white space on a suggestible consciousness, or the fact that these western Canadian mountains are rapidly becoming one of the few places left that can still be called an extensive wilderness. Or maybe it’s because the mountains make us reach for the best in ourselves, and force us to take a chance, and be less afraid.

  BUT THE RAREST and most valuable effect of time spent in the mountains in Canada is that it can still be a private experience. Our lives seem to be lived more and more in public, thanks to the camera phone and the internet and YouTube, and the general transformation of our written stories into visual ones.

  But in my experience the mountains are still a private place, a sanctuary for the independently meditating and worrying mind. There is so much pressure these days to think alike. Overwhelmed by information and the incessant pressure to connect, it’s harder and harder to know what you really think and feel, as opposed to what you are supposed to feel, what others want you to think and feel. In the hopelessly distracted, spectacle-addicted world we live in, simply being remote and hard-to-reach in the mountains, where the damn cellphone doesn’t work a lot of the time, feels like a radical act. A radically human act. Of course, the mountains are a radical place simply by virtue of their uncooperative topography. Every time I see them lifting their heads to the west of Calgary, I begin (after a short jolt of apprehension) to feel independent, to experience the electrical possibility of feeling new again. Going high, going into the mountains, going remote rather than accessible, is by definition an anti-establishment act, an act of rebellion against the status quo. Will I return? What am I trying to prove? Did I put tape on my heels? Should I have a drink of water?

  In the city, where everything feels like it has been done before, many times, where so many high standards have been set, the main impediment to action is all that precedent. How can you work up the nerve to begin anything fresh, when so much accomplishment precedes you? Whereas in the sparsely populated and not easily attained mountains, the trails have not all been broken yet. We can still make our own tracks, instead of following someone else’s.

  CREDITS

  The epigraph to “Ode to Bob” in Helen Mort’s poem-sequence “No Map Could Show Them” is from David Mazel’s Mountaineering Women (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1994) and was reproduced with permission of the publisher.

  “First Ascent” by Barry Blanchard was previously published in Alpinist magazine.

  “A World of Ice: Circumnavigating Ellesmere” by Jon Turk was adapted from “Ellesmere: Two Men Alone in a World of Ice,” published by Canoe and Kayak Magazine, May 2012.

  “Norman and the Crow” by Niall Fink was previously published in Other Voices: Journal of the Literary and Visual Arts, Volume 22, Issue 1, Fall 2009.

  Quotations from the “The Magic Bus” by Niall Fink were taken from the “Supertramp” inscription by Chris McCandless.

  “Finding Farley” by Karsten Heuer was previously published in Canadian Geographic, July/August 2008.

  “Muskwa-Kechika” by Bruce Kirkby was adapted from “Ride through the ‘Serengeti of the North,’” previously published in The Globe and Mail, September 1, 2012.

  “Walking Off the Edge of the World” by Bruce Kirkby was previously published in Up Here magazine.

  The following sources were used by Bernadette McDonald in “Searching for Humar”: Humar, Tomaž, No Impossible Ways, Mobitel d.d., 2001; “Modern Gladiator on his Way,” Delo, August 6, 2005; Duane, Dan,

  “Tomaž Humar: Incredible Rescue, Angry Backlash on Pakistan’s Nanga Parbat,” National Geographic Adventure Magazine, November 2005; Wallace, Colin, Climbing magazine, January 2001.

  “Underway” by Christian Beamish was excerpted from The Voyage of the Cormorant (Patagonia Books, 2012) and was reproduced with permission of the publisher.

  “Surge” by Erin Soros was excerpted from the novel-in-progress Hook Tender. A longer version of “Surge” was aired on the BBC as a finalist for the BBC National Short Story Award, and it has appeared in The Iowa Review and The BBC National Short Story Award 2008 (Short Books).

  “Spirit Friends,” from Explorers of the Infinite by Maria Coffey, copyright © 2008 by Maria Coffey. Used by permission of Jeremy P. Tarcher, an imprint of Penguin Group (USA) LLC.

  The following sources were used by Freddie Wilkinson in “A Short Climb with Ueli Steck”: Tim Neville, “Speed Freak,” Outside, March 9, 2012; Martin Gutmann, “Ueli Steck,” Rock and Ice.

  “The Descent of Man” by Don Gillmor was previously published in Eighteen Bridges.

  Passages of “Hunting and Killing” by Masa Takei previously appeared in “Why I Hunt” in the October 2012 edition of Western Living.

  Some of the material in “What the Mountains Mean to Us” by Ian Brown, based on a talk given at the Banff Mountain Film and Book Festival in 2012, originally appeared in “The Boys and the Back-Country” in the Winter 2002 issue of explore Magazine. That essay was later republished in Way Out There: The Best of explore (Greystone Books, 2006). Reprinted with permission.

  AUTHOR

  BIOGRAPHIES

  CHRISTIAN BEAMISH holds a B.A. in Creative Writing from the University of California Santa Cruz and an M.A. in Creative Writing fr
om San Francisco State University. A surfer, surfboard shaper, and writer, Christian is the author of The Voyage of the Cormorant (Patagonia Books, July 2012). Voyage is the account of his three-month solo surfing expedition down the Pacific coast of Baja California by sail and oar in the eighteen-foot Shetland Isle beach boat he built. Christian lives in Carpinteria, California, with his wife, Natasha, daughter, Josephine, and German Wirehaired Pointer, Rio.

  BARRY BLANCHARD: Canadian Mountain Guide and alpinist Barry Blanchard was born in Calgary, March 29, 1959. Twelve years later three boys navigated the Bow River through the western side of the city on a raft of nailed together railway ties, and Barry was at the helm steering the adventure. He found mountain climbing in the books of his high school library, some of which are still in his possession. A six month trip to the French Alps in 1980 set the course of Barry’s life: to climb the steepest and most complicated faces of the world’s great glaciated peaks. Barry moved to the mountains in 1982 to pursue his Mountain Guiding career (he is an internationally certified—UIAGM—mountain guide) and has included making Hollywood features such as K-2, Cliffhanger, and The Vertical Limit in his professional life. Barry lives in Canmore, Alberta, with his two daughters, Rosemary and Eowyn.

  IAN BROWN has been a roving feature writer at The Globe and Mail for the past decade. He is the author of three books, including The Boy in the Moon, which won the Charles Taylor Prize and the Trillium Book Award, among others, and was selected as one of the New York Times 10 Best Books of 2011. He was the host of Later the Same Day, Sunday Morning, and Talking Books on CBC Radio, and of Human Edge and The View From Here on TVO. He has travelled in the mountains of Alberta and British Columbia nearly every year for the past thrity-five years. He lives in Toronto.

  FITZ CAHALL is the founder and host of The Dirtbag Diaries, an online radio show dedicated to adventure and the stories that define outdoor culture. He currently works as the creative director at Duct Tape Then Beer, a digital storytelling agency in Seattle, Washington.

  MARIA COFFEY is the internationally published author of twelve books, three of which deal with mountaineering themes. Fragile Edge: Loss on Everest won two prizes in Italy, including the 2002 ITAS Prize for Mountain Literature, and Where the Mountain Casts Its Shadow won the Jon Whyte Award for Mountain Literature at the Banff Mountain Book Festival in 2003 and a National Book Award in 2004. For these titles, along with Explorers of the Infinite (2008), Coffey was awarded the 2009 American Alpine Club Literary Award. Originally from the U.K., Coffey lives with her husband, veterinarian and photographer Dag Goering, in British Columbia, Canada. They are the founders of Hidden Places, a boutique adventure travel company, and Elephant Earth, which advocates for elephant welfare and conservation. Maria’s website is hiddenplaces.net.

  NIALL FINK is a graduate student at the University of Alberta. He works as a wrangler, canoe guide, and hunting guide in the Yukon and Northwest Territories during the summer and lives in Edmonton during the winter. His first book, I Was Born Under a Spruce Tree, was written in collaboration with Tr’ondek Hwech’in Elder JJ Van Bibber. To learn more visit niallfink.com.

  CHARLOTTE GILL is the author of Eating Dirt, a tree-planting memoir nominated for the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize, the Charles Taylor Prize, and two B.C. Book Prizes. It was the 2012 winner of the B.C. National Award for Canadian Non-Fiction. Her previous book Ladykiller was a finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction and winner of the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize. Her work has appeared in Best Canadian Stories, The Journey Prize Stories, and many magazines. She lives on the Sunshine Coast of British Columbia.

  DON GILLMOR is the author of Mount Pleasant, a novel set in contemporary Toronto. His first novel, Kanata, dealt with 200 years of Canadian history. He is also the author of a twovolume history of Canada, Canada: A People’s History, and three other books of non-fiction. He has written nine books for children, two of which were nominated for a Governor General’s Award. He has worked as a journalist and was a senior editor at The Walrus and a contributing editor at both Saturday Night and Toronto Life magazines. He has won ten National Magazine Awards and numerous other honours. He lives in Toronto.

  NIALL GRIMES was born in Derry, Northern Ireland, and continued growing there for twenty years until he couldn’t take it anymore and moved to England. From his late teens, rock climbing has been his passion, and sadly, almost thirty years later, he has found nothing to replace it. He’s not much of a reader, but he does enjoy a good joke or a catchy song lyric. In two thousand and something his co-authored book Jerry Moffatt: Revelations won the grand prize at the Banff Mountain Book Festival. He cites his time in the Mountain and Wilderness Writing program as one of the ten best things he’s ever done.

  KARSTEN HEUER has worked as a wildlife biologist and wilderness park ranger for the Canadian National Parks Service for the past eighteen years. During this time he has become a well-known explorer, author, and filmmaker with a penchant for following some of North America’s most endangered wildlife on foot and skis. His two bestselling books Walking the Big Wild and Being Caribou have earned him numerous awards, including a U.S. National Outdoor Book Award, the Sigurd Olson Nature Writing Award, the Banff Mountain Book Festival’s Grand Prize, and the Wilburforce Conservation Leadership Award. He lives in Canmore with his wife and son and is the president of the Yellowstone to Yukon Conservation Initiative, a world leader in large-landscape conservation.

  KATIE IVES: A graduate of the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Katie Ives is the editor-in-chief of Alpinist Magazine. Her writing and translations have appeared in various publications, including Alpinist, The American Alpine Journal, Mountain Gazette, Urban Climber, She Sends, Circumference, 91st Meridian, Outside Magazine and Patagonia Field Reports. In 2004 she won the Mammut/Rock & Ice Writing Contest, in 2005 she attended the Banff Mountain and Wilderness Writing program, and in 2008 she received third place in the UKC/International Literature Festival Writing Competition. In 2011 she served as a jury member for the Banff Mountain Festival Book Competition.

  BRUCE KIRKBY is a writer, photographer, traveller, and adventurer. As a columnist for The Globe and Mail, regular contributor to explore Magazine and Canadian Geographic, and author of two bestselling books, Sand Dance and The Dolphin’s Tooth, Bruce’s journeys have taken him across Arabia by camel, down the Blue Nile on raft, and over Iceland by foot.

  ANDY KIRKPATRICK: The U.S. magazine Climbing once described Andy Kirkpatrick as a climber with a “strange penchant for the long, the cold and the difficult,” with a reputation “for seeking out routes where the danger is real, and the return is questionable, pushing himself on some of the hardest walls and faces in the Alps and beyond, sometimes with partners and sometimes alone.” The author of two Boardman Tasker award-winning books, Psychovertical and Cold Wars, Andy has climbed extensively in the Alps and greater ranges.

  BERNADETTE MCDONALD is the author of eight books on mountaineering and mountain culture. She was awarded four major prizes for Freedom Climbers, including the Boardman Tasker Prize and the Banff Mountain Book Festival Grand Prize. Additional literary awards include Italy’s ITAS Prize (2010), India’s Kekoo Naoroji Award (2012, 2009, and 2008) and American Alpine Club literary award (2011). She was the founding vice president of Mountain Culture at The Banff Centre and director of the Banff Mountain Festivals for twenty years. Among other distinctions she has received the Alberta Order of Excellence (2010), and the Banff Summit of Excellence Award (2007).

  HELEN MORT is from Sheffield, U.K. She has two poetry chapbooks with Tall Lighthouse Press, The Shape of Every Box and A Pint for the Ghost. Her first collection, Division Street, was published by Chatto & Windus in 2013 and was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. From 2010–2011, she was Poet in Residence at The Wordsworth Trust, Grasmere. She is currently working on No Map Could Show Them, a collection of poems about women and mountaineering, which she began writing as part of the Mountain and Wilderness Writing program
at The Banff Centre.

  JAN REDFORD spent several years climbing, kayaking, and taking on jobs like tree planting until motherhood motivated her to become a French Immersion teacher. Her work has been published in The Globe and Mail, the National Post, and various anthologies, and has won multiple writing prizes, including first place in Room’s 2011 creative non-fiction contest. She is working on a climbing memoir, and will start the MFA program in Creative Writing at UBC in September 2013. She lives in Squamish, B.C., with her husband, not far from her two adult children, surrounded by phenomenal mountain biking trails.

  WAYNE SAWCHUK grew up as a logger, trapper, and guide, and is now a conservationist, author, and photographer who fights to protect the country he once logged. He is the recipient of the federal Canadian Environment Award and the Province of British Columbia Minister’s Environmental Achievement Award, both given in recognition of his work to establish the 6.4 million hectare Muskwa-Kechika Management Area. He is the author of the coffee-table photo book Muskwa-Kechika: The Wild Heart of Canada’s Northern Rockies. Each summer Sawchuk leads three-month horseback expeditions into the Northern Rockies, and he is a member of the Explorers Club of New York.

  ERIN SOROS has published short fiction and non-fiction in international journals and anthologies. Her stories have been produced for the BBC and CBC as winners of the CBC Literary Award and the Commonwealth Short Story Prize. “Surge” was aired on the BBC as a finalist for the BBC National Short Story Award. Morning Is Vertical, a collection of stories with photographs, is forthcoming from Rufus Books. She is at work on her first novel, Hook Tender, set in a 1940s logging camp in the coastal mountains of British Columbia and inspired by the oral and archival history of immigrant and indigenous communities.