Mountain Life
  • Daily Content
    • Trips & Expeditions
    • Climbing
    • Mountain Biking
    • Mountain Lifer
    • Multiplicity
    • On The Trail
    • Paddling
    • Photography
    • Skiing
    • Snowboarding
    • Stay & Play
    • Surfing
    • The Great Outdoors
    • The ML Interview
    • Travel
  • GEAR
  • VIDEOS
  • STORE
  • Magazines
    • ML Coast Mountains
    • ML Rocky Mountains
    • Vie En Montagne
    • ML Blue Mountains
    • ML Annual
    • ML Subscriptions
  • ABOUT
    • What is ML?
    • Our Team
    • Newsletter
    • Adventure Grant
    • Distribution
  • Podcast
  • Contests
  • CONTACT
    • ML Agency
    • Advertising
    • Contribute
Subscription Form

Get notified of the best News

Social Links
Instagram 22K Followers
Facebook 25K Likes
Twitter 5K Followers
Pinterest 1K Followers
Vimeo 34 Followers
LinkedIn 0
22K Followers
25K Likes
5K Followers
1K Followers
Mountain Life
Mountain Life
  • Daily Content
    • Trips & Expeditions
    • Climbing
    • Mountain Biking
    • Mountain Lifer
    • Multiplicity
    • On The Trail
    • Paddling
    • Photography
    • Skiing
    • Snowboarding
    • Stay & Play
    • Surfing
    • The Great Outdoors
    • The ML Interview
    • Travel
  • GEAR
  • VIDEOS
  • STORE
  • Magazines
    • ML Coast Mountains
    • ML Rocky Mountains
    • Vie En Montagne
    • ML Blue Mountains
    • ML Annual
    • ML Subscriptions
  • ABOUT
    • What is ML?
    • Our Team
    • Newsletter
    • Adventure Grant
    • Distribution
  • Podcast
  • Contests
  • CONTACT
    • ML Agency
    • Advertising
    • Contribute
  • Mountain Lifer
  • Paddling

For the Love of SUP

  • May 10, 2022
  • Sarah Bulford
Total
1
Shares
1
0
0
0
0
0
Total
1
Shares
Share 1
Tweet 0
Pin it 0
Share 0
Share 0
Share 0

By: Bruce Kirkby.

Late last summer, with smoke blanketing the interior of British Columbia and meagre salmon runs beginning to fight their way up drought-stricken rivers, Norm Hann and I lashed paddleboards to the roof of his truck and headed north along the Island Highway, towards Telegraph Cove. Norm had invited me to tag along on a commercial paddleboard group he would be guiding in the Broughton Archipelago. Despite a long history of SUP expeditions, I harboured some reservations.

IMG 3086 3

Introducing people to the sport of stand-up paddle boarding is Norm’s expertise and passion. Holding the highest Paddle Canada certifications in every SUP discipline—flatwater, river, surf, touring & instructor training—he is one of the most recognized Canadian SUP professionals. He unquestionably loves what he does.

On the other hand, despite spending decades as a commercial raft and sea kayak guide, I had deliberately moved away from the industry. Age and a young family were admittedly factors, but I also found the constantly growing certification-requirements and guide-association memberships eroding the freedom that originally drew me to the outdoors. Add in a growing cultural emphasis on luxury “glamping” (gourmet meals, massive tents, hor d’oeuvres), and it all felt like a distraction from the real reason I wanted to take people outside—to connect to the wild.

BKirkby Card1 May2019 CardGrease Trail DSC 0154 2

In the years since my professional guiding days I’d fallen deeply in love with wilderness paddle boarding and felt protective of the experience. Now I worried: by accompanying a bunch of strangers on a guided expedition, would I risk jading the new-found joy that SUP brought me?

BKirkby CapeScott Jul2020 CardD3400 DSC 0435 1

I first met Norm in 2016 at Mountain Life magazine’s flashy Multiplicity event, when adventure speakers deliver back-to-back Ted-style talks to a raucous audience, as part of the Whistler World Ski and Snowboard Festival. The talent on stage was stunning; names that need no introduction, including Rory Bushfield, Benny Marr, and Jimmy Martinello.

But at the after party, as champagne bottles were decapitated by sabres and house music thumped, I found myself huddled in a corner with soft-spoken Norm, sharing our love for paddle boarding on the Canadian coast. Until that moment, I didn’t know that anyone else was out on the ocean atop a SUP…out doing the same thing as me.

BKirkby NH Jul2021 CardBroughton BK5 5476 edited
BKirkby CapeScott Jul2020 CardTG5 P7150106
BKirkby CapeScott Jul2020 CardTG5 P7160161

Three years earlier, I’d bought a cheap inflatable and taken it to my local lake. The very first thing I noticed—having spent far too much of my adult life seated in chairs, desks, sofas, kayaks and rafts—was how darn good it felt to be standing. The views were better too—beavers and bull trout flashed beneath my feet. Most notably, after a few minutes on the board, a peaceful, carefree feeling descended. Perhaps the constant demand for proprioceptive balance had helped tune out the noise, thoughts, and self-chatter of modern life—a physically dictated standing meditation. Whatever the case, I was hooked.

GOPR7240 1

A month later I tentatively set out to paddle from Vancouver to Victoria—not sure if the idea was crazy or revolutionary. Once amidst sun and seals, there was nowhere else I wanted to be. The next summer I raised the stakes, paddling solo from Port Hardy to Tofino along the outer coast of Vancouver Island. As wonderful as that journey was, I returned home with the nagging sense that I could do even more with a strong partner.

Then Norm appeared.

A few months after we met in a noisy Whistler bar, Norm invited me to join him on an attempt to follow a long disused Grease Trail, once linking the coastal Git’gat community of Hartley Bay with the Skeena River. No one in living memory had travelled the route and the five-day expedition beat the snot out of us. After dragging fully loaded SUPs upriver, through head-high devil’s club, we portaged a desolate height of land, and then ran class III rapids on the Ekstall River. Amid the struggles, it became clear that Norm and I formed a rare outdoor combination—one where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

So year after year, we continued pushing our limits, rounding Cape Scott the next summer, and then the notorious Brooks Peninsula the year after that. As our experience grew, so did the scale and ambition of our plans.

BKirkby CapeScott Jul2020 CardTG5 P7190459 1

“They are all women,” Norm explained, as we searched for his group in the Telegraph Cove fisherman’s pub. Each of these guests had been on trips with Norm before, and due to the relatively small SUP community in Canada, they all knew of each other. They had independently arranged to carpool from Vancouver and share a motel room—which seemed impressively collegial. They welcomed me like a long-lost brother.

BKirkby NH Jul2021 CardBroughton BK5 4482
BKirkby NH Jul2021 CardBroughton BK5 4201 2
BKirkby NH Jul2021 CardBroughton BK5 4029

After being shuttled into the archipelago by water taxi, we camped that first night on the tranquil Burdwood Islands, an ancient village site marked by the white shell beach of an eroding midden. Norm’s trips are centred on self-reliance so everyone was responsible for packing and cooking their own food. The group set up their own tents. All I had to do was take care of myself. It was kind of like being on a trip with friends…that I didn’t know yet.

The next morning, securing everyone’s gear on paddleboard decks became quite a production—but to be fair, the women had only been on daytrips before, and loading a paddle board for the first time isn’t easy.

But once on the water, the group came alive. Everything was new and exciting. They gasped as we drifted over beds of urchins, while schools of juvenile salmon flashed beneath our bows. A pod of Dall’s porpoise passed, and curious harbour seal tailed us. As the midday sun baked down, the paddlers leapt from their boards, splashing in the cool waters. Norm and I followed. We were not hammering out the kilometres we were accustomed to, but we were having fun being outside.

That evening, as I rinsed my dinner bowl, a muffled cry caught my attention. A member of our group was laying by the shore, motioning for me.

‘I twisted my ankle,’ she explained tearily. She was unable to stand…And we were on a StandUp Paddleboard trip.

Norm and I discussed options. Sending her home by water taxi felt akin to losing a family member. The group begged us to let her stay, declaring they would find a way to support her—even if it meant slowing the pace.

BKirkby NH Jul2021 CardBroughton BK5 4710
BKirkby NH Jul2021 CardBroughton BK5 4962

So the next morning, Norm rigged a dry bag in the centre of her board, which she straddled awkwardly, like a rubber pony. As the hours passed, and our group slipped onwards,

through the misty Broughton islands, she kept pace. Every night, upon arriving at camp, we piggy-backed the injured paddler to the eating area, to the biffy, to her tent. And as we did, the bonds between us grew closer—in the way only outdoor challenges can forge.

Along the outer White Cliff islands, we listened to sorrowful gulls while humpbacks fed nearby. Norm pulled in a pair of rock cod for dinner. Sometimes, when the winds picked up, and waves sloshed across the boards, I sensed concern in some of our group—self-doubt, even fear. But they courageously threw themselves at the challenges and I reassured them that even if they fell in, it was no big deal. In the bigger scheme of things, if they didn’t fall occasionally, perhaps they were being too cautious.? It’s a paddling metaphor that I think extends to how we live life. Besides, they’d already been swimming before, hadn’t they?

Laughs soon echoed over the waters. Somewhere along the way, I realized I hadn’t thought about the future, or the past, for days. Instead, I was living stroke by stroke, taking each moment as it came—such a precious state in the modern world, and fleetingly rare.

BKirkby NH Jul2021 CardBroughton BK5 4367

On our final night, we sat huddled against the northwest breeze on rocky headlands, looking out over Blackfish Sound. A trio of sea lions played below. Along distant shores, occasional Orca spouts billowed up. The next morning, after dropping the group back at Telegraph Cove, Norm and I pointed our bows south, and race towards his home in Royston. We paddled from sunrise to sunset, covering 250 kilometres over a long weekend. It was exactly the type of paddling expedition I’d grown to love with Norm; uncertain, challenging, exhausting, and revitalizing, all at once.

BKirkby NH Jul2021 CardBroughton BK5 4174
BKirkby NH Jul2021 CardBroughton BK5 4795
BKirkby NH Jul2021 CardBroughton BK5 4751
BKirkby NH Jul2021 CardBroughton BK5 4649

But instead of jading my love of SUP, the previous five days with a commercially guided group had reaffirmed just how special it is to travel the Canadian coast, precariously balanced atop a paddleboard. With just a tiny bit of instruction, the confidence of these enthusiastic curious, open-hearted middle-aged women had grown by leaps and bounds. And along the way, they had bonded more closely not just with each other, but with the wilderness itself. And what more can one ask of a trip?

BKirkby NH Jul2021 CardBroughton BK5 4921

Bruce Kirkby and Norm Hann are ambassadors for Mustang Survival, producers of top-quality recreational paddle equipment, including PFDs, storm wear, and dry bags.

On their SUP expeditions, they always pack:

  1. Greenwater 35l Submersible Deck Bag (“Bombproof. And because of its low profile, incredibly efficient in crosswinds.”)
  2. Callan Waterproof Pants, Jacket and Shorts (“Having these along gives piece of mind. No matter what rains and winds come, we’ll stay dry day after day. I admittedly wondered about waterproof shorts at first, but they are amazing! And they keep the butt dry no matter what we sit on.”)
  3. Torrens Hooded Thermal Jacket (“Form-fitting and super cozy, it’s our go-to warm layer.”) (“Form-fitting and super cozy, it’s our go-to warm layer.”)
Total
1
Shares
Share 1
Tweet 0
Pin it 0
Share 0
Share 0
Share 0
Sarah Bulford

Previous Article
Full-Circle-Everest-The-North-Face-Nepal-prayer-flags
  • CLIMBING
  • Trips & Expeditions

Full Circle: First All-Black Team Attempts to Summit Everest

  • May 9, 2022
  • Mountain Life Media
View Post
Next Article
Nick-Gottlieb-Pereval-Dzhuku-pass
  • Mountain Biking
  • Travel
  • Trips & Expeditions

Touching the Mountains of Heaven

  • May 12, 2022
  • Mountain Life Media
View Post
You May Also Like
Bora-Boreal-Quebec-winter-cabin-stars
View Post
  • Mountain Lifer
  • Stay & Play

Bora Boréal: Frozen in Time and Ice

  • Mountain Life Media
  • March 14, 2023
Skiis-and-Biikes
View Post
  • Mountain Lifer
  • Ontario
  • Skiing
  • Snowboarding

Skiis & Biikes Looks to the Future

  • Mountain Life Media
  • March 6, 2023
A-Forest-Journey-Patagonia-cover-photo
View Post
  • Mountain Lifer

A Forest Journey: The Role of Trees in the Fate of Civilization

  • Ned Morgan
  • March 2, 2023
Nalaga-Avis-O_Brien
View Post
  • Mountain Lifer
  • Women

Bringer of Light: A Conversation with N’alaga

  • Editor
  • March 1, 2023
Nnormal-No-Lost-Shoes-film
View Post
  • Mountain Lifer
  • Videos

Friday Flick: No Lost Shoes

  • Editor
  • February 17, 2023
Red-LTD-106-RIDE-MOZ-34
View Post
  • Paddling
  • THE GEAR SHED

Red Paddle Co Releases Limited Edition Board to Support Love the Oceans Charity

  • Ned Morgan
  • February 14, 2023
View Post
  • Mountain Lifer
  • On The Trail
  • Photography
  • Stay & Play

Let It Roar

  • Sarah Bulford
  • February 9, 2023
View Post
  • Mountain Lifer
  • Trips & Expeditions
  • Videos

Arc’teryx Presents: Shaped by Wild

  • Sarah Bulford
  • February 8, 2023
Featured Posts
  • Mustang-Survival-WOMENS-HELIX-CCS 1
    Gear Shed: Our End-of-Winter Picks
    • March 23, 2023
  • natural-selection-Redbull 2
    Friday Flick: Natural Selection Tour Highlights
    • March 17, 2023
  • Powder-Highway-BC-ski 3
    Powder Highway Revisited
    • March 21, 2023
  • AleTrailsSouthernInterior_Vernon_MikeGamble_LookoutTrail_BenHaggarPhoto 4
    Ale Trails: Southern Interior Part 1, Vernon + Shuswap
    • March 20, 2023
  • Bora-Boreal-Quebec-winter-cabin-stars 5
    Bora Boréal: Frozen in Time and Ice
    • March 14, 2023
RECENT POSTS
  • Elements-Outfitters-Filson-cabin
    Elements Outfitters Partners with SALTS to Protect Alberta’s Incredible Landscapes
    • March 16, 2023
  • Uncertainty-mountains-Rockies
    Facing Uncertainty: The Role of Chance in Mountain Adventures
    • March 13, 2023
  • The-High-Route-Kaytlyn-Gerbin-Jenny-Abegg-North-Cascades-High-Route-glacier-hiking
    Friday Flick: Alpine Ultra-Run Sufferfest
    • March 10, 2023
Social Links
Instagram 22K Followers
Facebook 25K Likes
Twitter 5K Followers
Pinterest 1K Followers
Vimeo 34 Followers
LinkedIn 0
INSTAGRAM
mountainlifemedia
22K Followers
From The Gear Shed: Last Monday was the official start of spring, but we know there’s still some winter to be shredded. So ML staff and partners have picked the latest jackets, lanterns, bindings, mugs and drysuits for winter-spring.
Exploring the sights around beautiful Sutton, Quebec with ML creator @adv_bird ❄️🫶
Back on the road with three generations, dancing lifties, best-on-planet pizza and elusive-but-exquisite pow days.
Live It Up EP 24 is out now!
The Southern Interior region of BC holds an ecological cross-section of the province with alpine meadows, arid Douglas fir grasslands, damp cedar and hemlock forests of the Columbia Mountains and the warm expanse of Shuswap Lake.
Do Not Disturb mode activated ✅ #mountainlifer
Conceived by superhuman snowboarder @travisrice, the @naturalselection Tour highlights earth’s premier riders, from big-mountain mavens to Olympians, all competing on the most stoketastic—and unpredictable—terrain known to humankind.
Built upon a shared desire to enjoy, respect, and advocate for Alberta’s incredible landscapes, it was a natural fit for @elementsoutfitters to work with a local conservation organization @saltslandtrust to highlight the province’s rugged beauty and outdoor apparel to match.
THE UNINVITED INVITATIONAL April 13-16 @woodwardtahoe 😱 $40,000 cash prize purse and a whole lotta spotlight on a group of riders whose time has finally come!! Presented by @jess.kimura and @thenorthface and supported by @yeti @capitasupercorp @slushthemagazine @unionbindingco @smithoptics @sunbum @coalheadwear @fattire 🫡 watch the finals in person Saturday April 15 and join the crew + @btbounds for a public ride day Sunday April 16 @borealmtn. Time to make some history!!! #linkinbio to learn more!
Close your eyes and, for a moment, imagine yourself deep in the polar regions aboard an expedition ship stuck in the ice. The white pack-ice is dazzling, and the immobile vessel seems frozen in time and space. That experience piques your curiosity, doesn't it? Without having to go all the way to Antarctica, you can experience these icy sensations 30 minutes from Quebec City in one of Bora Boréal 's two floating cottages.
Follow

Subscribe

Subscribe now to our newsletter

From The Gear Shed: Last Monday was the official start of spring, but we know there’s still some winter to be shredded. So ML staff and partners have picked the latest jackets, lanterns, bindings, mugs and drysuits for winter-spring.
Exploring the sights around beautiful Sutton, Quebec with ML creator @adv_bird ❄️🫶
Back on the road with three generations, dancing lifties, best-on-planet pizza and elusive-but-exquisite pow days.
Live It Up EP 24 is out now!
The Southern Interior region of BC holds an ecological cross-section of the province with alpine meadows, arid Douglas fir grasslands, damp cedar and hemlock forests of the Columbia Mountains and the warm expanse of Shuswap Lake.
Do Not Disturb mode activated ✅ #mountainlifer
Mountain Life
  • Home
  • About
  • Contact
  • Subscribe
  • Advertising

Input your search keywords and press Enter.