Six days in the Bugaboos with Yamnuska Mountain Adventures taught me that the most lasting alpine lessons are about judgment, trust, and instinct.
Words & photography :: Bronwyn Biro
Hound’s Tooth: Instinct
The most valuable lesson I learned in the Bugaboos wasn’t how to place protection or build an anchor. It was learning to trust something faster than thought.
I was in the Bugaboos for Yamnuska Mountain Adventures’ six-day Intro to Alpine Rock course, designed to teach glacier travel, alpine rock systems, and route judgement. The glacier looked blank from a distance, a sea of white leading toward Hound’s Tooth, our first objective. Up close, it was full of information I hadn’t yet learned how to read.
We had two guides that week, Grant Meekins and Adam Greenburg, who offered a steady stream of instruction, insight, and encouragement. Grant, an ACMG-certified mountain guide with over 40 years of climbing under his belt, has made first ascents on some of the Rockies’ hardest mixed routes. Judging by his snack bag, which consisted almost entirely of Snickers bars, I figured his mountaineering advice was probably better than his nutrition advice.
I’d been taught never to dig crampons into the snow while self-arresting. If your foot abruptly stops while the rest of you keeps moving, you could twist an ankle or knee. But as Grant pointed out, if you’re sliding toward a cliff, a broken ankle is a much better outcome than not stopping at all.
It wasn’t until I slipped for real that I understood why we’d drilled the self-arrest so many times. I didn’t have to think. My body rolled to the side and dug the axe and my toes in before I’d decided to do anything at all. Snow sprayed cold against my cheek as I came to a stop. My breath arrived in short, ragged gasps, my heartbeat still racing long after the slide had ended.
Experience doesn’t just build muscle memory; it builds intuition. Grant told me he’d learned to trust his gut the hard way: through a crevasse fall as a teenager and another fall in his early twenties. In both cases, he says, the feeling had been there. He just hadn’t listened. “It took me a couple of times of being lucky—instances where I was just lucky to get away with it—to realize how important that gut feeling was.”
“Experience doesn’t just build muscle memory; it builds intuition.”
Since then, he estimates he’s backed off an objective on instinct alone somewhere between 20 and 50 times. Every so often, he gets proof he was right to listen: he’ll turn away from a spot, head somewhere else, and watch a rock come down exactly where he would have been standing.
When guiding, Grant believes mistakes are one of the best ways to learn. “There is definitely value in having just enough room to make a mistake,” he said. He’d let me lead a stretch of the glacier without correcting every step, trusting the terrain to teach me faster than his voice could. Too quick to step in, and I’d never build that instinct myself. Too slow, and a wrong read on a snow bridge isn’t the kind of mistake you get to learn from twice. It’s one of the trickiest parts of guiding, he added.
“There is definitely value in having just enough room to make a mistake.”
The self-arrest had become something my body did before I could decide to. The harder lesson was learning to recognize when and why to act. That kind of judgment couldn’t be drilled into muscle memory; it had to be built through experience.
Life at the Hut
Life at the hut settled into a rhythm. We’d return each afternoon, drinking hot chocolate, drying damp socks, and listening as the next day’s objective was laid out. Evenings were filled with stories. Adam, a former videographer turned Parks Canada trail crew member and Visitor Safety Technician, told us about the false “man on fire” satellite SOS calls that sent BC search-and-rescue teams into the backcountry. They never ignored an alert, even when experience suggested another false alarm. Judgement, I was beginning to realize, isn’t just knowing what’s dangerous. It’s knowing what can’t be ignored.
Lion’s Way: Judgement
I learned to look at the terrain differently. I’ll admit, my route-finding on glaciers used to mean praying for existing tracks or following someone’s GPX line. I’d use someone else’s idea of what was safe, borrowed sight unseen. With my new knowledge, I was horrified to look at the existing tracks up the glacier on our way up to Lion’s Way.
Tracks on the right hugged the rock, squarely in the path where any rockfall would come down. Piles of fresh rock debris sat on the glacier, evidence of recent activity. On the left, the tracks went over a roll of snow that was likely a crevasse, the serac above it catching light in dull blue-white slabs.
Understanding where it’s safe to stop, where to speed up, which hazards to ignore, and which deserve your full attention is part of the hidden curriculum of the course. It’s not something you can just be told.
When I asked Grant how he teaches clients to make good decisions, he said, “You can teach by example… but whether or not you can teach it, I’m not even sure. I think it’s something a person has to experience in their own progression.”
Before the course, I wanted to memorize alpine systems like recipes. If I could just memorize the sequence, I’d feel prepared. If I forgot a step, I’d be lost. Over the course of the week, I stopped asking myself what the correct system was, and instead started asking what problem I needed to solve. When building an anchor, I started asking: Where is the force? What resources do I have? How can the system fail, and can I do anything to mitigate those risks? It wasn’t automatic the way the self-arrest had been. It required effort, but it was something I could rely on, unlike a memorized sequence I might forget under pressure.
“I stopped asking myself what the correct system was, and instead started asking what problem I needed to solve.”
By the end of that climb, I’d stopped reading the glacier for someone else’s answer and started reading it for my own. What I didn’t expect was how much faster that reading would need to become.
Pigeon Spire: Flow
The West Ridge of Pigeon Spire, considered by many climbers to be the best 5.4 in the world, was our final objective. It was here that I learned what practical alpine rock movement actually looked like. Rather than the deliberate, pitch-by-pitch structure we’d used on Lion’s Way, it was something faster and more fluid.
We simul-climbed sections of the ridge, moving together rather than trading belays. Without breaking stride, Grant would loop the rope over a horn or thread it behind a flake, letting the rock do the work of an anchor, and keep moving. The ridge narrowed until there was air on both sides of me, the glacier below a dizzying drop of white. This wasn’t a series of technical checkpoints anymore. We’d read the rock, commit, and keep moving.
Knots and anchors can be taught in an afternoon at a crag. What takes longer is learning when not to stop: when the terrain is easy enough, and the consequences low enough, that building a perfect belay costs more time than it buys safety.
By then, the two ways of thinking had become one. Up here, the instinct from Hound’s Tooth and the reasoning from Lion’s Way had folded into each other. I wasn’t doing either one consciously anymore.
As Grant put it, “The goal of the course is that you would be able to come back here and do your own trips.” I don’t know yet if I’m ready to lead this exact route myself. But I know, now, what readiness actually feels like. It’s not a checklist of skills mastered; it’s knowing how to read the terrain and make good decisions when the answer isn’t obvious.
Bronwyn Biro was a guest of Yamnuska Mountain Adventures from July 2–7, 2026.
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