MOUNTAIN LIFE - Coast Mountains | Fall Winter 2018

FALL/WINTER 2018 MLCM 111 It’s time for Brette to go up and me to go down. A few more pictures into the clouds, a raven soaring, and I push back into the steep, exposed couloir with a nervous glance upwards. Through time and experience I have learned the ways of life below zero—extra gloves, dry socks. Don’t sweat, slow is smooth, smooth is fast, fast is safe… and yet fear always finds a way to manifest itself, like water’s steady erosion on a stone dam. I don’t fear falling, but rather things falling on me. I trust my friends, it is the mountain I question. Safely out of the gully, but alone, I re-trace our path across the snow slopes below the face, aiming for an adjacent ridge, hoping for a clear photograph of my friends. In the mist I hear another climbing party, finally catching a glimpse of them on the north-east face of Sky Pilot, a 300-metre winter wall that Marc-André authored, on-sight and without a rope in 2013. He always joked it would be his most popular route due to the moderate difficulty and easy approach from the Sea to Sky Gondola. Sitting on my pack, eating lunch and peering up into the cloud for a glimpse of my friends, I notice a large group of skiers awkwardly climbing a wind-blasted slope together. Their gait looks inexperienced and I think about how more and more people are venturing outside for the first time. You see it at the top of the gondola every day—those previously caught off guard by the pace of modern life, blinking as their senses adjust to the world that has always been here, above the noise, smells, and flashing lights. I know the feeling, that almost audible fizzle and pop of delicate neural networks being burned out completely. Delusions dissolving, trajectories shifting—a new reality setting in, one best contemplated from a distance and some great height.