MOUNTAIN LIFE - Coast Mountains | Fall Winter 2018

FALL/WINTER 2018 MLCM 113 It has been said, “The only true sports are mountain climbing, auto racing and bullfighting… all the rest are just games.” But where is the truth amidst the cruelty of bullfighting? Or the noise and big business of auto racing? Is there any truth in sport? A ‘sport’ fisherman does not starve if they fail to get a bite. Without consequence isn’t anything just a game, something to be ‘played’ at? To play at something is a privilege. One could say that modern rock climbing is play and even mountain climbing can be played—ropes can be rigged, guides can be hired, the scales tipped in favour of success. And what is privilege if not predetermined success? And if all this is so, then what does it mean to challenge privilege? To really put yourself out there and stand behind your actions? Instead of answers, I spot the raven, reappearing through a window in the mist, circling low around me three times, each orbit a little closer, before turning tip and gliding past an elder mountain hemlock standing proud on the rocky divide between where we were and where we had come from. I pack up and head out of the mountains, thinking of my friends and the stories they will bring home. Two months later I sat alone atop a minor granite spire. To the west, the Gulf of Alaska. To the north and east granite peaks radiated outwards, breaking through the smooth surface of glacial ice like so many rows of shark teeth. I looked south to the dark walls of the Mendenhall Towers and waited for something to happen, some evidence of life—or the opposite—but nothing moved. Storms had grounded rescue efforts for over a week; agonizing intervals of time marked by the steady accumulation of snow, until yesterday, when the skies cleared and it was confirmed that Marc-André and his partner Ryan Johnson had been killed on the descent— the most dangerous part of any climb. My imagination filled in the blanks; the high tinkling of climbing gear, then an audible pop, a critical shift deep within the snowpack. The inescapable third law; that for every action in the natural world there is a reaction, opposite and equal. For every step up, somewhere there is one coming down, for every dawn, a dusk, for every birth, a death. We trusted each other—it was the mountains we questioned. 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. Brette climbing Pitch Two, the belay cave below.