MOUNTAIN LIFE - Coast Mountains | Winter / Spring 2018

80 MLCM WINTER/SPRING 2018 In a serpentine twist of the narrative however, Black Dyke became exponentially more difficult in 2014 when a series of crucial holds fell from the crux pitch. “No one has freed that roof since those holds fell off,” says Kumari Berry (“Koo” for short), a young Australian woman who has spent the last two summers on a mission to do just that — to prove that climbing the current arrangement of basalt holds on The Black Dyke is humanly possible. “Boys sending or girls sending. Who cares? I just want to have a good time,” Koo says. She invites me to join her on her most recent attempt to ascend Sínulhkay ̓ ’s glistening trail. Fascinated by the rock, the route and the rich cultural history surrounding it, I leap at the chance to support her. At ten o’clock on a Sunday —j ust enough time for Koo to recover from a raging hangover from the night before — we begin climbing. Rising up and out of the forest, we move fast over lichen- and mud-clad basalt, the Douglas firs shivering lithely beneath us. The base of the wall is coated thick with bushels of glistening creepers and the chunks of dislodged basalt littering the green vegetated valley floor slowly grow smaller beneath us. Koo swears that her laps up and down these lower pitches have cleaned up the worst of the loose holds, but climbers reserve a specific term for this amorphous, non-geologically-specific- but-definitely-unattached rock type — “choss.” Approaching the base of the first major roof, Koo starts up the pitch, casually clipping quickdraws before an abrading rumble, like boulders rolling downstream, rents the relaxed atmosphere in two. Ten metres to our left, a tooth of granite slithers from the wall and hurtles into the void. I watch in awe as the human-sized block plunges groundward, bouncing off the Chief’s lower slabs before showering the forest floor with a high-velocity airburst of shrapnel. In response, a chorus of “whoahs” emanate from other climbers on the wall. “That was f*cking crazy!” I yell from my secure nest of rope and nylon. “Holy shit! Epic!” Koo whoops. No one seems to have been injured, so our attention inevitably returns to the rock. When I meet Koo at the next belay, she reaches for the day-bag, procuring her never-would-dream-of- not-having-them pack of roll-your-owns. Time to calm those frazzled nerves. On the wall, Koo, a connoisseur of the irreverent, drinks and smokes like Warren Harding and carries her water in a never-washed, two-litre vodka bottle. Off the wall and during the week, she works rope access jobs in the city and trains like a World Cup boulderer in the gym. In between and on the weekends, she hangs her harness outside a tent at the base of the Chief before returning Sunday night to the room she rents in the home of a family of nudists. “Personally, I’m not that in to getting naked,” she tells me while hanging upside down from an eight metre roof on our next outing on the wall, “But hey, do what you want, I reckon!” On our second day up high, Koo reaches the first roof with the sequence now locked down and I watch as she throws her heel high, rocks up onto it and then darts her right hand for a sharp crimp. Execution effortless. LEFT Modern history. Squamish local Matt Maddaloni on the first free ascent of The Black Dyke in 2002. SIMON CARTER. RIGHT Kumari "Koo" Berry inches up the mythical path of the sea serpent.