MOUNTAIN LIFE - Coast Mountains | Winter Spring 2020

44 river—steep, technical basalt columns. “One rainy day, we hiked in from the highway and found that someone had left an old rope across the river. We tested it and it held, so we used it to put up a better rope, then a steel cable. Then we put up a chairlift.” Gary swears the chair just appeared at his place one night after a party and he figured it would be perfect for accessing his new climbing zone. Eventually, the chair came down as the area became more popular. “By then, Peanut and I were selling photocopied guide books at the climbing shops,” he says. “We wanted people to climb there and put up new routes. Plus, the more guidebooks we could sell the less time we had to spend working in the restaurant. That was important.” By 2003, Gary was living in Squamish with his girlfriend, working construction and looking for places to put up rock climbing routes in his spare time. “I was hiking up DeBecks Hill and Tonya suggested the trail we were using would make a good mountain bike trail. I’d never built one so I thought that would be an interesting thing to do. I knew nothing.” That ignorance may have been bliss. Gary planned, laid out and built what would become Plural of Nemesis, a Squamish classic. “That got me hooked,” he says. “Mountain bikers were so appreciative. People were thanking me and meaning it! I was used to climbers bitching at me about my bolt placement instead of acknowledging the work that went in. Trail building was good physical work, mentally challenging and there was the act of exploring and finding new spots. It was all renegade. That’s how trails were built back then.” As he aged, Gary continued building trails ( Word of Mouth , Somewhere Over There, Rupert, and more) and began to choose the bike over his climbing rack. “Free time plays a role,” he says. “When you are young and you work a few nights a week, there is a lot of time to climb and that’s good because climbing takes a lot of time. With biking, you just jump on your bike and you are doing it.” Free time is at even more of a premium right now because in the summer of 2019, Gary built and opened an indoor obstacle course/ ninja gym in Squamish. “I was watching the Ninja Warrior show and I wanted to do that but there was nowhere to do it,” he says. “So I had to build it.” “These days a dirtbag shows up at a climbing area in $100,000 van and wants to camp for free. It’s different.” PHOTOS COURTESY GARY MCFARLANE