NO QUARTER

MY LEGS TREMBLED AS I STOOD MY GROUND, struggling to maintain a foothold in the finely decomposed detritus with a heavy backpack and bike on my shoulders. The pitch of the mountainside had become preposterously steep. Simply looking up at the ridgeline above could easily send me and my top-heavy load tomahawking backward down the yawning scree slope below.

Inhaling with each tiny step, I inched my way upward, digging one foot firmly into the loose debris before shakily lifting the other alongside it. Every hard-fought bit of progress was met with an almost equal measure of backsliding as the brittle shale crumbled and shifted underfoot. It was truly a case of ‘two steps forward, one step back.’

Three of my four teammates had already made it to the top, clawing their way over the precipice and disappearing from view. Emboldened by their ecstatic whoops of celebration, I pressed on slowly, eventually thrusting my bike over the ledge and heaving myself onto the narrow ridge.

I was stunned by the terrain ahead: Not only was there another scree-littered scramble up to an imposing spine, but one of our crew had already scaled it.

“How the hell did he get up there so quickly?” I asked photographer Margus Riga as we watched our buddy, Andrew McNab, pedaling along the jagged hogback on the horizon.

“I dunno,” Riga mumbled as he swapped lenses and zoomed onto McNab’s lanky silhouette. “He’s always way out front. They don’t call him ‘Mutant McNab’ for nothin’.”

GRAND TRAVERSE

Mutant McNab was the main reason we were out here, in the middle of British Columbia’s remote Purcell Mountains, creeping our way from one treacherous ridge to the next. It was mostly his idea to trudge deep into this barren wilderness with a week’s worth of supplies on our backs in pursuit of pristine freeride lines.

He’d neglected to tell us that there were no trails, apart from the overgrown footpath that had led us above tree line. An accomplished backcountry ski guide, it had scarcely occurred to