Inner Ranges: An Anthology of Mountain Thoughts and Mountain People

By Geoff Powter and Chris Bonington

Winner of the 2019 Banff Mountain Book Award for Climbing Literature
Winner of the 2019 National Outdoor Book Award for Outdoor Literature
Shortlisted for the 2019 Boardman Tasker Award

Inner Ranges brings together an enlightening and entertaining selection of mountain writing by one of Canada’s most respected adventure journalists and thinkers.

This collection of original and previously published pieces includes provocative editorial and opinion work about the state of adventure, personal tales from a life of exploration and risk-taking, some touches of humour, and award-winning profiles of some of Canada’s mountaineering greats. Stories include conversations with and profiles of alpine personalities such as Barry Blanchard, Sonnie Trotter, Lena Rowat, Raphael Slawinski, David Jones and many more.

Bringing these essays together for the first time has given Geoff the unique opportunity to reflect back on the stories behind the stories, the consequences of their publication, and the sometimes complex processes of writing about adventure and adventurous lives.

• Language: English
• Publisher: RMB Rocky Mountain Books
• Release date: Oct 23, 2018
• ISBN: 9781771602884

Geoff Powter

Geoff Powter has been a mountain writer, editor and presenter for more than 30 years. He has written pieces for magazines and newspapers around the globe, was the editor of the renowned Polar Circus magazine and spent 13 years at the helm of the Canadian Alpine Journal. He has been the host of the Voices of Adventure interview series at the Banff Mountain Book Festival for the past 20 years, and has been a regular contributor to CBC Radio and to the Globe and Mail travel section. He is the author of Strange and Dangerous Dreams: The Fine Line Between Adventure and Madness. Geoff Powter lives in Canmore, AB.

Book preview

For Kathi, the best adventure of my life.

CONTENTS

Foreword by Sir Chris Bonington

Preface

Part I: Pieces of Me

That Joy

27 Funerals and a Wedding

On Assiniboine

Conjuring Kain

Short Change on the Shield

A Lightening Sky

Part II: Mountain Views

Death on the Wapta

A Herd for the Killing

A Mirror in the Mountains

A Higher Education

Meet the New Boss

The Art of Forgiving

Part III: Three against Everest

(with Apologies to Woodrow Wilson Sayre)

Into Hot Air

The Truth on Everest

What Went Wrong on Everest

Part IV: Mountain Lite

The Partner from Hell

The Vertical Limit

From Better, Traverse

Part V: Mountain People

The Happy, Tormented Life of a Mountain Legend

The Numbers Man

The Unstoppable Lena Rowat

The Life of Brian

The (Really) Good Doctor

The Rock Star

What Happens: Ryan Titchener’s Longest Climb

The Man Who Would Be First: Earl Denman’s Everest Dream

FOREWORD

In the fall of 2017, I had the pleasure of coming to the Banff Mountain Film Festival, and the doubled joy of sitting as a guest of Geoff Powter’s long-running Voices of Adventure series at the festival.

I’d spent time with Geoff before, both at past festivals and climbing together on our home crags in Britain and in Canada, but sitting with him on the stage offered a different view of him. Some combination of things was likely at play – Geoff’s long love of the mountain world, his training as a clinical psychologist, his years writing profiles of several of the leading climbers of our time, his personal drive to understand the whys of everything he sees – and it was only moments before he was pushing me, gently, into corners of my story I hadn’t talked much about in public before.

I smiled then, and I’ve smiled again as I travelled through this book. That same desire, willingness – and skill – to go into shadows and corners of the adventure life and ask that ever-present Why? runs as surely through this anthology of Geoff’s mountain writing as our Banff interview did.

There’s a refreshing touch, here, too, with Geoff turning the light on himself, both in writing candidly about some of his own adventures, but also in his reflections back on the pieces he’s written. Just as in climbing itself, it’s a complicated thing to get mountain writing right, and perhaps even harder to look back and honestly assess whether you’ve gotten it wrong.

There is some beautiful, provocative and astute mountain writing in this book, and I’ll hope you’ll enjoy the journey through it as much as I have.

—Chris Bonington

Cumbria, 2018

PREFACE

In the gear room of our home in the Canadian Rockies, I have a favourite map. It’s an old topographic chart of the nearby Wapta Icefields, printed on long-faded paper, laminated years ago to preserve a scrawl of route lines and barely decipherable notes and compass bearings. I used that map on several ski trips across the Wapta – one of my treasured places on the planet – and I’ve kept it all these years because those lines and scribbles are the memory traces of some of the most wonderful, and wondrous, experiences of my life.

At the top of the map, where the Peyto Glacier turns hard south and cracks into a minefield of crevasses, there’s a 90° angle in one of the routes drawn on the map, with a rough circle scratched at the turn. I remember sitting there with a couple of partners I barely knew, waiting out a bitter whiteout, hunkered down behind our packs, hiding from a wind that hurt. With naive faith that the weather had to break, we stayed far too long, until the cold made the decision for us: we’d just have to trust the compass and move if we planned to live.

Only a couple of inches to the side on the map but a lifetime of experience away, another, fainter scratch that reads X-1980 marks the point where another partner and I turned around on my first exploration of the ice. In an even worse storm that day, we gave up on our plans with a curse and spent hours bent over a compass, blindly feeling our long way back to the safety of a mountain hut. I remember with a sick feeling how two other skiers joined us in the hut long after dark, one of them in agony because his contact lenses had frozen to his eyes in the lashing cold. We all puzzled over how to solve his strange problem while he keened in a corner.

And then, leaping almost the entire length of the map, there’s a great straight line between circles that I’d drawn, marking that perfect New Year’s Day many years later when the Wapta finally consented and we sailed for hours on best-ever snow under a windless, baking sun, sailing, smiling, from one end of the ice to the other. The exclamation marks drawn above the line don’t begin to convey the joy of that long-ago day.

This book is, I think, a bit like that map, a collection of bearings through another great passion of my life: writing about the mountains I love so much and the people who bring them to life. I’ve selected pieces that I think tell the story of both the writer and the things written, trying to make sense of the path I’ve had the privilege to follow. As on the map, one waypoint led to another, and then to another, and the journey between them was rich.

There are a few landmarks in my parallel journeys as climber and writer that I cover in the pieces themselves, others that I navigate to in the introductions and codas to the stories. It’s been a pleasure to revisit these pieces and to write the notes, thinking about the stories behind the stories and looking back to see where both my writing and I have changed. They’ve given me the chance to evaluate what I got right, and in more than a few places, what I got wrong.

It proved to be something of a Frankensteinian undertaking to choose which pieces to put in this book and to figure out how to stitch them together. The stories included here certainly weren’t written with the thought that they’d ever be read together. Rants about the state of climbing bump up against pieces about the same subject that claim to have journalistic neutrality. Shards of comedy are nestled in amongst stories about terrible tragedy. Fiction and quasi-fictional pieces follow tales of all-too-true crime.

The stories and experiences here span more than three decades, and the world, the world of adventure and I have all changed a lot in that stretch of time. During the months of pulling this book together, I debated, over and over, with myself and with others, whether I should keep some pieces out of this book, or edit the pieces that are included here, to reflect those changes. There are certainly a few places where, with 2018 lenses and 61-year-old sensibilities, I’m surprised by what I wrote, and by what I apparently thought. In the end, though, other than editing for greater clarity, for the most part I’ve left intact even those stories that don’t quite have a 2018 conscience. I have some faith that, even if they leave me shaking my own head today, these early stories do reflect the thinking of their time and can perhaps serve as relics that help us understand and appreciate how far we’ve come. They certainly help me see how long my own journey was.

If there’s one thing I hope transparently pulls all these fragments of that journey together it’s how much I’ve earnestly and consistently cared about the mountain world for all these years.

There are a few crucial points I want to highlight here in this preface, mostly to thank some people who acted as guides along the way. There’s no question that I’ve been privileged with opportunities that many better writers haven’t. Several people have held doors open for me and have given me chances to write, and I don’t want to underestimate that privilege. My editors and friends made some pieces far better than they would have been in my hands alone. And here’s the heart of it: I have been paid, for God’s sake, to do what I love doing best. All of the people involved in my journey – as partners, friends, critics, editors – have been invaluable to me, but they might be invisible in the stories themselves.

Here are a few who deserve special thanks:

George Bracksieck, the long-ago editor of Rock and Ice, was the first person to put me into print, and every writer will understand how much that first vote of confidence means.

Urs Kallen and Dave Cheesmond had the courage to commit to the idea of a Canadian climbing magazine at a time when it couldn’t possibly make money, and then showed even greater blind faith by offering me the editorship of their Polar Circus. Despite a lack of editorial experience, they gave me free rein to explore and publish an entirely different kind of Canadian climbing writing, and that freedom came straight out of their pockets. I never thanked them enough for how my life changed as a result of that offer.

The most important door that Polar Circus opened was the chance to serve for 13 years as the editor of The Canadian Alpine Journal. In many ways, the CAJ was a dream project for a mountain writer: I was immersed for months at a time in the culture of our community and had the privilege to learn so much about our mountains and the people who climb them. I had the opportunity to work with, and learn from, some really good mountain writers, and was also given the forum to speak, pretty much unbridled, about the Canadian climbing way.

Bernadette McDonald, Shannon O’Donaghue and Joanna Croston at the Mountain Book and Film Festivals at The Banff Centre have been incredibly good to me, trusting me with the space to develop relationships, opinions and ideas, all of which led to even more opportunities – including the roots of some of the pieces you’ll find in this book.

The greatest gift from Banff has been the privilege of hosting the Voices of Adventure series that Chris mentioned in his gracious foreword. That chance to sit down and just plain talk with some of the people I respect most in the world of adventure influenced both my view of that world and my writing in more ways than I can count.

There are a couple of editors who deserve special mention for their role along the way. Michael Kennedy at Climbing, and then Alpinist, was always willing to accept pitches from me and then make the pieces immeasurably better. And James Little, formerly of explore, is, simply, one of the best editors a writer could ever hope to work with. Most of the pieces that fill this book, and all of the pieces that saw me get broader recognition for my writing, were channelled through James. He’s been a great friend and a great partner to have along on any adventure.

Lastly, to Don Gorman and the crew at Rocky Mountain Books, you deserve huge credit for all you’ve done for Canadian adventure literature in the past decade. Having sat on both sides of the table – in writing and publishing chairs – I appreciate how much commitment you’ve had to your writers. I know many of them understand that their books would never have seen daylight without your faith, commitment and effort. It’s been a pleasure to work with you.

Finally, special thanks to RMB’s copy editor Kirsten Craven for her wise suggestions and deft touch with the scalpel, to the Bow Valley’s master of light, Paul Zizka, for his striking cover of a winter’s night at Moraine Lake, and to Lauren Shaw for her transcriptions of early stories that came out long before the digital age.

—Geoff Powter

Canmore, 2018

PART I

PIECES OF ME

THAT JOY

From The Canadian Alpine Journal, 1994

There are moments of perfection in this game of ours: times of clarity of purpose and of simplicity; diamond bright days of sun and snow, summers of baking warm rock; moments with decades of memory behind them. Last September, after week upon week of perfect conditions, rain stormed into our valley just long enough to take the polish off the summer. When the storm broke after a soggy week, it was hard to find anyone with the faith to rush out into the canyons, and I ended up heading out alone.

Walking from the parking lot, I started into an evening washed with a tide of memories. The past sometimes comes back with the gentlest of hints, and the prompt for my nostalgia that day was simply an empty parking lot. Not that long ago, that’s the way that climbing always was: never a soul around; every adventure a quiet, solitary one.

But I was never alone that evening: throughout the climbs, the smell of the damp trees, the black shine of the drying rock, the burble of the creek brought many moments and wonderful people back from the past. I could reach for a hold and be overwhelmed by a flashback to a similar reach on granite 3000 kilometres away. A bird whispering in the wood became a friend’s voice happily calling off a belay. The hint of snow on the peaks rimming the canyon conjured a hundred other mountains I’ve dreamt, seen, touched and climbed. What stories this game has filled my life with; what friends and joys; what great tragedies, but what transcendent bliss. There is little in my life that I can’t tie to climbing: there are few dates that I don’t address relative to the trips I’ve done; few challenges that I don’t measure in comparison; few relationships that ever seem as full.

That evening I left the canyon ten climbs later, and I came out richer, fuller and, as always, a little happier within. Two days after, I packed my familiar duffels and went to Nepal, and one month after, I stood on a summit with the world below, just as I do in my dreams.

There is one reason to live this climbing life, to want it, to write it, to breathe it, and it is utterly simple: it makes us feel this way.

Ω

I’ve begun with this short piece and the next one in the hope that they might offer some insight into what follows in the rest of the book. They are, I think, good examples of the paired bookends of my experience of the mountains and of the opposing gravities that have pushed and pulled me as both a climber and a writer through nearly 50 years attached to mountains.

These forces are the constants in the math of my mountain life. On the one side of the equation, as in the piece above, the reckoning is simple and sunny: Climbing = Happiness. It’s an arithmetic that’s very familiar to most people I know who climb, and it would have been very hard – especially at the time of my life when I wrote the piece – to convince me the calculation was wrong. I saw the proof every day. Just the briefest spell on a rock face, a snowy ridge or a pillar of ice could turn the sourest day perfectly sweet, and a really good day was always made that much better by a view from a high place. And the couple of months in the Himalaya I mention above? I can testify that a trip like that can change the course of a life.

Mountains have always been the sharpest mirrors for me: they’ve simplified, purified and clarified my life, and have reliably shown me the better sides of myself, but there is also, of course, a more complex other side of the mountain equation. On that darker half – the edge the next piece considers – the calculation is far more bitter but is just as true. There, Climbing = Fear + Tragedy + Loss. Like too many climbers I know, I’ve spent too much time on that shadowed half. I’ve shivered through that fear, I’ve seen tragic things that leave lasting scars, I’ve lost far too many friends.

And like a lot of mountain writers, I’ve also found it far easier to write about the darkness than about the light. It’s just plainer to explain how a mountain can break your leg than it is to compellingly describe how the same peak can make you a better person.

For good or bad, it’s certainly been the darker side of mountain life I’ve most often been asked to write about. Somewhere along the path – perhaps because I was a psychologist living in a mountain town, perhaps because I simply accepted the challenge – a pattern started: when something bad or complex or confusing happened in mountains, my phone would ring, and I would answer it, I’d talk and I’d write.

I have loved that journey, trying to understand and explain the life we lead in the mountains, but – as the next piece suggests – that love hasn’t always been easy.

27 FUNERALS AND A WEDDING

From explore, 2003

I no longer remember my first kiss.

Like so many other rites of adolescent passage – the first time I drove a car, my first drink, the first furtive hit of a joint – my first taste of a woman has blurred over time, so that, as much as I sweetly remember her, I can no longer remember where or when I kissed her. Even though these other rites all occurred at roughly the same time in my life, it is only the memory of my first blood that is inviolate, written as clearly inside me as it is written in the scar on my right arm, where I first hit rock.

A close, humid, eastern summer morning, barely two months after we’d started climbing. The sun was already brazing the air and the mosquitoes were swarming as we geared up for the longest, hardest route we’d yet tried. I was terrified and I should have been; we were really just kids, book-taught because no one else we knew climbed, with gear chosen out of poverty rather than common sense and with attitude that far exceeded our abilities. We were pushing harder and harder, way past our limits, cowboys every time we went out that first summer.

I shook and clattered and grunted my way up the first half of the first pitch that day, quickly coming to the realization that I was playing in the wrong league. I just barely kept my head together, but that only got me deeper into trouble, because any comfort was an illusion. I managed to pause and rest briefly behind a small tree before seeking salvation out to the right, but then I suddenly found myself completely off route, lost in a maze of brittle, loose granite shards scabbed with rusty lichen.

Everything I touched moved, sending little skitters of dust down the rock and into my eyes. I sweated and held my breath and prayed, while miles below my hungover partner started to bellow some inane song. I shook, I cursed, I tried to find God, I screamed, then my arms melted and I pitched. Every single piece of discount gear pinged out or broke; only the tree held. I landed upside down, 90 feet below, my head barely bobbing above the ground.

Once my partner realized that no matter how bad I felt, I hadn’t broken anything, he sagely advised that the only thing to do was get back in the saddle again. Go back up, he insisted, or you’ll never climb again. Good, I said, pulling a blood-soaked sleeve out of a gouge in my arm. "Why would I ever want to climb again? Oh, and fuck you. You were sitting on your ass down here. No, I mean it, he said. Go back up, before you get too scared."

It was madness, but he was absolutely right. By the end of the day, I could hardly move for the bruises and scrapes, but against the odds we’d finished the climb and our marrow-deep exuberance outweighed any pain I felt. I understood then, in that moment, that joy can have blood in it, and that understanding changed me. As though I suddenly had charge of my life. As though even the smallest moments of my fate were entirely up to me. No kiss ever offered half that much.

Of all the questions that climbers, backcountry skiers and other outdoor athletes are asked, it’s the toughest one: Why? Why do what you do, when you know the consequences? When you’ve even seen the consequences? Why in the world would you get back up and do it again? What is wrong with you people?

It’s certainly not as though we don’t know there might be blood involved. Outdoor literature drips with the stuff; death and maiming and pain flow through adventure tales with the power of stigmata and the predictability of war. And yet we play anyway – climbing, skiing, paragliding, paddling, diving – while average, sensible people shake their heads and ask, again, Why? You know the risks, but you ride it anyway. The weatherman says storm, but you keep packing. That hole could be a keeper, but you line it up. Even after half your group gets swallowed by an avalanche, you head out and ski the next day.

There are a million individual reasons for what we do, reasons that run far deeper than Mallory’s koan Because it’s there will ever reveal. The reasons change as we age and gain experience, but for most of us, the reasons begin in the same soil: that great, blind, silly hubris of adolescence. Death? It might happen to somebody else, but not to me.

A short month after my fall, I was press-ganged into helping out in a rescue in the Shawangunks, the climbers’ mecca in New York State. Some guy had cartwheeled off the top of a 90-metre cliff, and the local climbing ranger loaded six of us into the back of his pickup truck. Ten minutes later, shaking with uncertainty, we unloaded a Stokes litter, scrambled up slippery brush to the foot of the hot white wall and set up just below a ledge. The ranger was giving orders to ready the stretcher, but I wasn’t listening, because my eyes were following the course of a crimson stream slowly making its way down the rock from the ledge. The stream started in what I sickeningly realized was a cave in a man’s skull at the edge of the ledge. The body suddenly went into seizure, the ranger climbed up to hold the man down and one of the rescuers threw up.

The fool – that’s what everyone called him later, an act of distancing ourselves from the event after the two hellish hours of getting this broken, delirious man to an ambulance – had bought a couple of hundred bucks of brand new gear, tied into a terrible little piece of protection, right beside an enormous oak, and stepped off the top for the first rappel of his soon-to-end life. He was gone before he reached the hospital. And around the campfire that night we all said, What a fucking idiot! I’d never do something that stupid.

This is what we do. We convince ourselves that our skills, our experience, our will were all the magic we need to survive. We didn’t need superstition or luck, because we had knowledge that we could use like an amulet to get us out of epics or help us avoid them entirely. I know what this weather’s going to do, we started to hear ourselves say. I can make this safe. Or If you know this move, you can get through that trouble on the river.

Then, at some point, with experience and skills and lessons learned, we moved past most of the fear, and the game changed. The beauty of things revealed suddenly made the risk make sense: beauty of place, the pure, graceful joy of movement, the pleasure of friendships built in shared challenge and the victory of doing what everyone said we couldn’t. Those things all became the real reason to be out there; we loved what we saw, and loved how we felt. The fear was just a hurdle on the way to some place new and remarkable.

In the face of what we thought of as our great knowledge, the blood seemed less a threat – all we had to do was blind ourselves to the fact that people with much greater skills and knowledge were dying around us. By my tenth year of climbing, I’d been to 15 funerals. At one, I’d watched a mother bury her only two children; at another, I said goodbye to a lover. Twenty years later, I look back and realize that was the smallest number of funerals I’d go to in any subsequent decade. My older brother has been to five funerals his entire life.

In 1988, I was given the chance I’d dreamed of all my life: to go to the Himalaya, to perhaps the most beautiful mountain in the world, with wonderful, tight, friends. Blood wasn’t in the picture, not even in my worst dreams. But beauty in the mountains can make you ignore clouds on the horizon, and for three weeks on Ama Dablam, beauty was what we had. Incredible weather, climbing in T-shirts on perfect, dry, crystal-studded granite on a peak that at that point had hardly been climbed at all.

But then, two days from the top, a storm hit us as suddenly as an avalanche, and a friend slipped off the end of a rope shredded by the wind and fell into the clouds.

It was impossible to think of not going to look for him, though I knew right away it was going to be the back of the ranger’s truck all over again – but this time alone. How ironic: We had nearly a mile of rope with us, thoughtfully strung out all over the mountain to guarantee our safety, but not one spare foot in the high camp when Charlie fell. So I climbed down into the glowering cold dark, unroped, calling his name, afraid of what I knew I would find. In the end, though, it wasn’t really Charlie that I sat beside in the fading light, just the flesh and bone that used to hold him back.

I jumared back up into the chilling storm, we made a funeral pyre and we left the mountain, and in Tengboche, Tom proposed to Susan. In the shadow of that most beautiful peak, perhaps with Charlie watching, we gathered for one of the richest, happiest weddings I’ve ever seen. Then we left for Thailand or for home, and most of us didn’t climb again for quite a while.

John. Ron and David. Catherine. Wilma. Simon. Nicci. Alex. Bugs. Dion. Mugs. Mark. Rooney. Guy. Jim. Dan. Karl. Chris. George. Dan. Ian. Karen. Lauren. Lawrence. Charlie. We’re not alone as a community in the numbers of our lost friends – the frequency of deaths of firefighters, cops and soldiers everywhere puts our own losses in chilling perspective – but, as a group, adventurers may be unique in the way we consecrate the activities that kill us as great and noble pursuits.

Of course, not all agree with the consecration. I’ve stood on one side of the fence when I buried friends, but I’ve also stood on the other, when I counselled the people left behind. Grieving widows, angry children, angrier parents, friends whose hearts hurt. It’s the part we don’t talk about too much. In adventure, you’re never supposed to leave your partner behind, even in the stories you tell.

Evolutionary biologists have an answer to the puzzling Why? They argue we have been sculpted by our distant, collective experience in ways that we’re not the least aware of – in fact, in ways that we try to deny, in the hopes of being greater than what runs in our blood. We forget that for the vast majority of our time on Earth, our survival was completely determined by our capacity to stare down death. But instead of celebrating this power, we declare faith, love and community as our salvations, and decry risk as the enemy, as though our successes in the gentle realms aren’t entirely contingent upon our ability to face fear. Somewhere, deep down in the bones, there may be a need as resilient as survival, an instinct to prove that we live as a result of personal agency, and not because someone else lets us live.

Four years after Ama Dablam, I returned to the Himalaya, in the way that one returns to a lover who has betrayed you – hesitant, not wanting to discover that perfect love, violated once, was bound to hurt again. It didn’t. It was an iconic trip: a summit, a great team, a magnificent mountain, and I climbed my heart out.

And yet, as we left the mountain, swathed in our bliss, another climber whom we’d just met watched his friend and then his fiancée slip away down the sun-burnished wall. He stumbled down alone in a storm. Our mountain was not the same as his.

The past year, my thirtieth in the mountains, was unlike any other, summing up all the good and the bad, the grand and the tragic, and framing risk against the bigger picture in a way I’d never experienced. There was real-world blood: My mother died – supposedly a blessing, because she had been painfully sick. Unlike any other death I’d experienced before, she was able to say, It’s time. There were climbing deaths – two young, bright lights avalanched off a mountain in Alaska – and there were the skiing avalanches in BC that the press and the public dissected, bringing into luminescent relief just how different our community seems to be at times. And then there were losses that combined the mountain and real worlds: climbers taken by illness rather than rockfall.

Blood was back on the surface of things – of everything, it seemed – and I was given the chance to question the differences in all these losses. Which made more sense? Which hurt more? Which seemed a tragedy while the other was simply life?

And, finally, my own blood came full circle. Last year, it was my turn to do something I’d never be stupid enough to do. I rappelled off the end of a rope. I screwed up. Plain and simple. From 20 feet, I hit the ground and bounced so high my partner thought I’d died. Once again, the lesson was in getting back in the saddle, committing to a faith that it would make sense in the end. I put it off for a while, then went to a favourite crag, chalked up and climbed. Why?

Because it was worth it.

ON ASSINIBOINE

From Canadian Alpine Classics, 2018

This piece was written nearly 30 years after three friends and I completed an