The now familiar scene unfolds like a good story. The yearly cycle of driving North and East through the night, over the Coquihalla highway, through Revelstoke, over Roger's Pass underneath Sir Donald, to end up in Golden, B.C. Lucky for us it was not too cold outside, as we snoozed the remaining 4 hours to daylight in Summer's cramped Toyota Tercel in down jackets and sleeping bags.
I had learned my lesson the previous two years. To climb ice in the Canadian Rockies you needed several things: an alarm clock to motivate for the pre-dawn starts, a good climbing partner who doesnt mind a little cold and wet, and a car with heat. Summer was from Arizona and didn't like cold, but is always up for something new. Her wristwatch had an alarm. And the Tercel had plenty of heat, unlike my van; driving in below-zero (° C) was downright comfortable. The bonus was that the Tercel is also front-wheel drive, making easy work of the compact snow on the roads.
When the sun rose in Golden, somewhere close to the edge of a time zone, we drove on up the Kicking Horse, ogling the ice climbs that had formed and not formed yet. We pulled off the road to check out Graduate Gully and Green Gully (once known as "Wetter than your Wife"). We moved on to look at the conditions in Field, traditionally a cold spot and the center for much Yoho ice climbing, with many routes along the Yoho Valley Road, Mt. Dennis and Mt. Stephen. I was not too excited about leading Guiness Gully as my first ice route of the season, or having Summer follow it as her first water-ice route ever! We continued on with the original plan, continued on to Lake Louise to climb the first two rambling pitches of the classic Louise Falls.
We racked up in the parking lot and hiked around the lakeshore to the base of Louise Falls. It was as I remembered it, as I had left it the year before when Gene and I had used this climb as our first-day warm-up. The bottom pitches fat and blue, while the upper pitch was threateningly thin and loomed over the climb with many icicle fangs, waiting to gobble us up. And spit us out. After a brief introduction to cleaning ice protection, I started up on my lead. The ice was brittle but fun! I broke my pick on a rock within 20 minutes, but hardly noticed and made it to a belay in 30 meters easily. Summer followed, moving very slowly, getting used to the medium. She had climbed glacial ice before, stuff much steeper than this, but had never sunk ice tools into water-ice. It is a different medium, one that requires crafting holds, good footwork, and sometimes calves to support failing arms. Good nerves help when leading. Falling with lots of pointy things strapped to your body is generally considered poor style in the Canadian Rockies.
Summer finished seconding the pitch and I took one of her tools for the next lead, giving her my tool with the broken pick. Although climbing with a broken pick is harder, and so would make her getting used to ice climbing all that much more difficult, leading with a broken pick might not be the smartest thing. I like to stack the odds in my favor. I led up and left, up some rambling ice to the left side of the cave formed by the frozen pillars spilling down from above. The final few meters were interesting climbing on mushroomed ice, steep and unconsolidated. Summer came up, never dropping a tool or a screw as she cleaned and seconded the pitch. In the Rockies, climbing with umbilical cords on your ice tools is considered bad style, as is dropping stuff off a climb. But since you do almost everything with one hand when ice climbing (and sometimes your teeth), dropping things is pretty common.
We rapped off the route and Summer top-roped the first pitch again in waning light. We got back to the car after dark and drove to Banff, where the order of business was to first buy a new pick to replace the broken one, then get to the hostel and dry out or wet gear, so that things would not freeze. At the hostel we learned there were few beds left, and none for the next night, New Year's Eve. We cooked some food and dried out gear.
The next day we drove a short distance from the Banff townsite to do a climb on Cascade Mountain, called Rogan's Gully. Rogans is an easy climb but has a lot of terrain - 300 m worth of climbing and scrambling up a narrow gully. It is located next to Cascade Falls, a famous Rockies moderate that has already claimed three lives this year. We started through the trees and roped up at the bottom of the first pitch. The route climbs a moderate ice step and then directly into a low angle gully, sometimes only as wide as a climber. Above the gully there are short snow and scree slopes interspersed with short steep steps. Summer and I roped up for the first few pitches and tried simulclimbing, but she moves slower than I do up the steeper terrain, and we didn't gain much time by simulclimbing. After the Narrows, we de-roped and soloed the shorter, steeper steps we encountered above. The climb was thin in spots, making tool placements delicate and in spots there was some mixed climbing, crampons screeching on the rock walls, gloved hands grasping the limestone. It was unseasonably warm, and parts of the climb were in the sun. It was an unusual thing to be climbing ice in Banff on December 30th in the sun, in mild spring temperatures.
The top pitch of Rogan's is a steep little stepped affair, and I led it on the heels of a party of three above. Summer came up and was pissed - I hadn't thought very hard about the position of the belay, and she had been exposed and pelted by ice. The walk-off proceeds skiers left down a treed buttress to a rappel station. Here we set up our twin 8.5 mm ropes and rappelled to the ground. When we tried to pull the ropes, one of them got stuck. My immediate reaction was to blame someone else. Summer frowned at me and promptly reminded me that I had been the one pulling and had been the one that stopped pulling at the critical moment. Now we were faced with a difficult task of climbing back up steep and unprotected rock, in failing light, in plastic boots, to free the tangled rope. I went up, feeling a bit guilty for my childishness, while Summer belayed. I found 2 manky knifeblade pitons and clipped them, climbing slowly and carefully, picking the easiest line. Some harder moves (in plastic boots anyway) put me past the difficulties, and I was able to scramble higher and free the rope, which had become wrapped in dead branches, then pinned by a rock. I rappelled off and cursed as I almost got the roped caught again, but we started walking back to the car when the rope finally came down.
Knowing that there was no space in the hostels for the night, we went to my friend Jason's place. His family owns and manages the Johnston Canyon cabins and lodge at the mouth of Johnston Canyon, off the Bow Valley Parkway in Banff. We found him there, nursing his sick wife Angie and pouring creek water into a rented hot tub. Jason had gone with me to Alaska in May 1998, and I had seen him rarely since. We ended up drinking alot of beer and scotch, making some microwave soup in a beer pitcher, and talking about space and climbing.
The next day I was nursing Summer through a horrible hangover. Around midday Jason, Angie, and I headed to town to get some supplies. I bought bottled water, soup, and cookies, and brought them back to Summer. Then Jason and I hiked up Johnston Canyon 30 minutes to the upper falls and got a nice easy pitch of grade 3 water-ice in before it got dark. Summer was feeling better when we got back, and Jason and Angie changed into their costumes for their New Year's Eve costume party that thye were throwing at the lodge. Summer and I took off and lodged at the ACC Clubhouse in Canmore, where we had made reservations when we found out there was no space in the hostels in Banff. Here we found a group of young revellers, intent on getting plastered. We enjoyed their background noise as we cooked, Summer read, and I wrote in my journal. New Years rolled around, the lights didnt fail because of Y2K, and we went to bed.
Day Four found us tromping into Grotto Canyon, to do His, Hers, and Grotto Falls. Grotto Canyon is a pleasant, narrow canyon with many sport climbs and elusive Indian rock art on its walls. We hiked in along the frozen streambed for 20 minutes and came face to face with an extremely nasty looking His and Hers, destroyed by warm temperatures and sunlight. No matter, on we hiked another 100 meters to the base of Grotto. It was thin and running with water; I led it in an easy full-length pitch, at no where near the grade 3 at which it is rated. Summer and I hiked out of Grotto with mixed feelings. In was happy to have seen a new area, but unhappy at the amount of time we had spent climbing. No matter, we would make up some of that mileage by heading over to the Canmore Junkyards, a great practice area. I led Scottish Gully, usually a 3 but at the moment an easy but thin 2, then led a steep pillar at WI3 to the left of Scottish Gully. Summer took the rope to the top of the Junkyards, her first official (albeit easy) ice lead, and we walked off in the gathering darkness.
Back at the ACC Clubhouse, we ate a good dinner and intented to go to sleep early so that we could get one more climb in on the way back to Seattle the following day: Riverview in Kicking Horse Canyon, near Golden B.C., a 100 m long Water Ice 3 route we had seen from the road. We got to sleep and actually roused to the alarm at 6 am, the first time we had really gotten up early on this trip. We packed up and ate breakfast and were on the road heading West before dawn, intent on climbing the route and getting back to Seattle in decent time. We got down to Golden and parked the car. I was ahead and already beating my way up the hill when a railroad inspector stopped Summer on the railroad tracks and told her the climbs in Kicking Horse were on private property and off limits to climbers. He said that the cops had been "cracking down" on climbers lately. Summer came up to the base of the climb and relayed the news. I didn't know what to think: on one hand, I wanted to climb and hadn't heard of access problems in Kicking Horse before. Plus we had driven a long way to climb some ice. On the other hand I didn't want to get busted and pay money for something like trespassing, and didn't want to give ice climbers a bad rep or create access problems. Riverview was in plain view of the road and it would be easy for a landowner or police to call us off the climb. The climb looked casual, Summer wanted to climb, but we ended up bailing -- an exericise in ethics. It was doubly frustrating to walk back to the car and see climbers on Pretty Nuts, another climb preportedly on private property and off-limits, unharrassed by the RCMP driving by.
We ate some food in Golden, then started the long drive back.