A Skier's Quest for PWDR

Back country skiing isn’t easy. You want the best, untracked, freshest snow and you won’t accept anything else. Thing is, you have to work for cold smoke. You earn your turns. You skin, you slog, you sweat. You don’t feel your legs screaming. You don’t notice the ice cold air flooding your lungs with every gasp. It’s you, the mountain and you’re paying your dues. With every fucking step, you pay your dues. Snow so deep that you can barely make forward progress? Good. Cliffed out? Awesome. Steep tight trees that you can barely thread a skin track through? Fucking fantastic. The worse the up, the better the down. I want the mountain to fight me every step of the way because it’s just going to make those turns I’m earning mean that much more, feel even more perfect. Chairlifts are for sloppy seconds loving weaklings. Sleds can’t get through the trees. Helis are for pampered old people.

Back country skiers, real back country skiers know that more work, more pain, more sweat, means more powder, more faceshots, more perfect turns.

I know how to work for powder. I know I work for glory.

This story takes us back about two months to the quaint town of Calgary and a day that I found myself sitting at the Vehicle Registry getting my old beat up Subaru wagon registered for another season. Just before I turned to leave though, I asked the guy about personalized plates. A couple of hundred bucks and I could emphatically state my driving force on the license plate of my car. I love wagons, I’m addicted to the most habit forming white powder on the planet. Only one possible plate for me.

PWDRWGN

My suby is the Powder Wagon. It takes me to the mountains, it brings me home, it shelters me at night. My suby is my partner in the powder hunter’s quest for glory. She’s my Powder Wagon. She deserves these plates.

I paid my money, explained what the plates meant on the application and was promised I’d have those plates in two weeks. I was stoked.

Two weeks later, the day of my birthday, I don’t have plates. I have a letter from the Department of Motor Vehicles at Service Alberta letting me know that they’ve decided that my ‘configuration’ does not “fit within the guidelines set out by Service Alberta”.

What. The. Fuck.

Personalized plates are almost universally owned by self-indulgent, narcissistic jackasses who take themselves way too seriously, so my initial thought is ‘meh, whatever’. But then I realize that this is just another mountain, another uptrack between me and Powder. Also, I am a self-indulgent, narcissistic jackass who takes himself way too seriously. So I call the phone number on the letter to find out what the heck they could have possibly rejected my ‘configuration’ for.

I get an incredibly nice and friendly ‘information officer’ who has to call the head office to find out what the deal is because she sure doesn’t see a problem. A short hold later she’s back on the line with the reason. The head office is concerned that powder could be a euphemism for cocaine. Apparently, Service Alberta feels that the word powder must mean cocaine and is so sure of it that no license plate can have that word on it.

I can’t stop laughing.

She asks if I want to appeal. I think this is getting ridiculous. It’s a vanity plate. But you know what? That rejection letter? It’s a cliff band on my uptrack. What do you do when you’re cliffed out on your uptrack? You contour around, find a weakness to exploit, keep going up. You work, you fight, you earn your powder. I want my PWDR.

So I find myself writing a letter of appeal to one Mr. Firoz Mohamed, Director of Motor Vehicles for Service Alberta. A reasonable person must see reason here and grant me my reasonable plates. My only hope is that Mr. Firoz Mohamed is reasonable.

Dear Mr. Mohamed,

I’m contacting you because I just tried to order some personalized plates and was told by letter that my selected plates were deemed not acceptable. The plates in question? PWDRWGN – a contraction of PoWDeR WaGoN. As I explained in the application, I’m am a dedicated back country skier and think that every car on the road should be a station wagon. The only thing I use my car for is to drive out to the mountains on weekends to go back country skiing or mountaineering. I’m chasing powder and normally sleeping in the back of my car so I can be the first guy at the top of a remote peak when the dawn breaks.

I just called in and spoke with a lovely information officer who let me know that the reason (and she had to contact the head office to find out) was that the word powder could be a euphemism for a narcotic.

I’m not even mad; I really just can’t stop laughing.

We live in a province that gets dumped on by snow. We have a ton of ski resorts and one on the biggest back county skiing scenes in the world. This is a province that just increased its dedication to powder safety by $150,000/year (now $250,000/year) in its support of Avalanche Canada. I literally moved to Calgary and started a career here because of the powder that is so accessible to skiers here. And I use powder here as meaning snow, not some clever double entendre. I’m guessing that there are a whole lot more skiers here in Alberta than there are narcotics abusers.

My plea to you Mr. Mohamed is two-fold. For one, I had no idea that the word ‘powder’ had developed such a nefarious and despicable undertone that the average person on the street could draw no other conclusion than that an old, green, 1995 Subaru Legacy Wagon, festooned to ski stickers and a PWDRWGN vanity plate, driving out past Canmore on its way to a weekend of shredding the gnar, must somehow be making a reference to narcotics. Let’s take back that word. Let’s return ‘powder’ its true meaning – that magical substance that drives so much of Alberta’s tourism – snow. Deep, fluffy, magical, snow.

The second portion of this plea is specifically how you can help do that. Please consider granting me my personalized plates so that I can continue to have fun driving my old beater Suby into the mountains late Friday night after a long week at work, loaded down with good friends, ski gear and a desire to explore the amazing terrain of this province, my home.

I will do my part. I will let everyone I know know that powder doesn’t just have to reference a narcotic but that it in general references any ‘fine, dry, particulate’ and that here, in this province, it means the lightest, driest snow found anywhere in the world.

Thank you for your consideration of this matter.

Sincerely,

Phil Tomlinson, Ph.D.

Had to include the Ph.D. in there so that he realized just how deadly serious this matter is. A doctor doesn’t deal with trifling matters.

And so I awaited his response and it came shortly.

Mr. Tomlinson,

Thanks for your inquiry and detailed information. Your request will be reviewed within the next business day or so. I will be in touch.

Sincerely,
Firoz Mohamed
Director, Motor Vehicles
Registry Services, Service Alberta

I chose to be the bigger man and did not immediately rail at the miss-honorific. The important thing here though, is that he didn’t immediately reject my appeal out of hand. I was contouring that cliff band. I’m glad he appreciated my ‘detailed information’. Sounded like a man of reason.

A couple of emails back and forth later, mostly me pestering him for a response and I found myself on the phone with Mr. Mohamed. Pretty quickly I could tell I was dealing with a reasonable person. He explained that people are passionate about their plates and incredibly creative in their attempts to get offensive plates through. He told me about his battles over EPH OPH and GFYS and, oddly enough NEWFIE. He explained his concern that some people – not myself or himself mind you – might come to the conclusion that my license plate was referencing cocaine and take offence.

Mr. Mohamed said he could tell that I was quite the ‘ski buff’ and asked if I was interested in compromising with another skiing related plate like, say, SKIBUFF. I’m not compromising, I want my powder and I will contour this cliff band and thread these trees as far as I have to. No, I want PWDRWGN. After a bunch more back and forth he tells me that we have one final option.

Mr. Mohamed will ‘conditionally approve’ my PWDRWGN, but he’s going to keep an eye on the situation and if he gets too many complaints, he reserves the right to recall the plates. This is nothing short of complete victory, I found the weakness in the cliff band, the ascending bench through the trees, because he might call this ‘conditional approval’ but every plate is conditionally approved. He’s just been telling me about plates he’s recalled. I win. Granted I win thanks to a reasonable person seeing reason, but I win. I get my PWDR. My Powder Wagon gets her name tag.

Backcountry skiers, real backcountry skiers know you gotta work for your powder. We work, we sweat, we earn our powder – neck deep blower or an incredibly inane and pointless vanity plate for our beat up old Subaru wagons.

And so ends the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever written other than my dissertation. Seriously, I can’t believe that Mr. Firoz Mohamed, truly a reasonable man confronted with a completely unreasonably one was so unfailingly polite, professional and conciliatory and I cannot thank him enough for professional emails a hilarious phone call and my license plates (assuming they ever show up, they’re late).

Book Review: Buried by Ken Wylie

2003 was such a horrific year for avalanches that it changed the face of backcountry skiing in Canada forever. 29 people would die in avalanches that year. Arguably the most infamous in the long list of tragedies was the Connaught Creek slide in Rogers Pass which hit three teachers and 14 grade 10 students. Seven fifteen year old students died in that avalanche, an event that galled the nation. But that wasn't the only major slide incident that year. Just weeks before the Connaught Creek slide, 13 skiers including guide Ken Wylie were hit by a slide while skiing with Selkirk Mountain Experience. Once again there were seven dead at the end of the day. Fourteen people dead in only two incidents. Jesus.

Out of these incidents, the Canadian Avalanche Centre - now Avalanche Canada, was born. If you had to find some good to come out of these events, it would be that it woke us up to the need to get our shit together. To figure out training, better assess danger, to communicate with each other.

Ken Wylie was an assistant ski guide working for Selkirk Mountain Experience at the time of the slide. Buried for over 30 minutes, a guide who led his clients to their deaths. When I heard that he had written a book about the event I expected something like Krakauer's Into Thin Air. I expected something slickly written, a clinical assessment of what happened that day, maybe a bit of back story on the cast of characters so you feel badly when they die. I expected the book equivalent of a movie 'based on a true story'. I expected some finger pointing, some technical reasons why Ken wasn't responsible for what happened.

That isn't what this book is.

Buried isn't a clinical assessment of what happened. In fact, the avalanche itself is only a small component of the book. The book breaks down into two halves. The first half deals with the slide and its aftermath, and not just the immediate aftermath but several years worth of dealing with the psychological trauma.

The book isn't slickly written. It isn't badly written, but it's awkward in places, uncomfortable. There isn't a hero, Ken is savage in his self assessments. You aren't watching a movie, you're living his life. The periodic stumbles and awkward, uncomfortable passages make it impossible to feel like an impartial observer. Ken's humanity, his flaws, his pain is inescapable.

Ken made mistakes, people died. He then made more mistakes. At times it felt as if this brutal self assessment, the agony of living with these mistakes led to a sense of despair. It felt like Ken was desperately searching for some good to come from his life - not to his life, but from. He wanted to feel as if he'd contributed something, but he'd fucked shit up so badly in his life that maybe the best thing he could do would just be a warning to others through this book. 'Look what happens when you fuck shit up like I did; don't be me.' It's brutal and it affected me deeply.

The second half of the book takes an altogether different tone. Ken looks back on his life and sees that he's made all of these mistakes - repeatedly, lived through so many experiences that should have been formative, but he failed to learn lessons at the time; so he re-examines these past experiences, past mistakes and tries to learn those lessons. What should he have learned, how can he take these experiences and use them to move forward, to grow as a person, to figure out how to live life.

The book takes you from a place rooted in despair and looks to build something positive out of a godamned mess. So many of us have felt incredibly lost and as though we've backed ourselves into a corner that it's hard to imagine escape from, and that resonates clearly here. It's incredibly powerful. Ken went through an experience that I pray is significantly worse than anything I ever have to deal with. Ken made the same mistakes over, and over again, just like I do. But Ken also seemed to figure a way out of his hole or at very least he found the strength and courage to try and I cannot overstate my respect for that.

Buried was not an easy book to read. By the end of the first half I found myself emotionally incredibly raw, I didn't want to keep reading but I also couldn't put the book down. I was watching a car wreck, but it felt like my car wreck. The second half of the book you get a bit more distance from Ken, which to be honest, is a relief. But you also get hope, inspiration to look at your own past mistakes in the same unflinching manner and learn those lessons you didn't learn at the time. If Ken can do it, after being through so much, fuck, maybe so can I.

You can get Ken Wylie's Buried from the Alpine Club of Canada.

Risk, Loss, Mourning, Skiing

JP Auclair died this week.

He was skiing in South America and his death was only one of five people killed in avalanches this week.

Right now there's rallies for democracy happening in Hong Kong. ISIS is butchering people. Putin is annexing Ukraine. Walruses have arrived in amazing numbers on a beach in Alaska because climate change has reached a point where there aren't enough ice floes for them to rest on. There are really important, scary things happening all over the planet. Things that matter.

But JP died and that's what's stuck in my head. I didn't know JP. I never met him. But I respected him. For all I know, he might have been some epic douche. But just like Shane McConkey he seemed like more than just an awesome skier. He seemed like the kind of guy I want to be. He was innovative - he helped make skiing cool again by showing skiers could jib just like the boarders. He helped invent the twin tip ski - he literally took skiing in a new direction. When all of a sudden it seemed like everyone is skiing monster lines, hucking monsters cliffs and stomping monster hits, he recorded the most innovative ski segment in years in a small town. He, with the amazing guys at Sherpas, made skiing down a sidewalk not only cool, but beautiful, emotional. Whether it's accurate or not, I saw JP as innovative, mature and yet never overly serious. He didn't seem to take himself or the sport too seriously and somehow reminded us to have fun.

Shane seemed to be like that too. As so, so epically documented in G.N.A.R., Shane seemed to loathe how seriously skiers sometimes take themselves. He hucked back flips naked. He filmed a ridiculous Bond homage. He invented his saucer boy alter ego just to make people laugh. He invented an entire game about how to be the most ridiculous person on the mountain. He also invented the pin tail ski. He has a god damned type of turn named after him. He invented skiing off cliffs with a wing suit. I didn't just want to be able to ski like Shane, as someone who takes things way too seriously, I wanted to BE more like Shane. I wanted to always remember to have fun. I wanted to remember to not sweat the small stuff. I wanted to remember to relax.

So many other skiers I've either known or have known of have died during my life on skis. Tyler Lewis of the VOC drowned in muddy tree well early season. Sarah Burke, Arne Backstrom, Andreas Fransson, CR Johnson, hell, Doug Coombs died less than a decade ago.

My dad wasn't an amazing skier. He learned to ski when he was 48. He tried to convince my Mom to let him quit his job (as a professor of neurophysiology) and become a ski bum. He volunteered on weekends as a ski patroller. He was like a kid on skis, the happiest I ever saw him. He didn't find it until he was in his forties, but he found what it is to be a skier. Skiing didn't just make him happy when he was skiing, it made him a happier person overall. It made him a better, more relaxed dad. Ten years after he discovered skiing, he died on his skis. Volunteering as a ski patroller, skiing his favourite run, he lost an edge and fell hard breaking a rib which pivoted around and punctured his aorta. Coroner said that if he hadn't seen it, he wouldn't have believed it. Total fluke. Shit happens. Bad luck.

In April I went up to the Fairy Meadows Hut. The day before we got there, there was a fatality in the party there before us. We were the first contact the departing party had. They didn't even know for sure that their friend was dead, the last they saw she was getting CPR in a heli. Countless times last season I would be standing on some ridge top considering a line when I'd hear a heli come in low and disappear up a drainage just across the highway from me. I knew someone was having a really bad day. I felt surrounded by death last season.

Am I good or am I lucky? I am so fucking haunted by that question.

I want to be good and lucky. If you make the right decision 99% of the time, statistically you're still going to get bitten eventually. You need to be good AND lucky. I am terrified that I'm only lucky. Do I make good decisions? Is it my ability to read terrain, snow, my group, that has kept me from joining so many of my heroes?

There's days when the avi danger is high and I go skiing anyway. I tell myself that by sticking to lower angle terrain with big run outs and limited terrain traps I can still ski with an acceptable safety margin. The woman who died at Fairy Meadows just before we got there died on a slope that I could barely believe could produce a fatal slide. There was a wind lip, off to the side, at the base of the line. She was skinning up, the slope went, she was buried over 3m deep in a wind lip that barely looked like it was in the slide path. Maybe she made a bad call. Maybe she should have been fine and just had bad luck. Maybe I would have done the exact same thing as her and it would have been my friends loading into that heli with that thousand yard stare.

At least once a week I have a nightmare. The only dreams I remember are in the mountains and bad shit is happening. I've watched my brother get nailed by a slide and killed in my dreams more times than I can count. Katherine dies in a similar way. Steve hits a tree. Piotr slips on a steep snow slope and goes hurtling into rocks. Christian slips on an icy traverse. Kiran badly breaks her leg in a boulder field, Jenna follows me up an ice route I just led and I discover the rope's totally core shot. Each person gets their own dream, always the same one.

Not everyone dies, but bad shit is happening and I have to deal with it. I'm scared, I don't have anything in my pack I don't normally carry, I'm cold. My brain cuts me no slack. Once a week, something bad happens in the mountains and I have to deal with it. I have to watch my brother die, or a friend get horribly injured. I wake up super anxious. I know it was a dream, but it always feels so real.

The day after the dream is the day that I ask myself if it's worth it. Strung out on coffee, sitting at my desk or on a plane I ask myself if this is really how I want to spend my free time. Is it worth it? Just to slide on snow? Stand on a summit? But then the weekend comes and I'm out there. I'm exhausted, I crest the last pass on a long hike. I mantle up over the top of a route. I ski trees so fast that my brain goes completely quiet and I exist in a state of pure instinct. I don't remember the dreams. I am happy in a way I have never been able to duplicate. I'm where I have to be.

I think skiing makes me a better person. When I've let girlfriends keep me from going into the mountains every weekend, I become a person I don't like. I'm more irritable, more serious, lost in life, less compassionate. In the mountains I remember to be like JP and Shane and take myself a little less seriously. I remember that the little stuff doesn't really matter and that it's almost all little stuff. I remember how lucky we are. I realize how amazing my friends are, how close we are. Through my dreams I realize how devastating it would be to lose them - what they mean to me.

At the same time, that question of 'am I good or am I just lucky' is going to keep haunting me. Maybe that's a good thing. Maybe that will keep me more conservative so when I'm standing on top of that line that I'm pretty sure is safe, maybe I'll take another second to consider it and maybe choose a safer line. Maybe being haunted by that question is what makes me good or at least better than I would otherwise be.

I don't know what the future is going to bring. I hope I never have to watch a friend's body get loaded into a heli. I hope none of them have to watch me get loaded. I hope we're good and lucky. I won't be able to do this stuff forever. I don't know whether I'll mentally or physically break down first, but eventually a weekend is going to come when I don't want to go into the mountains. I hope it happens when I'm 90 and watching my grand kids terrorize their parents just seems like a better use of my time.

What I do know is that every weekend I want to be in the mountains. Every weekend I want to push myself. I want to drag myself into the office Monday morning, sunburned, hoarse, and with a shit eating grin on my face.

JP, Shane, Tyler, my Dad, and all those others that went out on their skis. They knew that they were taking a risk. They knew that risk was worth it, for them. That risk is still worth it for me. I hope it's always worth it.

Not Really a Run on Northover

Type: Loop
Distance: ~40km
Elevation Gain: 1580m

I'd heard good things about Northover Ridge from a few people. It was also another destination that Katherine and I had attempted while she's been injured that we had been turned around on. That time we were turned around because it was a) super cold out and we were freezing mid-day, b) the ridge was getting nailed by howling winds and c) it was completely enveloped in fog and as much fun as bivying in a)the cold and b) howling wind without anything more than a lightweight down jacket and an emergency blanket, we decided that we're old and soft and turned around.

Northover is about 40km car to car and it's a loop so there's no hitchiking or stashing of a bike which pretty seriously reduces the logistical faff which means you spend more time actually doing stuff and then drinking victory beers. The route starts and ends at Upper Kananaskis Lake. I did the loop counter clockwise, heading along the west side of the lake until the Three Isle Lake trail splits off. From Three Isle Lake you head up valley towards a steep scree col which you gain, hang left, and then climb to the obvious peak. From there it's a 5km or so ridge walk before you drop down towards the Aster Lake Campground. From Aster Lake you drop to Hidden Lake, skirt the west shore to it's outflow which doesn't outflow, and follow an overgrown trail until you reconnect with the Upper Kananaskis Lake Trail and follow that out to your car. Piece o' cake.

So I set off, late (10am, not really an alpine start) and slightly hung over from hanging out with friends the night before and started running the trail. I was doing this solo again which I'm finding is just way easier for these longer days, it's nice being able to set your own pace. At least this time I actually brought some bear spray with me. I also had music playing from my speakerphone again as a pretty useless bear deterrent.

Cruising around the lake goes quickly and is pretty gorgeous in places.

I cruised around the Lake pretty quickly and maintained a pretty good pace up to Three Isle Lake. From there though, I slowed to a crawl. This isn't a run - at least not if you're solo. Google Maps shows the Lake having a big southern spur. It doesn't. Or at least it didn't when I was there, maybe when water level is high it fills in, but it was kilometres of lake bed. And not good lake bed. It's shitty talus. I fucking hate talus. Running it solo is suicidal, the odds of blowing an ankle are way too high.

A valley of ankle destroying talus

After a few kilometres you need to gain that col and it's steep scree and talus the whole way up - totally un-runnable. Once you arrive on top of the col the view is great, but you also shows you that you have a bunch more elevation to gain up to a sub peak. More steap, totally un-runnable scree and talus. Gain that sub peak and congrats, you're on the ridge. You can sort of run sections of it, but a number of places have decent exposure and sections are downright a scramble.

From the col, there's a steep talus and scree trail up to the sub peak

I don't like doing scrambles solo. The problem is that the guide books/people/beta out here seem to have really different definitions of what a 'scramble' is. I figured that the route was probably just a hike, but this is a very easy scramble in my book. I used my hands for balance a few times and a fall in a few places a fall would have really sucked. So yea, scramble. I cruised along, ran into a couple that seemed pretty out of their depth who were also trying to do it in a day. They were struggling with the exposure and where moving at a pace that meant they were probably going to end up finishing out their day by headlamp. The nice thing is that the start and end of the route is the trail around the lake which is easy to follow in the dark, so not the end of the world. Actually, I sort of figure that any day that ends up with you slogging out by headlamp is a good day as long as you're comfortable with that sort of thing.

Amazing views from Northover Ridge

Anyway, the ridge is gorgeous. Amazing views, super aesthetic, fucking talus the whole way. You can run some sections but the talus and the exposure are pretty limiting, especially if you're solo. I was missing the ankle deep mud of the Rockwall trail or the alpine meadows of Healey Pass. Another issue on this route is water. Even though it had snowed a few weeks before, some warm weather had melted it all out and it was actually pretty blazingly hot and sunny all day. After Three Isle, you don't have a chance to get any more water for quite a while and up on that ridge, you're getting hammered by the sun - the single Nalgene bottle in my bag wasn't enough and by the end of the ridge I was starting to feel a little wobbly. Nothing major, just had to watch my foot placements and pay a bit more attention to what I was doing. Pack water. More than a litre.

Eventually you drop down off the ridge, follow more talus garbage out to Aster Lake where I stopped for what little food I had left. I way underpacked on food. I had a sandwich, some wine gums and that gawd awful ziplock bag of mangled, melted cookies that I'd been carrying since the Rockwall. The cookies had travelled something like 150km in my pack at this point. I just wanted to finish the supid things. I failed. Even though I really didn't have enough food, I just couldn't eat all of those damn cookies, I was just sick of them.

I was pretty surprised to not see anyone out at Aster Lake. It was later on a Sunday, but I still would have thought someone would have been out there. In fact, I was super surprised how few people I saw all day. Once I left Three Isle Lake, the only people I saw was the couple up on the ridge. I'd expected way, way more traffic on the route. I'm glad I had my inReach with me and had been touching base with people throughout the day - if something had happened, I sure couldn't bank on some nice person passing by and helping me out.

From Aster is a cruise down to Hidden Lake which is actually really pretty. There's a ton of trees that have been died but are still standing, roots exposed, looking like vertical driftwood.

Vertical driftwood

I'd given up on running at this point. The first few kilometers had gone well but after all the talus, any idea of a fast day were long gone so I just hiked out the remainder. As it got dark I dropped into a jog in a few places just to speed things up, but really, I was hiking.

I got back to the car around 7pm, 9 hours after I set off. I hung out on a picnic bench at the lake, guzzling water to try and rehydrate and watched the sun set over the lake. Big mistake, meant I got to try not to mow down wildlife on Highway 40 the whole way out.

Shitty planning, inadequate research, not enough water, not enough food, too many cookies, absolutely fantastic day. Despite the talus, I love the route, it's gorgeous and I'll definitely go back. With more food and water, and someone to patch me up when I blow an ankle on the talus.

GPS, elevation profile, usual stuff is all on Movescount.