Sam's Climbing Blog: The Bugaboos

After spending some more days at the Atlantis Wall in Echo Canyon, where Tim and I managed to do 2/3 of all the routes on the sector, including several 7b's en c's and a 43m long 8a+, called Buffet Royale, for me, we packed our stuff and headed towards the Bugaboo Provincial Park, located in the Purcell mountain range to do some trad climbing in an alpine setting. At the same time this was the first time for me, and so i had to accept everything that's part of it, like long and hard approaches with heavy backpacks, moderate food, bad windy (hurricane is more appropriate) weather, getting up endless cols and the like. But we were able to climb some nice popular routes on all of the most important spires: McTech Arete on Crescent spire and Northeast Ridge on the Bugaboo spire were two nice but very easy mellow routes. Much harder and with a longer approach was Fingerberry Jam on Fingerberry Tower (5 pitches), located next to the Howser towers and North Summit Direct on the west face of the Snowpath Spire. One thing that all these climbs had in common was the fact that there always happened something, from minor shitty things to real epics. I felt like cursed, especially because Tim went a few times climbing with Aki, a Japanese we met in Bow Valley, and things went smooth when climbing with him, but when I joined something happened. Or the rope got stuck when rapping down, or we couldn't find the rap station at the top of Fingerberry Tower, and, after looking for more than an hour, had to rap down the route we climbed, leaving behind several slings ad biners, and with again rope problems, arrived at the campsite at 11 pm after walking 2 hours with soaking wet shoes. Another time I stared climbing totally frozen in Sunshine crack (NW face of Snowpatch spire), arriving at the first anchor as a dead man. But the epic of all epics mother nature kept aside for us 'till the very end. To days ago Tim, me and Aki wanted to do the North Summit Direct, 8 pitches containing some 5.11 pitches, fairly hard for me, since my crack techniques sucks. We knew the chance of showers was 60% that day, meaning a thunderstorm in the afternoon, as low hot air collides with cold mountain air, creating thunder and lightning. We were a bit slow with 3 guys, and the 3 last pitch all of a sudden hail came down from dark angry clouds, that we already saw approaching from afar. Nonetheless we continued climbing, hoping to arrive to the top before all hell broke loose. Idle hope actually, when Aki continued it stared to hail more and more, we yelled at Aki to rap dawn, and when he arrived we saw his chalk bag was full of hail instead of chalk, and we weren't able to see our anymore. They were covered with an icy layer of hail. So we had to rap down the route on some fixed nuts and slings with soaky wet ropes and almost totally frozen hands and bodies. "Climbing is cool", Aki said. He was right, when you're in a warm sleeping bag, with a hot meal and protected against the fury going on outside. We were lucky, we arrived at our tents just in time, the bad weather was accompanied with wind almost 10 beaufort at the scale of Richter. Two other guys, Sang and Nathan, we knew from Squamish can tell the same epic, but a day earlier. While climbing the Becky-Chouinard on the South Howser tower (20 pitches and 'the' Bugaboo classic)- also succesfully climbed by Tim and Aki, congratulations - Nathan got some electrical shocks in his ass and Sang's ice axe started zooming. Scary. So, feeling cursed, Tim and I decided to leave and head towards the US - country of -hopefully - cheap food. Probably we'll go and check out the basalt climbing in Trout Creek.