Squamishrock

Les MacDonald

From the 1962 Canadian Alpine Journal

I had never realized just what a chunk of the North Arete we had omitted from the lower section when we'd made the 1st ascent back in '62. But there it was sure enough. It was true that it was somewhat concealed in its lower reaches, dropping as it does into the near primaeval jungle around its base. But that was hardly an excuse, for there were always the nagging reminders from Sinclair that it was really only half a climb. Jim, the self-appointed warden-cum-historian of the Squamish Chief. If he said it still had to be done all the way through from top to bottom, "to kind of clean it up," then you can be sure it was probably true. For with the critical eye of the museum curator that Jim has in his self-appointed role of guardian. I suspect the incompleteness of the North Arete was a source of some discomfort to him.

Incomplete and disjointed it was. Not only had Beckey taken a stab at the bottom section one time, and climbed some in the middle on another occasion, but Culbert and Woodsworth, like thieves in the night, had sneaked across the path from the gully in 1961 and climbed the two beautiful pinnacles on the arete - the Acrophobes.

When Mather and I teamed up to climb the arete with Fred in 1962 we reached this step on the wall at dusk on the first day after having started some way up on the ridge by climbing in from the gully.

I remember distinctly asking Fred if it would be possible to traverse off the ridge into the gully. "Not a chance," he said. We shrugged and slept the night, perched on a tiny ledge, roped to a tree, and awoke the next day to finish off the top section. It was some time later that I realized that he knew perfectly well that all you had to do was walk around the corner and find yourself in the wide spacious North Gully. After all he'd done just that only a few weeks previously with Bjornstad. There was a cave, and still is, to sleep 40 thieves, let alone three, and water in abundance. Puritanical Fred had us bivouac on the wall at night - I never understood that, perhaps he was afraid we'd keep walking down the gully and go home if he told us there was an exit!

So the North Arete needed to be completed, and my annual penance was due - in the form of leading a trip once a year. A small penance mind you, considering the sins you get to commit in lieu of it! I would recommend it to those with pangs of conscience...

I have always maintained that the level of club trips should be elevated to give the more ambitious members a crack at something more serious than the average weekend trek. Psychological barriers can build up in climbers towards real, or imagined, difficulties - barriers which bar them from some of the most satisfying experiences in the mountaineering spectrum, and in many cases without good reason.

So it was that early in the month a group was gathered together that had had no previous experience on the steeper walls, and some who had never climbed before. We agreed to train as rigorously as time and energy permitted and then select a team by the end of the month, based on performance. This group, with the help of some more experienced leaders spotted here and there down the rope would try for a complete North Arete as a 2 day climb and club trip.

And train we did. Fingers that normally pushed pencils, or scratched the nape of the neck as their most energetic exercise during the course of the average day, were soon reduced to tender limp digits, aching in every pore with unaccustomed pain. As the original shock wore off, the same fingers eventually felt their way up most of the climbs at the Quarry and Point Atkinson, with routes on the Apron at Squamish thrown in for good measure. We even made a new finish variation to "Starfish" at Point Atkinson, which we promptly named "Holy Mackerel", in keeping with the pescatorial flavour of the other practice routes there.

The week before the climb was scheduled it rained without pause, and reluctantly we conceded that it would be folly to proceed. Three of us went up on the Saturday night anyway, just to look - to trace new lines with the eyes, to sleep in the cave, and drink our Beaujolais anyway!

We had just nestled down out of the rain, and were drifting off into troubled sleep, when we were awakened by the return of the lad who had been to the oasis in Squamish. Alas the Cacudemos cave resembled a loggers' boarding house Saturday nights! They claimed to have been to the billiard hall, but didn't look steady enough for that - a bout with the shuffle board more likely.

The flat monochrome morning was heralded by every bird from Pemberton to Brittania, who seemed to have gathered in the spacious cave entrance, and were shrieking with a racket that no poet could ever wax lyrical about.

Once when camping with some French climbers near a river, we found some real frogs, the kind whose legs you can eat. We hastened to de-culotte them in the traditional way, dropping the legs into the sizzling frying pan, and casting the remains away. Early the next morning, we were awakened by the same kind of inhuman shrieking. A ring of frogs surrounded our tents, all limbless, and seemingly cried out to be united again with their by now long digested legs.

We hastened out of the cave in the morning drizzle, enquiring en-route of an ill tempered and no longer sleeping Tony Cousins if he would like to have a bash at the North Arete after all. Alas, he was oblivious to the birds and rain and appeared to be suffering from his hellish bout with the billiards still.

So the brushing wet jungle wal to the foot of the arete committed us to the climb - too early to go home, too late to sleep - and soon only the damp rock was all that mattered in the world. David Turner, very fit, with all of a months serious rock climbing experience; Jan Atlung, originally Norwegian, coach of the Indian-Eskimo cross-country ski team from Innuvik, another 4 week veteran; and myself.

Jan had taken the bug seriously, and during our training had plunged into it with characteristic frenzy. One evening I got a call from his wife Charlotte, I hastened to the Quarry, to find him pinned up on the highest part of the cliff in the pitch dark, all alone, trying to figure out how to get down through the maze of ropes, pitons, carabiners and slings.

Short apprenticeship over, it was now Sunday morning, the rain was easing, and the sorely depleted but keen club trip was off and climbing. The curving wide crack at the start which leans outwards towards the ever-present gully was strenuous, and brought us up above the gully proper. The gully noises are more frightening than its looks - every dislodged stone argues and bickers its way down to the bed.

The arete is long for one day, so we avoided the use of pegs wherever decency, common-sense or lack of ability didn't make them necessary. Only time will tell how successful we were in that respect. Time was important to us, we hurried slowly. I thought of one of those childhood poems they drum into your head, about Jon's carrying the good news to Ghent - "I climbed, he climbed, we climbed, all three".

I admire the way in which climbers describe long parts of a route in detail. I don't know how. For me the passages go past, even the ones that take hours, like the gates in a downhill ski race - the whole is always vivid, but the detail obtuse. Crack, slab, undercut, wedge - and yet how the hands of the watch spin. Why don't they move that way during the week at work?

The welcome sight of the Acrophobes loomed into view above, the looked so different from underneath, they must be heavy. We gazed for a long time at the most symmetrical chimney I've ever seen. About 100' high, leaning back just a little, 2' wide perhaps, with edges square and smooth to the top - only bongs as big as garbage cans would fit that. Might it go free? The very thought sent one of those shudders down into the stomach, and further, at the audacity of the very idea. I meekly beat a slinking traverse around it, assuring my two neophyte partners, who had begun by now to show interest that it was a piece of cake, but not today as we were in a hurry...

By 6 p.m. we arrived at the escape ledge and a bivouac site of times past, but this time with two beginners, and we'd come almost twice as far. Beginners never complain and rarely notice your errors. Nor do they ask for the lead, and then bitch when they can't have it as Fred had 10 years before. We had told him he was a guest in our country, be he hadn't bought that - at least it was one climb of a thousand that he couldn't claim!

And those two bolts on the crack above the ledge, how could you, whoever you are? David and Jan came through like veterans, somewhat unnerved by the exposure that wells up and around as one steps out across the wall there. Looking down past the circling ravens we could make out a clutch of wives, kids and dogs on the road below anxiously honking horns, then mercifully drifitng off, bored, for milk shakes and home. Magnone once told me that when they were doing the 1st ascent of the West Face of the Dru his mother heard about it on the radio in Paris. She came to Chamonix next day with a basket of food, hoping to pass it up to them on the climb. When will those mothers and wives ever understand us? Or do they, all to well!

The final piton crack, around the corner and over the gully again, was completed in total darkness, with Jan unwilling to leave his chromolys behind in the crack. On the flat mattress of black-berry bushes we loosened off laces, let the blood flow again to the feet, and laughed, free again from the prisoning verticality of the wall below. For David and Jan a baptism in the joy of the long route, not terribly hard or tedious, and bound to be made a lot freerer and swifter yet I hope. But 16 hours is still a long day. Which way down? With visions of walking over the grand wall in the dark, I opted for the gully. It will be quicker too. Every experience in life, and every book I had ever read on climbing said it wasn't, and it wasn't!

We slipped, slithered, cursed and bumped into each other all the way down. I commandeered the flashlight as leader of the trip, and was the only one who fell badly - over a waterfall and onto my head.

At midnight the clouds cleared briefly and the moon shone dramatically against the white grey-granite of the Zodiac Wall. The primaeval atmosphere which that section of the chief has was very strong at that moment, as the three of us halted like men of that era - wet, tired, engaged in an obscure struggle, said naught and stumbled through the boulders.

Jan was killed shortly after, whilst climbing in the Interior Ranges. We had planned so many things together, including a new route on that moonlit wall. We even had the name - "The Paris Commune", in honour of its 100th anniversary that summer of '71. Like the "Peasants' Route" which Jim Baldwin and I had begun in distant '58, the complete North Arete will serve as a memory, not just as another day of fine climbing, but rather for another youth who found himself, however briefly, in the mountains.

Copyright © 1972, Les MacDonald