A Token Desert

Dearest reader, last time we met I was in a trailer park in Golden about to go ski touring in the Canadian Rocky Mountains. Now I am writing to you from the back of my van in a campground near Penticton. I don’t have internet here, so by the time I actually post this I’ll be writing to you from the car park of a nearby fast food restaurant with free wifi (my spellcheck doesn’t think that’s a word, in fact, it also doesn’t think spellcheck is a word, which seems somewhat defeatist). Thanks capitalism!

Anyway, I didn’t write this post to praise capitalism (although I do intent at some stage to write something about how grateful I am for the existence of rich people). Instead, I intend to fill you with wonder at my recent exploits, and explain how I came to be sitting in the back of my van in a desert next to an enormous lake in the rain. Be warned that this post is about my actual life, so all those people who just read this to laugh at my misfortunes can just skip to the next post.

So, let’s start with the trailer park. Last post I told you I’d explain how I ended up staying in one. It turns out that one of the ski touring crew from Rossland, the inimitable Brace, knew some folks living in Golden, and we stayed with them on the way to the Rockies. This worked out to be a fine arrangement, because we ended up barbequing snags over a fire in their front yard and Justin, one of our hosts, even came with us on our trip. Anyway, these folks lived in a trailer park, which I have unilaterally decided makes them the best kind of people. I’m glad that Brace was with me in the car as we drove to their house, because to get there you basically drive through Golden, out the other side, then up a narrow winding road until you come to a trailer park near a motocross riding area. It’s the kind of place that, if you were following written directions, would cause you to wonder if you hadn’t made a navigational error at some stage. However, despite the stigma of trailer parks, it was a super cool place. Everyone we met was friendly, there’s no traffic, people have big yards for dogs and barbeques and everyone leaves their cars and houses unlocked. Plus the view across the valley to the Purcell Mountains on the far side is pretty amazing.

Touring in the Rockies reminded me very much of New Zealand. Firstly, it’s alpine. You bumble through some trees on the way up to the real skiing near the peaks, but once you’re up there it’s rock, snow and ice all round. After the veritable forests of the Rossland area it was actually a bit unnerving to get up into the big mountains. Another way in which the Rockies are similar to New Zealand is the conditions. They are often bad. Visibility is frequently poor, the snowpack is variable, it’s very windy, and every gift that the mountain gives you (fresh snow, or a sunny day) is balanced by something the mountain takes away (windslab, or afternoon avalanches). The fact that you have to hike up everything complicates matters, because conditions are probably only going to be good on whatever you want to ski for a few hours, and you might spend all of those hours just walking towards your objective. Despite this, it’s clear that getting lucky in the Rockies would make for some amazing skiing. And by that I mean getting lucky in the good-weather-and-snow way, not the Justin-woos-all-the-ladies way.

So, with five days of glaciers and hiking and big mountains successfully completed, the time came to change from skiing mode to climbing mode, and commence The Great Climbing Improvement of 2012. The Great Climbing Improvement of 2012 is different from The Great Climbing Improvements of 2010 and 2007, because unlike the last two times I tried to get into shape to climb with Rohan, it will actually happen, and it won’t end in an ACL reconstruction before I even get to go climbing.

The GCI 2012 has kicked off in Penticton, in the Okanagan valley west of Rossland. Do you like the way I always explain the locations of things relative to landmarks you’re unfamiliar with? It’s always a feature of travel writing that I particularly enjoy. For example, I am currently south of Kelowna, and east of Vancouver, which outlines an area that’s probably the size of Victoria. Just look it up on Google Maps.

Anyway, I came to Penticton to climb in the Skaha bluffs, which are a couple of kilometres from town on the eastern side of the Skaha Lake. Skaha is known for having lots of sport climbing and is popular at this time of year because it’s warmer and drier than anything else nearby. In fact, the Okanagan is considered something of an arid zone by BC residents. In fact, I’ve even heard this region referred to as a desert. I suspect this is a relative concept. Maybe the Okanagan is dry compared to the rest of BC, where it rains (or snows) with the persistence and diligence of a model Newstart recipient (that’s an Australian dole/EI joke for those of you not familiar with the terrible burden of a jobseeker diary). But compared to somewhere actually dry, it still rains here a lot. Perhaps, to extend the simile, with the persistence of an actual Newstart recipient – it’s common to get a tiny bit of rain (just enough to say that it did, without actually achieving anything), and then it seems to hammer down every now and then to make up for all the time it spent slacking off.

Skaha is lucky that I got some climbing in yesterday, otherwise my assessment would be pretty harsh. To be honest, the crag doesn’t look very inspiring – it’s a few small chunks of rock set into some rolling hills next to a lake. But it turns out that the rock quality is really good and the climbing is actually pretty nice. This is good, because if I’d just rocked up, looked around and then gotten rained on I’d be questioning the judgement of the local climbing scene.

Of course, a bit of rain is not a big deal. There are plenty of things I need to do and a day without climbing is a great chance to sort them out. The big deal is that my van won’t start in the rain. So I’m stuck in a campsite outside town with no internet, no way to do laundry and most importantly, no way to renew my vehicle registration. Obviously, that registration expires today. As the kiwis would say, crepe.