Who Will Feed Me Now?

It is perhaps fitting that this, the 100^th post on this blog, is being written from the White Star Chalet at Broken River Ski Field in New Zealand. It is also fitting that I don’t have internet access here and that I’ll have to take my computer on some kind of road trip to actually post this to the blog. My journey of skiing, climbing, committing social faux pas and generating strong body odors effectively started here, and it is at once immensely satisfying and deeply disappointing to return to where things all began. Satisfying because coming back to Broken River, with its strong sense of community, ramshackle facilities and diabolical skiing feels like catching up with an old friend - one with a crazy beard, faded jacket and determination to get rad. And deeply disappointing because there have been a number of changes in the staff here, and I don’t know the new cook or ticket office person.

You might be saying (although it’s incredibly unlikely, since you probably know nothing about Broken River and its staff) “John, many of last year's staff are still there – you still know Doug the snow safety officer, or Barrett the ski patroller, or Dan the guy who fixes the grooming machine all the time even though no one seems to ever intend to use it”. And you’d be right, those people are still here. It has been great to see them and I’m looking forward to various forms of shenanigans with them during the season. But to truly know and master the beating heart of a ski field there are two people you must schmooze above all. First is the ticket office person (which is a euphemism for ticket office lady, which is a euphemism for ticket tart), for they hold the power to charge you for things, to ensure you pay for everything in advance rather than building up a large tab, and to save you a bed if the accommodation fills up and you haven’t made a booking because you’re an idiot. A good relationship with the admin person can mean turning up just before a storm and knowing that you'll get a bed. A bad relationship can mean spending four days in a 14 bunk hut with 13 high school boys from Queensland who balance their raging homophobia with bouts of late-night wrestling in their underwear*. Second is the cook, because the cook controls the food. A good relationship with the cook can mean scrubbing dishes like a high school dropout and eating like a prince. It can mean that extra loaves of bread or bottles of milk find their way to the dodgy hut with the cheapskate guests rather than to other less worthy places. But a bad relationship means that no matter how many vegetables you chop or cakes you bake you will never taste the wonders of BBQed chicken or hot muffins while night skiing.

It is also very handy to schmooze the ski instructor, because they can provide you with helpful ski advice for free. But in the grand scheme of things having somewhere to sleep and something to eat must take priority over video analysis of your turns even if that analysis is very helpful.

It was, then, with some dismay that I learnt that neither Giuliana, the ticket office person, nor Ray, the cook, would be returning from last season. I have to start all my schmoozing from scratch – a grave and concerning situation.

Also of concern, it appears that Broken River has made a concerted effort to have more women at the ski field. Last season, Giuliana was the only female staff member for most of the season. This year, the ski instructor is also a woman, and there seem to be other women just hanging around – possibly even as guests. Women choosing to be at Broken River for employment is understandable, but their presence here in a recreational capacity suggests something is amiss. Barrett recently informed me that earlier in the season he was at one point the only man in the daylodge (I can only assume from his tone of mixed awe and terror that he was not alone in the daylodge, because that would not be at all exceptional). The prospect of there being multiple women at the ski hill, some of whom are not staff, is unfamiliar and unnerving. After so many months of non-stop sausage partying, the thought of the party ending in one of the sausageiest places I’ve ever been is like returning to your home after a long absence to discover that, unbeknownst to you, your best friend from childhood is in fact imaginary, and that everyone has been humouring you all along.

I should probably say that I look forward to meeting all the new staff members, but most of you know me better than that. I am of course completely terrified of meeting them and having them dislike me. I would desperately like for things to go well, and indeed have a considerable emotional and financial investment riding on a positive outcome, but lack the capacity for self-deception required to believe that this is likely.

Wish me luck people – I don’t want to be expelled from here and end up spending the season at Mt Cheeseman.

*Thanks Giuliana.

Kicked Out Like a Bum

My hometown of Canberra is notorious across Australia for being terrible. Add to this the tendency of those returning from international travel to scorn the worn and familiar places they left, and it would be natural for me to loathe returning to my home city. But, my return to Canberra has been quite the opposite. Despite chasing winter for the last twelve months, visiting a Canberra winter has been an exceedingly pleasant experience. Canberra winters are cool, rather than cold, and crisp clear days with open skies and mellow sunlight are the norm. They are the sort of days that make you want to plant bok choy.

That is not to say that everything about my return to Australia has been rosy. It seems almost traditional to sigh about how nothing has changed when you return after a few months absence, but in my case a whole bunch of things have changed, some for the worse. But you, dear reader, don’t care at all about changes in my personal circumstances. Staying with my folks because I broke up with my girlfriend? No one cares. None of my keys (from just twelve months ago) work? Boring. You all read this blog to hear about my embarrassing or unpleasant experiences. Have I had any of those in Canberra? A couple, perhaps, but nothing of notable quality. I haven’t been on any dates if that’s what you’re hoping for.

Perhaps the most telling change upon my return to Canberra was getting kicked off the climbing wall at my old high school. A few preliminary statements are in order to understand the situation. First, the climbing wall is on the outside of the school gymnasium. Second, it is excellent quality – really well thought out climbing, interesting holds, neat moves. It’s made from real rocks epoxied onto a brick wall, so the texture and feel of the climbing is way better than your average artificial wall. Third, to get to this wall you have to climb over a large and very easy to climb fence. Now, some people would take the presence of such a fence as an indication that the school did not wish for members of the public to use their bouldering wall. But to my mind the idea of putting such an easy to climb fence in the way of a rock climbing wall suggests a more subtle intention is at work. To me, a fence like that says "Climbers, it might look like we don't want you here, but in fact this fence is just to keep riff-raff away. Please, come in and avail yourself of our excellent facilities." In my mind (and perhaps nowhere else) there is a clear distinction between climbers and riff-raff.

You might think my opinion of the fence somewhat fanciful and absurd, but it has been borne out by experience. I have been noticed using the wall on several occasions by school staff who have either turned a blind eye to my presence, or (especially if they recognised that I was an previous student) struck up a friendly conversation. But this time, two staff members wandered past and one of them KICKED ME OUT.

First they asked what I was doing and I pointed out that I was bouldering.

Then they asked how I had gotten in and I explained that I had climbed over the fence.

Then they said I shouldn't do that and I explained that I had been climbing over that fence for ten years.

They made the valid point that it wasn't a public climbing wall, and I countered with the equally valid point that it was a very good climbing wall. Although this argument is strictly non sequitur I think that it was a reasonable rebuttal in what was essentially a comparison of competing values.

She clearly did not find my value claim convincing and rather indignantly pointed out that I should leave. I agreed to do so.

At this point, the other staff member (who taught me chemistry back when I used to learn things) said hello and we had a quick chat while I pulled off my climbing shoes and hopped back over the fence.

Getting kicked off the climbing wall is more that just inconvenient. It’s a sign that I’m no longer a welcome dirtbag in my own home town. In cities all around the world, there are dirtbags and climbing/skiing/mountain biking bums living alongside regular folk every day. Not long after regular folk have left for their jobs in the morning, these dirtbags and bums will wake up and face the prospect of choosing what they will do for the rest of the day. Their lives are intertwined with those of the hardworking decent folk who fill the offices and businesses of the town, but different in all kinds of financial, recreational and hygienic ways.

I was once such a person in Canberra. I was more of a skiing and Frisbee bum than a dirtbag per se, but I was still tolerated or even welcomed by the institutions from whom I leeched resources and opportunities. But it seems my absence, and perhaps my graduation from bum to dirtbag, has put a stop to this. Now the familiar and reliable haunts of my youth are denied to me. The lady who kicked me out doesn’t realise that I still know the sequence for traversing the wall off by heart, or that I can tell which holds (or bits of holds) have broken off or where new holds have been attached, or that my initials are written above the ingenious arête climb I worked out in 2002 (and then couldn't repeat after I replaced my ailing climbing shoes). In all honesty, I should probably have kicked her out, but she probably wouldn’t have been comfortable climbing over the fence.

Does this mean that any return to Canberra to live must be accompanied by a submission to the norms and expectations of a real job and a normal life? I think (and hope) not. Does this mean I will hide in the bushes at the Narrabundah College bouldering wall if I hear people nearby? Most certainly.

The Bugaboos Explained

I’ve mentioned the Bugaboos in the last few posts, and the whole trip served as a kind of culmination and climax of the last few months of dirtbaggery, so I figured I’d try to document the whole experience. The risk is that I’ll fall into “Then we went here and then we ate an icecream and then I was tired and then we went there” travel bloggery, which is pretty much the single least interesting thing on the internet. So be gentle with me as I attempt to do something I’ve pretty much never done and write about my actual trip.

Despite the strange name, the Bugaboos are not a group of villains from a kid’s cartoon. Instead, they are a collection of granite spires in the Purcell Mountains near the border between British Columbia and Alberta. The problem with explaining the Bugaboos (or Bugs) to people is that when I say “granite spires” you think you understand what I’m talking about. Unless you’ve actually been to or seen the Bugs, you so totally completely don’t. Think of huge fins of rock rising from glaciers and snow fields. Now make those fins bigger. Now bigger again. You’re probably still not thinking big enough. The biggest wall in the area is over 1000m high. The slightly smaller spires near us had walls of 700m or more. The place is capital B Big. And capital S Scary.

Bugaboo Spire in the pre-dawn light. We climbed up via the right hand side of the peak and descended down the left hand side. From where it steepens on the right (above the diagonal line of snow) to the top is roughly 700m. That's me in the foreground.

To get to the spires you need to hike up the valley. That sounds simple, and it mostly is, except that Rohan and I were hiking in with food for 11 days, climbing gear, and enough camping gear to get through snow and storms. Our packs were heavy. So heavy that we could not actually lift them on our own and it took both of us to heave each pack up so that the unfortunate bearer could shoulder the load and start trudging. Rohan had a larger pack which resembled not so much a bag as a structural component of some kind of poorly designed bombproof cupboard. My pack was smaller, so to carry the required equipment my regular bag had another bag piggybacking on top of it like a midget in one of those 1980s wrestling matches that would not be considered PC in our more enlightened times. The path up to the hut was buried in snow in several places from a series of avalanches that had come from the slopes above earlier in the winter. Of course, it rained, which brought enormous joy to Rohan and I as we slogged our way up above the tree-line.

 

 It's Pack Man LOL!!1!

In just three hours of suffering we arrived and set up camp. There are two campsites and we chose the lower more sheltered one and tried to convince ourselves that there were good reasons to stay there, rather than simply because we didn’t want to haul our gear any further up the hill. We did move our camp to the higher and more exposed campsite a few days later, only to be hit by a storm that confined us to our tent for the whole day.

The rain continued overnight and through most of the next day. And thus began the long and arduous process of staying amused in the tent. At the start of your trip this is reasonably straightforward – there are things to tinker with, conversations to have, you can read the guidebook, sort food, sort climbing gear and think of all the things you’re going to climb. As the days go by, these basic means of staying sane slowly lose their appeal and new methods must be found. Eventually you have tinkered with everything you own; conversed your tent-mate from interest, to feigned interest, to outright bored, to irritation and finally to sullen resentful silence; you know the guidebook by heart; and it has become impossible to hide from the fact that the weather will prevent you from climbing any the routes you dreamt of when you first arrived.

In such situations, creativity must be used to stay sane, motivated and non-violent. Eating is a reliable means of burning some spare hours, as is digging in the snow (especially if you can fool yourself into thinking it’s constructive in some way).In an attempt to make sense of our seemingly arbitrary lives and circumstances, we invented a complex mythology involving an omniscient German packrat named the Snafflehound, living atop one of the spires and controlling the weather and local wildlife to nefarious ends. Finally,we discovered that attempting to trap small critters that came near our tent was an exciting and fulfilling way to pass the time. We caught two chipmunks, the first in a devious trap and the second in a bought of brutal UFC style grappling. At one stage we tried to catch a packrat, which we suspected of being a spy for the Snafflehound, but it was too big and strong for our trap.

 The trap is set.

Our patience is rewarded. No, we didn't eat him, we let him go. And he pooped all over our stuff, so it was a fair encounter.

In all, we had nine days to climb, and were more or less confined to our tent for 5 of those days. We really should have spent a sixth day hiding out from bad weather, but we took a chance on some marginal conditions and got pounded with snow and rain half way up the biggest spire in our immediate area. In our three days of good conditions, we climbed three different spires in the region, including the North East Ridge of Bugaboo spire on our last day, which is ranked among the best 50 climbs in North America. Most of our other original objectives were abandoned due to a lack of time or being covered in snow, of which there was much more than usual for that time of year. The North East Ridge redeemed the trip to some extent – it would have been a long way to go and a lot of trouble to go to (especially for Rohan) to sit around in the tent watching the spires wrap themselves in cloud.

 Getting high on the North East Ridge.

As is the custom, the weather improved just as we left. There’s a big high pressure system in place now and the snow will be melting off the rock pretty fast. Despite this improvement, I was still happy enough to leave when we did. Climbing in the Bugs is epic. The approaches are epic – there are glaciers, sections of exposed scrambling, steep snow slopes with terrible things at the bottom that you wouldn’t want to fall into or off of. The descents are epic. If you’re lucky you’ll be able to rappel down somewhere near the top of the climb you finished, which will be long and fraught with stuck ropes or scary anchors. If not you’ll have to traverse some exposed ridges (we’re talking about potential falls of 500 metres or more) and probably scramble down some route that would be bad enough climbing up, but is absolutely horrific to go down. The weather is epic. You can get storms that last for days, it can go from sunny to snowing in minutes, it can (and did) snow out of a blue sky, later in the season there are lightning storms that brew up in the afternoons which have killed people. There is no dashing out for a couple of hours of climbing if the rain clears. Even if the weather comes good, you might spend a day waiting for snow to melt off your route, or avalanche hazards to clear, or the rock to dry out. Just hanging around in the tent while a storm howls outside beats you up. I’m keen to go back, but I was happy to leave the park, sit in a pub and smash a burger that the menu bet I couldn’t eat, then get a thickshake.

Next Stop

Like a skipping stone bouncing across a cess pool, I will be dropping into Canberra on my way from Canada to New Zealand. If you would like to catch up, or introduce your attractive single friends to a man who has burst through the crotch of 60% of his pants, contacting me via the internets is probably more reliable than trying my mobile, which will surely have run out of credit.

I'll be in town from the 11th until the 23rd. My interests include skiing, short unromantic walks with a heavy pack, living in squalor and telling stories that make me sound more adventurous and capable than I really am.

To my regular reader(s?) in NZ, fear not. I'll be back in your country to endure your gentle discrimination, excellent skiing and affordable "meat" products soon.

Dirtbagging - Not a Glamorous Career Choice

So, kid, you think you’ve got what it takes to be a dirtbag? You think that bumming around someone else’s country in a beat up van, sleeping in car parks or tents and climbing rocks is easy? You think a life of poverty and leisure is easier than regular work for regular pay? Well, you’re probably right. After all, I’d much rather dirtbag my way around than get a job - those things are horrible. But if you think you’re up to it, be prepared for the following:

1) You had better like body hair.

If you’re going to live in a van, let alone a tent, and you have any hair on you at all, you’d better get used to finding it everywhere. And I do mean everywhere.

The logic is simple. Most people think they do most of their eating, sleeping and cooking in the same place – at home. Well, as a dirt bag, you can expect to eat, sleep and cook in literally the same place. While living in the van I used to wake up in the morning, push my sleeping bag into the corner of the van, sit on my sleeping mat and start boiling water for breakfast. If it was raining and there was no climbing to be done, I would move my cooking gear into a different corner of the tent and read magazines (either free or liberated) in exactly the same place.

That means that all the hair that falls off you ends up in your bed, your food, your lounge room. And you don’t have any worthwhile means of cleaning your van/tent. Vacuum cleaners are no longer a part of your world. The closest thing you have to a sweeping implement is your toothbrush, and you do NOT want to touch the floor of the van with your toothbrush.

As a fairly hairy human being, I have become intimately acquainted with hair on my stuff. Think about places and times and types of hair that should never come together. Yep, those have happened. All of those things. Do you really want me to say “pube in the eye”? Because I’ll say it. I’ll go there.

2) You had better like rain.

When you live in a house, rain is a pain in the butt (or a godsend). When you live in a van or a tent, rain is an existential crisis. The whole point of living in the van/tent is to trade off comfort and respectability for more time climbing or skiing or whatever your thing is. Rain both cancels that thing and confines you to your living pod. Of course, you could go outside and get wet and pretend that you were OK with that, but then you’d be wet and your stuff would be wet and you live in a van with no way of drying it and it will probably never stop raining in BC and life is miserable. So you stay in the van. It’s theoretically possible that you’re dirtbagging somewhere dry and living under a picnic table and everything is fine, but the big challenge of this lifestyle is that great places (like mountains) tend to come with terrible weather.

How much rain are we talking about here? Well, Rohan flew to BC with around 25 days available to climb. We had five sunny days, and two of them were wasted when Larry (the van) died. In the Bugaboos we spent seven days out of ten getting rained on, and of the three dry days, one was bitterly cold and windy (we climbed anyway, but it was not pretty). On those rainy or snowy days, we were confined to our tent for most or all of the day, and once stuff gets wet, the only way to dry it in your tent is to wear it. Wet socks? Wet gloves? Wet undies? Prepare to lounge around in discomfort folks.

3) You had better like sitting and/or lying down.

This really builds on point 2. If you’re stuck in your van/tent/cell, you probably can’t stand up. If there are two of you in a tent, you probably can’t even both sit up properly at the same time. In a recent storm in the Bugaboos, Rohan and I probably spent a collective 15 minutes outside the tent between going to bed one night and waking up two days later. That’s something like 35 hours and 45 minutes of sitting or lying down. Feel like going crazy? Don’t mind if I do.

We did this all day. All. Day.

4) You had better be able to laugh at farts.

Farts are a natural part of life, but for dirtbags on diets that are challenged by lack of funds, lack of 

refrigeration and/or the need to be light enough to carry into a campsite, farting is a common and potent experience. And if you’re stuck in a tent with another person for 35 hours and 45 minutes, they necessarily become a shared experience. And when a storm is blowing ice and snow through any openings or vents in your tent and you have to keep them closed at all times, farts become a lingering experience. Get used to farts. Learn to love fart humour. Avoid curry.

5) You had better be OK with smelling bad.

Farts are bad enough, but at least farts come and go. If you’re getting serious about your dirtbaggery, body odour will be your constant companion. While staying in the van in Pentiction I had to keep my elbows down whenever I wasn’t climbing. Ideally, I would have kept my elbows down while climbing as well, but at least on the rock there was no one but me to endure my stench and I could just grimace and keep moving. And once you’ve built up a steady reserve of body odour, washing yourself has less effect. You might clear the air for a little while, but your body is now firmly invested in producing and maintaining whatever it is that makes you smell so bad, so it’s not long before you are announcing your ripeness to olfactors across the land. Smelling this bad in a confined space with another human being? Well, let’s just say it’s not very charitable. With that sentiment in mind, good luck to the people sitting near me on the plane.

6) You had better like two minute noodles.

I must admit that I eat extremely well for a dirtbag. I don’t dumpster dive, I insist on actual fruits and vegetables in as many meals as I can get, I take the time and the fuel to cook better meals on my camp stove, and I devoted an inconvenient amount of space in the van to keeping condiments and spices and all that stuff. But I pay for that in both cost (which is low but could be much lower) and weight if I ever need to hike to a campsite. Rohan and I had an whole orange each on the third last day of our Bugaboos trip, a full 9 days after leaving the car, but in return we both hiked in with packs so heavy that we couldn’t individually lift them and it took both of us to heave each pack up before the unfortunate bearer could actually shoulder the load.

But even I, a veritable gourmet of the dirtbag world, occasionally stoop to two minute noodles. In fact, after a sufficiently horrible/awesome day of climbing, I rather enjoy two minute noodles, especially if I mix different varieties into exiting fusion recipes (on this trip we combined spicy chicken and beef – a delicate barnyard melange). For those of you who just can’t stomach two minute noodles, or its ugly, deformed half-brother Kraft Dinner, be prepared to abandon those boundaries should you choose the dirtbag life. There is no place in this world for such standards.

7) You had better be a sound sleeper.

No matter where you stay, something will try to keep you awake. The most feared opponent is the Snorer. It is a law of nature that in any occupied hut, at least one person will snore. In a hut where no known snorers are staying, a normally silent sleeper will fire up the midnight chainsaw just to keep the universe running smoothly. If you’re me, that snorer will probably be related to you, but rest assured that your diligent author is more of a snuffler than a genuine snorer.

Less feared than the snorer, but a no less serious opponent, is traffic noise. Trucks, cars, novelty horns or, for special occasions, trains will roar past your resting place with gusto. The Bugaboos was the first place I’ve stayed since my share-house in Rossland where I couldn’t hear traffic. And if you’re remote enough that you can’t hear cars or trucks, get ready for helicopters in the morning.

But with hard work and a little imagination you might be able to find yourself somewhere where there are no other folk to keep you awake. Rest assured that even if there’s no one around to snore or rev their engine, nature will fill the void. Perhaps the wind will hammer your tent, flapping the fabric around and clacking the poles together. Perhaps rain will pound your campsite and reverberate around your car. Perhaps rodents will rummage through your stuff and gnaw loudly on your shoes. Mark my words, something will try to prevent you from sleeping. Prepare for long nights spent with uncomfortable earplugs and growing anxiety.

As a dirtbag, one comes to not just tolerate, but to embrace such things. Once the initial hump of dirtiness and smelliness is overcome, the world is your cheap unrefrigerated oyster (and yes, I have eaten unrefrigerated oysters, and yes, I did puke them back up later that day). And I can tell you that that oyster is delicious (the figurative one, the literal ones tasted pretty wrong, but I was very hungry). After all, when the rain clears and the snoring stops, you get to do this:

 The sun comes up on another day of horrible/awesome climbing.

Larry Dies. Again.

OK folks, I've been caught up getting organised for and climbing in the Bugaboos, so I've got a backlog of posts to put up. This is actually from before we left for the Bugs back in June, so just pretend everything makes sense.

Regular readers will recall the story of my van, which was originally known as Trevor, but was born again as Larry after raising from the dead. When the time came to leave Rossland way back in April, I placed my faith in the miracle of Larry's resurrection and drove him north, to Golden to go ski touring, then west to climb, then further west for a hot date, then back east to climb some more, then further east to sit for a portrait, then back west to climb, then further west to pick up Rohan from the airport, then between Vancouver, Victoria and Squamish a few times, then back east again to continue climbing. Since leaving Rossland, Larry and I have travelled over 4000kms on a journey that Google Maps thinks would take 59 hours and consumed a conscience-shattering quantity of fuel.

On the whole, life with Larry has been good. It became apparent way back in April that Larry wouldn't start in the rain, which made some legs of this journey (including a speedy exit from Maud's Hot Sister's house) more difficult than desired. When Larry pulled this stunt in Squamish, Rohan and I made use of some tools from our host's house to access the engine (which is done by dismantling the part of the console between the driver and the passenger's seats within the van) and dry it out with a hairdryer. When Larry refused to co-operate in Victoria we again burrowed our way to the engine to find a spark up to several centimetres long forming across the top of the ignition coil. Don't worry, I don't know anything about cars either, but I suspect this spark represented electricity that was supposed to be going into the engine and was instead escaping. We fixed that problem by spraying rather flammable WD40 onto the offending component. It turns out that in this case spark + flammable material = success, which was vastly preferable to setting the engine on fire, and Larry has started reliably since that day.

But there is more to being a successful automobile than just starting. After a great day spent climbing Yak Peak just off the highway in the Fraser Valley, we loaded up the van to drive to the base of Mt Gimli (a few hours further east) for another long climb on our way to the main objective for the trip, the granite spires of Bugaboo Provincial Park. About 70kms from Kelowna, the biggest town in the region, Larry began to make what experts refer to as "a horrible noise". Worried that this noise might be a sign of problems to come, we quickly pulled over to the side of the highway. When Larry starts to malfunction, it is almost impossible not to view any problems through the interpretive lens of all the other things that are already wrong with Larry. We figured it was a problem with the brakes, and followed the directions in the manual for unsticking the rear brakes: Reversing the vehicle and applying the brakes sharply.

This did the diametric opposite of work.

In fact, this caused the vehicle to seize up completely. The engine was clearly working, but something was jamming the wheels and stopping us from moving forwards or backwards. Still convinced that the brakes were at fault, we simply revved the car hard enough unstick whatever was stuck and were able to continue driving again, albeit with a new and slightly worse version of the aforementioned horrible noise. Figuring Larry might need a break, we waited for a couple of hours on the side of the road and, after this had no effect, resumed our drive, hoping to reach Kelowna and find a mechanic. We rolled into Walmart in the evening and googled the shit out of our car problems, which by the time we had reached town, were extensive. At low speed, Larry had developed an alarming clunk which could be heard and also physically felt shaking the car which we managed to determine was coming from the front differential. Further inspection confirmed that the diff was leaking oil, and the situation was grim.

Larry in the Walmart carpark. The dirtbag equivalent of the Last Supper.

The next morning drove Larry to the mechanic, a 500m long white-knuckled journey of clanking and shaking. It didn't take long for the mechanic to tell us that all hope was lost. They even hoisted Larry up to show us how the front drive shaft could be shaken a good 5cm or so by hand. To compound our woes, they refused to do anything to the front diff unless they were also permitted to fix the power steering pump and brakes (since they were in unroadworthy condition), which they priced at over $4000.

Some people say you can't put a price on love, and they might be right that I couldn't give a precise number for how much I was willing to spend to fix my beloved death defying van, but I could definitely give un upper limit, and $4000 was well outside that range. After all our adventures, I could not afford to fix Larry.

But, Rohan and I reasoned, Larry had already defied death once. Perhaps the clunking noise was just that, a clunking noise. Perhaps it wasn't a sign of impending catastrophe. Perhaps if we could just get Larry as far as Revelstoke (a mere 200km away) he would make it all the way. After all, what do mechanics know about cars? And so it was that with a sense of fragile optimism we drove out of Kelowna while the drivers that overtook us looked at us in concern and alarm.

As the banging and shudderring in the car worsened, our optimism quickly faded. With a collective background in physics and chemistry, we were acutely aware of what happened when heavy objects moving quickly suddenly broke or jammed, or what happened when friction made car components hot enough to catch fire. As Rohan raised his voice over the increasingly load and frequent thuds from under the floor to describe the occaisionally horrific consequences of car parts catching fire, we decided that perhaps even Revelstoke was a bridge too far and turned back towards Kelowna.

We grudgingly hired a new set of wheels from the concerningly named Rent-a-Wreck, a car about as different from Larry as you could get without decreasing the footprint or age of the machine and set about squeezing a van's worth of gear into a sedan's worth of space. Our new ride, dubbed "Abe" took us south to Penticton to dodge more bad weather and we left Larry and all my ski gear in the hire car parking lot.

 Abe (and Larry in the background). And yes, that sign really does say "Darky's Pawn".

This was one sequel with a sad ending. After cheating death once, Larry had fallen short just two drives from the end of our trip. Vale old friend.