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.
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