Thursday, July 12, 2012

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.

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