The Chosen Onesie

I mentioned a few posts back that I have been trying out some new ski gear here at Broken River. Today I would like to introduce you to the most daunting and serious item of clothing I have ever worn. Around Broken River, it is known simply as “The Onesie”.

In my experience, the best things in life are rarely encountered as the result of any kind of deliberate search. Instead, greatness occurs when you put yourself in a position where it can find you. So it was with The Onesie, which came to me through a staff member at BR. Somehow we ended up discussing retro day at Red Mountain, and she claimed to have a onesie more awesome than both of the outfits I wore that day. I must admit that I passed this off as idle banter – everyone claims their onesie is the best. I was more than a little surprised when she delivered The Onesie in all its faded blue glory. I could tell straight away that this was no ordinary ski suit. It was, somehow, different. More...

Rad.

I tried it on and found that it fit like a glove. Snug around the thighs, ample in the shoulder and bust. Long enough through the body to not squash my man-parts, but not so long that the crotch prevented me from walking normally. Sleeve length, perfect. Legs tapered, but tastefully so. This was no mere fashion piece made to adorn an après ski bar or catch the eye in a cafe. This onesie was made for a real skier, for big mountains and epic runs. Wearing it I felt stronger, faster, more inclined to jump off things.

But there was something more. This onesie promised greatness, but beneath the incoming tide of confidence and control was a surging rip of fear. The Onesie demanded great skiing. It would not be content with mere tootling down the main basin, or cruising through the open bowls of Allan’s Basin. The onesie hungered for glory, and if I was to wear it, I had to deliver.

A crowd grew and thronged around me in White Star Chalet. They demanded to know: Who was I, where had I found The Onesie, would I wear it tomorrow? But I was daunted by the burden of expectation. Was I ready to don The Onesie? Could I satisfy its desires? Could I do it justice? I dodged their questions, took off The Onesie and made excuses.

I slept fitfully that night, tortured by visions of blue nylon, tight chutes, and big drops. As I sweated in my sleeping bag, the cold light of the moon cast through the windows of the hut and lit upon the onesie crumpled beside my bed. The fluoro pink highlights on the sleeves took on an eerie glow. I shuddered and turned my face towards the wall.

When the sun finally rose the next morning, it was the day after the day after a big storm. There were still plenty of fresh lines to be found and things to be jumped off. The snow would be powder, but stiff and heavy – perfect for skiing aggressively. But after the rigours of the previous day’s skiing, I wasn’t sure whether I could handle another hard day on the hill. I looked long and hard at The Onesie lying by my bed, but I didn’t have the courage to put it on. Sighing, I stuffed it into the bottom of my pack, threw on my normal ski gear and headed for the lifts.

In my first run, I tried a few jumps and stuck the landings. On my second, I opened up my turns and put on some speed. By the time I reached the bottom I was ready. I returned to the day lodge, stripped down to my inappropriately tight and hole-ridden thermal pants, and climbed into The Onesie. At once I felt the heady rush of power and expectation. I put Kanye West’s All Of the Lights on endless repeat, cranked up the volume, pulled down my goggles and got rad.

The rest of the day is a blur. I remember skiing lines I’d never had the courage to ski before, jumping off everything from medium sized rocks to small children and skied as fast and as hard as I could. At some stage I bumped into BR local, ski writer and photographer Joe Harrison who was also seduced by the power of The Onesie. He showed me some new chutes and got a few shots of The Onesie in action.

Picture courtesy of Joe Harrison. Don't go stealing it. Even if it is awesome.

I did everything that I could to satisfy The Onesie, and I probably skied better than I ever have before, and yet it still wasn’t enough. The Onesie knew what it wanted, but I couldn’t deliver. Again and again I stood below a line called “Ten to Five”, a tight chute that leads to a straight line exit with a mandatory cliff. The Onesie whispered constantly for succor. It wanted to ski the line, but I was too scared. Mostly because skiing that line would break lots of my bones and generally hurt a very large amount.

At the end of the day I returned to White Star, exhausted. Despite making a respectable effort wearing the ski suit, I had by no means satiated its infernal appetite. But I haven’t put The Onesie away. It sits in the corner of White Star on an unused bunk, waiting for the day when I’m ready to ski the line of death. And when conditions are right, and I’m more rad, I will put the onesie on and complete my end of the bargain.

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.

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.

Progress Report

Those of you who are looking at the twitter feed will know that after many delays work started the infamous painting yesterday morning. Originally, the plan was to start with a preliminary line drawing on one piece of canvas, then complete the final painting on another canvas frame. Brad already had a big photocopy of my driver's license photo to use to build my face around, but he ended up just drawing it onto the canvas instead of using whatever devious printmaking technique he was originally considering.

Work commenced in the parking lot behind the hostel, and moved into the laundry when it started to rain in the afternoon. Since then, Brad has been painting and napping around the clock, and is currently asleep.

The first iteration of the line drawing. My face is on the top right of the canvas.

During the afternoon, Brad started adding black and white paint to the mix (the original line stuff is in permanent marker), and overnight he started adding blue. Things currently look like this:

For a sense of scale, the canvas is about as tall as I am.

To be honest, the photos don't really do much justice. The details in permanent marker actually give the whole thing a sense of depth and perspective, and it's super interesting to see how it changes every time I get to look at it.

However, a cool painting of me on a chairlift/rollercoaster/ice mountain actually causes more problems than it solves. The embarrassment that I feel over coming to Rossland and commissioning an artist to paint a picture of me using someone else's money is offset by the fact that I'm supposed to be producing a hilarious tasteful nude that will make other people feel awkward every time they see it. While it is undoubted cool to see an interesting painting get made, and I suspect the finished work will be quite awesome, coming to Rossland to commission an awkward painting of yourself with someone else's money is somewhat more vain and conceited than originally planned. And I'm not merely a disinterested or self-interested patron of the arts. I'm also an agent for a financial backer (German Anna) who has a unhealthy interest in making Brad spend time in a room with me while I am also naked and maybe photos are taken.

Brad, on the other hand, refuses to see me in so much as a gauzy, partially-transparent top (not that I have one of those, but it's a mental image the rest of you can enjoy) and flies into a rage every time I mention nudity or nakedness. It appears that I will get a painting, and it will be awesome, but it may not match my original specifications. For a start, there's no tiger in this image. With luck, I will become more naked as the painting progresses, which is something that not many people have had the opportunity to say.

Cross Lingual Haircuts: A tale of sorrow and loss

Yesterday I spent the day trawling the thrift stores (known in Australia as op-shops) of Vancouver in search of a white suit. Sadly, there wasn't anything suitable to be found (pun completely intended. Oh my God. I think I need to lie down), and I settled for a cream jacket and a nice pair of pants. The lady at the checkout of the thrift store was pretty impressed by my selection and suggested that I must be headed somewhere nice in the outfit, at which I laughed nervously and did a poor job of concealing my terror.

Anyway, after the suit buying I went to get a real haircut from a haircutting professional. I have had several haircuts in Canada, but they've been from me, my housemate Robi, and at one stage I even got a trim from Maud's Hot Sister (who is, incidentally, a hairdresser). This combination of haircutting styles and levels of competence had resulted in a hairstyle which oscillated between completely amazing and pretty damn awful depending on how much time and hairgel I wanted to expend each day.

On a good day, it looked like this:

And the goal was to turn it into this:

Getting a haircut is a baffling and unpleasant process. I have to surrender control of my head to someone else, who will ask me questions in incomprehensible hairdresser lingo that I don't even remotely understand, and then charge me for the experience. Every answer I give to their questions is fraught with danger. Will this cost more? Is that a code for giving me a perm? One once asked me if I wanted layers. Layers of what? I said no, and that seemed to indicate to them that the haircut was over. That experience cost me $25.

Given that I don't expect to understand anything a hairdresser says, I don't feel compelled to go to hairdresser who speaks English. Pretty much the best haircut I've ever had was in Japan. Admittedly, he just cut my hair to a uniform 2.5cm in length, which was exactly what I wanted, but he also trimmed the bits around my ears, which was an added bonus.

And so it was that I went to a Chinese hairdresser in Vancouver. They spoke no English and I spoke no Chinese. Upon my arrival in their salon, it didn't seem to occur to them at all that I was actually a customer. After some confusion they swung into full-scale team haircut action. I tried to communicate that I wanted my hair trimmed on the sides, cut short at the back and then left long at the front. Things started out well, the sides were trimmed, and the back was cut short. Then, with little fanfare and a stern expression, my hairdresser cut a short strip into the front. Gone were my dreams of a Morrissey-like pouf at the front of my head. This was a serious hair salon, for serious people and serious haircuts.

I must admit that this had a strong deflationary effect on me. This whole romancing Maud's Hot Sister enterprise has been something of a grim duty that I must see through to the bitter end. Coming out with a cool haircut was the one part of this process that I was looking forward to. Well, such youthful fancies must be set aside, because now I look like this:

Which would be great if I was trying to get work as a defense contractor, but I'm trying to romance a lady. Oh, and so you don't get worked up, that's not my new suit. I'm saving the suit for my date tonight.

The Craigieburn Valley: A photo essay

During my time at Broken River (yes, this is another old post I've found on my laptop) I was looking at a lot of National Geographics. Not only are they a fine source of educational material which is in short supply in White Star Chalet, but if you're lucky they'll contain photos of boobs, which is almost like meeting a real woman.

One of the things that most impressed me about these magazines were their photo essays. I quite like the idea that by putting the word "photo" in front of the word "essay" you can take all of the difficulties of essay writing (like using words) and replace them with the even more baffling difficulties of photography. Having struggled with words on many occaisions while writing essays, the though of struggling to take and use good photos was quite refreshing.

And so, this is my homage to the photo essay genre. Of course, I suck at taking photos so it's going to be terrible, but hopefully you'll recognise the form that I'm working towards even if the content leaves something to be desired...

Craigieburn: A Photo Essay

In late September, I was commissioned by staff at the Broken River Ski Field to ski over Hamilton Peak and into the wilds of the Craigieburn Valley Ski Area. Renowned for it's intimidating terrain and even more intimidating staff, this area bears little resemblance to its friendly and laid-back neighbour, even though the two fields are so close together.

At White Star, every day starts by opening this red door. Unless you go out the fire escape, which no one does because it’s a weird trap-door. And that doesn’t include days where you don’t leave the hut. Such days leave one feeling particularly sordid, but then I guess you could also say that such days don’t start in an important sense, so the point still stands (except for the fire escape).

Many tourists have been cruelly lured to the top of these stairs by the empty promise of groomed runs and chairlifts.

At Palmer Lodge, Barratt (far right) explains the finer points of using zinc cream in the same quantities and manner as regular sunscreen. Dan (centre) wonders whether any day trippers will come up at all if word gets out that there is no chairlift.

On the other side of Hamilton Peak (the highest point on the horizon) lies the Craigieburn Valley, my destination for today. A group of skiers from Craigieburn has already arrived at Broken River seeking friendly staff and fashionable merchandise.

Substituting zinc cream for sunscreen not only provides SPF1000 sun protection that won’t come off without a belt sander, it also acts as a convenient disguise. And as you sweat and it runs into your mouth, you get 4500% of your RDI of zinc.

I change shirt on the Broken River side of Hamilton Peak before heading into unfamiliar and hostile terrain. Wearing BR merchandise in the Craigieburn Valley combines great skiing with annoying other people and should be considered one of life’s treasures.

The view from the sun deck at Craigieburn with the famous Middle Basin chutes behind me on the left. The rope tows will stop soon and the locals are becoming increasingly agitated about my shirt. I decide to beat a hasty retreat before the mood deteriorates and the snow hardens back up in the shade.

These footprints mark my return to Broken River, where people wait to hear whether anyone got irritated by my shirt. They also mark the change from spring skiing to fresh powder turns.

The last run of the day is to the BR car park, a few hundred metres past the last line of visible snow on the left side of the valley. Although it snowed several days ago, this is BR in September, so no one has bothered to come out here to ski this line. The top half of this run will be fresh turns.