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.