Jasper National Park

Snowy peaks in the clouds, Jasper National Park, Alberta.  

Hey everyone, welcome back! Springtime is rolling along out here in Vancouver, and we've already got 16 hours of daylight for PMC training!  We have two months before the ride and 4 months of fundraising remaining.  Contributions have been coming in, so a big thank you to all those kind donors.  There is still a long way to go, so please donate if you can! Thanks!  Outdoor education has been the theme of the past couple of trips, the first of which to Vancouver's local rock-climbing mecca.  Each year the VOC runs a bunch of rock climbing courses in the town of Squamish, an hour north of the city.  Squamish is home to the area's best rock climbing with over a thousand routes on sheer granite, a perfect place to teach classes at varying levels of experience.  Squamish also boasts fantastic mountain biking, hiking and both sea and river kayaking, and as such is known as the outdoor recreation capital of Canada.  I myself would be learning the art of anchor building on rock faces, crucial to roped safety systems on steep terrain.  I had guessed my way through this sort of thing before, but being the means of securing oneself to a cliff I thought it best to get some  formal training.  It was a great day with great weather, and a few steep hikes to get to different rock routes.  The only downside to the day was helping the local search and rescue carry an injured climber off the mountain, a sobering reminder to everyone to think twice.  

Anchor building school in Squamish, B.C.  

The next trip would take me a little further from home, an ear popping twelve hour drive through southern British Columbia to Jasper National Park on the B.C.- Alberta border.  Jasper sits in the heart of the Canadian Rockies and is full of huge mountains and covered in glaciers, and I headed there to take a class in glacier safety and self rescue.  

Hello from Mt. Athabasca , Jasper National Park, Alberta.  

The Canadian Rockies are an impressive mountain range, made up of steeply dipping limestone beds rising to 10,000 feet or more.  This area doesn't get half the snow that falls on the B.C. Coast Range, but being so far north the winter snowpack often survives through mild summers, and the next year's snow piles on top of what is left.  Eventually these snow layers are pressed into ice under their own weight, and they begin flowing down mountainsides in huge broken slabs.  These slabs are known as glaciers, and knowing how to travel over them is another crucial alpine skill.

Peaks and glaciers in the clouds from camp in the valley.  

We spent the weekend climbing through huge mountains and learning how to find safe routes over glaciers.  The key is to avoid falling into a crevasse, a crack that forms in the glacier when it is forced to change direction.  These crevasses can be hundreds of feet deep and are often disguised by a thin veneer of snow, waiting for unsuspecting climbers to walk right through.  Failing avoidance, it is also nice to know how to rescue someone from the depths of one of these things, so we did some of that too.  

Mt. Athabasca (11,500') and one of it's glaciers.  Mountain hazards abound with crevasses beginning to open up and avalanches coming off of the ridge in lower left.  

Our first day was spent hiking around practicing rope systems for hauling fallen climbers out of crevasses.  This was a very educational day with lots of knot tying and messing with gear, but weather was bad and we did not go very high up.  Thusly, most of the pictures from this day are of knots and clouds.  

Jay, Mathieu and I talk about some rescue set-ups.  

Andy shows off his crevasse rescue set up.

The next day was a little more interesting, the weather cleared and we headed up into the alpine zone on 11,500 foot Mt. Athabasca.  We climbed up to about 9,000 feet, looking for safe routes on the faces above and talking alpine skills.  It was a great climb with much better views and clear weather, the only real hazard for the day was dangerously strong sun reflecting off the glacier.  This can make climbing much more exhausting, and can sometimes warm the snowpack to instability leading to avalanche.  

A large group of climbers head down from Mt. Athabasca after an unsuccessful summit attempt.  

Heading up the glacier on Mt. Athabasca in the sunshine.  

Jay and I take a break to enjoy the view.

 A glacier spills over a cliff on Mt. Andromeda.  House sized chunks of ice break off and tumble overboard here, definitely a place to avoid.  

Not a shabby classroom.  Talking about snow anchors in the shadow of Mt. Athabasca.

Clouds roll over the Canadian Rockies.

Our summit for the day, 9,000' on Mt. Athabasca.  Hot sun and unstable snow would block access to the higher reaches of the mountain.  

We made it back to the trailhead without incident, and so ended another great weekend in the alpine.  I made the long drive back home in good weather and scoped out a few summer mountaineering objectives on the way.  Over the course of the weekend I had done about 10 miles of steep high elevation snow climbing.  Not the most strenuous weekend but the skills I learned will allow me to explore the bigger and more serious mountains in this area, and be ready to help myself and others should anything go wrong.

That's it for this one folks, thanks for stopping by and please head to my PMC profile and donate if you can!  Every penny of rider raised donations goes to support the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in researching treatments and cures.  Next week I'll be heading up Cypress Mountain just north of Vancouver to teach some folks from the university outdoor club some basic mountaineering skills.  Hopefully the weather holds and I can get some good photographs for you.  Check out Dana-Farber.org for the latest updates on cancer research in Boston, and Jimmyfund.org to see how we're doing with fundraising.  See you next time!