Geoff Powter - Inner Ranges: An Anthology of Mountain Thoughts and Mountain People

Copyright 2018 by Geoff Powter

Foreword copyright 2018 by Chris Bonington

First Edition

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Cataloguing data available from Library and Archives Canada

ISBN 9781771602877 (paperback)

ISBN 9781771602884 (electronic)

Edited by Kirsten Craven

Design by Chyla Cardinal

Cover photo by Paul Zizka

Distributed in Canada by Heritage Group Distribution and in the U. S. by Publishers Group West

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We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund and the Canada Council for the Arts, and of the province of British Columbia through the British Columbia Arts Council and the Book Publishing Tax Credit.

For Kathi, the best adventure of my life.

CONTENTS

Part III: Three against Everest
(with Apologies to Woodrow Wilson Sayre)

FOREWORD

In the fall of 2017, I had the pleasure of coming to the Banff Mountain Film Festival, and the doubled joy of sitting as a guest of Geoff Powters long-running Voices of Adventure series at the festival.

Id spent time with Geoff before, both at past festivals and climbing together on our home crags in Britain and in Canada, but sitting with him on the stage offered a different view of him. Some combination of things was likely at play Geoffs long love of the mountain world, his training as a clinical psychologist, his years writing profiles of several of the leading climbers of our time, his personal drive to understand the whys of everything he sees and it was only moments before he was pushing me, gently, into corners of my story I hadnt talked much about in public before.

I smiled then, and Ive smiled again as I travelled through this book. That same desire, willingness and skill to go into shadows and corners of the adventure life and ask that ever-present Why? runs as surely through this anthology of Geoffs mountain writing as our Banff interview did.

Theres a refreshing touch, here, too, with Geoff turning the light on himself, both in writing candidly about some of his own adventures, but also in his reflections back on the pieces hes written. Just as in climbing itself, its a complicated thing to get mountain writing right, and perhaps even harder to look back and honestly assess whether youve gotten it wrong.

There is some beautiful, provocative and astute mountain writing in this book, and Ill hope youll enjoy the journey through it as much as I have.

Chris Bonington

Cumbria, 2018

PREFACE

In the gear room of our home in the Canadian Rockies, I have a favourite map. Its an old topographic chart of the nearby Wapta Icefields, printed on long-faded paper, laminated years ago to preserve a scrawl of route lines and barely decipherable notes and compass bearings. I used that map on several ski trips across the Wapta one of my treasured places on the planet and Ive kept it all these years because those lines and scribbles are the memory traces of some of the most wonderful, and wondrous, experiences of my life.

At the top of the map, where the Peyto Glacier turns hard south and cracks into a minefield of crevasses, theres a 90 angle in one of the routes drawn on the map, with a rough circle scratched at the turn. I remember sitting there with a couple of partners I barely knew, waiting out a bitter whiteout, hunkered down behind our packs, hiding from a wind that hurt. With naive faith that the weather had to break, we stayed far too long, until the cold made the decision for us: wed just have to trust the compass and move if we planned to live.

Only a couple of inches to the side on the map but a lifetime of experience away, another, fainter scratch that reads X-1980 marks the point where another partner and I turned around on my first exploration of the ice. In an even worse storm that day, we gave up on our plans with a curse and spent hours bent over a compass, blindly feeling our long way back to the safety of a mountain hut. I remember with a sick feeling how two other skiers joined us in the hut long after dark, one of them in agony because his contact lenses had frozen to his eyes in the lashing cold. We all puzzled over how to solve his strange problem while he keened in a corner.

And then, leaping almost the entire length of the map, theres a great straight line between circles that Id drawn, marking that perfect New Years Day many years later when the Wapta finally consented and we sailed for hours on best-ever snow under a windless, baking sun, sailing, smiling, from one end of the ice to the other. The exclamation marks drawn above the line dont begin to convey the joy of that long-ago day.

This book is, I think, a bit like that map, a collection of bearings through another great passion of my life: writing about the mountains I love so much and the people who bring them to life. Ive selected pieces that I think tell the story of both the writer and the things written, trying to make sense of the path Ive had the privilege to follow. As on the map, one waypoint led to another, and then to another, and the journey between them was rich.

There are a few landmarks in my parallel journeys as climber and writer that I cover in the pieces themselves, others that I navigate to in the introductions and codas to the stories. Its been a pleasure to revisit these pieces and to write the notes, thinking about the stories behind the stories and looking back to see where both my writing and I have changed. Theyve given me the chance to evaluate what I got right, and in more than a few places, what I got wrong.

It proved to be something of a Frankensteinian undertaking to choose which pieces to put in this book and to figure out how to stitch them together. The stories included here certainly werent written with the thought that theyd ever be read together. Rants about the state of climbing bump up against pieces about the same subject that claim to have journalistic neutrality. Shards of comedy are nestled in amongst stories about terrible tragedy. Fiction and quasi-fictional pieces follow tales of all-too-true crime.

The stories and experiences here span more than three decades, and the world, the world of adventure and I have all changed a lot in that stretch of time. During the months of pulling this book together, I debated, over and over, with myself and with others, whether I should keep some pieces out of this book, or edit the pieces that are included here, to reflect those changes. There are certainly a few places where, with 2018 lenses and 61-year-old sensibilities, Im surprised by what I wrote, and by what I apparently thought. In the end, though, other than editing for greater clarity, for the most part Ive left intact even those stories that dont quite have a 2018 conscience. I have some faith that, even if they leave me shaking my own head today, these early stories do reflect the thinking of their time and can perhaps serve as relics that help us understand and appreciate how far weve come. They certainly help me see how long my own journey was.