Donahue Topher - Bugaboo dreams: a story of skiers, helicopters and mountains

Like great sailing ships with towering masts and enormous keels, mountains are alive at their tallest peaks, humming in the elements, alive at hearts of stone floating on the fiery matrix which gave them birth. Perched on mountains, I am a human speck of an observer to this wild extravagance of creative force. It extends beyond my world, and time, to know that I cannot truly measure space, energy and beauty. In the face of mountains, measurement seems contrived, impertinent, dwarfed. But mountains do not dwarf the spirit; they present reaches that convene with the universal. I feel them renew and deepen my first transaction with nature. I have a covenant with mountains.

Andrea Mead Lawrence, A Practice of Mountains.

The mountain guide tensed his vocal cords in a way only men of the alpine can, and the chortle of a loud yodel left his lungs, spreading across the pristine white glacier to rebound against the sheer walls of black and white stone where the ice abruptly ended. Before the echo of the yodel had time to return to his ears, his world was transformed by a catastrophic change under his feet as the edge of a nearby crevasse collapsed into the bowels of the glacier.

The crevasse was one of many formed by the long battle between ice and stone. He was standing in a place where the rock forces the slowly moving ice between two monolithic spires, causing upheaval in the glacier as it squeezes through. Like a river flowing into a narrow canyon, the surface becomes chaotic and broken, changing daily in a rare display of geologic change moving in human time. The ice carves huge shards from the surrounding rock, mixing boulders into the ice. Within the crevasse wall, a massive boulder the size of an automobile was entombed, and when the weight of the yodeling climber, or maybe even the vibration of the yodel itself, was added to the pressure within the delicate sculpture, hundreds of tonnes of ice, the boulder and the guide dropped into the depths.

A second later, stillness returned. The guide a young Austrian named Hans Gmoser along with the ice he had been standing on and the boulder were rearranged at the bottom of the crevasse in a diabolical order. The ice was shattered into blocks and thrown about the chasm. The rock was leaning against the impenetrable ice of the inner glacier, and the guide was on the bottom, pinned between rock and ice.

To understand where this guide was trapped, imagine a mountain range built from ancient islands compressed and folded into a continent by the movement of the earths crust before being shaped by an ice age that deposits two kilometres of ice over the region. After eons of carving, give the ice a few millennia to melt and expose the chaotic layers of rock, leaving jagged peaks and deep valleys at the edge of the biggest body of water on the planet.

Position winter cyclones with colossal violence and moisture content right off the coast to spin wave after wave of precipitation into the steep-sided mountains. The first blast of moisture falls on the coastal mountains, creating some of the heaviest rain and snow falls in the world. Then align a series of warmer, drier valleys running perpendicular to the prevailing winds to warm the storm cells, allowing them to pick up even more moisture from evaporation off numerous rivers and lakes. Finally, bring cold air down from the Arctic to freeze and dry the moisture as it runs headlong into ever taller mountain ranges, where the precipitation is dropped in the form of cold, light, dry snow before passing over the Continental Divide.

During the summer, waist-deep snows are replaced by waist-deep wildflowers. Stark granite spires jut from high ridges above valleys perched at the edge of deeper valleys. The vertical relief is overwhelmed by the sheer vastness of the mountains. From any summit, mountains stretch as far as the eye can see, many of them still unnamed, unclimbed, unskied and uninhabited. Dark castles of mountains built of every combination of rock imaginable, from blinding white quartz to jet-black shale. Some are cut as if chiselled from a single block of stone, while others contain uncountable fragments, not one rock bigger than you could move, all held together by the sheer grace of gravity.

Precipitation and geography combine to give the mountains of western Canada an almost mythical stature in the world of adventure destinations. Few who know the area would disagree that the heart of the region, both physically and philosophically, is the Columbia Mountains. Most people living outside of British Columbia think the range is part of the Rocky Mountains, while many have never even heard of the Columbias. Its hard to blame them; the geography of the region is so complicated, rugged and mountainous that even locals and geographers have differing definitions of the borders of the ranges. Other than a few broad river basins, mountains stretch for 700 kilometres from the Pacific Ocean to the edge of the Great Plains that make up the centre of the continent.

Rainforests cling to nearly vertical mountainsides. Turquoise-coloured lakes prone to easy reflections nestle at the bottom of steep valleys draped with veils of mist that cling to the forest canopy. Wildflowers and berries inject bursts of colour into the deep greens and browns of photosynthesis and decay.

These rainforests are the only ones on Earth that receive most of their precipitation between October and March in the form of snow. Short winter days hold the snow in a refrigerated state for much of the time, so it piles up to unbelievable depths. Its no mystery why these mountains have become one of the seven wonders of the world of skiing, but it took a series of events and concurrent technological breakthroughs before the ultimate recreational potential of those mountains and their powerful storm machine could be realized.

Returning to our guide, one essential factor in his fate was the trajectory of the boulder as it fell into the hole in the glacier. With enough force to smash a bomb shelter, the boulder landed on Hans Gmoser. A slight curve in the crevasse wall left enough space for most of his body to remain intact, and his backpack cushioned his torso from the iron hardness of the ice. His leg was twisted at a rakish angle where it disappeared under the boulder but he was alive. With a slightly different trajectory of the boulder, Hans would have been dead before the echo from his yodel faded.

A second guide rappelled into the crevasse and spent several hours hacking at the ice around the broken leg. Eventually the leg dropped free. The rest of Hanss body was a mass of bruises, but his injuries were relatively minor considering the forces pounding the crevasse walls around him at the time of his fall. A rescue flight took him to the hospital where he was stabilized, bandaged and plastered.

Hans had no time to heal. He was scheduled to interview a potential cook, Lynne Seidler, for his new project of using a helicopter to ferry skiers to the summits of the mountains surrounding the very crevasse that had almost killed him. He conducted the interview from his hospital bed, hiring the cook on the spot. I remember being horrified by how beat up he was, remembers Lynne, and he didnt talk much, so I asked him a lot of questions and he seemed impressed that I was so interested in everything. He did ask me if I could cook for 44, and I figured if I could cook for one I could cook for 50. I got the job.

Neither Hans nor Lynne knew it at the time, but they were on the verge of changing mountain recreation forever. Through the next decade neither gave any thought to the magnitude of what they were involved with. The day-to-day adventure of running an unprecedented business in the mountains gave them little chance to step aside and consider the magnitude of the story engulfing them.