Tony Howard - Adventures in the Northlands: Vertebrate Mountain Shorts

May your trails be crooked, winding, lonesome, dangerous, leading to the most amazing view. May your mountains rise into and above the clouds.

Edward Abbey author, environmentalist and political anarchist

Adventure, it seems to me, has become a rather overused and even misused term these days, diminished by TV shows purporting to show heroic deeds in hazardous places, yet where safety lies close at hand behind the cameras. Personally, adventure is something I thrive on, often deliberately sought out, sometimes happening unexpectedly, but always enjoyed, though sometimes more in retrospect than at the time.

Roy Brown, who I first met at the age of 14 in my home hills of Chew Valley in the Peak District, was my first climbing mentor. He lived in an old hen hut with the gritstone cliffs of Dovestones Edge and Wimberry just a half hour walk from his door. One of his favourite phrases was When in doubt, brew up, which, if time permits, is not a bad plan when disaster looms. In fact, come to think of it, having a brew is always a good plan! In later years, Roy, for whom work was never a first choice, would turn up at Troll where I worked making climbing gear. Having scrounged a brew and dragged me not too reluctantly from whatever I was doing, he would leave with his favourite parting shot, always guaranteed to make me envious if the sun was shining; Well, I must go, the days half gone and I havent had an adventure yet an approach to life that has stood me in good stead over the years.

Between leaving school and starting Troll Climbing Equipment some seven years later in 1965, I worked as little as possible, just enough to get money together to climb, though sometimes the jobs themselves were quite adventurous in their own right. Being a partner in Troll allowed that ethos to continue over the next 30 years, though my partners were not always overly impressed with my prolonged absences. However, as I used to say, you cant design climbing equipment if you dont use it. After we sold Troll in 1995 I took early retirement, continuing a life based on climbing, trekking and generally having fun in the hills, which, for me, is what its always been about.

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What follows is a collection of tales from the north; the first, Adventuresin the Northlands, first written in 1971, also provides the books title and describes some adventures I had while on time-off from Troll, working in northern Canada between 1970 and 1972. The second, The Trail of Ninety-Eight, written in 1971, describes a canoe trip of over 800 miles along an almost forgotten Klondike gold rush route through Canadas arctic wilderness that I also did in that period. Next is a story of Adventures in Greenland, written in 1973 and updated in 1975, including an attempt on an unclimbed 6000-foot face in east Greenland in the early 1970s. The last two stories are of climbs and mountain adventures in my favourite European country, Norway. The Home of the Giants piece, written in 2003, takes place in Norways mightiest mountains, the Jotunheim. Return to Romsdal, from pieces written in 1968 and 1979, is a story of new climbs in the vicinity of the Troll Wall, of which I made the British first ascent with our Rimmon Mountaineering Club in 1965.

There are more where these came from, but I must go, the days half gone and Ive not had an adventure yet.

Tony Howard

March 2012

Teslin village, Yukon Territory, 1971.

Ode from a mountaintop dumpshack, while on nightshift, winter 1970,
Yukon-British Columbia border

On the greenly phosphorescent snows,

Herald of the dawning, glows

The witchlight of the hidden sun.

Then blushing pink to swiftly run

The gauntlet of the clutching night,

Pale peaks reflect the morning light.

Deep down, darkly, hollows nestle

In the gloom where bull-moose wrestle,

And unknown, languid, ice-fringed lakes

Await the dropping dawn that makes

Inverted mirrors of their deeps,

Ring-banished when the grayling leaps.

But still the mountains in their glory

Conceal below, frost-gripped and hoary,

Dungeon valleys where the nascent day

Yearns for the suns first cleaving ray

To cut them from their pine-locked womb

That holds the darkness like a tomb.

Then, from the chalice of the dazzling peaks

The morning light pours forth and seeks

The lingering refugees of night,

Last shadows shrinking out of sight

Till over all the sun holds sway,

Creator of the newborn day.

The winter, as always on the Yukon-British Columbia border, was bitterly cold and long. Temperatures on the mountaintop where I had started work in an opencast mine as a lowly dumpman were regularly down to anywhere from 10 to 40 Fahrenheit below freezing, and sometimes 60 below. Thats -5 to -30 Celsius. Being a dumpman is a crazy job, but it does leave plenty of spare time to read and write even to write poetry. It was one of the easiest jobs Ive ever had all that was required was to sit in a sentry box high on the mountain above a scree slope of quarry waste and wait until a truck arrived. Sometimes they would be frequent, sometimes maybe only a few times a shift. All I had to do then was put down my book, step outside, make sure the truck didnt reverse over the edge before it dumped its load of rock, then nip smartly back in and settle down in front of my stove again. In winter, the upside was watching the Northern Lights, which burnt with red and green fire over the dark pine forests. The downside was that the fuel in the small gas stove usually froze at around 10 Fahrenheit (-12 C), just when you needed it, so it could be decidedly chilly. But who cares, compared with wages in England, the pay was fantastic!

The job didnt last. Within a few months I had been promoted via shovel-oiler (terrible job) to drillers mate, which paid even more money than sitting in a dump shack. Unless we had a breakdown, it was also much warmer, though we had some memorably cold shifts. One night the temperature was -60 Fahrenheit. In addition, a fierce wind was blowing, the wind-chill bringing the effective temperature down to -120 below, or -65 Celsius.

We were dispatched to the summit of the mountain to bring the drill down. In those conditions, drill steels can break like twigs. Pee seemed to freeze before it hit the ground, thats if, like me, you were daft enough to experiment! But we thawed the engine out with blowtorches and got the job done and I, at least, enjoyed it.

On days off, I sometimes hitched out to see friends. The Quartz Creek Gang lived in log cabins in the bush a few miles down the track that ran from the mining camp to the Alaska Highway, 100 miles away. Beyond that, the nearest town was Whitehorse, another 250 miles further up the dirt road, snow covered for much of the year. Being the early 1970s it was the hippy era and The Quartz Creek Gang were living the life. Marijuana bloomed in the ambient warmth of the log-burning stoves and high voltage psychedelic rock boomed from the sound systems. Like many of the others working up at the mine, those that went to work were sometimes stoned, driving 50-ton dump trucks and other heavy machinery while high on pot, or whatever high was available that week. Perhaps it was just as well that dumpmen were up there to see they didnt reverse over the edge of the mountain.