The year was 1997, I’m guessing, and I had driven my Ford Escort wagon up to Squamish from Vancouver on a sunny Dec. 25th.
The traditional family wake up, breakfast and gift giving had all taken place in the city and now the lull of the day had begun, where family members drift through, driven by obligation and talk totally disconnected from the time I am living in.
Does every child think this of his mid-morning Christmas Day schedule?
I found myself asking, then being granted without guilt, permission to head to Squamish until the evening.
Soon I was driving the winding highway under a blinding sun and blue sky.
I still don’t know how I knew to go up and seek out solace in the boulders so long ago. I wasn’t well connected with the scene at that time. I didn’t consider myself a dedicated boulderer or even know anyone who was really bouldering much. It just seemed to call out and I answered.
I’m quietly sitting below Superfly in the Grandwall Boulders, reading a book I was given for Christmas, Royal Robbins’ autobiography and trying to puzzle out this problem in the cold, crisp, clear sub-zero air. Each attempt is punctuated by the eating of chocolate and the shaking of my head. I felt so lucky to be here. I climb it once, twice, then start working backward, learning how to climb each move more precisely and in control. I felt the cold, dry grip of the quartz crystals into the skin, the cool stick of climbing rubber on smears and smell of cold in the air. In that moment, I felt incredibly lucky to have had the idea come here and to be alone in the heart of winter to climb.
Shoot ahead 20 years almost to the day, and I find myself tying my shoes up under the same boulder. The landscape has groaned under the growing number of climbers and the boulders once edged in moss and draped in downed boughs are now clean, buffed and manhandled to a chalk-white spotted, skin sweat-yellowed pattern. More climbers dot the sub-canopy landscape but each is in their own universe. The same feeling of quiet luck and peace is there, as the moves flow together. There’s nowhere else I’d rather be.
But, what a different time this is, what a different place. World powers in shoving matches, several rungs farther down the climate-change ladder, governments in chaos or buckling under the weight of swelling economies and the cost of living soaring higher than the mountains, driving the desire to move here in the first place. A climbing community shrinking as the number of climbers swell, who is replacing whom?
It is just so easy to forget about it all and go climbing. This is both a blessing and a curse. Be careful which moments you choose to forget. Just as issues such as mortgage payments, student loans, and rising taxes can seem fleeting compared to the greater picture of life, people have a transience too. When it comes time, remembering the incredible send you trained so hard for or the friends who encouraged and supported you along the way, the human factor rises to the top. Our successes are built upon the building blocks of the community surrounding us and the relationships between us.
Sadly, this year ended with the death of a friend who I never got to know quite well enough. I had big plans for us, so it is to Hayden Kennedy that this piece is dedicated.
Editor’s note: Hayden Kennedy died shortly after he lost his partner Inge Perkins in an avalanche in the southern Madison Mountains, in Montana, in October.
