During the summer months I work as an ACMG rock guide, teaching climbing instruction, guiding people on routes around Squamish and up the Chief, and coaching people on how to improve their own rock climbing using the district as a lab.
Each summer provides a few encounters with climbers where my choice of route mix combined their willingness to push outside their comfort zones results in really unique and changing experiences. This past July 19 was one of those days.
It started with the end of school. I received emails from Stacey Spencer and Wayne and Kirstin Takashiba about taking their two daughters up a route on the Chief as a summer present. These two 12-year-old girls, Lily and Emi, are both seasoned competition climbers and had just come off a long fall, winter and spring season of training and competing, not to mention finishing up the school year. They needed something to bookend their training and add a new page to their growing climbing experience – something, I thought, like climbing Angel’s Crest to the Central Summit of the Chief.
A little bit of back-story here. Lily and Stacey are a local Squamish climbing family. Lily is a member of the Ground Up Climbing Centre’s junior climbing team. Wayne, Kirstin and Emi live in Vancouver and climb at Port Coquitlam’s Climb Base 5, where Emi is a member of their competitive junior team.
I met Wayne close to 20 years ago in Yosemite, lost touch, and then reconnected over this idea of his daughter and her pal climbing the Chief together. Angel’s Crest, originally climbed from 1962 to ’64 and then freed in 1975, is not the easiest introduction to a full length Chief adventure. It climbs the crest, or ridge, traversing over top of the famous “Dancing Bear” or “Witch on her Broom” in 12 pitches up to 5.10b, summiting at the north end of the Chief’s second summit. The route covers a lot of ground, involving devious route finding as it skirts its way around pinnacles, crumbling towers, forested ledges, cracks, corners, chimneys and slabs.
Was this too much for the girls?
We met pre-dawn, at 5:30 a.m. at the Apron parking lot. In the dust choked pre-light it was chilly but you could feel the mounting heat lurking to the east.
We drove down the Mamquam Forest Service Road to the trailhead, quietly racked up so as not to disturb the slumbering van-dwellers scattered along the roadside and hiked up through the trees to the route’s base.
The trail meanders through the rock-fall zone, where we pick our way through talus.
The sticky humid heat beneath the forest canopy has all of us sweating before we even begin the climbing.
The route is so popular that, even today, a Wednesday in July, there are two parties ahead of us some ways above.
The first party began at 4 a.m., an unrealistic starting time for two 12-year-olds.
We begin climbing at 6:15 a.m. and it’s instantly obvious that the girls have little granite experience.
However, after a few pitches, with me setting a hustling pace to stay close to parties ahead and away from parties below, the girls quickly adapt to the foreign feeling of climbing cracks, jamming hands and feet and smearing shoes on crystals.
All of us absorbed in our tasks, the pitches flow by, hours pass and the girls start to get into the groove of covering ground, removing gear, securing themselves at anchors, belaying me and taking in the view.
We eat and drink on the fly to maintain a steady pace, not too fast to tire and not too slow to stagnate and waste time.
We meet a visiting party of British climbers who, upon meeting the girls and hearing that it’s their first time up the Chief, immediately tell them just how lucky they are to live in such a beautiful place.
We climb, belay, lower, pay out rope, smear, jam and push our way toward the second summit of the Chief.
We’re one of seven parties on the route that day.
The only party to pass us was a friend guiding one guest, and boy were they both impressed with the girls.
All of a sudden, I’m squirming my way up the last pitch, topping out to the cheers of Wayne and Stacey and hurriedly building my anchor to get the much anticipated girls on top of the mountain.
Incredibly the girls barely looked stressed during their journey.
Not a whimper, cry, tears or comment about the exposure, painful feet or how tired they were after 11 hours of climbing. Amazingly, these two were so stoic throughout the day I barely knew if they enjoyed themselves.
High-fives to Lily and Emi for doing so well at something completely new and a huge thank you to Wayne, Kirstin and Stacey for helping make this happen, as well as the lemonade and watermelon on top.
