Howse Peak sits at one hundred sixteen degrees, forty minutes,
fifty-three seconds west of the prime meridian, and fifty-one degrees,
forty-eight minutes, forty-nine seconds north of the equator. The summit
is ten thousand seven hundred ninety three feet above sea level and
separates the Pacific drainage, and British Columbia -to the south; from
the Atlantic, and Alberta -to the east , north, and west. The
mountain bears the name of Joseph Howse, a Hudson Bay Company fur
trader and explorer who crossed a pass five kilometers west-southwest of
the mountain in 1810. The pass, and the river draining it to the
northwest, also bear his name. One hundred seventy five million years of
orogeny and erosion has thrust and carved the mountain into a dramatic
pyramid falling shallowly to the south and west and precipitously to the
north and east. Seen from the north the peak is a
broad sweep of black limestone that walls in Chephren Lake like a human
hand gathering spilled salt. The wall is two thousand feet high and it
arcs from Mount Synge in the east to crest and break at the NE Ridge of
Howse Peak. Above, the defiant and glaciated summit block
stacks one thousand three hundred feet more relief onto the wall.
The peak was first climbed in 1902 by four aristocratic tweed clothed
gentlemen and their pipe smoking Swiss guide. They horse-packed for weeks
from the Canadian Pacific Railway stop at Laggan in the company of a team
of outfitters. Two new routes where added in 1939 and 1958.
All three ascents climbed from the Howse River via the shallower
backslopes of the mountain. Canada celebrated its hundredth year of
nationhood in 1967 and in August of that year Ken Baker, Lloyd MacKay and
Don Vockeroth opened the Northeast Ridge of Howse Peak. It was the third
grade V alpine route climbed in the Rockies in as many years and along
with the Geiser/Hudson/Gran on the East Face of Howse's neighbor, Mt
Chephren, in 1965, and the Greenwood/Locke on Mt Temple in 1966; the
Northeast Ridge birthed the "Grande Course" era of Canadian Rockies
alpinism. Being the time of technically expert lines established
over several days up the massive northerly faces of the Rockies' great
glaciated
peaks. Prophetically Vockeroth predicted that the route would go in one
day citing "the short approach", "unsustained difficulties", and
"generally decent rock" (In the early 70s John Roskelly and Chris
Kopcynski climbed the NE Ridge in one day).
August 21, 1981, a Friday. Tim Friesen and I drove from Calgary after work
and stopped in Banff to buy a six pack because the beer store would be
closed when we descended, with a thirst, from the North-East Ridge of
Howse peak on Sunday. We slept in my MG-B that night and began the climb
the next day. We climbed in wool knickers and Galibier
full leather boots and for two days we climbed the dawn and quit at dusk
gaining a paragraph, or two, on Vockeroth's route description. The
route description was many paragraphs long. Sunday night we ate the last
of our food and late Monday we summited and ran down the back slopes to
bivy on the Howse River. Tuesday morning, gaunt and hungry, we began the
25 km walk out. Midday we met two hikers and they gave us a bag of
caramels, but then restowed the rest of their food when Tim and I devoured
the caramels like ravenous wolves. I couldn't
get the wrappers off fast enough and crammed so many into my mouth
that they formed a gooey blob the size of a golf ball. It was the first
food we'd had in forty two hours. An hour later, ahead of Tim, I took the
horse packers' fork in the
trail and missed the footbridge over the Mistaya River. When I got to the
horses' ford on the river I stripped and waded in holding my pack and
clothes and boots over my head. The water was green deep and frigid and
swirling and my feet lost all feeling -then lost the bottom- and I was
hauled around 180 degrees; I could feel the power of the river and it was
terrifying and I panicked and groped and floundered my way from its clutch
and staggered back onto the bank. My feet felt like a couple of stumps.
Silvery cold water planed over them like lacquer and I sat and shuffled my
feet over the river rocks 'til they were square to the sun. Across the
Mistaya I could see the 93 highway and Winnebagos lumbering down it (did
they notice me, trembling goose-flesh-naked-man?). I redressed and
bushwhacked upstream and came to a tight cliff-walled canyon. The Mistaya
was emerald and raging thirty feet below. Everywhere was the thunder of
the river and mist draped the air like a veil. Two lodge pole pines had
fallen in intersection and bridged the canyon. Keeping my feet to the
lower tree I was able to balance with my hands on the upper. Half way
across I had to straddle the upper tree to get past the crossing of the
trees, when I set my crotch on the upper tree it cracked and settled six
inches and I felt the fear of having it all splinter and me clawing the
air for long horrified seconds before crashing into the Mistaya to drown.
I sat very still, and exhaled the adrenalin, and continued. Crawling up
the far bank I heaved my pack over the guardrail. The first vehicle -a
Winnebago- passed me by and I felt amazed and insulted. How could they
pass me by for I was living a higher form of existence ... at least in my
own head I was. A motorcycle stopped, Tim was on the back, he'd hitched a
ride to look for me -he'd taken the right fork in the trail and walked
over the Mistaya on the footbridge.
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A warden was standing beside my MG-B when I got off of the back of the
motorcycle. He'd been scoping Howse Peak conducting the first stage of a
rescue. I told him that we were ok then I drove back to pick up Tim and my
pack. The beer store was wide open when we drove through Banff that night. The VI th grade came to the Rockies in the seventies,
and the VI th grade in winter in the eighties, specifically to Howse Peak
in 1988. In the third week of March, 1988, Ward Robinson and I made the
first ascent of the North Face -grade VI, 5.9, A3- over four days. Ward
fell twenty five feet from the aid climbing crux and led the most serious
mixed pitch of his career on the upper headwall: a snow plastered overhang
70 feet out from his last real gear -the belay. This route remained the
hardest winter route that I've climbed, that is until I returned to Howse
Peak in March of 1999 with Scott Backes and Steve House. I first met Scott
Backes on the Kahiltna airstrip in the spring of 1985. I'd been guiding on
the West Buttress of Mt McKinley and Scott and his partner, Bill Bancroft,
had been waiting to get on the Diamond Face of Mt Hunter. My clients had
pulled off the ultimate airstrip coup: skied up to the strip and stepped
right onto the first plane to land in 8 days, because it was a K-2
Aviation plane and we were their sole customers. "Sorry folks, no hard
feelings, fly the friendly skies next time." As I waited for the plane to
return Scott and Bill and I shot the shit and swigged from a litre of
Grand Marnier. Scott and I locked into the GM and the energy. That being
the energy of being in your mid twenties and being ABSOLUTELY into alpine
climbing, constructing your whole life around alpine climbing and
measuring the worth of your life by the routes that you'd climbed, the
faces that you'd attempted, and most importantly the pitches that you'd
led that had demanded of you something that you'd never done before. To
this day we value only action and we assign no value at all to possession
or position or wealth.
Steve House showed up at the first "Gathering" of the ice clan that my
wife, Catherine, and I attended in December of 95 in Cody Wyoming. That
year was, more or less, just a hand shake and a hello with Steve as it was
a busy, busy gathering. What between Catherine and my climbing, and Alex
"Going Off!", and Rad and Steve with him, and Verm and Wilford -"The
Alcoholidays"- off busting caps, too thrashed to climb after pushing it
too the plateau yesterday, and Verm actually blowing away a full can of
beer ("Ah, it was Coors Light, it doesn't count."), and Scott and the
Minnesotans, and the crew from Jackson, and Java-man and brethren from
Bozeman, and Wilford saving me in the
Silver Dollar Saloon when I'd had a couple and started reeling off my best
cowboy jokes (ah, shucks, ma'am, I was just helping that sheep over the
fence), and all forty of us, and a cowboy we'd just met, Jake, getting on
the phone and telling Twight that he sucked because he wasn't there: "Hi,
my name's Jake, and you don't know me, but I want to tell you that you
suck." Well it was just too busy a time to really get to know
anyone. 1996 was a quieter gathering Java (Jack Tackle) and Catherine and
I actually got to know Steve a bit. He'd driven out from Seattle with Tom
Hargis and Steve Swenson and it was Swenson who whispered to me as an
aside at breakfast our last morning, "You should take Steve on one of your
winter alpine routes up there. He's a very good mixed climber." So when
Jo-Jo (Joe Josephson) and I were reeling up for the Emperor Face on Mt
Robson the next April (1997) Steve met us in the parking lot on an e-mail
invite from three days before and a solid 12 hours behind the wheel. We
didn't get Robson that go round, but we had a grand time and swore a pact
to return in one year.
1998, April,
we returned but didn't get the weather and didn't even go in. The next
day, however, we did get the first ascent of "The Silver Lining" IV,
5.10/A0, WI 6X, a beautiful 12 pitch gulley line on the 2000ft rock wall
that borders the south flank of the Saskatchewan Glacier at the Columbia
Ice field. Having climbed many of the alpine
routes at the Ice fields I believe I can say that "The Silver Lining" is
the best quality route there: incredible ice, modern mixed, good snow, and
decent rock; add to that a two hour approach and one day ascent (20hrs)
and you have a great route. Steve got the crux pitch right off of the
snow-cone and it was the first time that I'd ever
seen him mixed climbing. I quote, from the article that I wrote:
"Steve had already railed across the lip of this roof and connected 30 ft
of ice blobs to reach the detached plank of ice. At 1/2 rope the ice had
baked off of the rock and you could pass a yardstick behind it. It
vibrated visibly when you hit it with the broadside of your axe. I was
pitoned tight under the roof and couldn't see Steve,
"What's he doing Jo-Jo?"
"He's looking for dry tools over the lip"
"Any pro?"
"Oh man, a stubby 10' down. He's a
dude man. He's a dude."
And the rope just kept going out until there wasn't anymore and Steve
screamed "OFF BELAY!" Jo-Jo and I jumared the pitch. At the lip I kicked
the ice. It fractured in linear patterns like a mirror flexed too far, the
world reflected there transected into a world of related, but disjoint
images."
1999 was to be round three on Robson, and
my 40th birthday, an event that Catherine had invited many of the best
alpinists in the world to with the suggestion that they all get out
climbing with me. I wondered if I would survive to see my 40th:
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