Mountain Life – Coast Mountains - Winter/Spring 2022 by Mountain Life Media

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TABLE OF CONTENTS Optimism

ON THIS PAGE The man, the myth— McSkimming. Whistler backcountry. REUBEN KRABBE ON THE COVER Alexi Godbout, pitted again. Whistler backcountry. GUY FATTAL

UPFRONTS

FEATURES

P.17 EDITOR’S MESSAGE Feet First

P.30 FINDING QUENEESH Three Days on the Comox Glacier

P.18 OPTIMISM Martin Gallant

P.52 THE OPEN WINDOW Motos & SUPs in Myanmar P.66 TOUCHING THE MOUNTAINS OF HEAVEN Kyrgyzstan’s Tian Shan Range

DEPARTMENTS P.26 TRAILBLAZER Requiem for a Relic

P.76 BEYOND Jon Turk

P.39 ARTIST Anuximana

P.80 GALLERY Here Comes the Sun

P.43 MOUNTAIN LIFER Stephanie Sloan

P.91 GEAR SHED The Right Stuff

PUBLISHERS JON BURAK TODD LAWSON GLEN HARRIS

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EDITOR FEET BANKS

We launched a freakin’ podcast!

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CREATIVE & PRODUCTION DIRECTOR, DESIGNER AMÉLIE LÉGARÉ

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Live it Up with Mountain Life is a collection of conversations about life in the wilderness with the people who do it best.

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DIRECTOR OF MARKETING, DIGITAL AND SOCIAL SARAH BULFORD

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CONTRIBUTORS Jeremy Allen, Kieran Brownie, Chris Christie, Jim Martinello, Reuben Krabbe, Jon Turk, Grant Lawrence, Taylor Godber, Mason Mashon, Erin Hogue, Dan Ashton, Tim Emmett, Ben Haggar, Neve Petersen, Matthew Sylvestre, Brett Tippie, Anatole Tuzlak, Guy Fattal, Marcus Paladino, Tempei Takeuchi, Chis Bowers, Ben Tour, Andrew Findlay, Dave Silver, Sarah Woods, Ace MacKay-Smith, Nick Gottlieb, Lani Imre, Andrew Strain, Kai Jacobson, Brian Hockenstein. SALES & MARKETING JON BURAK TODD LAWSON GLEN HARRIS

Tim Emmett

Jon Turk

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EDITOR'S MESSAGE

FEET FIRST

Social Distancing 3.0.

If ever there was a time to just go climb into a hole in the ground, this might be it. As the plague enters its third calendar year, who can be blamed for wanting to retreat to somewhere awesome, dig in, drop out, hunker down, and ride it out till summer? Enough is enough. And yes, of course, here in the Coast Mountains we are incredibly fortunate to have ample wilderness to head out into. And we’re privileged to live in healthy, like-minded communities willing to power through the confusion, division, doubt, fear, and societal chaos in a somewhat civil manner (social media notwithstanding). On a global scale, very few people have such access to clean air, pristine water, open spaces to frolic in, and nutritious food to eat. Shit could be definitely be worse. On that note, and because we are eternal optimists here at Mountain Life, it’s important to recognize that these past two years have also held tangible silver linings for outdoor enthusiasts: a focus on exploring and rediscovering our own backyards, increased conversations about diversity in the outdoor community and industry, a greater appreciation of Indigenous lands and culture, the realization that global travel should not be taken for granted, and a wider understanding of the complex realities and connections between climate crisis and human behaviour. Thinking optimistically—if more people get out into nature, then more people will care about it, and more will understand the intrinsic value of an ancient rainforest, an unsullied watershed, or a remote peak. And if they understand the value of these spaces, they’ll want to protect them. That is, of course, providing they don’t die while they’re out there. And there’s the rub… Because on top of an increase in garbage, dog poo bags, and abandoned smouldering fire pits at many a once-

TEMPEI TAKEUCHI

favourite spot, the “outdoor boom” of the past two years has also seen a sharp increase in accidents, incidents, and people getting in way over their heads. From 2015-2019, Search and Rescue (SAR) crews in the Sea to Sky Corridor (Squamish/Whistler/Pemberton) mobilized teams for a combined average of 171 calls per year. The “low” year was 2015 with 151 responses, and the busiest was 186 in 2019. Garibaldi and other parks were COVID-closed for much of 2020, yet teams still mobilized 181 times, but 2021 broke records with 268 SAR responses, a 56% increase over the pre-COVID average Certainly, shit can happen to anyone in the wild—veteran or rookie—but it’s important to remember that the mountains are in charge out there, and the deeper you push, the more in charge they get. The best way to stay alive, and have the most fun, is to know where you are, what you’re doing, and how to react if the cheese starts sliding off the cracker (because eventually it will). Take this picture for instance. Photographer Tempei Takeuchi and two friends were ski traversing from Blackcomb to Mount Currie and had to dig this emergency snow cave after a storm flattened their camp and filled their tarped sleeping area with snow. Digging for two hours in the darkness, they were able to burrow into the snowpack, stay warm, and avoid a SAR call (or worse). Knowledge is power. And in the backcountry, it’s sometimes the only sliver of power you have. So, take a course this spring, tag along with more experienced adventurers, check out the SAR resources at adventuresmart.ca, memorize the book Mountaineering: Freedom of the Hills, and pack out what you pack in. The good news is— knowledge doesn’t weigh a thing. –Feet Banks 17

UPFRONT

Optimism

With Martin Gallant

Snowboard legend Martin Gallant drove west from Quebec in the summer of 1992 and taught himself English along the way by listening to NWA tapes on repeat. Over the past three decades, he’s evolved from a halfpipe competitor to a magazine shoot regular to a video company boss to a backcountry icon and surf shack owner. But one thing has remained consistent— he’s never stopped riding, never stopped stoking those around him, and never lost his love for “da slash” and “da launch.” We caught up with Marty after a huge storm and cold snap as he was digging out his home in the Squamish Valley and defrosting his pipes. “My shed is almost collapsing. The roof, and every’ting is frozen stiff,” he explained. “But there are salmon in the river and about 30 eagles in the trees and flying around. The sun is shining… it’s paradise, for sure. If something is broken, who cares, we will fix it. That is what my dad always say.” Who better to kick off an issue about finding the good in things than the godfather of stoke himself? “The secret is the beauty of nature,” says Marty. “The blue sky, the powder, the trees, the mountains. You gotta pay attention of nature and your surroundings. On your way up—by snowmobile, or chairlift, or walking, or any way—you take the time to stop and breathe and look at the mountain and see how beautiful it is. By doing this, you will notice the detail—the cracks or crowns in the snow, the direction the wind blows, the shape of the cornice, and this and that. That is one thing I’ve learned, that ‘go-go-go’ is not always the right way. Take your time up there and breathe and enjoy where you are. Know where you are, that is how you have the best day and the best life.” – Feet Banks

Martin Gallant riding out another fine day. Squamish backcounty.

CHRIS BOWERS

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COMING UP

Bear Yeung Ski fast, and carry a large heart

Always ready to rip.

I meet Jonathan “Bear” Yeung for après at Basalt, a popular Whistler spot with old-school local flavour, tasty food, and good music with no words playing at exactly the right volume. The staff here know him well, but when Bear walks in the first thing he says is, “We probably should have planned this for the Bearfoot Bistro… you know ‘cause of our names.” Bear Yeung is 11 years old, and just like that he wins my heart. Which, it turns out, is something he is highly adept at. Bear has two main interests in life right now: skiing extremely fast, and doing everything he can to help people in need—especially other kids. “Why not help kids who are going through hard times?” Bear asks. “Those kids at the hospital, they are really brave. They are braver than anyone and if I can help them, I want to.” Bear is referring to the toy-and-tablet drive he organized in December for kids at BC Children’s Hospital. For the second year in a row, he and friend Landon Brown spent the autumn canvassing for sick kids. In 2020, the duo raised upwards of $60,000 in donations and gifts, including more than 1,000 new toys and 159 tablets and iPads. The tablets and iPads are especially important during these pandemic years, explains Rita Thodos, head of BC Children’s Hospital Foundation. “When you are in a hospital, you’re often isolated from the outside world,” she says, “and with visitor number restrictions,

KEVIN YEUNG

it can be increasingly difficult. So tablets help kids stay connected to their families and friends. It’s been incredible working with Bear, he’s very motivating and inspiring to us all.” “He’s always been that way,” says father Kevin Yeung. “His passions are being in the mountains and doing things for others. He’s a kid who helps kids.” Bear and his buddy Quinn Lester-Coe were just seven years old when they began fundraising to hire a home tutor for a pair of young girls who had to miss school in order to care for their mother while she battled a brain tumour. He also fundraised to buy a new car for a family whose children were injured in a car crash on Highway 99, raised money to buy hockey jerseys for kids in Lions Gate Hospital, and organized a ‘snack-drive’ to ensure essential health care workers would have healthy snacks available as they worked overtime during the early months of the 2020 COVID pandemic. Now enrolled in his second year with the Whistler Mountain Ski Club, Bear fills his off-season months making calls, sending emails, and even sometimes getting excused from parts of his school day in order to take an important Zoom meeting with a corporate CEO from the East Coast. He’s on a first-name basis with the heads of Allwest Insurance, LEGO Canada, and Canadian Tire (who all partner with him on the toy drives), and he has official letters of commendation from all levels of government, including the prime minister of Canada. 21

“It’s about never giving up or quitting,” Bear adds. “Just keep pushing, speaking my mind, and it always works out… nothing will happen until you do something.”

But, sitting and chatting over a chorizo pasta, Bear seems much more excited about the end goal—helping kids—than the recognition he receives, although his parents show obvious pride in his drive and tenacity. “Landon and Bear get nine rejections for every dollar or toy they are able to collect,” Kevin explains, “but they keep trying. He sends dozens of emails every week.” “It’s about never giving up or quitting,” Bear adds. “Just keep pushing, speaking my mind, and it always works out… nothing will happen until you do something.” Once the snow falls however, what Bear mostly wants to do is ski—as fast as possible. He was voted “most improved” after his inaugural season with the Whistler Mountain Ski Club, and this season, Coach Jack Evans says things are progressing well. “He listens and reacts,” Evans says. “It’s impressive how quickly he can take on feedback and execute on it. He’s also really attentive to the team’s well-being, always the first to help if someone falls or drops a glove. And he definitely has no fear of speed.” “I used to play hockey,” Bear explains, “so I understand ice.” Pumped to ski on any day in any conditions (“-25 degrees means fewer people on the runs!”), Bear says his goal this year is to podium in each of the four races he has on the calendar. In the meantime, he’ll be enjoying après much like any other 11-year-old ripper—ice cream cones from The Rocky Mountain Chocolate Factory or the giant cookies at Moguls. Or, if I’m lucky, the Bearfoot Bistro. – Feet Banks

Follow Bear on Instagram @bearsvancouver

ABOVE That truck has more than 1,000 toys ready for BC Children's Hospital. Bear can't drive yet so Joe Savier (left) and Landon Brown are ready to help. BELOW Expressing the need for speed. Bear on Whistler Mountain. KEVIN YEUNG

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BEHIND THE PHOTO

Good to Go Skiing the Chief's North Gully Let the record show: Squamish adventurers are opportunistic. Just a bunch of optimists, sitting around waiting to turn any ordinary hardship into an opportunity to find new ways to get rad. So, during the great Arctic snowpocalypse of early 2022, while local pipes froze and roads became luge runs, some optimists continued to find ways to turn challenges into opportunities. New ice routes went up on local waterfalls, snowmobiles became an acceptable grocery store commute vehicle—and Eric Carter, Paul Greenwood, and photographer Chris Christie decided it was time to ski the first known descent of the north gully of Siám’ Smánit, the Stawamus Chief. Chris Christie: There were a lot of people in town keeping an eye on these sorts of things because of the cold weather and heavy snow to the valley. So, when Eric and Paul called and said it looked good, I was in. We left the parking lot at 6:30 a.m., and broke trail the whole way up. It wasn’t bad until the gully towards second peak. We skinned up to the ladders then put the skis on our back and took turns plowing through waist deep snow. Once we got up the ladder onto second peak, it was all good. Just ski touring looking out over Howe Sound—all good.

Mountain Life: The idea was always to come in from the top? Chris: That was the most important part; makes it an adventure. I know JF [Plouffe] hiked up the south gully and skied that a few years back but for this, it’s safer to come from the top. It self-cleans in there, and the walls are so steep there was really nothing hanging above our heads the whole time. Plus, there are giant chockstones you’d have to climb up and over if you approached from below. ML: Yeah, it looked like you had a couple rappels to link it all to the valley. Chris: Five rappels. Those giant chock stones were the crux. In the summer you can scramble underneath them but with all this snow, they are basically just giant crevasses of rock. We had a 20-metre overhanging rappel to get over one of them, but they are incredible. You see these huge granite rocks and wonder how they got there. ML: What most people are wondering is—how was the skiing? Chris: We had incredible skiing in there. The gully was legit. Didn’t hit a rock until we got into the trees. ML: Well, great work seizing the day. Chris: Half day, we were back at the car by noon. I had to work that night. But it goes to show, we have four distinct seasons in Squamish and there are always opportunities here if you keep your eyes open. Every time I turn around someone finds something to do. People look at exotic places like the fjords of Norway and Iceland, but we just skied a couloir from summit to almost the ocean like you would in Baffin Island. I put Squamish on the exotic list. We have it all and we have to appreciate it and take care of it. – Feet Banks

TRAILBLAZER

Requiem for a Relic 50 years after The Beachcombers first hit Canadian TV screens, Mountain Life celebrates a West Coast slacker icon

words :: Grant Lawrence illustration :: Ben Tour Before Schitt’s Creek, before Kim’s Convenience—even before Corner Gas, there was The Beachcombers. The Canadian TV show set in Gibson’s BC was an international smash hit, all about a group of salty blue-collar entrepreneurs whose lives revolved around their beat-up boats and a diner named Molly’s Reach. This year, the show celebrates its fiftieth anniversary. It first aired on CBC Television on October 1, 1972 and ran weekly until 1990, making it the longest running show in English Canadian TV history. And while plenty of The Beachcombers names and reference points have endured, the one moniker that is arguably the most synonymous with the show is… Relic. The undisputed star of The Beachcombers was supposed to be Bruno Gerussi, who played protagonist Nick Adonidas, a proud Greek who ran a log salvage company with his First Nations buddy Jesse Jim, played by Pat John of the local shíshálh Nation. But by the far the most beloved character was Relic who, played brilliantly by Robert Clothier, held a more antagonistic anti-hero role, and was once referred to as “Canada’s all-time most popular scoundrel” in the commemorative book Bruno and the Beach: The Beachcombers at 40. 26

For this landmark anniversary of the show, we’re here to celebrate Relic’s underlying legacy in West Coast life, lore, and culture. The iconic wharf rat’s look was disheveled and unshaven, with unkempt hair sticking out from under his omnipresent well-worn toque. An unbuttoned mack jacket pulled over layers of colourless

If you were to walk into any craft brewing tasting room along the coast today and look around, chances are you’d see many of the staff and half the patrons adorned in that slacker-barnacle-Relic-style clothing. shirts. Canvas flood pants held up by suspenders revealed beat up Converse-style sneakers. If you were to walk into any craft brewing tasting room along the coast today and look around, chances are you’d see many of the staff and half the patrons adorned in that slacker-barnacle-Relic-style clothing. Relic: the hipster template. Jackson Davies, who played the bumbling and hilarious Constable Constable on The Beachcombers, notes that Relic always existed on a whole other level of classic cool. When I asked him why, Davies put together the following list:

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“Relic could drive his ultracool jet boat at 100 kilometres an hour, with one hand on the wheel, and the other resting on the windshield while playing with a toothpick in his mouth, with his knee pushed down on the throttle.”

“Relic was way ahead of the curve on the tiny housing craze, living in a one-room float house named the ‘Chuckchee’ down on the dock.”

“Relic’s actual character name was Stafford T. Phillips. The ‘T’ stood for Taffy.”

“Relic’s woolen headwear was so famous that Roots sold a knockoff Beachcombers toque.”"

“Relic had omnipresent stubble long before Don Johnson. (Miami Vice ran for six years, The Beachcombers: 19).”

Relic’s last snarl came in the final episode of the series, entitled “Sunset,” in 1990. In 1996, Clothier suffered a stroke. He passed away in 1999 in North Vancouver at age 77. Clothier may be gone, but Relic and the show have lived on in popular culture, having been referenced by bands like Relic’s Jetboat, Molly’s Reach, and Bruno Gerussi’s Medallion, as well as gathering mentions on TV shows like The Simpsons and Corner Gas. This year, Bill Wouterloot, CBC Vancouver’s last-remaining crew member from The Beachcombers, announced his retirement. When I asked Bill if he had any memories of Clothier’s Relic, he didn’t hesitate. “Robert was the consummate professional. He always showed up on set knowing every one of Relic’s lines, and would accept any situation that they threw at Relic—no matter how disgusting.” Clothier, also a decorated World War II pilot, had to be held back from doing many of the outrageous stunts involving his character, such as jumping the jet boat over a log boom or leaping into a mud pit, but in the episode where Relic does a swan dive fully clothed from the top of the Gibson’s government wharf, yes, that’s really Clothier. And while Relic was the ultimate duplicitous, miserly, grubby hermit, Wouterloot points out that Clothier was a gentleman. “What I always found so endearing,” continued Wouterloot, who did set design for the show, “was that if a small child came by, he would go out of his way to delight them with a story. That’s what I admired the most about Robert.” So the next time you stop into Persephone Brewing in Gibsons, and the young, unshaven bartender in the toque and mack jacket serves up a cold glass of Coast Life Lager, be sure to raise a toast to the legacy of Robert Clothier’s Relic, icon of the coast.

Grant Lawrence is a CBC personality and the author of the award-winning bestseller Adventures In Solitude, which was directly influenced by The Beachcombers, Grant’s all-time favourite Canadian TV show.

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BACKYARD

Finding

Queneesh Three days on the Comox Glacier words :: Andrew Findlay photography :: Dave Silver

oe Schwartz revs up the Husqvarna, its 30-inch bar slightly overkill for bucking the blown-down alders blocking the logging road—but in the backwoods of Vancouver Island, there’s no such thing as too much saw. A few kilometres beyond the two-stroke fumes, Joe’s Tacoma becomes buried to the running boards in snow on a shaded corner of the Kweishun mainline. We haven’t made a single turn on this ski trip, but have already checked three requisite boxes of any great Island mission: poaching private gated logging roads, chainsaws, and stuck pick-up trucks. Locked down during a pandemic winter provided the opportunity to look at my Vancouver Island backyard with fresh eyes. And by backyard, I mean the Comox Range, a group of tantalizing peaks rich in lore and legend, and clustered around their namesake Comox Glacier, the largest remaining on an island of vanishing glaciers. Straddling the divide between private forestland and Strathcona Provincial Park, this range is like a forbidden kingdom concealed behind locked gates on logging roads. Which of course, only makes it that much more appealing. We leave Joe’s truck in the lower Kweishun Valley, a hallowed place in the shadow of the Comox Glacier that, I had been told, is flanked by Yosemite-like walls further up the valley. Our plan is to be back here in three days’ time. With one truck stashed, we jump into Dave Silver’s Expedition to shuttle the steep Carey Lakes logging road, hitting snow sooner than hoped but excited to get the skis on and leave day-to-day concerns in the rearview mirror. Pre-kids, Dave and I skied a lot together; postkids, getting into the mountains feels like a rare treat. Our foursome is rounded out by Sam Lam. He’s young and fit and, I surmise, useful for trail-breaking and other grunt work if needed.

Upwards we skin, occasionally removing skis to cross bare dirt, or to stop and admire a rock cut where someone had spray-painted a cock and balls; the universal declaration of male insecurity and a difficult-to-ignore trail marker. Far below, the Cruikshank River winds through a valley of stumps and slash. The terrain levels as we glide through one last cut block towards virgin timber. Where logging ends, Strathcona Park begins. Once among this old forest of yellow cedar and hemlock, I feel a primitive relief setting in, a shift in mood from agitation to calm. The tree trunks seem stout and resilient, but also not, as the cemetery of stumps behind us proves. Back in 1911, the visionaries of BC’s first provincial park wanted Strathcona to replicate the tourism bonanza of Banff National Park, with steamboats shuttling affluent guests to a Candian Pacific Railway-style chateau at the end of Buttle Lake. Rugged landscape and remoteness thwarted their grandiose dream. But this commercial flop was a conservation win, and citizens were left with this wilderness playground. By 1928, members of the newly formed Comox District Mountaineering Club built a log cabin on the eastern shoulder of Mount Becher as a base for deeper ventures into the park’s mountainous backcountry.

Nigel Harrison and Archie Pateman boot packing somewhere in the Vancouver Island wilds.

They slashed out trails and made many first ascents. But the bigger peaks of the Comox Range—Harmston, Celeste, Iceberg—proved beyond reach for most at the time. A century of logging dramatically altered the landscape around the park but within its borders, not much has changed. Beyond Carey Lakes, a dry, restless wind prowls the mountains, turning the snow surface into a shifting landscape. A small clump of witch’s hair lichen tumbles past my ski tips into a tree well. Delicate tracks, a pine marten perhaps, imprint a patch of soft snow, the silent signature of its passing. I immerse in these details, forgetting for a moment that I have kids, a wife, and any other responsibilities other than being here in these mountains.

Straddling the divide between private forestland and Strathcona Provincial Park, this range is like a forbidden kingdom concealed behind locked gates on logging roads. Above treeline, we follow a narrow ridge that has been pulverized into a knife-hard crust, then battle our way to a nameless summit. A rock cairn clings stoically to the mountain like a forgotten Scottish castle. The wind nags at us, creating tension where otherwise there would be none. After checking the map and a chilly snack break, we agree to descend into the cirque of Lake McQuillan and some hoped-for respite from the wind. Vancouver Island’s mountains are complex. Like a topographical Rubik’s Cube, they are both frustrating and 32

Sam Lam enjoys some spring corn on Iceberg Peak’s south ridge.

infinitely rewarding. Our evening’s destination is gated by basalt crags, threaded with chutes. Some funnel into cliffs, others slip through rock walls with entrances difficult to discern from above. After some sideslipping and traversing, we find a promising couloir that plumb lines to the lake shore. “After you Joe,” I say, feeling generous. Without hesitating, he slashes a turn on the steep-sided gulley, then arcs across to the other side. His lurching second turn tells me all I need to know, and I follow tentatively. Within 100 vertical metres, I ski ankle-nipping powder, breakable crust, sun-softened shmoo, and everything in between—variety that massacres technique. Still, the four of us make it down without incident and cross the frozen lake, wind in pursuit. Dave and I soon wrestle the tent into position, as Joe and Sam stake out theirs nearby. The sun quickly dips below Rees Ridge, bringing the temperature with it. Cocooned in the tent, I listen to the gust of wind and ponder this wild and rugged country that has always had a mysterious appeal for me. So close, so visible from my home, yet also so unattainable behind a veil of locked, gated roads, the reasons for which stem back to the early days of Canada as a country. The turn of the 19th century brought boom times for Scottish baron Robert Dunsmuir in the form of the E&N land grant (referred to as “the great land grab” by the Hul’qumi’num Treaty Group), a complex deal to bind the country coast-to-coast and encourage development.

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It gave Dunsmuir ownership of 8,000 square kilometres of Vancouver Island, including the mountains around Comox Lake. Extracting coal and timber from the lands enabled Dunsmuir to build a family castle in Victoria but for the working class, those coal shafts were also killers. Tired of watching good men perish, labour activist and shit disturber Ginger Goodwin lobbied for better wages and safer working conditions. His protests put him on the wrong side of Dunsmuir and the elites, and Goodwin became a marked man. In late July 1918, he escaped to the woods at the end of Comox Lake, but was eventually tracked and shot by a government deputy. There were no witnesses to the murder, but it turned Goodwin into a martyr whose legacy lives on—union activists gather annually at his tombstone in Cumberland. Similarly, the legacy of the E&N land grant, long since parceled up and sold to different logging companies, endures. When we ski the backcountry of the Comox Range, we do so as trespassers. To gain access beyond the yellow gates, you either need to know someone with a key, or join the Island Rangers—a group of volunteers deputized by the private forest landowners to be their eyes and ears on the ground. Months earlier, I had volunteered Joe to apply as a sort of double-agent Ranger (he’s a ski guide, and cleans up much better than I do) but admission into this all-access club seemed to take longer than winter would last so we procured a key through anonymous backdoor channels. Which makes each new zone explored that much sweeter. We wake the next day to mercifully calm skies. After a quick breakfast, a scenic ridgeline above the lake makes for easy travel until it terminates abruptly in a rocky cleft.

Joe Schwartz skis the north facing snowfield below Argus Mountain.

“Pretty icy. Skis on or off?” Sam wonders out loud. We choose the latter, downclimbing a few metres by punching our boots an inchdeep into the crust. With skis back on, we slide to a stop above an exquisite 45-degree chute and launch, one by one, into a narrow tenturn wonder. It ejects us onto a broad low-angled face below Mount Celeste, and another transition. I fight with skins that are losing their stick, then scramble to catch up to the others.

A century of logging dramatically altered the landscape around the park but within its borders, not much has changed. An hour later, we top out on Celeste’s broad pyramidal peak. From there, the full expanse of Vancouver Island’s rugged spine is visible from coast to coast. Golden Hinde, the apex of the island, punches the skyline like a white sail in the heart of Strathcona Park—yet another addition to a growing tick list of Vancouver Island summits. Late that afternoon, we leave our overnight gear on the slender divide between Mirren and Milla Lakes, plans incubating as we survey the surroundings. A sinuous white line slashes diagonally from Mount Harmston’s north face. Argus, one of the peaks that cradles Comox Glacier, is sliced by stiletto couloirs each capped with a locomotivesized cornice. “We have lots of time for a lap,” I say, pointing to the obvious pocket north glacier that draws eyeballs toward Argus. After skinning for half an hour toward the bergschrund, we regroup on a bench beyond the reach of cornice fall—we hope.

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Where snow turns to gravel, and provincial park turns to clear cuts. Stomping out the Kweishun Valley logging road on the exit from the Comox Range.

For the first time on this trip, our efforts are rewarded with powder, consistent top to bottom. I open the throttle, greedily claiming as much of this alpine face as possible. A half-dozen turns below me, a plume of feathery snow billows behind Joe, catching sparkles of refracting light. Snow quality is like a mood; fleeting, it comes and goes. For a second or two, I lose track of space and time. Is it possible that such wild and wonderful ski terrain exists on this island in the Pacific? Post-run, the four of us pause on a bench to navel gaze like adolescents, looking back up at tracks, knowing they will soon be blown out of existence, as ephemeral as the spirits that some believe dwell in these mountains. The K’omoks First Nations people know Comox Glacier as Queneesh. They tell stories of an ancient flood that prompted them to load canoes with provisions and tether their boats to the glacier with cedar ropes. Torrential rain fell, and the waters rose until just a tiny patch of ice remained. That ice then began to move, taking the form of a white whale and swimming with the rising water, thus saving the K’omoks. Since then, Queneesh has sat watching over the Comox Valley—resolute in legend, but not in reality. Doctor Brian Menounos, a leading BC glaciologist, told me recently that by 2050, the Comox Glacier and the rest of Vancouver Island’s glaciers will have disappeared. And that’s a disconcerting thought for a winter soul like me. Light fades as the camp stove hums. From our alpine perch above the Kweishun Valley, we watch the amber lights of Comox town flicker and fade in the distance, analogous to the stars above. The mountains around us loom dark—shadows in the windless night. The next morning, we linger over breakfast, reluctant to leave. Eventually I shoulder my pack and start skiing toward the low point in the divide, making a single turn on a convex roll still steel-hard from an overnight freeze. My skis rattle uncomfortably. Suddenly, I double-eject in a slow-speed unspectacular fall, then watch as my mint carbon-fibre Blizzards torpedo silently over the ridge. “Fuck,” I say quietly and to nobody. My partners find me sitting motionless and gazing at my boots that now feel like anchors. 36

“That’s a bummer,” Joe says, sympathetically, but also likely relieved not to be the one facing a full day of post-holing. Dave continues downslope without a word. “I see one,” he shouts out, a few moments later. One is better than none. Not long after, Joe finds its mate speared into the snow halfway down the headwall. I give a nod to Queneesh, for lack of any other deity to thank. Like a receding flood, my mood shifts and we get back to skiing. In the morning shade, we zig zag up a steep moraine below Mount Arthur Evans, geological evidence of the glacier that would have snaked thousands of years ago to the valley bottom. I eye up another couloir, a perfect pencil line and wonder if I’d have the moxie to ski it, sometime in the future and earlier in the season, before the cornice has time to grow into the overhanging monster we see before us. “Maybe,” Joe says, reading my mind. Instead, we rip Super G turns on a wide, planar slope as buff as freshly groomed piste. By 1:00 p.m., we’re gliding across Mirren Lake, exiting the upper Kweishun just ahead of the baking spring sun. This wild, looming valley proves a humbling place, a shooting gallery without cover. The scale seems disproportionate, out of place on Vancouver Island. Icicles drip from high on Mount Arthur Evans like giant frozen tears. Car-sized chunks of cornice sit monolithic in the valley bottom. So, we move quickly and quietly, as though conversation could trigger catastrophe. I ponder the fate of Comox Glacier—Queneesh—aloft above our heads, looking more anemic with every passing summer. As vulnerable as an ice cube on the counter, it’s doomed—like the imminent passing of a terminally ill friend that I feel powerless to prevent. Safely past the precarious, corniced “hang fire” areas, we meander through the shade of cedar and hemlock. The air is fresh and citrusy. Meltwater gurgles beneath the snowpack. We leave Strathcona Park, slipping between worlds, from primal protected forest to the primal destruction of logging where spring sun blazes with cruel intensity and stumps make for moguls. The stark transition brings the pandemic, family, deadlines, and the infinite other details of life nudging back into my consciousness, while the mysterious valleys of the Comox Range begin receding like a dream locked behind the yellow gates of history and the future of a warming world.

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Anuximana The hearts speaks in colour words :: Sarah Woods There’s a collective force of energy coming together during these dynamic times. Across different mountain towns, various beating hearts are joining in resonance of an unseen spirit echoing a shift in consciousness. It’s the return of the sovereign woman. One who aligns with Mother Earth and through various expressions, evokes great change through her unique wisdom of heart. For Anuximana, that unspoken call from within is as an artist. “You pronounce the “xi” in my name like a hissing cat. That’s how my elders taught me,” she explains. Anuximana is Nuxalkmc, from the Nuxalk Territory—the land surrounding the rivers and coastline near Bella Coola, BC. At 21 years old, she’s just one year shy of her ten-year career as an artist. When

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most of her peers in school were cutting class, she was absorbing knowledge of an ancient craft through elders, and making it her own. “My art speaks in colour. That’s my language. That’s how I tell the loud stories I’m here to voice. I don’t know how, I just know it happens,” is the way she describes the nameless space of being that births such beauty. “Hours feel like minutes. Something is working through me. It’s just… natural,” she adds. There’s a beautiful simplicity about creations of heart. They’re never expressed by asking how, but rather offered through one’s surrendering to self. “I was working on Mother Moon. For a long time, she just sat there. A blank face. But I felt I needed to finish her. So, I asked… what do you want to be? And then all these colours danced in my head. I couldn’t stop painting and drawing. The next day… she was done.”

RACHEL TOPHAM PHOTOGRAPHY COURTESY OF YVR ART FOUNDATION

COURTESY ANUXIMANA

That piece sits with her great grandmother, Violet Tallio, a celebration of Anuximana’s mastery as a carving student. At 17 years old, she graduated school early and worked with Tahltan-Tlingit master carver Dempsey Bob at Freda Diesing School of Northwest Coast Art.

“My art speaks in colour. That’s my language. That’s how I tell the loud stories I’m here to voice.“ “In some cultures, carving wasn’t allowed for women. But for the Nuxalk people, our knowledge keeper explained that gender wasn’t used as an obstacle. If you wanted to fish, you could fish. If you wanted to carve, you could carve. Regardless of your gender.” Anuximana represents a new kind of leader. One who knows that she is governed by the force of nature and guided by the spirit of her own wisdom in every moment. And in that trusted space, she accepts her role as an ambassador for the future through her very own genius of being—an expression where the heart speaks.

Or, in Anuximana’s reflection, where one dreams like her ancestors. “If I don’t make art today, who will express these stories? I will be an ancestor soon, I want to be a good one. Future generations need this art to look at. I see the joy in my little sister when I create with her. That connection inspires me to keep going. I always think about my great-great-great grandchildren studying my carvings, amazed by our form-line and the sophisticated designs. Just like I’m doing now with our ancestors. That’s what it’s all about. Dreaming like they did.” That’s the key to the return of the sovereign woman and the impending global shift to wholeness and unity from the current chaos and discomfort that exists—the ability to dream and create through the colours of heart: a remembering of who we all are, and who we came here to be. It’s not something you have to work hard at being. You just have to be… you.

Find more of Anuximana’s work on Instagram @anuximana

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Stephanie Sloan

Hot doggin' and freestylin'—vintage Sloan.

I just can’t imagine not being a “ski bum” (thanks, mom and dad!), so it was a real treat to sit down with one of Whistler’s greatest. Not everyone knows about her (which is kind of crazy considering she had a combined 24 World Cup podiums in 1980 and 1981), but anyone who knows anything about the history of freestyle skiing will have certainly heard the name Stephanie Sloan. And for the rest of you… It really all started in the spring of 1972 with a patch of mud on the last run of the last race of the last day of the season at Stephanie’s hometown ski hill, Osler Bluff, in Collingwood, Ontario. Nineteen years old at the time, Stephanie had been skiing since age two and racing seemed like her set path—she’d even booked a spot to train “way out west” at a summer race camp, which had just relocated from the Kokanee Glacier to rising-star ski hotspot, Whistler Mountain. But on that patch of mud, fate intervened. “I broke my ankle,” Stephanie says, “so I got my swimming certificate and went to teach swimming to kids in Haida Gwaii for the summer instead.”

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She made it to Whistler the next spring though, and lived at an old logging camp in the Soo Valley, skiing until the cash ran low. When it did, a Haida Gwaii connection serendipitously needed help working a fishing boat, so Stephanie did a summer at sea. “I made a thousand dollars. I’d always wanted to learn to speak French, so the plan was to go to France, pick grapes, and learn.” Instead, she ended up in Chamonix for, “the best ski bum year I ever had—over my head deep powder; I needed a snorkel.” That spring, Stephanie witnessed her first-ever freestyle ski competition, a mogul contest held as part of the Federation de Ski International (FIS) European Cup. There was only one woman competing with the men. “I saw her and thought, ‘I can do that,’” she remembers. The next winter saw Stephanie teaching bumps in Val d’Isere, ski action modelling for photo shoots, performing nighttime Christmas ski demos in Sweden, and competing on the freestyle circuit. Stephanie was thriving as a ski bum with sponsorship dollars to boot! Through athleticism, practice, and a natural feminine grace, soon she began beating her male competitors at ski ballet, a discipline she picked up on a trip to Sweden (for you kids out there, ski ballet was a choreographed dance on skis that included dizzying spins and flipping over your poles— kind of like slow motion figure skating on skis). To win the freestyle title, athletes had to compete in all three disciplines of moguls, aerials, and ski ballet. From 1976-1981, Stephanie toured the world as a freestyle pro, returning to Whistler each spring, but primarily based in Europe— teaching skiing at Les Deux Alpes in summer and in Val d’Isere in fall. “That’s when I’d see the Crazy Canucks and (Whistler locals/ national team support staff) Toulouse and John Ritchie, who had once also been my ski race coach! I was so happy to see Canadians, I’d have them over for dinner.”

PHOTOS COURTESY STEPHANIE SLOAN

"We were trying to get pregnant at the 1988 Calgary Olmypics. We wanted an Olympic baby."

TOP Glacier summer camp fun. ABOVE Stephanie and Dave Murray. PHOTOS COURTESY STEPHANIE SLOAN

Known for their balls out, all-in racing style, Canada’s national downhill ski team challenged the long-dominant European racers throughout the late 1970s and 80s. One of those Crazy Canucks was Dave Murray. “David,” Stephanie calls him. The professional freestyle circuit gained popularity quickly, but not everyone was ready for women who could shred. Stephanie recalls a particularly stubborn fellow at Labatt Brewing who didn’t see the point of including women in a 1978 freestyle competion in Quebec. “After competing all over the world, my own home country wouldn’t let girls compete,” she recalls. “He told me, ‘women don’t drink beer!’ and we had a huge fight. I convinced him to let us do a demo, and after a couple more contests, he realized how much TV loved us. He also discovered that women do, in fact, drink beer. It’s funny because years later, he became the marketing manager at Blackcomb when I ran the women-only ski camps there.” By the end of the 70s, the FIS had recognized freestyle skiing as an “official” sport. Between 1978-1981, Stephanie won three consecutive World Championship titles, then retired in 1982 after placing second overall. That year at Les Deux Alpes, she reunited with Dave Murray, who had one last year of racing to go. By fortune, she received a call from Jalbert Productions and nabbed a film job skiing/acting as a photographer following the Crazy Canucks on the World Cup circuit trying to capture “the perfect moment.” “I got a job—and I got to follow David in his last year of competing,” recalls Stephanie. Perfect indeed. After Murray retired from racing, he and Stephanie returned to Whistler and started ski camps. “‘Divide and conquer,’ is how David put it,” she says, “racing on Whistler and bumps on Blackcomb.” Noting a distinct lack of women in either camp, Stephanie started a womenonly ski clinic—the first of its kind. To advertise, she taped posters in the stalls of women’s bathrooms throughout the Sea to Sky Corridor— “Toilet seat marketing,” she laughs. Those clinics ran for 23 years. Eventually, Stephanie and Dave merged their summer camp programs. “He’d run the business and I’d do the photography and brochures.” Did ‘doing the photography’ include an annual iconic shoot where Stephanie skied bumps on the Horstman Glacier in a bathing suit? Yes, it certainly did—skiing is about having fun, especially for two life-long ski bums who spent their off-season windsurfing in Maui or at the Columbia River Gorge (aka: Living the Dream). In 1985, Dave was diagnosed with cancer. “At one stage he went into remission, and I got pregnant,” Stephanie says. “We were trying to get pregnant at the 1988 Calgary Olympics. We wanted an Olympic baby.” They got one! Julia Murray was born in December 1988. Tragically, Dave passed away just 22 months later. The Whistler Mountain downhill course was renamed to honour his memory, and Stephanie—now a single mom—took over operations of the ski camps alongside her own programs. She also served two terms as a Whistler municipal councillor and, being an established legend of the sport, was designated to receive the flag from the previous host country in Meiringen, Switzerland when Blackcomb Mountain was to host the

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Skicross is a mash-up of freestyle and downhill, and not surprisingly, Julia Murray was excellent at it.

World Freestyle Championships in 2001. That’s when she met her current husband, Ray Longmuir, a member of the organizing committee on that trip. While on council, Stephanie advocated fiercely for the inclusion of arts and culture at Whistler’s festivals and events. She was also on the committee that successfully bid for the 2010 Olympic Winter Games, despite that she had originally been against Olympic inclusion of her own sport, freestyle skiing, back in the 80s. “We were so independent, and I was having so much success and supporting myself,” she recalls. “I didn’t want to go back to being an amateur.” Moguls and aerials were officially added in the 1990s (ski ballet never made the cut ), but for 2010 a new “freestyle” sport would make its Olympic debut: skicross—a mash-up of downhill and freestyle. And, not surprisingly, Julia Murray was excellent at it. “I didn’t push Jules to be a ski racer,” Stephanie says, “but she had an Olympic dream from a very young age, and she enjoyed the camaraderie and the friendships.” Julia Murray retired from competition after the 2010 Winter Olympic Games and has gone on to become a Whistler icon in her own right (nabbing a Mountain Life cover in 2015). Stephanie, who continues to coach the Whistler seniors’ ski team every Wednesday (a ski bum’s job is never over), says Jules is definitely faster now when they ski the Dave Murray Downhill together, but only by a few seconds. “We always joke that it’s in her genes, her blue jeans.”

ABOVE Skicross Olympian Julia Murray shares a moment with her mom at the 2010 Games in Vancouver. BELOW And shares some spring pow in Whistler. JOERN ROHDE

PHOTO COURTESY STEPHANIE SLOAN

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Motos & SUPs in the Republic of the Union of Myanmar

words :: Feet Banks photos :: Jimmy Martinello

As our secret stashes on the ski hill get less and less secret and the remote campsite or surf spot sees more and more campers, it starts to feel like Walt Disney was right—it’s a small world after all. And only getting smaller. Which is to say it’s only getting busier. The good news, however, is that the wilderness is vast, and there are still plenty of unexplored spots even here in the Coast Mountains that fly under the travel blogger radar and are too grueling or remote for even the most hardcore Instagram influencer to sully. But an entire unexplored country? That’s rare. The Republic of the Union of Myanmar (formerly Burma) is the largest nation in mainland Southeast Asia and borders India to the northwest, China to the northeast, and Laos and Thailand to the east. A British colony from 1885-1948, Myanmar’s independence was crushed by a military coup in 1962, and the country struggled under military dictatorship in one form or another (and numerous human rights issues) until 2011, when Myanmar “opened up” and the government began considering tourism as supplementary income to the nation’s rich natural resources. In late 2019, with the borders open and a large tropical archipelago of limestone islands that could be the long-hidden cousin of Thailand’s infamous Railay Beach rock climbing scene, Mountain Lifers Jimmy Martinello, Jon Burak, and Justin Sweeny cleared their calendars, rolled up their inflatable SUPS, found what might be the only place in the country to rent enduro dirtbikes, and booked flights. When the window to exploration opens, it’s best to catch the breeze as early as possible…

Traditional fishing nets on Inle Lake.

Mandalay Old Bagan Inle Lake

With just three weeks in the country, the plan was to divide the trip in half: paddling/climbing down south in the Andaman Sea, then flying 1,200 kilometres north to Mandalay for as much two-wheeled exploration as possible.

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Jimmy Martinello Spontaneous travel, just going somewhere where you don’t know what’s around the next corner really appeals to me. Anywhere that hasn’t seen a lot of tourism offers a better chance to really share experiences with people you cross paths with and learn from their culture and lives.

Kawthoung

TOP LEFT Sunset paddle off McBride island. BOTTOM LEFT The bay on MacLeod Island. befriending some local fisherman on the ride back to civilization.

JON BURAK. ABOVE Justin Sweeny deep water solos an unnamed island. First descent, 100 per cent. BELOW Jon Burak

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Justin Sweeny There is a sense of naivety with every adventure— an intentional ignorance designed to keep things interesting and less predictable. My guard was up going into this trip, and my expectations were truly unknown.

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Jon Burak We had no contacts on the ground, just a bunch of internet searching and a lot of Google Earth—the new tool for modern explorers. But in Kawthoung, at the bottom of the peninsula, we met a local guy—William—who wanted to build tourism. We pointed to a group of islands on the map and said, “This is where we want to go.” He said, “no problem.”

William set the crew up with a tour on a tourist boat, complete with a stop so the Myanmar military could check everyone’s papers, it turned out the boys were not actually allowed to stay or camp on the island of choice. Forced to return to town, William suggested they book into a beach resort on nearby Nyaung Oo Phee Island and paddle out from there.

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Burak There was a heavy military presence out there and it felt like a lot of people were unsure what was or was not allowed, so they erred on the side of caution. At one point, I tried to take a photo of an island and the boat tour guy literally slapped my hand down, “You can’t take a picture. That is a military island.”

From the resort, the trio finally got to explore the islands.

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Sweeny We paddled around and found some climbing. It felt like paradise—just beautiful limestone islands, very similar to Thailand, and we did some nice deep-water soloing, no one around… just a real sense of mystery.

After a windy ten-kilometre crossing to Macleod Island, the crew set up camp on a deserted beach for a few days of oceanic adventure.

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Burak We were able to score some fresh water from a giant catamaran that came through the area, and we chased down some fishing boats and were able to pantomime enough that they sold us some fish.

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Sweeny That area is home to the last remaining nomadic, fully sea-dwelling humans on earth—the Sea Gypsies (Moken). Their maritime lifestyle is heavily based on the sea, but this is increasingly under threat, as both Thailand and Burma are wary of their borderless existence.

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Jimmy Connecting with people on the water is always amazing. We don’t speak the same language and come from vastly different cultures, but there’s a shared love and respect for the ocean. Myanmar was off limits for so long, some places are still essentially untouched. It’s just beauty everywhere and whatever the ocean decides to offer.

A view worth hiking for.

ABOVE LEFT Bagan, 2000+ temples and almost as many balloons. ABOVE RIGHT Depending on the season and weather, these temples will be submerged. Lake Inle. BELOW Balance is key. Burak tests out the local longtail watercraft.

After paddling, climbing (and even seeing another foreign climber touring in a kayak) the crew hitched a ride with some friendly fishermen, bade their farewells to the sea and returned to the interior of Myanmar for some two-stroke moto adventure. Dirt roads and friendly locals eventually led them to the ancient city of Bagan, a UNESCO World Heritage Site. During the 11th to 13th centuries, more than 10,000 Buddhist temples, pagodas and monasteries were built on the Bagan plains. More than 2,200 remain today, and the best way to see them is by hot air balloon at dawn.

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Jimmy Hot air ballooning sounds like an overly touristy type of activity, and it is. But this one was not to be missed. Dozens and dozens of huge balloons lifting up into the sunrise is a pretty magical sight. And the perspective of seeing thousands of ancient temples from the sky is really the only way to understand the true scale of this site.

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Burak After that we hit some rugged mountain roads, just having fun on the bikes, and crossed over a mountain pass and down to Inle Lake. It’s a huge freshwater lake with crazy systems of channels and paddies growing water crops. We stayed on the lake in huts on stilts and got to do some more paddling.

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Sweeny We met lots of fishermen on the lake. The boats are low and and narrow and they fish standing up on foot, balancing with a net and using one leg as an extra arm to pull the net around so they can spear the fish with their other hand. It’s the traditional way, they’ve done forever, and arguably the true roots of stand-up paddleboarding.

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Burak The fishing scene is pretty crazy there. You can tell people are already getting used to tourism, but our paddleboards helped us connect with the locals in a unique way.

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ABOVE LEFT Out for a rip. A monk watches the crew on the return trip to Mandalay. ABOVE RIGHT The luggage racks. BELOW Local SUP training session south of Inle Lake.

Back on the road, and nearing the end of their 500-kilometre loop connecting dots between tiny villages in the mountainous terrain of central Myanmar, disaster struck…

≈

Jimmy I thought Sweeny had died. To see your friend hit the ground and slide across the pavement was terrifying.

≈

Burak The trip was going awesome, and then… when he hit, my brain went to broken bones, hospital, this is not good.

≈

Burak It was not as bad as I expected, the kid was okay. Sweeny had a gash on his leg, a swollen ankle, his bike was bent. It took a while and the whole town came out to see, but eventually an ambulance came. Sweeny

≈

Sweeny We were firing through a small village just two hours from our final destination and I was t-boned by a village kid and sent flying over my bars. I awoke in a daze curled on the side of a ditch. My leg was ripped down to the bone. What had I done? Did I just kill a local kid on my bike? In the middle of nowhere?

≈ No anesthetic or pain killers, it was raw and real.

≈

Jimmy Sweeny wanted to finish the ride. I was skeptical, nervous really—he was probably concussed. We put him the middle, stayed close and went slow. We made it back to Mandalay in one piece.

ABOVE The people of Myamar—welcoming and friendly.

JON BURAK. BELOW Good roads and smooth sailing (not the day Sweeny tooled himself).

≈

Burak Being able to see this country that had been closed off for so long, and watch these incredibly kind and generous people building a tourism industry—renting bikes, offering boat tours, helping us string together a real adventure that maybe no one had ever done before… I think there is still a lot going on that went over our heads, we didn’t go through military checkpoints or anything but there are definitely places where we were told, “You’re not allowed to go.”

≈

Jimmy Not a lot of people wanted to talk about the history or what has happened there. There’s a sense of mystery, maybe even fear, but you can see the people of Myanmar want freedom. They want to share what they have.

Shortly after the boys returned home, Myanmar, like most of the world, closed its borders due to the COVID pandemic. An election in November 2020 saw former political prisoner Aung San Suu Kyi win leadership. The military quickly seized power in another coup and arrested Kyi on a number of somewhat dubious charges (violating COVID protocols was one of them) The official national tourism website says the country is open to foreigners, but the Government of Canada has a firm advisory to “Avoid all travel due to political tension and high risk of civil unrest.” According to the Irrawaddy news site (founded by Myanmar exiles), “Since seizing power, the junta has violently put down opposition to its coup, killing at least 1,435 people, torturing to death more than 100 detainees, and arresting more than 11,300 people.” Any travel to the region is likely to fund that regime. Tragically, for the people of Myanmar especially, the tourism window has closed, for now.

THE RAVEN SERIES Art by Stu MacKay-Smith

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EPIC TRIP

of heaven

TOP Starting the trip with a long climb towards Pereval Dzhuku pass. LEFT Hazards of the road in the Tian Shans include unpredictable horses, flying goat carcasses (straying from a roadside game of kok-boru), and stoic but suspicious camels. RIGHT There was a pretty good dirt road both before and after this creek crossing and the few cars we saw up here were relatively small sedans, leaving us with some big questions.

Discovering the story beyond the landscape of Kyrgyzstan’s Tian Shan mountains

words & photography :: Nick Gottlieb

“Kumis?” A teenage girl called out as she ran to flag us down in front of her family’s wall tent. “No thanks,” I attempted to pantomime. Over the past ten days, I’d already ingested more fermented mare’s milk than my stomach could handle. But my partner Carl pedalled up and accepted without hesitation, perhaps more interested in a warm yurt to sleep in than the viscous, sour, tepid, and often chunky liquid we’d been offered at every single stop on our trip here in Kyrgyzstan’s Tian Shan mountains, aka: the “Mountains of Heaven.” We stayed the night, the girl’s mother offering us their yurt while she, her daughter, and her two sons slept in a converted train car next door. They treated us to a dinner of bread, tea, and an entire goat that had been boiling since morning. Our hosts saved the most prized organs for their guests, eagerly handing us the eyeballs. For the second course, they brought out a steaming plate of ramen cooked in goat broth and adorned with bits of chopped liver and kidneys. Carl enjoyed a few glasses of kumis. I did not, my politeness overcome by my desire to keep my dinner in. I had no idea what to expect from this trip, neither from bikepacking, a fancy term for cycle touring and a sport I’d never done before, nor from Kyrgyzstan, a country most people cannont find on a map. Carl, who I’d only just met recently after moving to Canada—I’d flagged him down after backcountry skiing after seeing his Montana license plate—had invited me on this trip while on a mountain bike ride. I said no. A few weeks later I figured, “Why not?” and said yes. My prep work was limited to downloading topo maps and making a serendipitous last-minute connection to a local driver through an old friend. Carl’s prep work involved nerding out on previous renditions of the Silk Road Mountain Race, a bikepacking event held in the area we’d be traveling through. I’m embarrassed to admit that neither of us did any reading about the people of Kyrgyzstan, its turbulent political history, or the diverse lifestyles across Central Asia that rely on water originating in the Tian Shan range. Mars, the driver, showed up as promised and gave us a tour of downtown Bishkek—Kyrgyzstan’s capital city—still scarred by bullet remnants in the main square from an uprising in 2010. After the brief tour, he drove us about 300 kilometres east and dropped us in the dark outside a small town near Lake Issyk-Kul, the second largest mountain lake in

the world (6,236 square kilometres, elevation 1,607 metres). We pitched a tent in the dark just off the road, crawled in and hoped for the best. We woke the next morning surprised to find ourselves on the side of a beautiful glacial stream, surrounded by sandstone cliffs and towering snowcovered peaks. We were also surprised to find two other bikepackers camped next to us. A French couple travelling our planned route but in reverse, they warned us about the 13,000-foot pass we’d be tackling over the next two days. We smiled and nodded, ears clogged with hubris and excitement, eager to embark on our own journey rather than talk about theirs. We probably should have paid more attention. After a solid day of riding and a night camped at 10,000 feet, plagued by painful altitude-induced headaches and harassed by a group of strangely territorial cows, we bushwhacked back up to the “road”—a boulder-strewn path that climbed 1,500 feet in under a mile. There’s a certain grade and road condition combination where hike-a-bike devolves into “push bike one step forward, hold brakes, use bike to pull yourself up, repeat.” This stretch was well beyond that threshold. But it was worth it. From the top of the pass, we could see back down the steep glacial valley we’d just climbed as well as out across an unexpectedly flat alpine swamp with no roads in sight, and no descent. We knew we would be in for some “off-trail” travel on this trip, but didn’t realize it would be at 13,000 feet through a hummocky, marmot-infested swamp— especially when the “on-road” portions were rocky mountain paths that could only be driven by the old allterrain Soviet military vehicles they were built for. Not wanting to camp high again, we pushed through, riding what we could, plodding through what we couldn’t, wading where we had to—eventually finding our way to a gravel road that serves the Canadian-owned Kumtor gold mine, the second highest mine in the world. As I write this, two years after our time there, a former prime minister of Kyrgyzstan has just been arrested for allegedly circumventing Kyrgyz environmental regulations and allowing Kumtor to dump mining waste on the surface of nearby glaciers. The rivers flowing from these glaciers support the pastoral lifestyles of the mountain peoples of Kyrgyzstan, the irrigated agriculture of the valleys below, and countless other communities and modes of life downstream, throughout Central Asia. The quiet, atypically well-maintained mountain road we had pedalled along offered little hint that the Kumtor mine has been a defining political feature for much 67

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of Kyrgyzstan’s turbulent history. The mine opened in 1997, just a few years after the Soviet Union collapsed, and while the nascent Kyrgyz government initially embraced the opportunity, Kumtor has been the site of repeated environmental disasters that poisoned water supplies, sickened and killed villagers, and polluted Lake Issyk-Kul. We knew nothing of this on our ride, as there was no one around to tell us. Instead, we simply enjoyed the views and the smooth-pedalling descent off the high plateau and into a narrow alpine valley dotted with occasional yurts and wall tents, and a run-off stream we drank from freely (right below the mine). Later, as we waded across a creek, two families waved us over to the side of the road. Their truck had broken down so, naturally, they had stopped for a quick picnic and insisted we join them. Communicating mostly through pantomime and the maps on our phones, we told them about our trip and they responded with stories about their lives; how they spent the summers there in the mountains and the winters in Bishkek. They shared bread, horse meat, and soda with us and then broke out a bottle of vodka, followed shortly by a second. They weren’t concerned about the truck (or anything really), and after our extended picnic they changed their tire and hit the road, leap-frogging us along the bumpy dirt track before eventually waving goodbye as darkness fell and we set up camp. The miles rolled by. We battled a headwind so fierce that we could barely ride downhill. We raced two young boys on horseback. We left the grassy alpine valley and the glaciers behind and entered a steep, forested river canyon reminiscent of BC’s Kootenay region but with the volume of one of BC’s massive coastal rivers, riding along the rim of a gorge full of wild rapids. When the canyon gave way, we found ourselves in the desert, pulling our buffs over

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TOP These fellows got a little close for comfort. Apparently, our campsite was home to their favorite grass. BOTTOM He tried out our bikes, but he's more of a dirt jumper than a bikepacker.

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a former prime minister of Kyrgyzstan has just been arrested for allegedly circumventing Kyrgyz environmental regulations and allowing Kumtor to dump mining waste on the surface of nearby glaciers. TOP This monument marks MELS pass–Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin–a high point before a 5,000 foot descent. BOTTOM Carl having fun in a snowstorm at 13,000 feet.

our faces to keep sand out, trying not to absorb too much of the new landscape through our lungs. After cresting a pass on a freshly paved highway—the best road we’d seen yet—we descended into a broad valley near the Chinese border, the dry and desolate terrain now punctuated by bright green fields of agriculture irrigated by another glacial river. A partially-paved road under a new Chinese transmission line brought us into At-Bashy, where things seemed different: instead of a seminomadic husbandry focused lifestyle, this was a larger town with permanent structures and a strong Islamic influence. We spent the night in a house owned by a pair of doctors. They spoke no English, but some English-speaking fellows we met at the water spigot on the main street assured us that it was a guest house. Sure enough, we were treated to multiple meals (mid-afternoon dinner, regular dinner, breakfast) and a hot shower. Glittering pillows and a karaoke machine with a pink donkey on top of it gave the dining room a surreal feel. The blanket in my bedroom had the word “happinese” embroidered over a chaotic tie-dye pattern. The food was good, the shower was needed, and the tour of the family photo albums—complete with graduation photos from Soviet-era medical schools, was fascinating. The kumis—well, it was disgusting. This was the last stop where I even tried. From the comfort of my home in Squamish, looking at photos on a laptop made in China running on power harvested from BC rivers, some of which swelled, flooded and wreaked havoc on my home province just months ago, it’s hard for me not to re-consider our journey to Kyrgystan within a larger global-environmental context. Rather than reduce the doctors we met in At-Bashy or the family in the train car into funny and memorable travel anecdotes,

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I need to recognize these snippets and stories are also facets of full lives, tiny windows into people’s experiences—in Kyrgyzstan today and in the Soviet times of yesteryear—but also into ways of being in the world that evolved over generations of living on the steppe, a unique product of thousands of years of both natural and human history. It’s hard not to think about the fact that these lives are being transformed by climate change and ecological collapse. Having spent time breathing their dusty air, and drinking water from their receding (sometimes poisoned) glaciers, I can’t help but wonder how the people of these mountains will adapt as dust storms become more severe, the summer heat more intense, and the reliable glacial water supply not so reliable…? And what role do we play as residents of “the Global North,” post-imperial European and settler colonial nations. Nations like Canada, which has the highest cumulative emissions (since 1850) relative to its population of any country on Earth. (Kyrgyzstan is near the lowest.) And as the Kumtor mine demonstrates, this north-south inequity is about much more than atmospheric carbon: 75 per cent of all mining companies globally are Canadian, and many have devastating ecological and human rights records in the countries in which they operate. Implicit in these crises, and particularly in the north’s collective failure to either make any serious progress on climate mitigation or to financially support the south’s efforts to adapt—is a value judgment. In the Western worldview, human development exists on a linear scale of progress from “less developed” to “modern.” Casualties along the way, whether they are yurt-dwelling Kyrgyzs enjoying some vodka on the side of a creek poisoned by a Canadian gold mine or entire Pacific Island nations that will disappear because of sea level rise—are bumps in the road, ridden over, absorbed, and forgotten under the inevitable forward momentum of progress. We are experiencing real-time effects of climate change and ecological collapse—caused almost exclusively by people engaged in one particular way of being in the world—so perhaps it’s worth revisiting that value judgement. A just response to climate change must be one where the life of a girl in a train car in the alpine grasslands of central Asia making good use of every part of a dead goat is treated as just as meaningfully as that of a Silicon Valley billionaire; where understanding how differently people experience this bizarre journey we’re all on—being alive—is the first step we take in figuring out how to fix this ecological trainwreck; where we stop poisoning the rivers in the Mountains of Heaven and start better understanding all the different ways of being this planet supports. That is a journey I am ready to take (just please don’t offer me any kumis).

TOP Our hosts in At-Bashy greeted us with this spread–we weren't sure if it was second lunch or first dinner, but at least there was no kumis. BOTTOM Kyrgyzstan is immensely popular with Russian tourists; these folks were on a 4x4 tour, although it didn't look like their vehicle would make it much further up the pass.

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BEYOND

Seeyaatthebottombye words :: Jon Turk illustration :: Lani Imre

A few years ago, I interrupted my Fernie ski season to do a speaking gig in Philadelphia. I hopped on an airplane, zoomed around, and checked into my hotel. The next step was to take the subway to the auditorium where I would be the keynote. Simple enough. I trundled down the stairway into the bowels of the earth along with the usual river of humanity: a man in a business suit and leather briefcase, a woman in a dress so tight she could hardly navigate the stairs, a teenage goofball with baggy shorts hung so low you could see the top of his crack, another woman with a yoga mat rolled under her arm taking the stairs three at a time and cross-fielding through the crowd like a running back in the Superbowl. For the people around me, this journey into the underworld is a daily routine, business as usual, but I had spent the winter on snowy ridges and in white-clad subalpine forests, and this was not normal. I felt closed in and confined, squeezed tight by humanity, bombarded by advertisements telling me to buy this and crave that, and breathing lifeless air that was running through the stale air machine that hummed and gurgled on worn bearings in the ceiling. “Okay,” I reasoned, “this air won’t kill me—not today anyway— and thanks to the red exit signs plastered liberally at every corner, I can get outta here alive, just as I survived that avalanche in the Canadian Rockies or the moving ice on a polar ocean. Only different. But I couldn’t shake my mind free. I stopped, becoming a temporary island in the flow of people. To calm myself, I dragged up an old hippie aphorism that every passage into darkness must also be a journey into light. Of course, of course. I’d been here before, in a hallucinogenic dream state with Moolynaut, the aged Siberian shaman. She had led me down into the dark lifeless bowels of the Underworld so we could journey into the bright light of the Dream World. In that amanita-induced trance, it seemed as though we walked for days. And then, I saw a tiny bright oval light at the end of the tunnel. Moolynaut told me that I must now proceed alone. As soon as the words left her mouth, she disappeared—poof—as if she had been vapourized. Alone now, I stepped forward, slowly placing each foot deliberately. The light grew larger, brighter, and I knew that soon I must step across the abyss, into the Dream World, where I would find Kutcha the Raven, who had helped heal my pelvis. Then, I froze. I wasn’t strong enough, brave enough, or assured enough to enter the Dream World. Not now, not in this way, not launching from a frightening non-reality that I couldn’t understand. I turned and ran back headlong through the cavern, bouncing off the walls in my haste. After running in panic for a long time, past many junctions in the labyrinth, I realized in terror that I was lost in the never-never land between the Real World and the Dream World. Everyone knows that that you are supposed to trail a string when you venture down into the Underworld to lead the way back into the Real World—if that’s where you need to go. Pop. Bing. Drop it. Give yourself a break, a Jon. Your think-too-muchknow-it-all brain is creating an elaborate story, again, to complicate a simple task. Remember, this is Philadelphia and some kindly person

has carefully plastered the Underworld with red exit signs. All you need to do is follow the Google instructions, find the correct subway train, locate the address, and then stand up in front of all those people, and give your talk. You’ve done it a million times before. So, I trundle onward, past a KFC that serves up food-like-stuff to compliment the air-like stuff that engulfs me. Turning a corner, I find a skinny toothless man, in his early fifties, slightly balding, with improbably large ears, sitting on an upturned white plastic bucket, loudly beating on pots and pans, and blowing a penny whistle, imagining he is creating music and hoping people will drop a quarter into a paper cup. His eyes are closed in rapture and his body vibrates with a song he imagines in his dreams. He revs up, dripping in sweat, contorting his whole body, and banging away. He grabs his penny whistle to squeak out a few improbably shrill bars, twirls his sticks above his head in imagined triumph, thanking the non-existent crowd for their non-existent applause, then back to the pots and pans with gusto. He is the only one down here who doesn’t need to trail a string because he isn’t going anywhere—forward or back. He carried his pots and pans into the Underworld and had the courage, or madness, to step across the threshold into the Dream World—his Dream World. Of course, to the sea of people flowing past he may have been just a lost soul living underground, scraping by at the bottom of our society’s barrel. I wanted to slip a $20 bill into his cup, but that seemed inappropriate, so I dropped in a dollar instead. He nodded almost imperceptibly and twirled his sticks again. A few days later, I’m back on my home turf, standing on a snowy ridge with my best ski buddy, Luc. It’s a sunny afternoon, spring corn, stable snowpack. Luc looks at the distant ridges, looks at me, nods and says, ‘seeyaatthebottombye’—fired out as one word, his standard parting statement before he drops in. Luc was a professional bull rider before he took up skiing, and he rides the undulations in the slope with the same mixture of power and grace that kept him alive and largely uninjured on the rodeo circuit. As he snakes his way downslope, I expect him to lift his hat off his head and wave it at the imaginary crowd, as the toothless man twirled his drumsticks, announcing, “I am on the top of the bull ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls. Despite all odds against it. For now, anyway. And that’s all that matters. Isn’t it?” Luc disappears over a steep roll and I’m on the ridge, alone. The spring sun is warm. I take a deep breath of clean mountain air, ceremoniously lift off my toque, and announce with gusto, to no one and everyone in the cosmos, ‘seeyaatthebottombye.’ I point my tips downhill and slide into the valley below, because I know with absolute certainty that I can find my red exit sign easily enough simply by slapping on my skins and climbing slowly upward through the parallel lines of afternoon shadow, offset by sunlight on sparkling bright snow. And who’s to say where the bottom is anyhow?

Jon Turk is the author of Tracking Lions, Myth, and Wilderness in Samburu published by Rocky Mountain Books. jonturk.net

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11. The BURTON [AK] DISPATCHER 18L BACKPACK is purpose-built for short tours, quick hits, and cat or heli trips when less is more. Pack light and ride longer. Time to rip! www.burton.com // 12. YETI doesn’t make throwaway gear. They cut no corners, and don’t rely on gimmicks, bells, or whistles. The PANGA 75 DUFFEL is such a durable beast, you could probably drag it behind your sled from Squamish to Bralorne and everything inside would be dry and undamaged (bottle of scotch not included). Tough, rough and ready to rumble. www.yeti.com // 13. The most underrated piece of winter gear, socks can make or break a cold day. DAHLGREN SOCKS are the difference between cold, wet, miserable feet and warm, dry, happy feet—no matter what adventure you get up to. Dahlgren pioneered and patented a system that absorbs moisture created by your foot and continually moves it up and out of the sock to where it can be evaporated, leading to feet being drier and more comfortable. Toasty toes for the win! www.dahlgrensocks.ca // 14. Start your mornings right—with Skadi, a kickass Norse ski goddess who howles with the wovles, hunts with a bow, drinks vodka and glacier chips, and once stormed the home of the gods to demand revenge for her murdered father. If that spirit, imbued in each MOUNTAIN LIFE SKADI CERAMIC MUG, doesn't start your workday off right… nothing will. www.mountainlifemedia.ca/store // 15. Highly versatile for any year-round in-water adventure, the MUSTANG HUDSON CCS DRY SUIT features neoprene wrist cuffs, strategic seam placement, and Closed Comfort System (CCS) adjustable neck seal for customizable fit and comfort. Designed for durability and performance, this suit is manufactured and tested in British Columbia. www.mustangsurvival.ca

Located at the base of the Whistler Village Gondola Open Late! 604 932 4100

16. Your versatile companion for fresh powder, steep descents, or long climbs to a perfect line, the women’s DYNAFIT BEAST HYBRID JACKET combines waterproof protection with windproof fabric to make it an ideal “do everything” jacket. Features include large front pockets, internal mesh pockets, and a sleeve pocket for your lift pass. The matching Beast Hybrid Pants round out the outfit perfectly. www.escaperoute.ca // 17. The PRIOR PHALANX FREESTYLE POWDER BOARD features a true twin stance combined with a tapered overall shape to handle anything you throw at it. From heavy pillow lines to switch landings, the balance and responsiveness of the Phalanx is second to none. If you are after a board that excels in deep snow and pillow lines but can also nail technical tricks, this is it. Designed, tested and built in Whistler. www.priorsnow.com // 18. When you’re in the eye of the storm on the mountain, visibility is crucial. SHRED.’S AMAZIFY BIGSHOW RECYCLED GOGGLES tick that box—and more. The company has completely eliminated plastic from their packaging, and 84 per cent of the strap is made from recycled plastic bottles, which allows them to recycle about 170 plastic bottles for every 100 goggles made. SHRED.wide™ lenses maximize the field of view, and these goggles are also compatible with prescription glasses so you feel confident, stoked, and in control. www.shredoptics.com // 19. Call it a comeback! Born in 1987, Bored of Authority (B.O.A.) is a classic brand with deep Whistler roots and they’re back with a re-launch. Leading the charge, the B.O.A. FLUTE VENTI-LAYER™ MIDLAYER JACKET offers a dynamic blend of warmth, breathability and toughness that will stack up against the best outdoor brands in the world. Get ready for the return of a Whistler OG. www.boredofauthority.com

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Y O U R

Angie - Partner & CMO

D I G I T A L

Christian - Partner & CEO

M A R K E T I N G

A G E N C Y

Gord - Digital Marketing Director

Aleasha - Division Leader - Finance

Josiane - Account Director

Kristin - Account Director

Matt - Division Leader - SEO/WEB

Lauren - Account Director

Catherine - Digital Marketing Director

SEO - Google Ads - Social Media - Website Development

604-670-5465

www.marwickmarketing.com

FURNITURE THAT WON’T GO OUT OF STYLE

Showroom located in Pemberton, available by appointment. Free local deliveries. retromoderndesigns.com

604-868-0117

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Leanne Pelosi remains optimistic that a brighter day is coming. That's why she has her sunglasses on.

"As it stands, Plan B is to just keep on givin'er."

– Deaner Murdoch

Next issue drops June 2022.

LIVE IT UP

ERIN HOGUE

Mountain Life – Coast Mountains - Winter/Spring 2022

Articles inside

BEYOND

THE OPEN WINDOW

ARTIST

TOUCHING THE MOUNTAINS OF HEAVEN

FINDING QUENEESH

OPTIMISM

MOUNTAIN LIFER