MOUNTAIN LIFER

words :: Andrew Findlay

In 2015, Alison Criscitiello, Kate Harris and Rebecca Haspel were skiing in the remote Pamir Mountains of Tajikistan hoping to trace the country’s border with China, when they were confronted by a group of men. They were armed, agitated, and wary of the trio of foreign women who had appeared, seemingly, out of nowhere.

“They very much did not want to be questioned on exactly where the Tajik-Chinese border really is,” Criscitiello says, recalling the sudden feeling of powerlessness in a volatile situation. “We left the area immediately and skied a different route than planned.”

The experience is another footnote in a life that has seen no shortage of adventure and adrenaline. Criscitiello loves adventure as much as she loves the cold. As a kid growing up in Boston, her happy place was exploring the frigid corners of a New England winter with her twin sister, Ra.

So, it’s fitting this world-renowned glaciologist celebrated her fortieth birthday this past May swaddled head to foot in down-filled extreme weather gear on Mount Logan, where she spent six weeks launching a two-year ice core study. Logan is one of the few non-polar regions of the planet where you can walk on ice that’s up to 200 metres deep.

“We summitted for fun just to take an altitude reading,” Criscitiello told me from her home in Edmonton, where she heads up the University of Alberta’s Canadian Ice Core Lab (CICL).

Scientist, mountaineer, mother, and mentor to young women— this pioneering alpinist and glacier specialist wears many hats.

For Criscitiello, science and fun intersect at the coldest places on Earth. She studies ice cores for clues about both ancient history and how climate change will impact glaciers and life on Earth. When she’s not in the lab or drilling ice cores, Criscitiello climbs mountains, and her resumé is impressive. She’s guided expeditions in the Andes, Alaska, and the Himalayas, and led the first all-female ascent of 6,955-metre Lingsarmo in the Indian Himalaya. In 2015, she, along with Harris and Haspel, ended

up completing a winter ski traverse of Tajikistan’s eastern Pamir Mountains despite the close call with suspicious gun-toting locals. Criscitiello’s path to the pinnacle of science and alpinism has been a parallel journey. After earning an undergraduate degree from Wesleyan University in her twenties, she felt the call of the mountains. She trained to become a climbing ranger for the U.S. National Park Service, responsible for conducting alpine rescues and assessing route conditions. After a three-year tenure at Olympic National Park and North Cascades National Park, she was ready to move on. “A lot of people told me that I had a dream job and in a lot of ways it was. But I’m also a bookish person and after awhile I wanted to use my analytical mind,” Criscitiello says, “I wanted to study the places I love.” So, she hit the books again, studying for a master's degree in geophysics from Columbia University. This was an important time in her life. Following her MA, she shopped around for a doctoral advisor and ended up choosing Sarah Das at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). It was a fortuitous decision, as her second pick advisor wound up losing his job for accusations of repeated harassment of female students and colleagues. "I could have been one of those women," she says. She went on to earn a PhD in glaciology, the first ever conferred to a man or women by MIT. Her “I’m a bookish person and formal education reinforced some life lessons for Criscitiello. Despite being after awhile I wanted to young and coming of age in an era use my analytical mind,” of awareness around gender equality, Criscitiello says, “I wanted there were still barriers. When she looked around, she didn’t see a lot to study the places I love.” of contemporary role models and mentors in her realm of the physical sciences. Instead, ironically, she was inspired by women of the past—people like Mary Vaux, who was born into a wealthy Philadelphia Quaker family. On numerous trips to Western Canada in the late 1800s and early 1900s, Vaux conducted pioneering studies of iconic glaciers like the Illecillewaet in Glacier National Park. However, her contributions to science were overshadowed by those of her

TOP LEFT Alison Criscitiello and Kate Harris (and an unlucky Marco Polo sheep) skiing into a headwind on the Afghanistan-Tajikistan border. When the snow ran out, the team traveled on frozen rivers. Rebecca Haspel. BOTTOM LEFT The -40C archive freezer at the Canadian Ice Core Lab (CICL), which currently contains 1.5km of ice mostly from the Canadian high Arctic.

John Ulan. ABOVE Self-portrait while ice core drilling on northern Ellesmere Island, Canadian high Arctic in 2017.

Alison's wife and 2-year-old daughter catching a supply heli flight up to Snow Dome, Columbia Icefield, in April 2021. They were able to visit Alison in the field during this recent ice coring season. Rebecca Haspel.

famous husband, paleontologist and geologist Charles Doolittle Walcott. Like Vaux, Criscitiello’s scientific curiosity led her to Canada, specifically to do a post-doc with University of Calgary’s Shawn Marshall. She moved from Boston to Canmore, knowing nothing about the town and with no intention of staying in Canada long term. But her timing was good; the newly established CICL was well funded, and of course she could climb and ski in Canmore’s backyard. On a trip to the Yukon, she met her future wife, Amy.

“I was offered the job here at CICL upon finishing my postdoc. Accepting the job, marrying Amy, and falling in love with the mountains here, all have kept me here, permanently,” Criscitiello says.

As her scientific career flourished in Canada, so too did an understanding of her own personal circumstances and the advantages it has afforded her.

“I grew up in an upper middle-class family,” she says candidly.

This realization led her to start volunteering with Girls on Ice, an American non-profit dedicated to giving teenage girls mountaineering experience and opportunities to explore art and science in a wilderness setting. At first, her involvement was minimal, mostly helping to select candidates. When she started seeing more and more applications from Canadian girls, she spotted a need and an opportunity.

So, in 2018, she co-founded Girls on Ice Canada. The program accepts ten candidates each year and is held in Rogers Pass. The Canadian version has been so successful that two new chapters are being launched—Girls on Ice Kootenays and Girls on Ice Yukon.

“I don’t get paid for any of this, but I think it’s the most important work that I do,” Criscitiello says.

When it comes to her paid work—examining ice cores drilled from the coldest locations on the planet—she’s forced to face a stark reality: the very frozen places she loves to explore are melting beneath her feet. Though at altitude on Mount Logan, climate change can seem like a distant reality, not so in the Canadian Rockies where even a non-scientist would be alarmed by the rate at which glaciers like the Athabasca are retreating year after year.

“People ask me if my work is depressing. I’m a field-based scientist and I write papers. Ultimately, I hope that the work I do informs policy,” she says. “The policy world is not my world.”

Now, with a two-year-old daughter named Winter at home, Criscitiello has a new challenge: balancing risk and research in the mountains with motherhood.

“It’s always hard to tear myself away, and it’s simultaneously so good when I’m out doing what I love. I’ve needed help finding that balance. I think bigger, riskier objectives, which I used to love might not be something I’m comfortable with anymore. But I’m okay with that,” she says. “I truly think, for me, the biggest risk since becoming a mother is not being myself.”

The Golden Life

Winter

To the west, the Selkirk Mountains let out a stampede of glaciers and rock. To the south, the Purcells line up like a row of siblings, their soft backs draped in snowcaked evergreen. To the east, the Rockies stand guard cold, crisp and clear. In the centre of them all, a small town howls at the inevitable cascade of winter, and the waltz begins. When the snow fi nally falls, Golden gets its dance shoes on, and there’s no better dance fl oor out there.

For Brenna Donaldson, it’s easy to take the lead. Kicking Horse Mountain Resort bends and sways at her command; she knows its 1,314 vertical metres (4,314 feet) of nooks and crannies intimately. Moving in perfect time with them, she traces a long ridgetop across a series of north- and south-facing runs. CPR Ridge points her into the Marley Chutes, and instinct takes over. She moves between cliffs and rows of spruce seamlessly, from top to bottom. Having snagged fi rst tracks, she’ll fan out farther in each direction now, chasing each new bowl as it opens throughout the day—fi ve of them in total.

Farther to the north, Ty Mills and his group click their splitboards together in anticipation of a similar run, but longer, earned in sweat, and with nary a soul to compete with. As an ACMG snowboard guide, the entire Dogtooth Range is Ty’s domain—and beyond. Be it the summits of Rogers Pass, or the home pull of his native Purcells, Ty, like many these days, fi nds his fl ow in the backcountry. He’s spent his life learning these mountains so he can wander freely in them, and bring others. Steeped in the tradition of the Swiss mountain guides that founded Golden, Ty is part of a new generation that gets as much satisfaction going up as coming down—walking calmly through postcard scenes, and then gliding effortlessly down blank mountainsides in long drawn-out swoops, like calligraphy.

Another few bowls over, Aaron Bernasconi is in search of the same thing, only with a lot more power. Roaring through billows of powder on his snowmobile gives him a feeling he hasn’t found anywhere else. The groomed trail into the bowl at Gorman Lake provides access to just one of 13 zones the Golden Snowmobile Club maintains. It’s in this sea of terrain that Aaron learned to work his throttle and throw his body weight; now there’s no Golden zone he can’t ride. From the valley bottom to the savagely steep mountainside, he’s still fi nding new corners all the time.

Farther afi eld, someone hangs from ice with axes and crampons, a family walks with snowshoes through the calm forest, and Nordic skiers lope in long strides over 33 kilometres of trails. At the end of each of their days, they’ll take their dance shoes off, put them by the fi re to dry, and then wake to do it all over again.

Spring

Margaret Atwood once wrote, “In the spring, at the end of the day, you should smell like dirt.” In Golden, it’s impossible not to. From the wash of winter snowpack swelling creeks and rivers, to the laces of forest throughway coming alive again, dirt offers the access to every wonder the mountains hold, and this place was made for getting down in it.

On the fl anks of Mount 7, Sophie-Anne Blanchette’s tires bank with practiced grip into corners packed with premium soil. The moisture in the ground is perfect, and the traction is the best it will be all season. Not a speck of dust fl ies behind her mountain bike, kept at bay by the same water she was skiing in frozen form only weeks earlier. Sophie-Anne is part of a vanguard of new riders: hammering up to 1,200 vertical metres (4,000 feet) from town on purpose-built climbing trails to descend revitalized downhill tracks remade into sprawling enduro works, all under her own human power.

For Sophie-Anne, who’s as strong on the way up as she is down, these trails are tailor-made. Golden offers a seemingly endless all-mountain buffet of modern fl ow and tech that she can spend two or 10 hours on. She can climb as high or as low as she wants, punching her lungs on the way up, and her forearms on the way down—all in an ecstatic blitz of roots, rollers and jumps that will stay prime until late October or early November.

Below her the whole time is the emerald green braid of the Columbia and Kicking Horse Rivers, and their pumping fl ows. Spring is when rivers froth with waves and whitewater rafting is at its best. Ryan Johannesen and Carmen Narancsik know this well; they’ve been guiding people down the convulsing Kicking Horse River for over a decade with their company Glacier Rafting. Each spring, they tap the water cycle from glacier to ground to bring guests down the gravity-fed roller coaster that is one of the world’s greatest churners of H20. Rafters start in the calm upper reaches of the Rockies, and are delivered over 25 kilometres (15 miles) back to Golden. The bold will fi nish the journey by running the lower canyon, accessed only by helicopter, and only by Glacier Rafting. While high water brings with it an adrenaline punch that’ll attract ambitious rafters and kayakers alike, it’s not mandatory to run the Kicking Horse’s lower canyon—which frames the river’s wildest waters. More gentle passage fl ows from its headwaters, in places only marginally more turbulent than the mellow Columbia— the Kicking Horse’s sister river. One of the largest waterways in North America, the Columbia is a gentler fl ow where you’re just as likely to fi nd swimmers and sun bathers as canoeists and SUPers on any sunny day. Not to mention trail runners and golfers, who also chase its shores, their playground equally nourished by its waters.

Set in dirt delivered to the valley fl oor by eons of spring fl ows, Golden lives in yearly celebration of these spring months, and the ever-widening smile they bring of the sun across the sky.