The first draft, of the first chapter, of Mike’s planned memoir
To my mom. Writing this chapter sitting beside her while she’s in the hospital with a broken leg.
Chapter 1
In 1999 I managed to graduate university and after that a lot of things started happening quickly. Newly single, and no longer tied to living close to SFU I decided to move into a more social situation. Having recently begun taking rock climbing more seriously, I had signed up for a course with the BC Mountaineering Club and spent every weekend over 12 weeks in a row climbing, usually in Squamish. One of the other students, Caroline, had mentioned her living situation was with 5 other people and one had recently moved out so I jumped at the opportunity to live with what seemed like a community of people around my age. So it was that I moved into a shared house in East Vancouver with a cast of 5 other characters.
The other major thing that changed was that I decided that I needed to volunteer for something. While in my last few semesters at SFU, and as part of the SFU Outdoor Club (for which I was briefly the president), we’d organized a training night on the climbing wall to learn how to “self rescue” (when a belayer rescues the climber, usually in a party of two). As usual in the self taught model these small clubs use to this day, one of the members, Brady, had been brought in to teach.
It turns out Brady was involved in Search and Rescue so in the course of the evening, while learning how to escape the belay and rig a lowering system, I quizzed him on what it was like volunteering for SAR. He told me he was with Coquitlam Search and rescue and gave me the basic rundown of what SAR was about. I remember being surprised that it was all volunteer, and was fascinated to hear about some of the search techniques since I wasn’t aware that there was any systematic approach to the problem. At some point in the evening, as Brady was telling stories about some of the different searches he had been in, iit came up that he’d been on a search near hope, BC for two mountaineers who had died.
As it happened, I had gone to high school with one of those two mountaineers: Tom Zarzeki. Although the incident had happened in 1997, I had only heard of it recently, and learning that Brady had been on the search and had assisted in the body recoveries struck me deeply. Although I had only known Tom in passing, our school was small and the class was only about 100 people so I’d been a fellow student of his for years. Learning that he had become a mountaineer, like I had, after high school made me feel an even deeper connection. I believe it was this, more than any other urge, that convinced me to try to join Search and Rescue.
——
The 10 years from 1989 to 1999 constituted my university career, during which time I somewhat embarrassingly only managed to earn a Batchelor of Science in Computing science. “Ten years” some of my friends would say, “What the hell were you doing?” What the hell indeed.
I was engrossed in university, and didn’t know what I wanted to do. I studied the sciences, concentrating on Physics and Chemistry at first, but I also found Introduction to the Essay, one of the required english courses, deeply satisfying. After a few years I became fascinated with Philosophy, and eventually did a few upper division courses in Existentialism, and metaphysics. As part of Computing Science I ended up studying the history of Mathematics, one of the single most interesting courses I’ve ever taken, and a course on Finite math which would have been better titled “How to solve puzzles with algorithms”.
In between all the school I had slowly become an athlete. After breaking up with a girlfriend in 1990, I started riding my mountain bike to school, which is far easier to say than it is to do. Simon Fraser University is located atop the somewhat aspirationally named Burnaby Mountain, a 370m (1240’) glacial moraine in the suburbs of Vancouver. It’s not tall by any means, but riding your bike to the top became my daily task. Initially exhausting, I quickly gained fitness but it never stopped being something that would make me want to puke up my breakfast, which I quickly stopped eating in order to save money.
SFU is surrounded by forests and trails and eventually I began riding those up the mountain because the traffic on the single lane hill became tedious. The trails, while they took even more effort to ride, were at least a daily dose of nature, and the consequent end of day ride down was very fun. Having only been involved in athletics in the final year of high school, I found the challenge of mountain biking to be novel: there’s the exertion of the climb which is an interesting combination of skill and strength, followed by the thrill of the descent and its obvious risk. I began to ride consistently every day, then on evenings and weekends. Finally I sought out others who were into it.
The late 80’s and early 90’s were the very early days of mountain biking, before suspension when we all rode what people call “rigid” bikes today. Those early mountain bikes had more in common with what people call “gravel bikes” today, but make no mistake, we rode every bit as hard and as fast as those steel frames could take us. There were no “groomed” trails back then, and most of the places we rode had no names, at least not early on. The group I joined, the Burnaby Mountain Bike Club, ranged from Vedder, Eagle and Burke mountains to “The Shore” (North Vancouver), Squamish and Whistler. But our home base was Burnaby Mountain.
One evening on the way home from classes I passed the SFU East Gym and noticed a few people climbing on what was at that time Western Canada’s only climbing wall. Primitive by today’s standards, the old climbing wall was on the outside of the Gymn, and was made of concrete forms and intended brickwork. Most modern climbers wouldn’t even recognize it. As I passed I noticed I knew one of the people so I stopped to chat and they asked if I wanted to give climbing a try, and I agreed.
Even writing this now, I can easily remember what it was like making those first few “climbing” moves on those rudimentary holds. My mind was empty, focussed on a single task – moving upwards. Similar to the flow state I’d experienced while mountain biking downhill, it felt like I’d unlocked some kind of super power. I climbed horribly, awkwardly, scrabbling up the wall in terrible style but inside my mind I was calm and centred. In short, I was hooked.
I fell in with a group of people who were similarly driven; mountain bikers, hikers, climbers, and skiers mostly – with a few into ice climbing, caving or swiftwater. Officially we were the SFU outdoor club, but unofficially anyone was welcome – and we joined and were joined by other clubs and individuals as opportunities arose. We spent our weeks planning and researching weekend objectives; in the days before the internet poring over maps and aerial photos in the SFU library. Carefully tracing routes through the forests, up the rock and over the glaciers of Southwestern BC and northern Washington State. Armed with skills we’d just learned, we eagerly taught our friends and went out to practise what we’d learned.
We started small; climbing local mountains, hiking the trade routes published in books like 103 Hikes. I took a general mountaineering course, then one on first aid. I saved up money for a junker of a 4×4 that lost its exhaust on one trip and sounded like I was driving a Cessna in the neighbourhood. In the winters we took up backcountry skiing, I decided on Telemark equipment because at the time it was lighter, cheaper and more reliable than the Alpine Touring alternatives. I took an avalanche course and then another. We skied every Thursday at Cypress, and every weekend was a new objective.
Our groups expanded; we traded stories of our trips with each other. People travelled and showed slides of mountains they’d climbed. We took on big targets; 6 day summer backpacking trips, 10 day spring ski traverses. We dropped food caches on remote glaciers by airplane, spent days with all our equipment on our backs, nights in remote valleys under the stars by giant fires. We climbed big routes without enough water. We skied thousands of meters in massive descents. We climbed the coastal volcanoes, and we traversed the glacial valleys. We got blistered by the sun, blasted by the rain, and burned by the wind.
There were incidents. A party would be late returning from a big weekend, and the story would run through the community who would hold their breath until we got good news. An avalanche where we dug our party out of the snow. A friend had a boulder roll over and pin his leg then later got hit by a rock; we all bought helmets but called him “danger boy” from then on. Another friend fell, abrading his arms, scarring them to this day. We attempted massive trips; we rode our bikes across Canada, canoed and kayaked enormous rivers, and travelled routes that took months. Improbable distances, unimaginable efforts, and also indescribable losses. Someone we knew died while pioneering a route, another on an unclimbed summit. We read their trip reports, viewed their photos, read their books and magazine articles. And we kept going.
—-
Being an outdoors person and attending university was a conflict, and for me the winning side was always the outdoors. When faced with the choice of taking a course, or having enough free time to hike, camp, ski, or ride, free time won. However, I continued my studies and maintained a series of part time jobs, and made it through university with a collection of coursework and research in Physics, Chemistry, Mathematics, Computing Science, English and Philosophy that amounted to enough credits to get a Bachelor of Science in Computing Science, awarded in the fall of 1999.
After meeting Brady that evening at the same SFU climbing wall where my obsession with the outdoors was re-sparked, I contacted him about what it took to volunteer for Search and Rescue. As it happens, Brady told me, Coquitlam Search and Rescue, the team he volunteered with, was recruiting, Brady gave me some advice, and encouraged me to apply.
As luck would have it, within a week or so of applying to join SAR I was organizing one of the last trips with the SFU outdoor club to climb Sky Pilot Mountain near Squamish and Brady invited a few of the people from his SAR team to join us. I was familiar with the road into the area since I’d made several previous attempts to climb the mountain, so I was the local guide. This is what led me to meet Nick, Ian, and a few other SAR members. Ironically, that day was my first successful climb of Sky Pilot but the SAR guys, who decided to try a different route, didn’t make it up.
Chapter 1
In 1999 I managed to graduate university and after that a lot of things started happening quickly. Newly single, and no longer tied to living close to SFU I decided to move into a more social situation. Having recently begun taking rock climbing more seriously, I had signed up for a course with the BC Mountaineering Club and spent every weekend over 12 weeks in a row climbing, usually in Squamish. One of the other students, Caroline, had mentioned her living situation was with 5 other people and one had recently moved out so I jumped at the opportunity to live with what seemed like a community of people around my age. So it was that I moved into a shared house in East Vancouver with a cast of 5 other characters.
The other major thing that changed was that I decided that I needed to volunteer for something. While in my last few semesters at SFU, and as part of the SFU Outdoor Club (for which I was briefly the president), we’d organized a training night on the climbing wall to learn how to “self rescue” (when a belayer rescues the climber, usually in a party of two). As usual in the self taught model these small clubs use to this day, one of the members, Brady, had been brought in to teach.
It turns out Brady was involved in Search and Rescue so in the course of the evening, while learning how to escape the belay and rig a lowering system, I quizzed him on what it was like volunteering for SAR. He told me he was with Coquitlam Search and rescue and gave me the basic rundown of what SAR was about. I remember being surprised that it was all volunteer, and was fascinated to hear about some of the search techniques since I wasn’t aware that there was any systematic approach to the problem. At some point in the evening, as Brady was telling stories about some of the different searches he had been in, iit came up that he’d been on a search near hope, BC for two mountaineers who had died.
As it happened, I had gone to high school with one of those two mountaineers: Tom Zarzeki. Although the incident had happened in 1997, I had only heard of it recently, and learning that Brady had been on the search and had assisted in the body recoveries struck me deeply. Although I had only known Tom in passing, our school was small and the class was only about 100 people so I’d been a fellow student of his for years. Learning that he had become a mountaineer, like I had, after high school made me feel an even deeper connection. I believe it was this, more than any other urge, that convinced me to try to join Search and Rescue.
——
The 10 years from 1989 to 1999 constituted my university career, during which time I somewhat embarrassingly only managed to earn a Batchelor of Science in Computing science. “Ten years” some of my friends would say, “What the hell were you doing?” What the hell indeed.
I was engrossed in university, and didn’t know what I wanted to do. I studied the sciences, concentrating on Physics and Chemistry at first, but I also found Introduction to the Essay, one of the required english courses, deeply satisfying. After a few years I became fascinated with Philosophy, and eventually did a few upper division courses in Existentialism, and metaphysics. As part of Computing Science I ended up studying the history of Mathematics, one of the single most interesting courses I’ve ever taken, and a course on Finite math which would have been better titled “How to solve puzzles with algorithms”.
In between all the school I had slowly become an athlete. After breaking up with a girlfriend in 1990, I started riding my mountain bike to school, which is far easier to say than it is to do. Simon Fraser University is located atop the somewhat aspirationally named Burnaby Mountain, a 370m (1240’) glacial moraine in the suburbs of Vancouver. It’s not tall by any means, but riding your bike to the top became my daily task. Initially exhausting, I quickly gained fitness but it never stopped being something that would make me want to puke up my breakfast, which I quickly stopped eating in order to save money.
SFU is surrounded by forests and trails and eventually I began riding those up the mountain because the traffic on the single lane hill became tedious. The trails, while they took even more effort to ride, were at least a daily dose of nature, and the consequent end of day ride down was very fun. Having only been involved in athletics in the final year of high school, I found the challenge of mountain biking to be novel: there’s the exertion of the climb which is an interesting combination of skill and strength, followed by the thrill of the descent and its obvious risk. I began to ride consistently every day, then on evenings and weekends. Finally I sought out others who were into it.
The late 80’s and early 90’s were the very early days of mountain biking, before suspension when we all rode what people call “rigid” bikes today. Those early mountain bikes had more in common with what people call “gravel bikes” today, but make no mistake, we rode every bit as hard and as fast as those steel frames could take us. There were no “groomed” trails back then, and most of the places we rode had no names, at least not early on. The group I joined, the Burnaby Mountain Bike Club, ranged from Vedder, Eagle and Burke mountains to “The Shore” (North Vancouver), Squamish and Whistler. But our home base was Burnaby Mountain.
One evening on the way home from classes I passed the SFU East Gym and noticed a few people climbing on what was at that time Western Canada’s only climbing wall. Primitive by today’s standards, the old climbing wall was on the outside of the Gymn, and was made of concrete forms and intended brickwork. Most modern climbers wouldn’t even recognize it. As I passed I noticed I knew one of the people so I stopped to chat and they asked if I wanted to give climbing a try, and I agreed.
Even writing this now, I can easily remember what it was like making those first few “climbing” moves on those rudimentary holds. My mind was empty, focussed on a single task – moving upwards. Similar to the flow state I’d experienced while mountain biking downhill, it felt like I’d unlocked some kind of super power. I climbed horribly, awkwardly, scrabbling up the wall in terrible style but inside my mind I was calm and centred. In short, I was hooked.
I fell in with a group of people who were similarly driven; mountain bikers, hikers, climbers, and skiers mostly – with a few into ice climbing, caving or swiftwater. Officially we were the SFU outdoor club, but unofficially anyone was welcome – and we joined and were joined by other clubs and individuals as opportunities arose. We spent our weeks planning and researching weekend objectives; in the days before the internet poring over maps and aerial photos in the SFU library. Carefully tracing routes through the forests, up the rock and over the glaciers of Southwestern BC and northern Washington State. Armed with skills we’d just learned, we eagerly taught our friends and went out to practise what we’d learned.
We started small; climbing local mountains, hiking the trade routes published in books like 103 Hikes. I took a general mountaineering course, then one on first aid. I saved up money for a junker of a 4×4 that lost its exhaust on one trip and sounded like I was driving a Cessna in the neighbourhood. In the winters we took up backcountry skiing, I decided on Telemark equipment because at the time it was lighter, cheaper and more reliable than the Alpine Touring alternatives. I took an avalanche course and then another. We skied every Thursday at Cypress, and every weekend was a new objective.
Our groups expanded; we traded stories of our trips with each other. People travelled and showed slides of mountains they’d climbed. We took on big targets; 6 day summer backpacking trips, 10 day spring ski traverses. We dropped food caches on remote glaciers by airplane, spent days with all our equipment on our backs, nights in remote valleys under the stars by giant fires. We climbed big routes without enough water. We skied thousands of meters in massive descents. We climbed the coastal volcanoes, and we traversed the glacial valleys. We got blistered by the sun, blasted by the rain, and burned by the wind.
There were incidents. A party would be late returning from a big weekend, and the story would run through the community who would hold their breath until we got good news. An avalanche where we dug our party out of the snow. A friend had a boulder roll over and pin his leg then later got hit by a rock; we all bought helmets but called him “danger boy” from then on. Another friend fell, abrading his arms, scarring them to this day. We attempted massive trips; we rode our bikes across Canada, canoed and kayaked enormous rivers, and travelled routes that took months. Improbable distances, unimaginable efforts, and also indescribable losses. Someone we knew died while pioneering a route, another on an unclimbed summit. We read their trip reports, viewed their photos, read their books and magazine articles. And we kept going.
—-
Being an outdoors person and attending university was a conflict, and for me the winning side was always the outdoors. When faced with the choice of taking a course, or having enough free time to hike, camp, ski, or ride, free time won. However, I continued my studies and maintained a series of part time jobs, and made it through university with a collection of coursework and research in Physics, Chemistry, Mathematics, Computing Science, English and Philosophy that amounted to enough credits to get a Bachelor of Science in Computing Science, awarded in the fall of 1999.
After meeting Brady that evening at the same SFU climbing wall where my obsession with the outdoors was re-sparked, I contacted him about what it took to volunteer for Search and Rescue. As it happens, Brady told me, Coquitlam Search and Rescue, the team he volunteered with, was recruiting, Brady gave me some advice, and encouraged me to apply.
As luck would have it, within a week or so of applying to join SAR I was organizing one of the last trips with the SFU outdoor club to climb Sky Pilot Mountain near Squamish and Brady invited a few of the people from his SAR team to join us. I was familiar with the road into the area since I’d made several previous attempts to climb the mountain, so I was the local guide. This is what led me to meet Nick, Ian, and a few other SAR members. Ironically, that day was my first successful climb of Sky Pilot but the SAR guys, who decided to try a different route, didn’t make it up.