Reinhold Messner, one of the best mountaineers of all time, once said, “Mountains are not fair or unfair, they are just dangerous.” I had written Messner’s quote on an image of the famous and deadly north face of the Eiger, which I kept in the back of a climbing journal.
After a journal entry, I’d look at the Eiger with Messner’s words and remind myself to keep my goals well within my safety bubble. It’s not breaking news that climbing and skiing in the mountains is dangerous, far more than driving your car on the highway, but it’s good to remind ourselves from time to time.
This past year has been a deadly one for climbers and skiers, not only in the Canadian Rockies, but around North America and abroad. Over the past two weeks, an ice climber died in the Canadian Rockies, a skier has died in B.C. and a skier has died in Colorado.
Unfortunately, over the past 15 years, I’ve lost friends to crevasse falls, avalanches, rockfall, anchor failure, cut ropes, ground falls and altitude. So many of us in mountain towns have stories of our friends and loved ones dying in the mountains.
I recently met a new resident in Canmore who said they never lose a friend to the mountains. A few weeks later, I got a text saying, “I’ve lost my first friend to climbing.”
She was friends with the ice climber who died on Christmas Day, a local climber (originally from Ontario) named Carl Hawkins. After some words of comfort, I did what I do every time a climber in the community dies: pour a beer and reflect on the friends I’ve lost. My heart goes to Carl’s friends and family.
The three climbing deaths in the Bow Valley in the past year were the result of preventable accidents: a fall while soloing, a cut rope on a route where two ropes should have been used and an oversight that led to a rappel failure. It’s important to reflect after a tragedy, as difficult as it is, so we can be better prepared.
I’ve been lucky to have gotten away with some close calls, most of us are, and we’ll continue to head out and push ourselves in 2019. Many factors are within our control: equipment, route choice, partner choice, what conditions we chose to climb/ski in and where we go.
On the same photo of the Eiger with the Messner quote, was another quote by legendary climber Allen Steck from 1967. Steck, who I was lucky to share a beer with at the Banff Film Festival in 2018 shortly after his 93rd birthday, wrote: “We do not deceive ourselves that we are engaging in an activity that is anything but debilitating, dangerous, euphoric, kinesthetic, expensive, frivolously essential, economically useless and totally without redeeming social significance. One should not probe for deeper meanings.”
To everyone in the mountains, be safe and have fun in 2019.
