Raphael Slawinski

November 2014 . Ian and I were gunning for The Hole, a natural arch in the middle of the north face of Mt. Lawrence Grassi, a prominent yet obscure wall above Canmore. But we missed the break leading up to it and instead found ourselves below The Gash. The thin ice dribbling out of the giant chimney looked innocent enough. It was only when I was halfway up the twenty-metre flow, picks wobbling in shallow placements, that I began to think I might have strayed over the line separating scrambling from soloing. Pulling onto a steep snow ledge, I spied faded cord connecting two bolts: relics of previous attempts on The Gash. But we hadn’t come for The Gash. Tying into the rope, we took off on a rising traverse in search of The Hole. December 2014 . The Hole route ended up being fun in an alpine kind of way, but the sport climber in me was drawn to the project on the wall. A couple of weeks later Ian and I, joined by young Sam, slogged back up to The Gash. This time, instead of travers...

Last month, if you happened to glance at the southeastern horizon at dawn, before the sky was bleached by daylight, you'd have seen a bright star rising. In Greek mythology, Sirius, the brightest star in the northern night sky, was the Dog Star, the canine companion of Orion the trophy hunter (he once bragged he'd kill every animal on Earth). The fact that the star rose together with the sun at the hottest time of the year led ancient Greeks to suppose that Sirius was responsible for that heat. Hence, the dog days of summer - a classic instance of confusing correlation with causation. Reality is, as always, stranger and more interesting than superstition. In the nineteenth century, Sirius was found to be in fact a double star. The previously unseen companion is a white dwarf , a fantastically dense object held up against the crush of gravity by an exotic quantum mechanical effect. Thoughts of ancient superstitions and modern physics flitted through my head as I sweated up ...

The last time I wrote a post for this blog, I was on a 13-hour flight from Vancouver to Guangzhou, the second of the three flights taking me from Calgary to Kathmandu. A great deal happened since then, most of it unexpected. Was the Nepal earthquake a black swan event ? Or was it merely an instance of Russell's turkey ? I suppose it's a matter of perspective. I wrote about my experiences on the north side of Everest on my sponsors' blogs. For raw impressions of our expedition as it first unfolded and then folded, check out the blogs of Arc'teryx (instalments 1 , 2 , 3 and 4 ), Black Diamond (instalments 1 and 2 ) and Scarpa (instalments 1 , 2 , 3 and 4 ). I didn't feel I had much to add to what I wrote there, so rather than repeat myself I thought I would relive the trip through images. I didn't find the experience I was looking for in Tibet, but I lived through the one nature dished out. I am one of the lucky ones: I still have a future to dream about. ...

The night sky to the north, over the Bering Straight, was the surreal blue of another planet – perhaps the methane-rich atmosphere of Neptune, with all the red sucked out of the light. I was halfway through a fourteen-hour flight, itself only the second of three. Step by step, they were transporting me from the familiar surroundings of Calgary to the alien chaos of Kathmandu. It’s on the plane that a big adventure first becomes alarmingly real. For months we dream, plan, train and organize. Then one morning we wake up, make one last espresso, load bulging duffels bugs into the car trunk and head for the airport. The future becomes the present. What was still in the future, but a very near one now, was my first experience of the highest mountain on the planet. Everest? Really? How is it that after saying for years that I was too much of a climber to have any interest in that massive, graceless peak, I was headed there? What had changed? Photo: Gunther Goberl. Everything is ch...

"Let's go to the Headwall tomorrow." And that's all that needs to be said. When Rockies' ice climbers talks about the Headwall, there's only place they could be talking about. In the twenty-odd years I've been ice climbing (has it really been that long?), I spent a lot of time in its cold, blue shadow. Some seasons it seemed like I did half of my climbing there. A couple of years ago I put in seven days just on The God Delusion : stumbling over snow-covered scree in December, skiing up loaded down with rack, drill and avy gear in January, either way coming out by headlamp. But this year, February was already more than half gone and I still hadn't been to the Headwall. I began to feel an unease, a feeling of guilt almost, as if I'd neglected to visit an old friend. All the same, I needed a reason to go; otherwise I'd just be going through the motions. While hanging out on an unloved face above Canmore that was Ian's latest obsessio...