Raphael Slawinski

"I don't want to write about climbing; I don't want talk about it; I don't want to photograph it; I don't want to think about it; all I want to do is do it." - Chuck Pratt . I can't remember when I first came across Pratt's quote but it's stuck ever since. Pratt, after penning his classic essay  The View From Dead Horse Point , never published another piece of climbing writing. Unlike Pratt, I continue to be guilty of occasionally spewing about climbing, from slideshows to this blog. Still, with each passing year and with the buzz around climbing growing ever louder, I find his sentiment more and more appealing. There was a time I used to record each climb I did: when I did it, with whom, how long it took and other like details. At some point I stopped this practice: once an experience was in the past, there seemed little point in recording it. Yet climbing for the moment, letting go of climbs as soon as you've done them, can shade into selfish...

I step from a luxurious belay ledge onto a steep, prickly slab. The slab is undercut just beneath my feet: a rock dropped from here might hit the distant orange spot of my pack at the base of the wall. I clip a bolt. Wait, what, a bolt? By this point Alik and I expected to be traveling across untouched rock. Five years earlier Alik, Ian and Nino climbed three pitches of the line we're attempting, but we've already passed their highpoint. It seemed unlikely that anyone else should've wandered up to this obscure face, overshadowed by the bigger, better known north faces of Ha Ling Peak to the north and Mount Lawrence Grassi to the south. And yet a bolted anchor four pitches up makes it clear we're not the first people up here. The slings on the anchor suggest the mystery climbers rappelled off, but then the bolt I've just clipped hints they might also have finished the route. We don't know. I shuffle further left, stuff a cam under an overlap, and turn my attentio...

Earlier this month I spent a week in Squamish, taking in and taking part in the Arc’teryx Academy . The event kicked off with a slide show by Peter Croft. The adjective “legendary” is overused but it applies to Croft. I’d never seen the man in person before, and while cragging in the Bulletheads that afternoon we kept an eye on the time so as not to miss his show. As it was, he was already being introduced when we squelched our way through wet grass and tried to squeeze in under the crowded awning to escape the rain. Mixing humour with wisdom, Croft told stories of his early days in Squamish, from false starts on Sentry Box, his first 12a, to multi-hour soloing circuits. The soaked Chief rising above the town provided a fitting backdrop. My own contribution to the festival was much more prosaic, consisting of teaching a clinic on alpine systems with Tim McAllister and a seminar on expedition planning with Steve Swenson . What are alpine systems, you ask? Before the clinic I asked...

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 ...

"Summer's almost gone, Summer's almost gone. We had some good times, But they're gone. The winter's comin' on, Summer's almost gone." - The Doors Steve Holeczi’s name appeared on call display. “There’s a cool-looking corner system just left of Homage to the Spider. Wanna go check it out on Tuesday?” I thought briefly about the sport-climbing fitness I’d lose by going into the mountains, but in the end adventure won out. I even agreed to meet at five in the morning. *** After just a few minutes of wading through long, wet grass in the grey light of dawn, our shoes and pants were soaked. The sky might’ve been clear now, but the night’s downpour lingered in the mud on the trail and in the dark streaks on the rock faces above. “The north side of Edith is completely wet. Think it’s worth walking all the way to Louis?” Steve wondered. I’m a believer in Steve DeMaio’s saying, that no matter how a route loo...