Raphael Slawinski

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...

Last November, in a dark studio in the bowels of the Banff Centre, I had the chance to talk for an hour with the English climbing journalist Ed Douglas . I'd long been a fan of his lively yet careful writing, so it was a real treat to speak with him in person. He rose even further in my estimation when I found out that, being from Manchester, he knew some members of New Order . For a while Ed had a hard time steering the conversation away from that band's history and music, and those of its ill-fated progenitor . However, eventually we did get around to other things - like alpinism. By rights my friend Ian Welsted should've been there too, but he was actually climbing  at the time. Recently the Banff Centre started releasing on its  YouTube channel  the wealth of material it had collected over the years. There are some real gems there, like Geoff Powter's conversation with the quirky duo of Rick Allen and Sandy Allan . For the record, here's Ed's and my chat...

Solstice just passed. With barely eight hour of daylight and the occasional spell of minus-thirty weather, it may have felt like winter for some time already, but now it’s official. On my last outing, while attempting a chimney system on an obscure north face, spindrift repeatedly darkened the sky. At belays, Pete and I stamped our feet and swung our arms to avoid the dreaded “hot aches” (as my English companion euphemistically called them). Booting down a snow gully, the beams of our headlamps shone across a white, untracked surface, our steps from the morning already erased by fresh sloughs. “Avalanche!” Pete shouted. Instinctively I jumped to the side. Fortunately the slab that’d cut loose was a thin one. I enjoy winter climbing, I really do, but its pleasures can be of the masochistic variety. Maybe that’s why I’ve always liked climbing in late autumn: freshly formed ice, just a skiff of snow on the ground, temperatures barely below freezing... However, this past fall I didn’t...

"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...

1995 Humble Horse on the north face of Diadem Peak was my first “hard” alpine route. Or at least it was the first route I’d ever done where you couldn’t sit down anywhere. Stopping for a drink and a bite meant kicking out a foot ledge in the ice, hanging the pack from a screw, and carefully fishing out bottle and sandwich. Anything you dropped, be it a piece of ice or a snack, would end up in the ‘schrund hundreds of metres below. Still, given all the gear I dragged up and over the route, it couldn’t have been that hard. Empty, my pack weighed nearly three kilos. A board-stiff Gore-Tex suit, plastic boots, Footfangs, a Canadian Tire sleeping bag, a bulbous Peak 1 stove: today I wouldn’t like to hike with that kind of weight, much less climb vertical pitches with it. Luckily twenty years ago I didn’t know any better. Cody Wollen on the first roped pitch of Humble Horse. 1998 The night before the climb we slept comfortably, if briefly, in Jim Sevigny’s Eurovan. We were...