After Bozeman, Jen and I headed North across the border, waited through a van search, drove through 50-foot visibility with random snowdrifts across the highway, and ended up in Canmore. The previous week it had dropped below -40F, but the day after we arrived it was +41F. That’s a temperature swing of more than 80-degrees in about five days, and you can imagine what that does to an ice climb.
We mostly kept things pretty chill over the next couple weeks, climbing in popular cragging areas like Grotto Canyon, Haffner Creek, and Johnston Canyon. We drove up to Lake Louise on a rest day so Jen could complete a lifetime goal of skating on the lake there, and we drove up the Icefields Parkway as far North as the Weeping Wall late in the trip, hoping to find some good ice in the warm conditions. On that drive, we found none.
By far the most eventful day of the trip was when we went up to climb Louise Falls, which I did last year and was excited to get back to. But, on that day I just had a bad feeling in the pit of my stomach the entire time. Maybe it was the warm weather, or maybe I was just having an off day. Either way, I was listening to it the entire day and cautiously started up the first couple pitches. The first was alright, but the second was so wet that when I got to the cave I had a hard time finding two screws that I thought would hold a fall. The crux pitch above looked even worse, and I made the decision to listen to the voice and call it after bringing Jen up to see the cave.
But, just after I decided to bail I heard a loud yell from below and looked down to see a hiker who had gone to the base of the falls tumbling down the approach hill. He fell over 100-feet down a bullet-hard 45-degree slope, catching air near the bottom and hitting the ground in a loud thud. Jen was not yet on belay, so I yelled down to her that I was coming down, and built a V-thread. It was so full of water that I didn’t trust it, and instead chopped a hole in the pillar and ran the rope around it to rappel down to her. One more rap found us on the ground, and then we headed down the slope to check on the hiker.
I won’t go into a lot of detail on a public forum, but I got to use some skills from my now-expired WFR, and for the second time in two years helped load someone onto a helicopter. The man who fell and his family were all super nice, and I was happy that they reached out the next day to let me know he was (relatively) ok. But I was bummed to hear that my assessment of his injuries turned out to be correct.
A couple of takeaways…
1) Get medical training if you do things in the mountains, or even if you don’t. This is the second time I’ve loaded someone onto a helicopter in two years, and I’ve been on site for a lot of bad stuff. Knowing what to do and how to do it makes a lot of difference.
2) Don’t let your gear end up on the helicopter. My small pack ended up in Banff and my jacket flew all the way to Calgary. Luckily, we were headed that way in a few days.
After that, we did one more day of too-warm cragging in Haffner Creek, where every mixed pitch ended in vertical sugar snow that would barely support bodyweight. So, we left the now 50F Canmore area, headed to Calgary for a couple days to visit some of Jen’s family, and then went South once again.
