The VOC has its share of glorious epics. Ideally these end up as a trip report or a journal article, and if they don’t, word-of-mouth only keeps them alive for so long. It’s always best if a real participant writes it up, but sometimes they just don’t do it.
For the 2016 VOCJ, I tacked on one of my all-time favourites, that happened to Eliza Boyce a few years before, into my journal article. I just got it finished before the submission deadline and then fact-checked it with Eliza, since the version I heard was retold by Veenstra, and things can go awry pretty quickly after a few retellings. In this case. There were so many things wrong that I chucked my original version and rewrote it, both to be more accurate and because the truth was even better than my version.
I sent in the revised journal article as quickly as I could, but when the journal was published, my mostly wrong and inferior version was what was printed. I get it–I submitted the final version after the deadline, and putting the VOCJ together is a scramble–so no complaints about the journal editor, but it is a shame. It wouldn’t bother me if it was just one of my things, but it was someone else’s epic-supreme that got watered down and botched.
Trip reports are supposed to be sort of current, but I had a bit of a thing with a wasp nest during the summer, so I can start kind of current and then digress.
When we were replacing the roof on the Waddington Hut, I always seemed to be doing the trail in the middle of the night. Sometimes I’d be working on some last-minute welding all day and wouldn’t get there until after dark. Sometimes I’d be taking up plywood after work, but it’d always be something. Because it was always night, I never noticed the growing wasp nest. About half-way up, there’s a creek crossing where you walk across a log. A smaller log is tied up to adjacent trees as a handrail, and a nest was growing out of it.
Someone mentioned difficulties with wasps at the bridge, so I decided to deal with it. My never-been-stung solution to problem wasp nests is to sneak up on them at night, slip a bag around the nest, and squeeze the top tight while picking the nest. Once the nest is in the bag, it just takes a bit of stomping to be done with the nest. I think this is a better strategy than Veenstra’s approach of not using a bag, throwing the nest one way and running the other.
The next time I went up to the hut, I had a bag in my pocket and was confident that dealing with the nest would be a piece of cake. I ran into a bit of a snag when I tried to squeeze the bag shut at the top of the nest. Normally the nest’s attachment point is pretty thin, but this one wasn’t. For whatever reason, these wasps had built a hemispherical nest and I couldn’t get my hands all around the top.
Wasps immediately started coming out. I pulled either side of the bag up around the top of the log, trying to seal the wasps inside the bag. I’d happened to have grabbed a clear bag, which gave me a good view of the wasps, and there were a lot of them.
We were deadlocked for a while, but it was clear that if I didn’t try to do something, I’d make a slip at some point and the wasps would get out. I gingerly pinned one side of the bag with my right thumb, got my right fingers over the top of the log and squeezed the left side of the bag as I let go with my left hand.
I didn’t feel my grip was the greatest and that it was only a few seconds until the wasps got out, so I smacked the nest as hard and fast as I could until I was sure that the wasps were done.
Although this wasn’t the smoothest, I didn’t get stung, and I think the Veenstra approach would have been a total disaster as the nest wouldn’t have come off in one piece.
Glorious victory
Talking about a recent wasp encounter allows me to awkwardly segue to a couple things that happened years ago, since there were wasps in those incidents. Here goes:
Many things around Squamish have been climbed. Certainly all the aesthetic big faces that aren’t ridiculously hard have been mopped up, so if you’re looking to become famous for some first ascent, then you need to be pretty good. If you’re looking to climb something that no one has climbed before and don’t expect any fame, there are lots of options for the not-particularly-good, especially if you’re cool with heinousness.
Looking from Britannia Beach across Howe Sound, you can see cliffs that certainly look like the kind of thing I’d want to wrangle with. There’s a good 200m of very steep stuff out there. My first attempt was with Scott Webster, I think in 2005. That one didn’t go so hot. I was young and naïve; Scott wasn’t as amazingly stoked as he really ought to have been and was somewhat discouraged by the puddles being frozen in Britannia Beach (it was January), and it was pretty windy. We paddled over there and had quite a time getting out of the kayak onto the wall. We managed to get up on some rocky outcrop and hoisted the kayak a ways up a tree, to make it safe from the tide. From there, we did our best to climb, which wasn’t very good. We made it a couple pitches until it was dark. Scott slept in a bivy sack in a salal-filled notch, and I hammocked off a couple trees growing out of the cracks. Both of us remained roped. The next morning it was highly windy, and a decent-sized branch from above broke off and landed on Scott, which didn’t exactly float his boat, so we paddled back against a determined headwind and went to the Smoke Bluffs, where we demonstrated that being not very good to start with and then tiring out your arms paddling against a headwind leads to lousy climbing.
Sea cliffs
I didn’t go back there for quite a few years, but it was always there, asking me to give it a go. After floating it by a few potential partners, I decided that people were in general not the kind of animals I was going to deal with, and it was just going to be me. This time I was going to do whatever it took to get out of the water where I wanted to climb, regardless of how poorly it lent itself to landing a boat, so I grabbed a grappling hook that I’d welded up for this other thing that didn’t go so well. The intention was to toss the hook up to something, ascend the rope and tow the kayak up after me. Maybe if I’d tried throwing something upward from a kayak before, I would have known to work on a launch mechanism, but that’s not what I did.
After paddling over there, I went to throw the grappling hook and discovered that it’s damn near impossible to throw upward from a kayak. Overhand, underhand and sideways lobs all failed ridiculously. The great thing about the ocean, though, is that I was rewarded for my persistence by the tide going up enough that my feeble throw could hook some questionable edge. Jugging out of the boat was a bit of a circus, and after I was up I discovered that my chunky butt had plastically deformed the hook. I guess if I do this again, I’ll make the hook out of drill rod and do a real heat-treatment instead of just using mild steel.
It held, so that’s good enough.
I barely made it anywhere, but I left a short fixed line to make it easier to get out of the boat next time and a coil of static rope clipped to it so that I could make some real progress when I returned. I came back a couple weeks later and discovered that my rope had been stolen. It was clipped with a locking biner, so there’s no innocent explanation. Pirates are the worst.
One of the many times I hoisted up the kayak during the sea cliffs years
For the next couple years, my standard sea cliffs trip was paddling over, jugging out of the boat, hauling it up, ascending my fixed lines, doing some roped solo or solo aid, moving up the fixed line a little further and then paddling back in the twilight. If it wasn’t raining, there’d be a bunch of Britannia Beach folk around a big fire, and they’d tell me I was nuts, drink some beer and occasionally do some duelling banjo. I’m not even making that up.
If you look carefully, where it looks hazy up above, it’s water pouring down. The anchor is all Bugaboo knife blades.
The real crux was near the top. After aiding up a steadily shrinking crack, I discovered that it just ended agonizingly close to a ledge with a tree and a bunch of hanging salal. It was definitely way too far to dyno, so I had to make at least one placement. There was this little indentation that I could reach from the top step. What I really wanted was a copperhead, but I’d taken them off my rack to make room for more bugaboo knife blades, which was the only hammer-applied thing I ever seemed to need over there.
After extensive humming and hawing, I ended up with stacked #1 and #2 RPs. In all the pictures of stacked nuts they want you to put a runner on the upside-down one so that you don’t lose the piece if it pulls. I couldn’t do that as the weight of the biner would always cause the top one to tip over and then they’d fall out.
The crux is about 10 m above.
So there I was, with a long way down to anything solid, thinking about dynoing off a dubious pair of stacked RPs onto hanging salal. Eventually I was going to end up doing it, and sitting and thinking just increased the chances that I’d be nighted, so I went for it.
Stacked RPs.
Everything seemed to go well. I jumped without the RPs pulling, I made it to the salal, and as it always seems to, it supported my chunky ass. This seemed really good, but then I started to get stung. I ignored the first few because I didn’t want to jeopardize my stance on the salal, but it rapidly became excessive.
Upon closer inspection, I was sharing the salal with a small wasp nest, and wasps don’t like sharing because they’re a bunch of jerks. I didn’t really want to be there anymore, but I couldn’t un-dyno, nor could I move up at anything even remotely resembling wasp-escaping speed.
I ended up deciding that defeating the wasp nest was likely the best thing to do. This involved taking one hand off the salal, which I didn’t like, but realistically I’d need to do that anyways to move up.
I punched the wasp nest. It swung back and forth and wasps came out of it, so I punched it some more. They say that the definition of madness is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result, but that’s probably not true at all, as one of the punches dislodged the nest, which is what any reasonable person would want. I watched it fall until I couldn’t resolve it anymore. I hope that it made it all the way to the ocean and was devoured by a shark.
I got stung some more, but the bulk of the wasps went down with the ship, so things got much better.
After reaching the end of my rope I set up an anchor. Roped soloing a multi-pitch requires rapping down, cleaning everything, taking out the bottom anchor and jugging up again before starting the next pitch. Rapping down went well—it was only five minutes or so after my wasp battle—but jugging up was significantly less good, because by the time I returned a cloud of angry wasps had amassed at the former location of their nest. I ascended through this as quickly as I could, but that probably didn’t help, as they likely all emptied all of their nastiness into me.
I summitted the sea cliffs that night and began my triumphant rappel to the kayak. There was a larger cloud of wasps than before on the way down, but each sting was a badge of glory.
Afterwards I was telling Christian Veenstra about my distaste for wasps. He replied that I had nothing on Eliza Boyce and he told me of a poignant debacle. I wrote down the tale as it was told to me and double checked that everything was right with Eliza and she told me that basically everything was wrong, but as it turns out, the corrected version is even better.
In the uncensored version, I tell what happened to Eliza. The VOC was threatened with legal action about posting this kind of stuff, though, so the link is a special link. It works if you’re logged into the VOC site, but if you’re not, you get 404ed. Are you logged in? Buckle up!