Brian Waddington Hut 2023 Roof Renewal, Phelix Creek
Aug 5-7, 2023
Participants: Braydon Massoud, Quintus Zhou, Mykal Bakker-Westeinde, Sonia Landwehr, Jeff Mottershead, Jacob Grossbard, Haley Foladare, Sam Viavant, Nadine Bruneau, Juliane Bonnefoy, Rachel Bates, Joe Meyer, Alex Beauchemin, Aaron Lee, Avery Soule
I wrote this for the journal but never published it on the website. Here we go, at least it’s not a full year late.
Braydon Massoud organized the second round of Phelix construction for the August long weekend, which involved a rotating crew of approximately 15 people. On Saturday morning, August 5th, a very tired Quintus Zhou picked up Mykal Bakker-Westeinde and me in Squamish. Mykal got behind the wheel, and he and I promptly prevented Quintus from getting any substantial sleep by singing the classic California Dreamin’.
We made an essential stop at the bakery along the road to D’Arcy. I had previously seen their sign advertising Saturday as their only open day, so I was very happy we lined up with it. Mykal bought a loaf of rosemary olive sourdough for the trip, which became an essential bit of sustenance for the weekend. Seeing, unsurprisingly, that we had beat Braydon’s rickety minivan to the trailhead, we set off toward the hut – lamenting the spicy air caused by the wildfire smoke and flies. When we arrived, Jeff Mottershead, Jacob Grossbard, Juliane Bonnefoy, Haley Foladare, Sam Viavant, and Nadine Bruneau, were predictably hard at work, putting up soffit and finishing up the wood bracing. Rachel Bates and Joe Meyer soon joined the group. Braydon and Alex Beauchemin, who had driven up with Rachel and Joe, were mysteriously absent. Mykal and I got to work applying mold control solution onto any piece of outer plywood and lumber that could potentially be exposed to rain or snow. We started out using the spray bottle that the stuff came in, but I very quickly broke the spray mechanism. By the time I somehow broke a second spray bottle, Mykal was reassigned to actual construction due to his actual building experience, and Joe stepped in to help me with mold control. We only had so much mold control liquid for the 34+ pieces of plywood and lumber, so we had to calculate how to ration it out. Because the spray bottles were no longer in commission (whoops), we applied the mold solution using paint rollers and trays. Honestly, I think this was a better method. I wouldn’t be too surprised if for example, in however many years from now when this new roof is getting replaced, outer plywood #8 has a weird pattern of mold growth compared to its paint roller-serviced counterparts.
Finally Alex and Braydon arrived carrying rakes, and explained their uncharacteristically late arrival: Alex had gotten stung by some wasps while crossing one of the little bridges on the trail (Jeff eventually went and destroyed that wasp nest – a beast as always). They had stopped to soak his ankle in the lake for some relief. Adding paintbrushes to our mold control tool roster, Braydon and Alex set to work helping Joe and me with our endless pieces of strapping.
Braydon Massoud applying some mold control
Now for the best, and not at all unpleasant part. The insulation. I spent a fair amount of time this summer wearing Tyvek suits at my nightmare summer job, and I thoroughly despise them. However, insulation really makes you appreciate them. Despite the relatively warm temperatures, several of us got decked out in the suits, goggles, N95 masks, and gloves in an attempt to not get aggressively itchy from the fibreglass insulation. One of the main frustrations that developed for many of us over this project was the ‘dormer’. I love the dormer in the hut because it’s an objectively cute little part of the loft, and it makes the hut more aesthetically interesting. However, construction logistics with the dormer proved to be frustrating in the extreme. More on this to come, but I will say, the insulation was perfectly easy to apply until it came to the dormer areas, because you had to cut the insulation blocks into the right shape. This cutting step released even more gross fibreglass particulates. Haley generously gave me the good exacto knife though, so I had an easier time than Joe must have had. As Joe, Haley, and I conquered the front and dormer (running low on insulation in the process), others quickly completed the back of the roof and began adding strapping. Eventually, we got the insulation finished on the front and started rapidly adding strapping of our own. We were hoping to finish so that we could put on the outer plywood the next day once the mold control had set.
A view including the freshly insulated roof. PC: Alex Beauchemin
I had brought all the ingredients to make a nice couscous salad for myself, with everything ready to go except for the couscous and the bell pepper. This proved to be a mistake because by the time we finished working past 10:00 pm I had absolutely no interest in cooking, no matter how simple boiling water for couscous would have been. Instead, I subsisted largely off of carrots and some muffins I had made. Despite really hot days, we were still in the alpine, so nighttime got pretty cold. Everything in me did not want to go into the lake in the dark, but the itchiness of the insulation particles that found their home on my skin and hair was a big motivator, especially at the thought of contaminating my tent and sleeping bag. Remembering how good it felt to finally swim on the last day of the previous weekend, I convinced myself to go for a dip to rinse off, and Sam and Jacob joined me in the dark and cold.
At some point on Saturday, we realized we would run out of soffit well before we expected, so Sam was deployed to sprint down to his car, drive into Pemberton, buy some more, and sprint back up. Throughout this process, we were corresponding with people in town via the assorted inReaches up at the hut to see what stores were open. Due to the long weekend, the Pemberton store was in fact closed, and we knew Sam would discover this himself and subsequently have a long journey to Squamish. There were no idle hands in the meantime, however, with the rest of us working very hard to finish up the wood strapping and bracing and setting to work on the outer plywood. A phenomenon that I noted during the weekends I spent at Phelix was the different bug hours throughout the day. It was uncanny how there were specific times of day when certain bugs would make their presence known. Of course, mosquitoes were a constant, as were small black flies, but horseflies and deerflies tormented anyone with slightly bare skin or thin socks from 11:00am to 2:00pm-ish. I was grateful for my Carhartt overalls and tall steel-toe boots, but others envied Jeff for his coveralls. At 3:00pm mayflies would swarm for about an hour, not doing anything in particular except for landing on any surface and just generally getting in the way.
Me surveying the whole scene from the apex of the dormer. PC: Alex Beauchemin
As we worked, I continuously shoulder-checked, looking out to see when Sam would appear across the lake with a large pack. Upon one of my glances, I was surprised to discover Aaron Lee arriving with my partner, Avery Soule. Aaron was very keen to attend a third weekend in a row of the project, but was not able to join until Sunday. Somehow, he had tracked down Avery via my VOC profile after I sent him a vague text before leaving cell phone service that my partner might be joining on Sunday after driving home to Squamish from Alberta on Saturday. Despite never having met Avery before, Aaron was able to convince the very sleep-deprived Avery, who had gotten stuck at a highway closure at Roger’s Pass (making the 12-hour drive into a 22-hour drive), to make the journey. So on Sunday morning, Aaron took the bus to Squamish, and the pair drove up to the trailhead and then hiked up the trail in likely record time. That’s true dedication, thank you, Aaron and Avery.
Outer plywood in the process of being applied.
The extra hands were needed as we had a bit of a time crunch to get a waterproofing layer onto the roof as it was supposed to rain during the week. There were also conflicting forecasts for some downpours imminent that night and we had to scramble to attempt to finish off the plywood and then throw on some tarps for the night. Sam finally returned from his very long journey with new soffit, and Victor Sira, a VOC member who was camping with friends in the area, joined in too. Many hands made for quicker work even despite the apparently insufficient number of hammers. My nemeses of the weekend were the 4-inch nails we were using on the plywood. It was so frustrating to nail in 3.5 inches perfectly and then accidentally bend them in the last half inch, ruining the smooth surface of the outer plywood. Full disclosure, I was really bad at hammering, using both hands at once to hammer in almost every nail. Avery assured me it was because I was using a hammer that was not intended for 4-inch nails and there may be some truth to that. This strategy ended up making my wrist so sore that I had to miss two days of work the following week (for those of you who heard about my job this past summer, you’ll know I didn’t see that as the biggest tragedy). Rachel set up her camera and took a wonderful time-lapse of the evening, capturing all of us workers crawling like ants over and around the hut through the transition into dusk. We continued to work into the dark, donning our headlamps. Eventually, we took on the mission to cover the hut with tarps, as it became clear that we could not finish putting up the plywood until the next day. We wrapped up for the night and ate some meager dinner while debating a chilly nighttime swim. Rachel produced some beers from her bag and they were rapidly finished off, despite my feeling that we would all immediately become pretty inebriated if we were to drink them given the work we had undertaken and the sweat of the day. After all, when it comes to beer and backpacking, what comes up must not come down.
Braydon chefing. PC: Alex Beauchemin
On Monday morning, we woke to discover it had not in fact rained. Better safe than sorry, though, and we quickly removed the tarps. The final sheets of plywood were quite easy to apply, as they were on the back of the hut, with none of the awkward corners that were characteristic of the dormer region. The faff of moving the scaffolding was also reduced as there were no stairs to awkwardly carry the structure around. Jeff had been assessing the quality of the nails before we could apply the waterproof layer and discovered the many aforementioned bent nails. Bent nails were not an issue in most of the components of the project, but for the outer plywood, it was imperative that we did not have jagged nails poking out so that the waterproof layer would not be punctured (as far as I know, at least). This led to the removal of a huge amount of nails that we had ignorantly nailed flat after bending them. Whoops again. One car group started to pack up their things and package up some garbage to attach to their bags. Still on the roof, those of us who did not have to leave right away started applying the Roofnado. Mykal and I found the name of this very blue waterproof layer pretty comical, along with its hilarious accompanying slogan that has since unfortunately been forgotten. This may have been the most faffy part of the entire weekend. Roofnado is a peel and stick material that we had to cut into specific lengths and angles and apply with as little accidental folding as possible. This step required being roped up, which definitely restricted our range of motion as we got closer to the edges of the roof. We found a pretty efficient system though, and soon enough, we were all finished up and could descend. Mykal, Avery, and I packaged up some sharp pieces of sheet metal and plywood and made our slightly slowed descent, exhausted but satisfied with a very very productive weekend. We also had a much smoother drive home than those in Braydon’s car did, seeing as our brakes did not catch on fire on the way down the forest service road.
My favourite picture of the whole project: Braydon and crew examining his brakes.
All in all, this was another incredible weekend that demonstrated the collective might of the VOC, with a large crew scraped together somewhat last minute and with helpful bystanders joining in. A huge thanks to Nadine, a non-member of the VOC who volunteered with us after seeing our general post to the public on our website about the project. She, along with every other person who gave up their long weekend, were instrumental in making sure we got the roof done. And endless thank yous to Jeff for leading another successful weekend.