Lockie and Jess come to Cow town

After a long break in seeing friends from Toronto, Lachlan and Jess came to Calgary this weekend. They were in town for Jess' family reunion. The weather turned out to be stellar (low 20's on sat, sun and mon). I ended up convincing Lockie to bail on girlfriend duties to come climbing with Mike and I on saturday at Cougar Creek.



As most of you have seen from previous posts Cougar creek requires a couple shallow creek crossings to get to the climbing areas. Normally these crossings aren't a big deal - however the temps on friday night went below zero in canmore... which meant that almost every boulder we normally use to cross the creeks were covered in ice! I ended up slipping off two boulders and going ankle deep in freezing mountain run-off water (yes both feet got soaking wet). Lockie was smart enough to come climbing with sandals on so he had completely frozen toes too! Mike was the only genius to wear hiking boots - so even though he slipped into the water a few times his feet remained dry - bastard ;)




Once the sun came out conditions were spectacular for climbing - we even ended up gettin Lockie back to Clagary ON TIME!

Lock was originally supposed to go home on sunday night - however he changed his flight and called in sick to work so we could get a chance to do some multi-pitch trad climbing on Yamnuska. I picked him up from his fancy bed and breakfast and we zoomed up to the mountains. We decided to do Kahl Wall - a 3 star fairly sustained 10a that took a line up the tallest section of Yam.


The approach up to the base of Yam was an hour walk up a constant uphill... the wind was also really blowing... this was going to be an interesting day.

A little background - Yam is a beautiful 1000 foot face that is on the edge of the rockies - the cliff sits atop a 2000 foot hill - so the exposure on this mountain is quite stunning... in addition there is alot of loose crap sitting on this mountain just waiting to go crashing down, there have been more accidents on Yam then on just about all the other local moutains combined. Routefinding on this infamous cliff is very hard - many people (myself included in July) find themselves wandering around halfway up the mountain trying to figure out where the fuck they are! This is a serious - yet amazingly rewarding place to climb.

Lock had previously attempted one route on Yam with his girlfriend Jess last year. They ended up deciding to retreat around 10pm when they were only a couple hundred feet from the top. The retreat was full of problems and they ended up missing their flight home and not getting down till 7am the next day!! Needless to say Lockie was ready for revenge!








Anyways, our climb went off without a hitch - no falls, no getting lost and no other glitches. We made steady progress up a beautiful route that continued to throw interesting pitches of phenominal climbing at us. Both Lock and I thoroughly enjoyed every bit of climbing we did on Kahl Wall - and best of all we summitted with light still left in the sky and not a single epic!!



Congrats with your revenge on Yam Lockie! See you in the ice season!

On a side note I finally get to move into my home on Saturday!! I'm super psyched to finally have a home - woohooo. I'll post some pics when I can.

Stay in touch guys!

Kev

Fall in the mountains...

I know...

Its been a long time since I've updated this blog - guess I've just been waiting for worthwhile news.

I had a beautiful home lined up, was less than a day away from moving in when I got the call from the leasing office that there was some big fallout with the developer and the apartments were basically no longer available... shit.

Anyways so I went through the whole search process again, this time finding a great place right on 17th Ave - for you guys in Toronto think Queen street but with way hotter girls ;) The place was recently totally renovated and looks great - the only problem is that my place isn't available till oct 1 (boo). So basically I've gotta wait out the next 2 weeks.

I'm moving to Tat's parents house tomorrow, there just isn't enough room here at Tat's (she has 2 great roommates who have been very cool with me being here). I love her parents and they seem to like me so I'm sure we'll have a great time, in addition Tat has 3 other sisters who are all cool too so I'll have lots of company.

Anyways - in addition to my home search I've been looking for work too, the home search took alot of my time, now that that has been settled I'm psyched to go fulltime into job hunting mode.



I've also been going up to the mountains around canmore a couple days here and there. Spent last sunday doing some amazing mountain biking with my friend Mike. We did a gruling loop that involved some lung killing up hill spinning - which thankfully rewarded us in some KILLER-FAST bombing our rigs downhill for over 20 minutes. Weeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!!

In the last week fall has come hard and fast to Calgary. There aren't beautiful fall colors like we have in the east... you see a few specks of yellow here and there but thats it - there are very few deciduous trees here (deciduous trees shed their leaves before the cold season). In the last week snow has also begun to appear above treeline on the peaks, I must say its a beautiful sight. A sight that makes me want to sharpen my ice tools and get my snowboard out here from Toronto!





Today I was up in Camore spending the day climbing with Mike, his wife Claire, Tat, Kent and Gisele for a fun day of climbing at Cougar Creek - my favorite easy access crag here.







Hope you all are doing well.

P.S. I've decided to keep this blog going till I get my own place - as that will really be the ending of what has been an amazing pilgrimage across country in search of a new beginning.

Rock on friends.

Kev'er

So this is what you do on weekends around here?

So I've been in Calgary for a week now - figured it was time for an update.

I spent last week searching for both work and a new home. No real developments on the job front yet - but that will take a couple weeks. Home-wise I have several appointments this week to view apartments and townhouses, thankfully rentals are much more affordable in this town than in Toronto.

My long weekend was amazing - reminded me why I had moved here after all. I went to Waterton National Park on the Alberta, Montana border. We had planned on going to Banff but iffy weather changed our plans at the last minute (which proved to be a great choice!).

Tatiana, her friends Giselle, Kent and I packed up our mountain bikes and camping gear for a fun filled weekend. We arrived in Waterton around 11pm (it's less than 3 hours from Calgary). Sadly all the campsites in the main campground were full, as were all the sites in the secondary site... so out of options we drove to the lake and set up our tents beside the beach (which seemed like a great idea). Just as everyone crawled into their sleeping bags - the winds started, and got stronger and stronger... The winds blasted our tents with gale force-like winds, thankfully my aerodynamic-ish tent faired well - Kent's tent didn't do so well, though never totally collapsing he had to constantly hold the tent up from crashing down on him. Needless to say no one slept very well.

Saturday was mountain biking day - we took this great trail up to a beautiful lake surrounded by peaks, though constantly uphill and rocky we had a blast huffing and puffing our way up.

Pic of Kent showing me how he can flip over the handlebars yet stay on his feet - amazing!



Then the fun part - riding down... a 15 minute ride all downhill - through some tricky yet super-duper-fun sections we bombed our way down! Later we discovered that if the girls took us in the car around the mountain we could do the fun downhill ride again with minimal hills to climb. This second time around I had a little give'r in me and hucked my way down the steeper sections.

At one point I hit a lip, caught some air and landed like a champ (sadly my back brake wasn't working - something happened to the hydralic fluid when the bike was shipped to me) so I couldnt scrub off the speed I had picked up, I had just enough control to steer the bike to the only non-rocky section and came to a stop in a bush! Finishing the trail we thought all the excitement was over until we saw the bear - a good sized black bear was chompin down on barries by the roadside - we watched for a while in awe.

We ended up getting a great campsite on sat night in the main campground so we slept like babies after a phenominal day of riding in the mountains - dispite years of mountain biking, I had never ridenmy bike on a mountain!




Sunday was scrambling day - we set our sites for the Akima Ridge - a highly recommended 20+km scramble high in the mountains that took us along a beautiful ridge - hitting 4 seperate peaks (2 of those being over 8000 feet). We had amazing weather throught the hike - the winds obviously were quite strong on the peaks. We ended up finishing the circuit in 6 hours - not too bad for a bunch of east coasters (we're all from either toronto or Nova Scotia).




























Today I went climbing in Canmore at Grassi Lakes with my new climbing buddy Mike and his wife Claire. Dispite chilly temps we had a great day at this outdoor gym! I haven't sport climbed since our time at Smith Rocks in Oregon almost a month ago!