So many friends - so much climbing

The last few weeks have been so much fun. I've been crazy busy at work (not that I am complaining - I'm really enjoying what I do). I've have 2 weekends with great out-of-town friends visiting.

2 weekends ago I had Lachlan and Jess in town - they came here to run through some interviews - yes, that means they are seriously considering moving here - Wooohoooo!! After a long week of working for me and interview for them we headed to Hafner creek home to some great Ice cragging and mixed climbing (climbing rock with your ice tools). After a super-fun day I'm pretty sure that Lockie and Jess are EVEN more psyched to move here ;)

This past weekend saw my old friends Tim and Elena come here - they are living in spain now. They're actually herre on their honeymoon - how many people you know go ice climbing on their honeymoon?? I love these guys!!




Grant and I drove up to Lake Louise early on Sat to meet up with the happy couple. After some coffee and catching up we decided to head out to Golden, BC to do a beautiful 2 pitch climb called Lady Killer (called a WI 3 in the book but we faced grade 4 conditions). We hiked up a pretty steep hill for 20 minutes (wow it was so great to have such a short approach!).



The climb was in 'interesting' shape - due to its southern facing nature the climb had a thick layer of rotten ice on it. Tim lead up the first pitch - showing that living in a warm climate hadn't diminished his ice climbing abilities at all.





After a whole series of bad jokes I started climbing the second pitch - which appeared to be pretty straight forward - boy was I wrong! As it turns out the ice was rotten, trying to find good ice for protection was quite tough... as I approached the halfway point I came to a huge horizontal fracture in the ice - about 8 inches big and going all the way across the climb - YIKES!! This is a bad thing - its something that if you saw it beforehand you wouldn't do the climb. However given that I was WAY past the point of no return I had no choice... 10 stressful minutes later and I topped out - the sun came out and everything seemed good in the world again!





We went back to the hostel where Tim, Elena and I passed out - I can now say that I slept with a honeymooning couple... boy it wasnt as exciting as I thought a honeymoon night would be ;) I guess thats a good thing though!

The next day we awoke at 5:30am... damn that was early! Grant showed up around 6:30 and we started the 2 hour drive north towards Jasper on the Icefields parkway - for those of you that haven't made the drive - do it! This is one of the most beautiful drives I've ever made... saying breathtaking doesn't do it any justice.



2 hours later we had arrived to the pullout we were searching for, we quickly got suited up and started the 1.5 hour hike to Shades of Beauty (WI 4). The aproach was pretty straight forward yet long and thankfully only the last 20 minutes were uphill.



The climb itself was great - 3 long pitchs of amazing ice in a fantastic setting. Pitches 2 and 3 were incredible, amazing positions high above the ground and steep challenging ice.









As we were almost to the top Elena looked down and noticed some ravens were hanging out by our bags. After rapelling down the route we came to Elena's pack which had it's zipper opened and the contents all spilled out.



The crazy part was that Tim's pack was nowhere in sight... after some searching we spotted it 80 feet blow us on a steep hill - hanging off a bush. The damn crows had somehow pushed it down the hill!!

Anyways after all that hubub we packed up and hiked out just as it got dark - always always take your headlamps when ice climbing!

In the end I had an amazing weekend of great ice climbing with good friends - I get to see Tim and Elena again on Friday when they come to Calgary to hang before their flight leaves on Sunday - I realized this weekend how much I value their friendship - I'm comforted knowing that no matter where we live we'll always get together to climb and make bad jokes.

Congrats and good luck with your new life together Tim and Elena!!

Holidays and stuff

Wow - finally a blog entry not about climbing!!

The last couple of weeks have been quite busy and fun. I had two wonderful Christmas dinners with my adopted Calgary family - the Muiznieks. The daughters Tat, Aleks, Erika, Dionne and the parents Rolands and Rasma. This family has been amazing to me, they've let me live with them when I was looking for a home, the fed me when I was hungry and took me out when I wanted to party.

The Muiznieks brought Chewie and I into their home and welcomed us with open arms. Chew and I actually made the family newsletter this year!!

Thanks to them my first holidays away from my family wasn't so bad. I ate a ton of turkey and had alot of laughs surrounded by this amazing, caring family.

New Years was fun too - we didn't want a big blown up thing so we hit a bar and drank-in the New Year. Other than a couple of hours at work during the holidays I did alot of ice climbing and eating.



On Monday Tat and I finally got out to Sunshine Resort to ride (ski in Tat's case). The sun was out, the temps were warm (right around freezing) and the snow was pretty good considering that the mountains hadn't seen new snow in over 5 days.