Waddington Mountaineering in B.C.

Here we are in the Waddington Range! Excuse the out of orderness of the pics and writings. The task of updating everything is a bit overwhelming and some things are working and some are not.

We had to move through days of this stuff.

Slide alder...a cherished sight. Yeah, right. Better than devil's club perhaps...

The Jenga!
Mother Teresa is a wicked mountaineer!

The Waddington Range of British Columbia...in all it's splendor, we did see for 30 days in June and July. The quick story is we had a student go anaphalactic on the first night because of eating a sandwhich with buckwheat in the bread - she went to the hospital and rejoined the course late that night. It was an interesting way to start the course...waiting in a Canadian Provincial Park, a bit out of the way, for half an hour for an ambulance to come, hoping the student's airway did not swell shut. (She had already given herself a shot of epinephrine and Benedryl doesn't work for her.)

The bushwacking began: 3 days of moving 1/3 of a mile for each arduous hour. We sweated our way only 3 miles for 9 hours of toil. I would be in the lead sometimes wondering how these students are following me, and not knowing how I was going to get through what we called "the jenga" - a lincoln log array of fallen pine trees that had succumbed to the pine beetle infestation.

But eventually we made it to the snow and alpine territory, and it was beautiful. We climbed some wonderful peaks and had long days of glaciated mountain travel. It was fantastic to be back in the same mountain range that I'd been on two years ago, some new territory, and some old.

We had many crevasse punch throughs, but thankfully no one went through more than up to their waist. There were some exciting times though, and some HUGE, GAPING crevasses that we crossed on relatively small snow bridges. That's all for now. Hopefully the pics will tell some of the rest of the story.

The above picture is from climbing Jubilee Peak. We awoke early and as we made our way up the peak, the sun rose EXACTLY between the two peaks of Mt. Waddington. It was an amazing sight. Many things had to align for that to work out!