My Conversation With Mallory

 

Some background:  Wettin Peak is below Brunswick Peak, between Hat Mountain and Deeks Lake. There's no known trail to it, or at least, no trail I've been able to find information on. It’s not an imposing peak at all, rather a rise on a ridge-line below Hat Mountain. But it's a named peak in the Baggers Challenge. All of the other peaks in the area were either well buried in snow and inaccessible to a dude in shorts and running shoes, or I'd bagged them already. So my friend Wendy and I set off on a little bushwhacking expedition we figured would be as simple as pie. 

 

It was sunny, but unseasonably cold at about -2C. The forest was alpine old growth, so apart from fallen logs and other debris, it was relatively easy to pick our way about 1/2 way up the side of the mountain. It then got steeper and steeper as we made our way up a narrow gully. Wendy had the common sense to turn around, but given the intense competition in the Baggers Challenge, I needed this peak if I were to have a realistic crack at winning the coveted Quaich. I continued upward.

 

Wendy was now about 300m below me. If I dared look down between my legs, I might have seen her looking up at me thinking, "if one of those stubby little pieces of blueberry bush he's trying to grab gives way, he'll probably not even bounce once before he lands directly on my head!"

 

Everything was so simple. No worries about mortgages, which party to go to next weekend or what would I have for dinner tomorrow. There was one thing on my mind: if the root broke, would I fall backwards and slide over the cliff below head-first, or would I have time to flip over and self-arrest before reaching the edge?

 

My thoughts turned to George Mallory. Mallory, if you recall, may have been the first person to ascend Mount Everest way back in 1924. What would Mallory have done if he were in the same pickle I was in? The similarities are amazing. We were both bagging peaks. The stakes were high. We'd probably been separated from our climbing partners and we were most probably well out of our comfort zones. Mallory may have bagged Everest. Then again, he may not have. His freeze-dried bones were found a few hundred meters below the summit in 1999.

 

OK, OK. Wettin Peak is not Mount Everest. Mallory didn't have an FRS radio and a cell phone with him, nor did he have Tim Jones and the North Shore Rescue team to haul his broken carcass off the mountain... but you get my drift. 

 

So I asked Mallory what he thought I should do. " Damned if you do. Damned if you don't. Forge on!", he said. So from that point, there was no going back. I tried kicking the sides of my shoes into the frozen dirt for a foothold and reaching over and up for the next root or rock to grab. I jammed my knees into rocks to leverage myself upward a few more inches.  My daughter radioed from below, "Everything OK?" "Sure," I replied, "Almost to the peak." 

 

After about a half-hour more of grinding up that mess, pulling myself through a tangle of bushes at the top of the chute and traversing a wide meadow of deep snow, I arrived at the Wettin summit: a little rocky outcropping without as much as a bit of orange surveyor tape to mark its presence.

 

I asked Mallory if he thought it was worth it. "A peak is not truly bagged unless you survive to celebrate your achievement," he said. Something to chew on as I headed back down through the snow to the chute of doom.

 

Needless to say, I made it out of there and back in one piece. Was it fate, blind luck or the ghost of Mallory that prompted me to drop down a different chute?