Jumar School

July 24, 2022

Guides: Alex, Kevin, Lilla, Phil
Participants: everyone

After a rest day spent driving from Canmore to Revelstoke, we met the group for breakfast at a small downtown cafe. Eleven participants, four guides, two artists, a camp manager, custodian, cook, and a camp dog round out the group. After eating and filling out the appropriate legal paperwork which always seems to be required for these kind of trips, we drove for about one hundred kilometers north to the CMH Gothics Lodge where we parked the cars and transferred into two 4wd vans for forest service road travel to the staging area. The vans were appreciated as this half hour drive was very rough and included a short ford of half meter deep water, where I do not think our rental car would have survived very well.

The first helicopter arrived at the makeshift pad in the woods within a few minutes of our arrival and our friends Andy and Emily hopped out. Kat and I were scheduled on the second flight, so we had a good thirty minutes to chat with them about their adventures during week three of the camp. Our bird arrived and we hopped in for the ten minute flight up to base camp. Unfortunately camp was 300m lower than was planned, due to melting snow on the upper plateau, so we will have some extra bit of hiking to do every day on the approach to the climbs.

The bus has arrived.

Icefall of the Austerity glacier above camp

After a quick introduction by Pierre the camp manager, the entire climbing group headed up a short way to a skills course the guides had set up, where we practiced jumaring up fixed lines and rapelling back down. Apparently the access to some of the routes this week is going to invlove climbing 150 meters of fixed lines. This was a new thing for me so I ran over the course twice experimenting separately with both a jumar device and a progress capture pulley device. The camp is overshadowed by a massive rock face in front of us, overhung with the Austerity glacier icefall and during the training we witnessed one large piece of ice come crashing down which was exciting to witness (from a distance). The day ended with appetizers and supper while socializing in the dining tent. It looks like it should be a fun group of people whith quite a few avid climbers, so we might be offered some challenging objectives by the guides in the week to come.

Rope ascention practice

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