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Understanding mountains

By G.D. Maxwell Last Saturday’s two tragic events, one in space, one on earth, couldn’t more neatly bookend the sweep and scope of human experience.

By G.D. Maxwell

Last Saturday’s two tragic events, one in space, one on earth, couldn’t more neatly bookend the sweep and scope of human experience. They constitute a deep reflecting pool for our collective psyche – who we are, who we were, who we might someday become. They illuminate our hopes and fears and lay bare both the amazing strides we’ve made in knowledge and the astounding ignorance we might never evolve enough to overcome.

Early in our morning of that day, seven adults, adventurers, scientists, explorers, screamed across the lightening skies of the southern United States. They travelled in arguably the most complex vehicle yet devised by mankind. While no one’s certain, their fiery deaths may be laid at the failure of one of the least complex, least technological components of their craft: adhesive. Ironically, it was their collision with Earth’s atmosphere – the very thing that makes life and the human experiment possible, the soup of gasses that should have turned their guided missile spacecraft into a controlled if cumbersome glider – that tore Columbia apart.

Later in the day, seven youths on their own quest of exploration, a personal journey of growth and discovery, crossed paths with the power and the glory of terrestrial indifference. The oft tragic confluence of wrong place-wrong time visited their young lives for maybe the first but certainly the last time. Earth shuddered, shrugged a shoulder and brought down a mighty wall of crystalline water. In the cold and dark of a world turned upside down, they quietly suffocated, passing into memory and breaking the hearts of those who knew them and many who only learned of them in death.

The reaction to both incidents was predictable. Denial, shock, anger… the visceral interplay of emotion and intellect long defined by social science but little understood either by those swept up in it or even those spending their lives studying it.

NASA, government, most in the scientific community, many in the general populace pushed past the grief and vowed to continue firing people into space, as much to discover who we are as what’s out there. The voyage of exploration is just that, a journey. The destination is irrelevant. Goals reached are goals replaced. There will be another, just over the horizon, and another and another after that, an endless string of destinations to fire our imaginations and keep us reaching beyond our grasp. To stop reaching is to stop living, settle comfortably into an easy chair and wait for death by safety, death by boredom, death by stagnation.

Compared to the deaths of seven children in the mountains, the deaths of seven astronauts is acceptable, glorious even. But the loss of seven children trekking through snowy mountains insults the sophistication of a modern, urban society out of touch with nature.

Already the crowd has turned ugly. Villagers are lighting torches and any moment now, the mob is going to coalesce on a scapegoat. The list of suspects range from the teachers who led the lambs to slaughter, to the administrators who frivolously supported and authorized such a pointless adventure, to the government who hasn’t thrown enough money at avalanche research, to the same lawmakers who haven’t restricted access to the backcountry.

Life’s a bitch.

The contrast it striking. People who have never been to space, people who will never even approach the chance to visit space, are vocal in their support for continued space flight. Talking heads who have been weighing in with theories of what went wrong have been asked the question, "If given the chance, would you go into space?" Their answers have all be a variation of, "In a heartbeat."

How bizarre. How different from the voices now being heard to demand more regulation of backcountry travel. How come no one’s clamouring to explore the snowy stretches, the wild places of our back yard? Why is it easier to support a grand technological dream with esoteric rewards – Teflon notwithstanding – than it is to support life-changing, soul-defining voyages of discovery well within the reach of most of us?

I go to the mountains to discover my self. The same forces drive me there that drive me to the desert and to bodies of water. Unlike the epithets being slung by media, these aren’t exercises in risk taking. I’m not in those places for adrenaline rushes. If that’s what I seek, a brisk drive down the Sea-to-Sky Highway is risky enough to sate that desire.

I go to the mountains because the mountains renew my soul. They are my spiritual centre. Being a nonbeliever, I find salvation in the mountains in ways just as profound, just as personal and just as meaningfully deep as true believers find in communion with their god. Please don’t reduce my quest to one of simple risk taking.

Media coverage of the Calgary students’ deaths has bordered on fanatical. CBC television, and Terry Milewski’s coverage in particular, has taken on the air of a carnival sideshow. Questions being asked reveal such a profound ignorance of nature, human motivation and the limits of our ability to control the uncontrollable that they rise to sublime inanity.

Much has been made of why in the world anyone in their right mind would wander into the backcountry when avalanche risk is considerable. Again, irony abounds.

In the mid 1990s, when the Canadian community of avalanche forecasters, backcountry skiers and mountaineers were struggling with the adoption of our current, five-level risk scale, much debate and deliberation centred on the word "considerable." From the late 1970s – when those same people first brought in a uniform scale to describe avalanche hazard – there were four levels of identified danger: Low, Moderate, High and Extreme.

With European countries having already adopted the so-called Uniform Risk Scale – the current five-level measure – there was pressure within the community to fall in line. After all, what good is measuring and reporting avalanche danger if everyone’s using different scales?

The five-level scale sought to define a transitional zone between "moderate" and "high." Many favoured "moderate to high" as a descriptor. There were two problems with that. Europe had already settled on "considerable" to describe it and "moderate to high" sounded too fuzzy and too much like both "moderate" and high."

Like all jargon – specialized language peculiar to a given discipline – "considerable" has to be understood within its special meaning in avalanche-speak. Those who speak the language understand; those who don’t need to learn its meaning, not attack it for straying from their dictionary definition.

But in the final analysis, more money for research isn’t going to make much difference. Daily avalanche bulletins aren’t going to make much difference. One aspect of Mount Cheops slid last Saturday. Other aspects of the same mountain didn’t. The same aspect of other peaks adjoining Cheops didn’t either. No forecast can pinpoint slides with any degree of certainty.

And no set of laws can limit backcountry access without an army of law enforcement on the ground to stop people. We seek mountains; some of us will die in mountains. I can think of many worse fates.