Starting this month I am very pleased to announce the beggining of our series of guest blogs by prominent members of our community.

I am honoured to have my friend Rob Wood as our first contributor.

While many of our readers know who Rob Wood is, there is perhaps a younger generation of you who are not as aware of him. Rob came from Yorkshire to Canada in the late sixties. In the early seventies he particpiated in the first ascents of Weepling Wall, Cascade, Takakaw and Bourgueau falls, to name a few, as part of that group of Calgary climbers who invented waterfall ice climbing in the Canadian Rockies. In the Yosemtie Valley, Rob was part of the first non-American ascent of the Nose of El Capitan. Here on Vancouver Island he made the ground breaking first winter ascent of the Grand Central Couloir of Mount Colonel Foster with his friend and fellow climbing legend Doug Scott and American Greg Child. He has a storied history as an outdoor educator and climbing community philosopher and hails from his remote homestead on Maurelle Island here in the northern gulf islands. He is the author of “Toward the Unknown Mountains” a delightful meeting of adventure story and philosophical pondering.

CLIMBING AND THE LOVE OF LIFE

Right from when I first started climbing I experienced a sense of happiness and freedom on the crags and in the mountains and later in deep Canadian wilderness that was way over and above any other aspect of my normal everyday life. The more I experienced this natural high the more convinced I became that climbing manifested, for me at least, an essential ingredient of life that modern society was missing and possibly even precluding.

I spent many hours in steamed up pubs, around smoky campfires, on tent bound storm days and cold  dark bivouac ledges, discussing and defending the fascinating and illusive question of what exactly it is  about climbing that motivates climbers to risk their lives in such spectacular and dangerous ways. Even though many of us believe passionately that deep inside the rewards outweigh the risks, it seems impossible to explain the reason why to someone who has never done it. In other words the answer is beyond reason, beyond the ken of normality, which probably contributes to the attraction of the mystery.

Now, reflecting on fifty years of knocking about in the mountains, I see a fine line between success with profound satisfaction on the one hand and failure, desperation and even disaster on the other. The difference is determined not so much by quantifiable factors such as good planning, hard skills or even by good or bad luck so much as by state of mind, awareness and perceptions. Things go well when we are positive, focused and in tune with our surroundings and each other; when we are in the moment and in the Zone. Conversely things go badly when we are not paying complete attention and or not getting along with each other; when our minds are distracted and our spirits fragmented and scattered.

I had my fair share of fame and glory but after witnessing close friends getting killed and a few near death experiences myself I came to recognize the lethal impediments of excessive ego gratification and competition. They occupy our minds with deeply engrained and often habitual, culturally conditioned impressions of reality which prevent honest engagement with the actuality of the here and now.  If deliberately putting one’s life in danger just to impress other people were really what climbing is about, as might well be assumed by people who don’t do it, it would indeed be a mug’s game of questionable sanity.

To me the more profound, inestimable rewards of climbing occur when we break through the fearful, conditioned constraints of ego and conventional perception of being separate individual entities and engage ourselves with the dynamic flow of the powerful energy fields of the natural environment. Then, not only is our physical performance guided and enhanced but also our fear and anxiety is released, replaced by a secure and euphoric sense of love and unity with something much larger than our selves. While effectively reducing the risk of losing life, momentary as these transcendental experiences may be, they easily justify what remains of it by creating the freedom to be more fully conscious of the joy, unity and wonder of being alive.

Rob Wood     Maurelle Island   January 2014