Everyone's a Winter

by Rich Gottlieb

My motto is, “Everyone’s a winter,” that is, if you want to get in touch with your arctic side. Packing the car with all the imaginable cold weather gear in my arsenal and driving up east of Québec City has been a sure bet cure for the winter blows (a disease that curses the Hudson Valley all too frequently). I have been using this cure for 9 out of the last 11 winters and this winter has really been an insult to the season.

Felix and I launched early in the evening on the first Saturday of March and made our way to the land of kilometers, liters, and the Québécois. We didn’t quite make it to our first destination that night and pulled off the highway to set up camp on the side of a road in a snowstorm before dawn. At about 6 A.M., a man, Canadian style, woke us up. We apologized to him about our choice of camping spots and he apologized to us in broken English that he didn’t want to disturb us but the woman in his cruiser had had a black trailer stolen from her yard that night and did we see it go by?

Driving in a snowstorm at 3:30 in the morning has the tendency to create all kinds of visions— I swear I saw a black Hummer with the presidential seal pulling a black trailer. Felix wasn’t so sure. But I’ll tell you, there’s nothing like a good interrogation to freshen you up after two hours of sleep in a tent.

We made it to a beautiful ice climb called Fantasma a little while later and lazed in the car watching a couple of  Maine men ascend the ice in the distance. We got to the base of the climb just as they got down and then flew to the top for our first ice tasting of the trip. Reenergized by the climbing (which is a bit more exciting than driving), we were able to burn some more imperial gallons. We passed the fake mountains (giant fenced in mine tailings) of Thetford-Mines, and up past Québec City to the Saguenay Fjord where the road cuts proudly revealed that the average depth of the snow was 2 meters.

We set up our base camp in a motel, had a good meal; some lively political discussion with one of the proprietors; and (ahhhh) sleep. The invaders would begin in earnest tomorrow. We got permits from the Parc national du Saguenay in the morning, packed our gear into our special sleds (made for pulling behind us), put on our cross country-skis, and started off at around 9:30. Our goal was to climb a route named Contre vents et marées just to the left of Cap Trinité. We skied quite a few kilometers into the Fjord and stopped by the flank of the magnificent Cap, whose 300 meter steep rock walls drop straight into water which was, at that point, conveniently frozen. We left our sleds on the ice, took off our ski boots, put on our climbing boots, snowshoes, and packs for the final approach. The climb started a short distance up a hill but an obstacle stood in our way: a moat about 15 feet wide, choked with ice blocks. As a 20-foot-long section of these piled blocks suddenly and noisily collapsed, I thought of the infamous Kumbu Ice Fall at the base of Everest. Getting knocked out of the game pretty much before you even get started is bad luck and luck is one of those elements in mountaineering that you need to come to terms with, but, crap, we’re just going climbing for the day, not pitting ourselves against some evil-looking man-eating malevolent mountain. We crossed Kumbu Jr. one at a time, roped up and were relieved to be on terra firma, albeit covered with terra snowa. After a half-hour’s wade up deep, steep, frustrating snow we were ready to begin.

The ice climb was easy, but its smoothness gave us a mean and painful calf burn. Nevertheless, it was fun getting to and up the climb but now the time came to gather our reserves and get back to our car and base camp. We got back to the car at 8 P.M. and spent the entire next day just resting. I managed to find a Frenchman in l’Anse-Saint-Jean, a small picturesque town on the Fjord, who gave me shiatsu massage. Felix took a leisurely snowshoe that afternoon. Another night of good food and a good sleep and we were ready to go at it again.

So the next day, we donned our snowshoes and took a beautiful trail that wound through the woods and led to an even more beautiful lake that had cliffs rising up from one of its sides. Unfortunately, the climb on the edge of the lake that was pictured in the guide book had not formed well enough to climb so we scoped another climb that started way up the hill next to it. We fought our way up the hill through loose deep snow, remembering that there wasn’t a flake in New Paltz, and finally made it to the base of Psychotrauma. Then I led up a steep icefall and was faced with more snow slogging to get to the final headwall. Now I had to plod up through the snow without the benefit of snowshoes (which I left at the base of the ice). It was very slow going and I remembered that Felix did not like the snow conditions on our previous climb, so I side-stepped; put a sling around a small tree; and clipped my rope to a sling with a carabiner. I continued up and just before I got to a piece of ice that protruded from the snow (where I intended to place an ice screw), I heard a woumff and realized that I had triggered a slab avalanche that began to pull me down the slope. Harder snow was uncovered in front of me and I desperately swung one of my ice tools. It stuck and I held on as the moving snow filed past me. Felix’s jaw dropped as he watched blocks of snow and a mass of powder fly off the top of the ice cliff (he was safely off to the side). He later told me that it was an awesome sight but it was just a tiny avalanche. It was only about 8 feet wide and 50 feet long, practically a joke. Luckily, the joke wasn’t on us.

The next day we cross-country skied, going up and down in the woods, crossing lakes and swamps, with the goal of reaching a hut. We built a fire in the hut stove (it was 50 degrees F in New Paltz that day) and warmed up, then turned around and got back to the car just before dark. It was supposed to rain late that night and the next day and this was something that we deemed unacceptable so we scurried back toward the border. It was sad to see winter go but it seems to have bounced back a bit oui?  

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