“We are homo sapiens – the tool users. We earn the name by developing tools to increase our leverage on the world around us, and with this increased technological leverage comes a growing sense of power. This position of advantage which protects us from wild nature we call Civilization. Our security increases as we apply more leverage, but along with it we notice a growing isolation from the earth. We crowd into cities which shut out the rhythms of the planet – daybreak, high tide, wispy cirrus high overhead yelling storm tomorrow, moonrise, Orion going south for the winter. Perceptions dull and we come to accept a blunting of feeling in the shadow of security. Drunk with power, I find that I am out of my senses. I, tool man, long for the immediacy of contact to brighten my senses again, to bring me nearer the world once more; in security I have forgotten how to dance.” – Yvon Chouinard, “Climbing Ice”

Everything is quiet in my little glass box as it rises through the clouds. The rain has subsided. Only the mist – thick and grey – remains, clinging to the green hillsides. The leaves of the Douglas firs shiver, renewed and alive. I know the air outside is cold and wet but inside the gondola cart, the air is warm and dry. I am comfortable as I ferry a cartload of French fries from the base to the summit lodge.

The day grows older and the clouds begin to part, the first rays of sunlight piercing through the white. I return to the base again with a new shopping list. When I arrive back at the summit later in the afternoon there is a horde of tourists lined up in the cafeteria hall. They file along the bain-marie with the relentlessness of a factory assembly line. The cooks in their black uniforms pile mac and cheese, burgers, pork ribs and poutine onto freshly-wiped plastic trays. The horde moves on. They reach the till, they swipe their cards and with their trays overflowing, they move out onto the observation deck – a grazing ground with a view.

After eating, the iPhones and SLRs come out. Buttons are pressed, shutters flicker, high-powered lenses click into place. Here, as anywhere, it is not the view itself but the photo of the view which is important. It is not what the eyes have seen but what the wide-angle lens has captured. The panoramas, the selfies.  The view is what you pay for. The scene becomes pixels, memories reduced to data. Instagram snaps, Facebook profile pics – they’re all here waiting for you. Ride the gondola. Eat some food. Take some photos. Make some garbage.

Another busload arrives at the base and a conga-line of packed glass carts arrives at the summit. The daily cultural tour begins – a representative of the local First Nations arrives. With a crowd thronging around her, she gesticulates wildly at various points of interest. She’s wearing a feather in her hair. Designer sunglasses – made in Italy. North Face jacket – made in Vietnam.

“Natural medicines were sourced from plants in the woods around us,” she says. “The Squamish people never had need of a drug store.”

She points up at Skypilot, the rocky peak watching over the Shannan valley. She begins talking about it. Bare of snow and ice to keep it glued it together, Skypilot is crumbling beneath itself. The glacier which feeds Shannan creek is almost gone. Last winter was the driest on record. The falls have become a trickle. At the height of summer, the gondola was taking water from Shannan creek. An emergency agreement with First Nations and BC Parks. The toilets must keep flushing. The kitchen faucets must keep running. The customer does not like to go without.

Now the cultural tour is over. There are no more pictures left to take. What reason is there to linger? The horde begins to thin. No one takes the walking trail back to the base. That’s what the gondola is for.

Remaining at the summit, on the back end of the assembly line, I pile garbage onto a cart, prepping the detritus for downloading.

I board a glass cabin of my own. The doors close behind me. Everything is quiet again on the way back down. Below, the contours and colours of the landscape – the forested hills, the bulges of granitic mountaintops, the wide flat expanse of the Sound and the distant glaciers of the Coastal Range – meld one into the other: shades of green, of grey, of blue, of whitest white. To me, on the other side of the glass, the view may as well be a postcard – a messy watercolour of jumbled hues and shades. There is no texture, no depth of field, no ignition of the senses – just a scene.

I look to my right. It is the white of the mountains that arrests my attention more than any of the other colours. the far-off, the cold, the uninhabited. Inside my box, I feel a disconnect between me and the world outside. I am aware that a seaborne breeze is blowing hard against the cabin but I do not feel it cold and fresh and salty on my skin. I see the colours but I do not feel myself amongst them. I observe but I am not apart of.

High on the Chief, a day later, I slide my hand into a crack in the granite and flex my palm and thumb. My hand jams into place and I climb higher, hanging off skin and bone. I reach a small ledge. Two ring bolts and two hangers await me, affixed to the wall. I did not place these anchor bolts but I clip myself to them, trusting them implicitly, and belay my friends towards me. As I pull in the slack, I take in the granite walls around me, rising up on either side. I hear the rumbling of a truck in the distance and look over at the mine site across the way. The sound of exploding rock in the quarry. A copper mine. Sometimes I’ve wondered if the green deposits in the Sound are glacial or man-made.

Rowdy car horns are sounding on the highway below. A traffic jam has built up on the road back to Vancouver. A tugboat chugs down the fjord, dragging a bundle of wooden logs, bobbing side-by-side, through the water. Kitesurfers wallow about in the shallow water either side of the spit. A busy scene.

Squamish. An old logging town. An old mining town. An outdoors town. I hear the shouts of climbers elsewhere on the walls of the Chief. I pull in more slack and my friends climb higher towards me. Here I am, hanging from a pair of bolts that I did not place, climbing a granite big-wall with just four abseils between me and a supermarket. Somewhere below, a long-line helicopter waits dormant on a helipad – a search and rescue team always on standby. I am insured against calamity.

My friends arrive at the belay and we climb on, navigating the complex ridgeline of the Angel’s Crest – climbing toward the second summit. A gust of wind rustles through my hair as I traverse the razor-backed knife’s edge of the Acrophobes tower. I feel comfortable in my sticky rubber shoes and I remove one hand from the rock. I look down at the town again.

The Acrophobes, The Angel’s Crest.

Squamish. Skwxwú7mesh, in the Native tongue. When said aloud, it seems more a whisper than word. Whispered with the sighing of the wind through the spruce trees. Whispered by the last glimmer of the sun as it sets behind the Tantalus Range. Whispered by the waters of the Sound as they change from green to blue and from blue to ultramarine in the evening. It sounds old – primordial. Squamish. “The Mother of the wind”.

There was not always bolts on the Chief. There was not always the hustle and bustle of the town below. In earlier times, Squamish warriors would scale the low-angle faces of the Chief in barefeet and full battle garb to harden their minds and bodies. What must the fjord have looked like in those days? Before the copper mine? Before the pulp mill? before the golden arches next to Highway 99? Before the gondola? Before Man? What must this place have looked like?

(Photo: Pete Harris)

Standing at the base of the Chief, in the climber’s campground, I look up at a prominent line of basalt – the Black Dyke – which snakes its way from sea level to summit. Squamish legend tells of a mythical serpent – Say-Noth-Ka – who, fleeing the might of a Native hero, slithered up the walls of the Chief, leaving this glistening path of geologic slime in its wake. Say-Noth-Ka fled across the landscape, carving out mountains and valleys and runnels for rivers and waterfalls. After hiding in the pools at the base of Shannan Falls, the warrior finally tracked Say-Noth-Ka down and slew the beast. Shannan Falls thus became a sacred site for the Squamish people. Today, with the glaciers bare and the rivers dry, the falls are reduced to a trickle. A line of bolts goes the whole way up the Black Dyke.

Down from the wall and back at work, I sit in my little glass cabin, moving French fries, once again, up through the mist. Working in logistics means keeping the summit fridge stocked. I arrive at the top. The crowds are thronging as usual – a camera lens between iris and panorama. There is the sound of French fries in the deep fryer, the chink of glasses at the bar, the rachet and jingle of the cash register as another North Face jacket goes into a shopping bag. The customer, his pockets a little lighter, his stomach a little fuller, steps outside into the mist. He rips the jacket from the shopping bag and pulls the new jacket around his shoulders. He struggles with the sleeves but then zips it up tight to the neck. The shopping bag and receipt goes straight into the garbage…

Eager are we to armour ourselves against Nature. So eager, in fact, that our armour has become inescapable. It has smothered us. It is only by breaking free from this armour, by leaving Civilisation behind us on the trail of the known and the comfortable, and by exposing ourselves, our whole selves, to Nature and her rawness, that the worth of Man can truly be found.

On the gondola ride back down, I gaze up at the mountains – Garibaldi and Atwell and the Coastal Range beyond – hanging white and wild and mighty. The Mother is calling me to be with her children amongst the tops.

At the Rubble Creek trailhead, I slide an ice axe into the straps of my backpack. I watch the sun rise over the Douglas Firs, and with my gear stripped down to the bare essentials – the minimum I need to survive – I shoulder my pack and walk into the wild.