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Outside Magazine August 2001

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Spires of the Bugaboos
Forget the Yosemite circus. Head north to Bugaboo Provincial Park, a fortress of world-class granite in a quiet corner of British Columbia.

By Mark Synnott


	Rock Steady: Rob Frost takes the lead on South Howser Tower.

HALFWAY UP the South Howser Tower, a 2,000-foot spire of white granite in the far reaches of Bugaboo Provincial Park, my partner, Rob Frost, a 30-year-old professional climber from New Hampshire, and I stop to contemplate our options. It's July, about four in the afternoon, and massive thunderheads swirl around the peak. "I think we should bivy here," says Rob, gesturing toward a sandy ledge encircled by a wall of stones. Plopping down with our backs to the rock, we gaze west past a glacier-cut valley and beyond into a no-man's-land of 10,000-foot peaks draped in jackets of blue ice. A few minutes pass, visibility drops to nil, and lightning cracks the air around us. When sleet begins to fall, we crawl into our bivy sacks.

The plan had been to spread the single sleeping bag over us, but since Rob isn't paying attention, I keep the bag dry in my sack. I repeatedly tell him that it's only a passing squall, but after two hours, the storm increases in intensity and rivulets of slush flow down the wall and across our ledge. Static electricity sticks our hair straight up. Our fingernails tingle. Then a bolt of lightning slams into the peak a couple of hundred feet above us. The boom-crack makes my ears ring and the stone trembles beneath me. Making it through the night is no sure thing, but rappelling off right now would be suicidal.



	The Conrad Kain Hut

Like many climbers from around the world, we chose to risk a thunder-lashed night for the opportunity to climb in the Bugs, an oasis of clean crystalline granite in the middle of the Purcell Mountains, a Canadian range notorious for crumbly sedimentary shale. Climbs here vary from easy 20-foot top ropes on glacier erratics just outside a backcountry hut to remote 3,000-foot faces that could easily be mistaken for something in Patagonia, Alaska, or Greenland—perfect for wall rats burned out on the carnival atmosphere of Yosemite Valley. The Bugs have become a required stop on the world climbing circuit, and they just happen to be in our own backyard, in the southeastern corner of British Columbia, a four-hour drive west of Calgary. July and August are ideal months to climb here, but as we're experiencing firsthand, the weather is unpredictable; wicked afternoon storms pop up frequently, with very little warning.

Three days earlier, after parking our car and wrapping it in chicken wire to protect the brake lines from hungry porcupines, Rob and I staggered under 80-pound packs onto a flat dirt path meandering along the banks of a silty creek. A massive glacier spilling chaotically between twin granite spires dominated the view from the trailhead. After 20 minutes, we emerged from a dense forest of cedar, Douglas fir, and hemlock below a steep rock wall. That's when we realized why the sign at the trailhead read NO DOGS ALLOWED: In front of us was a broken cliff with bolted-on ladders and cables, similar to the via ferrate in the Italian Dolomites. Gaining 2,100 feet in three hours, we arrived at the Conrad Kain Hut by early afternoon.