HA! HA! HA! I've discovered the blogging secret!

After much pondering I realised it couldn't be too hard to upload some images and write somthing!

The pictures are of Howse peak in the Canadian Rockies and of Mike (my boss) on the summit. We climbed up the spur facing the camera over two days. It was pretty cool, we slept halfway up on a tiny ledge (we had to be tied in to the mountain so we didn't fall to our deaths). The climbing was quite scary as the rock often had the consistancy of stacked tiles; if you pulled the wrong one out there was a serious danger of it all falling down and killing you.

So at 3pm on day 2 we got to the summit. We made the 19th ascent since 1976 according to the summit register. The only names in there seemed to be famous climbers. We realised why this was on our descent; it took six hours and involved descent 3000ft on the wrong side of the mountain to tree line, then going up a brutally steep slope for two hours more to our desired col. From here we glissaded (like skiing but with no skis!) 3000ft to the forest. Since no one goes here we hiked for 2hrs through trailless bush to reach the highway. Unfortunately wire crossing the river had been taken out so we just waded through it (up to our waists). Oh, and we were so tired we kept our boots on so arrived on the highway sopping wet at 9:30pm. Thankfully some one decided it was a good idea to pick up two soaking wet climbers and take them to their car. Not much later we were sipping ice cold beer and eating ice cream.

Since then I've taken the advanced course from the centre up the highest mountain in the area Mount Cline. This was a good four days of instruction as they all know what they're doing and it was a cool climb!

Torran