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Voice of the Mountains: Mountains Tell the Truth with guest Barry Blanchard
7k Plays7 months ago
We are thrilled to release the first episode of our new series, Voice of the Mountains. Hosted by legendary climber Steve House, the first episode welcomes Barry Blanchard. He hardly needs an introduction, but Barry is an Alpinist, a mountain guide, a father, a mentor and a dear friend to many. Barry and Steve explore the connection of Barry’s childhood and his foundation and desire to be a mountain climber. From Barry’s Metis heritage, to his connection with the mountains and those that challenges themselves within their grace, the two cover a wide array of their experiences and what it means to live a life in the mountains. This is the first in the Voice of the Mountains series as the podcast explores a range of ideas with the hope of building a philosophy of the mountains.
You can learn more about Barry's climbing here.
Also you can purchase Barry's book at this link.
Write to us at [email protected] or visit us at uphillathlete.com/voiceofthemountains
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Transcript
The Innocence and Self-Belief of Childhood
00:00:03
Speaker
As a father, I'm often struck by the purity my children naturally possess. Small kids have an innocence and a beauty of spirit that we all seem to lose as we grow up. I can't put my finger on it exactly. Is it pure self-love? A sense of belonging? Or is it an undeniable belief that they are special? Of course, not every child starts from the same place, and some face much grimmer beginnings and much harsher challenges. For some, innocence is lost much sooner than it is for others.
Losing and Rediscovering Self-Worth
00:00:33
Speaker
I'm not certain exactly when or where, but one day I lost that belief that I was special. Talking to and observing friends, artists, climbers, and lots of other humans. I started to notice this theme seemed universal. We all forget that we're special. The mountains are what helped me remember. If we're lucky, we all find the mountains in our lives. They're symbolic for some.
00:00:55
Speaker
But for me, they're real rockin' ice. Some find them, lose them, and then get called back later in life. Once I heard the mountains call to me, I never left.
Lessons from Mountains and Legendary Climbers
00:01:06
Speaker
Today you'll hear from a great friend of mine and a living legend of climbing and he will describe the moment that he not only lost his innocence but found out that he was a killer. The mountains helped him channel that self-knowledge from violence and revenge into scaling peaks from the Canadian Rockies to Mount Everest. Mountains tell us the truth.
00:01:26
Speaker
And the truth that I want to explore today is the idea that we all must embrace the innocent, self-assured belief that we are each special, just like each of us deserve to believe we were as children. The mountains have repeatedly helped me relearn or remember this lesson that I've often forgotten, that I am, that we all are important. So keep these questions in mind.
00:01:48
Speaker
When do you feel that you matter in the mountains? And when and how do you feel small? And what truths have the mountains whispered to you?
Mountain Philosophies and Perspectives
00:01:59
Speaker
Hold on to those questions, because we'll come back to them. With Voice of the Mountains, I'm going to take you with me, and we're going to explore a mountain range of ideas with the aim of building towards the philosophy of the mountains.
00:02:14
Speaker
We will take one idea at a time and explore each idea with a different guest. We are going to call on the most influential, experienced, and in many cases, older generation of uphill athletes to help us map the internal, mental, and emotional journey that we all take through the mountains.
00:02:30
Speaker
And as with any mountain pursuit, we're going to bring our powers of self-reflection, our humility, and our gratitude as we embrace the beauty and the struggle of the mountain experience. But first, two admissions. My personal philosophy comes from five decades of living in the mountains.
00:02:47
Speaker
And I acknowledge that that comes with biases formed over that time. I'll try to remember that and I'm going to hope my guests will remind me if I forget. The second admission is that this is an unscripted live creative act and I know it may not hang all together. In fact, it may not ever mean anything to anyone other than myself. But I'm okay with that because I trust that if I explore topics with the guests, honestly and deeply, what we learn will resonate with the community.
00:03:16
Speaker
The mountain community is all of us. And collectively, we're a massive group that not only spans the globe, but spans economic differences, political differences, and a ton of other differences that make us all human. I want this community to find its voice and to bring our hard-earned wisdom, literally cut from stone and ice, to the rest of the world.
00:03:37
Speaker
for it's not enough if we keep our voices to ourselves. I envision Voice of the Mountains as a collaborative pursuit, not just for my guests and me, but for everyone who listens and shares this conversation with their friends, relatives, and coworkers. This is our community and our conversation, and your participation is vital.
00:03:57
Speaker
I want this podcast to be one that if it existed when I was in my 20s living in the back of a 1976 Mazda pickup, that I would have been drawn to it. And if it exists in my 80s, that I will be drawn to it. I will invite guests who know, who have earned insight, adventurers who have conquered challenges, accomplished goals, and turned back just short of coveted summit because it was the right thing to do.
The Athlete's Journey and Peace in Movement
00:04:23
Speaker
Above all, I want guests who have walked away from those experiences understanding better why we seek and how our journeys change us and guests that have allowed themselves to be changed. I would have loved that when I was getting started in climbing and hopefully I can provide it to many of you.
00:04:41
Speaker
Today, I call myself an athlete, but I'm not an athlete because I compete. I'm an athlete in the same way someone who practices yoga is a yogi. I move, I reflect, and I try to evolve. Being an athlete gives me agency over my body, which gives me agency over my mind. I seek what a lot of us do, peace from mind, not peace of mind, but peace from self-criticism, self-doubt, from the need to prove my worth, peace from mind.
Barry Blanchard's Formative Years
00:05:13
Speaker
This is Voice of the Mountains. Today, I want each of you listeners to imagine yourself as an impoverished, half-native child of a First Nation's mother of five living in a dilapidated neighborhood of prefab housing on the edge of a bustling boomtown in the cold and windy far northern plains of Alberta, Canada. You're poor with a capital P. You fight most days, literally and figuratively.
00:05:40
Speaker
You're a dark-skinned kid, a disposable and often delinquent boy. And the only positive male role model you see is your uncle that drives the milk truck. That was a childhood of our first guest. Today, Barry Blanchard is an alpinist.
00:05:58
Speaker
a mountain guide, a father, and my dear, dear friend. And he is certainly one of the purest alpinists and best humans I've ever known. Welcome, Barry. Thank you for joining me today. I'm so grateful to you for being here. Well, it's a pleasure and fabulous to be here, Steve. Yeah, you feel it in my heart. So thanks for having me, Matt.
00:06:21
Speaker
Barry, this is the first episode of Voice of the Mountains and I can't help but feel it's sort of a full circle moment for me to be here now having this discussion with you and to be kicking off an adventure together with ideas. It only seems fitting and right. Yeah, we've shared a lot of life and of course a lot of experience and a lot of climbing and a lot of different mountain ranges together.
00:06:51
Speaker
But I think the most precious stuff in that circle is just the life that we've shared together. So for me, I grew up in a small timber farming community. In rural Eastern Oregon, there was a lot of kids who spent most of their time in ag class. And I sort of struggled to fit in. I was pretty intense, so super energetic. I was most definitely ADHD.
00:07:20
Speaker
My father had exposed me to climbing and I focused on what I found in climbing magazines. I was into all kinds of sports, but something about climbing just grabbed my heart.
00:07:34
Speaker
But I didn't have any direct contact with climbing, per se. I started a little bit of climbing in the way so many of us do as youngsters, kind of trial and error methods. But one thing I found was a photo of you in, I believe it was a Rock and Ice magazine.
Cultural Heritage and Climbing
00:07:55
Speaker
I can still picture this image and you were climbing alone, you were climbing solo up and kind of across this solid blue and white wall of ice, somewhere in Canada. I think it might have been on Quardub. Is that how you pronounce the root? Remember the pictures.
00:08:15
Speaker
Tools are just completely buried in the ice. I think you were climbing on Stu by tools I remember that and Your head was kind of turned down to the camera and you're kind of looking at your feet and you had this thick long black hair tied back with this pink bandana and one foot was planted in the ice and you had Red foot fangs on which were just these sort of mean cool
00:08:38
Speaker
bike to rails with this blood red base plate that bolted it all together you wore plastic boots of course because of the time it was and your other foot was kind of back mid-swing and you're just sort of balanced there one toe one front point just cool relaxed focused and i used to just
00:08:56
Speaker
there at that picture your dark face your dark eyes studying you studying that that moment and I would wonder how you did it how you were just some so composed in a moment where presumably you could be killed by a single mistake or miscalculation do you remember that photo and can you tell me the story I've never heard the story of how that image came to be
00:09:22
Speaker
Well, yeah, it is actually a photo that was taken by Pat Morrell, the second Canadian to climb Mount Everest a day after, two days after Laurie Screzlett did the first Canadian to climb Mount Everest. And that was back in 82. So that photo was taken in 90 or 91. And it was a film project that Pat and I had put together called Spirit Dancer.
00:09:51
Speaker
which was largely a lot of me soloing ice around the Rockies and then incorporated my Métis indigenous heritage into the footage of the film. So that picture was from one of our episodes out in the mountains in that project, probably Louise Falls. Could be.
00:10:21
Speaker
Yeah, and the stuff that I was wearing at the time the picture was taken was in all of the locations. We had needed consistency with all of that stuff. So definitely the foot fangs and the plastic boots and the stew buys, one of which had white marking hate and the other one had love.
00:10:44
Speaker
Love and Fear, Love and Fear. Those were the ones on it. And you painted that on the tools or drawn it? Yeah, I painted them. I think I had them dark black was the painting part. And then the labeling of Love and Fear were with just white electrician's tape cut into, you know, things to make. I might have painted them too. It's been a while. I'll have to look back at my own film.
00:11:16
Speaker
But yeah, yeah, I think that was the thing. And Pat being a great photographer who captured other images of us ice climbing around that time, even ones like with Jojo when we went and did the first ascent of the sliver and burning in water, drowning in flame, which were ice climbs that we did. But Pat just captured some marvelous
00:11:41
Speaker
images and in the spirit dancer project I tried to solo white man falls and got halfway up and it was just too hard and serious and scary so I climbed down and in retrospect it was probably harder climbing down that would have been continuing up but yeah yeah you gotta you gotta draw you know boundaries and limits so
00:12:09
Speaker
Yeah, and in that point in time, and still to this point in time, and as you learned yourself, you get to be such a good carpenter with ice. Like a carpenter, you know the various forms and we know it's dozens and dozens and dozens of forms of ice that can be presented for us to use our tools on.
Challenges and Risks in Ice Climbing
00:12:37
Speaker
And we just know how much to stress and where to stress the ice structure that we're climbing. And we become quite adapted at the risk levels and when we know, you know, we're in trouble and when we're not. And not that we ever relax, but when we don't have to worry about
00:13:05
Speaker
falling and, you know, perishing. And the mountain could always do that to us. But those are those kind of events, they do happen. But in the lifetime of a mountain, you know, the slivers of those events, they happen. And if we're in the way, they can be catastrophic for us in life.
00:13:30
Speaker
Absolutely. Yeah. So much of the time, you know, that isn't the case. So we get to know the ice so well that in that picture, I was probably very calm and very relaxed and I had wrist loops on, so I wasn't over gripping my tools. Yeah, of course. Yeah. Foot fangs worked amazingly well. They were great crampons. I don't know if we've improved on the front point of the foot thing.
00:14:00
Speaker
for pure ice climbing, probably not. Yeah, a masterful, masterful thing. It's interesting that you talk about this film Spirit Dancer. I'd love to dig a copy of that up. Because I would say that in the last few years, there has been a lot more, as there should be, focus on people from different backgrounds and different races that
00:14:28
Speaker
come into climbing, which is mostly a white man's sport, as we could say. I think both mostly a white person's and mostly a man's sport, historically, especially ice climbing and winter climbing. And, you know, this would have been, like you said, early 90s, and you were making a film that was integrating your heritage as a Métis. And, you know, that's...
00:14:56
Speaker
Seems like something that people might be trying to do now. But you were already telling that story. And, you know, it's always been an aspect of you that I always found fascinating. Having kind of grown up in a pretty leave it the beaver life, I was always a little bit...
00:15:14
Speaker
kind of struggled, frankly, to imagine what it must have been like for you as a kid. You know, I've heard a lot of stories from you. We don't have to go into all of them now. But I mean, it was, you know, it was tough. I mean, first of all, tell us what Metis is and what a little bit about what it was like for you as a young kid in Calgary.
00:15:38
Speaker
Yeah, being Métis is a recognized culture in Canada separate from what you could call Canadian culture and then indigenous culture. So, you know, a lot of Métis history, which the culture has been around for
00:15:59
Speaker
pushing 300 years. We used to be buffalo hunters and largely of the union of usually Scottish or French fur traders with indigenous women. And the culture was born out of that. And
00:16:21
Speaker
We're a distinct culture in Canada. It was very common in the early part of the last century and into the 70s to call Métis half-breeds. That's what we were. That's what we referred to and even put on birth records and death records in the Canadian census system as half-breeds. And yeah, I experienced a prejudice growing up
00:16:50
Speaker
Not as much in Alberta because the Métis influence in Alberta is less than it is in Saskatchewan and less yet than it is in Manitoba. The second part of that is the poverty. My mom had five different kids by three different fathers. And yeah, basically we were raised on welfare. So we were really, really poor and that would be
00:17:20
Speaker
you know, put against me in Canadian, you know, just going to school sometimes. Because I just by a fault of geography, ended up being going to school with kids who were in Scarborough, one of the, usually the higher you go, the wealthier people get on the planet.
00:17:42
Speaker
The lower you go, the poorer people get on the planet. There is some inversion about that in certain places, like Bolivia.
Embracing Métis Identity and Overcoming Prejudice
00:17:49
Speaker
Yeah, it's weird. The rich people live down low and the poor people live up high. Yeah, so that made me try to be the white part of my being and be away from the native part of my being.
00:18:09
Speaker
And as Métis, we have a foot in both worlds. We're half-breeds, we're mixed blood. That's what Métis means, it means mixed blood. And yeah, I was trying to be like the blue eyed, white skinned guy. And at a certain point, after leaving school and, you know, getting into the mountains, I suddenly very much switched to my indigenous side.
00:18:38
Speaker
and started to really be proud of and stand up for. And some of the prejudice would be like with my wife at the time being, you know, basically of Scottish descent and very blonde, very blue eyed, very pale. And me, this dark skinned boy with her obviously man as her husband in a shop in Saskatchewan where I can just feel the prejudice.
00:19:07
Speaker
And, you know, just saying to her, we don't need to be here, honey. Let's get out of here. Goodbye. That's yours. You keep that. It's not coming on here. That doesn't work anymore. That shame. Great. You have it, whatever, but you're not putting it on my head. So Mark Twain Huckleberry. Yeah.
00:19:37
Speaker
And how do we connect that upbringing? I mean, for me, besides being a friend and all the other things we have in common, you're an alpinist and a mountain guide. And you have had a very long career. You've been climbing hard since
00:19:58
Speaker
quite young age, and you've climbed many of the hardest mountains in the world during a time when most of these mountains were effectively empty of people. And they really didn't even hold much in the way of human history because they have, you know, you have climbed a tremendous number of new routes, especially in your home mountains and the Canadian Rockies.
00:20:23
Speaker
And, you know, you got really high on Everest in 1986. This is for me like the, like, if I have to make a parallel distinction, it would be, you know, when Peter and Reinhold climbed Everest without supplemental oxygen,
00:20:40
Speaker
In 1978, that for me was sort of the beginning of the Enlightenment, if you will, of Himalayan climbing. And you're right there. You're right in there. Just a few years later, getting really high up on Everest without supplemental oxygen.
00:21:01
Speaker
It just a few years earlier, doctors had been telling Peter and Reinhold that they would come back down from the Summit of Everest, complete vegetables, and they wouldn't be able to talk, they wouldn't remember their own names, they wouldn't recognize their families. And so, you guys were doing something that was really on the edge of what
00:21:21
Speaker
the consensus human viewpoint of possible was. You and your very dear friend, and my friend as well, Kevin Doyle, climbed Denali's Cassine Ridge. What year was that? 1982? 1982? Okay, that's what was going to be my guess.
00:21:43
Speaker
At that time, there were no weather forecasts. The landing strip wasn't even where the landing strip is now. Maybe that route got climbed once every five, six, seven.
00:22:00
Speaker
I don't know, 10 years, it didn't get climbed often. And Denali itself probably only got climbed a handful of times a year back at that time. And, you know, there was no assistance, no rescue, nothing. So, you know, if you think back for beef, how do we connect?
The Fighter Spirit in Climbing
00:22:22
Speaker
this Metis kid, you know, this dual heritage that you had to these accomplishments. Like, what is the connection? Is it something to do? Like, I think coming into this, I wanted to try to connect, like, the fighter in you. But, you know, I feel like this part of your identity is something that is, I don't quite understand. How do you connect that?
00:22:48
Speaker
I am a fighter and I think in my own, I don't know, common sense or something that I've, you know, one of the physical fights I got into and as an adult, I got knifed. I have a knife wound. This part of my chest from, you know, being slashed by a knife in Joshua Tree, California.
00:23:14
Speaker
with a gentleman I was out on the street with having basically a fistfight, and I was getting better at them actually, so the knife might have been a good survival tactic. But yeah, you know, as one of our also dear friends, Carl Tobin, who's an ecologist, once pointed out to me, and I don't know, maybe I knew this,
00:23:38
Speaker
that male on male combative aggression with most mammals ends at death. And it does with humans. You can kill someone with your fists and it does happen. So it's a serious thing to enter into. Yet when your back is up against the wall, I know mine, I just know that about myself. My back is up against the wall, I come out swinging. I don't run away, sometimes I do, but I don't run away
00:24:07
Speaker
And I don't play dead, you know, those are what we're hardwired for. I will come out swinging and it'll snap. And I'll go into that, that combative fighting load and that fighting stance doesn't happen very often, but it's in there. And one of the places I know I found that was as a young confused boy, um, you know, back in Calgary,
00:24:38
Speaker
with fear just overwhelming me. My aunt had been brutally beaten by a guy and my sister and my infant cousin were in the room and it's a really small apartment, you know.
00:24:55
Speaker
Uh, you know, my aunt is Métis and she's, she was poor too. But, uh, yeah, she got, you know, violently beaten up by this guy in front of my sister who went into a freeze mode. She couldn't move. And thankfully my infant niece, uh, uh, cousin,
00:25:14
Speaker
was asleep, so didn't witness her mother get pummeled like this. But immediately after that, my mother and her sisters, and my mother has a number of sisters who are living in Canada, they all got together and they're talking through this as my aunt has dark glasses on, because she's been beaten. And I know in bed that night, I knew that once I was big enough,
00:25:41
Speaker
If I ever met that man, I would kill him. I would kill him with my own hands. I would defend my family with that. And I don't know if that man is still alive. I never knew who he was. It's unlikely I'll ever come into contact with him. But if I did, I know it's not.
00:25:59
Speaker
I'd snap right there and then, and I'd come out swinging. But the fighter is connected to the climber, I think, because I think a lot of the climbing, when I think of what you did and things that we did together, too.
00:26:16
Speaker
You know, I've, I've seen you do this. I've seen you, you know, and I think alpinism is a lot about having your back against the wall at times and fighting and fighting for it and not really knowing the outcome. There's, there is a certain aggression to do it, I think. Is that connected for you or? Yeah. No, it, uh,
00:26:45
Speaker
It is connected and I think, you know, the connection goes back to around that time and this is so common and I'll speak with boys because I'm a boy.
00:26:59
Speaker
You know, we all grew up, we want to be heroes, which I think is a great ambition for young boys to be a hero sometime. And we often pick motorsport racing or going to be in an astronaut and go into the moon or being a mountain climber. Those are three of the common templates to be a hero. And a climber was the most available to me and the mountains called to me and I started going into the mountains and part of my indigenous
00:27:28
Speaker
being, even then, although I couldn't articulate it, knew that the mountains are alive. That there is spirit in the mountains, and they are like everything around me right now. Nothing is dead. Everything is alive. And if we want to trace that back into physics, yeah, they're all atoms, and they're all moving. And yeah, they're all alive, as are we. And the universe is made up by
00:27:57
Speaker
smaller and smaller particles that we learn more about all the time. Greater minds than ours need to try to figure that stuff out and thankfully they have. But yeah, you know, the mountain is a mentor and a teacher and something alive. And it can also be a really
00:28:24
Speaker
worthy and overpowering and superior opposition.
Sacred Mountains and Evolving Wisdom
00:28:32
Speaker
You know, the mountains aren't always bathed in sunlight. They have a really dark side. And like I said, every once in a while they move. And if we're in the way where
00:28:42
Speaker
We're basically bags of water. And if Sarac or Rockfall or some of the things that mountains can throw at us, avalanches, we don't stand a lot of chance with that kind of movement of a mountain. So as we, you know, go into
00:29:01
Speaker
You know what I call a sacred place of alpinism, you know, across the threshold and I'm in a sacred place, everything changes. All of my senses are deeper and richer and more acute, like smell, hearing, sight, all of that stuff is the volumes right up.
00:29:23
Speaker
Yeah, I'm in a sacred place because it's like going into Valhalla as a Viking without having to die first to get into Valhalla. We're going into the ramparts of Valhalla. And we're going into church, but we got to fight with it sometimes. And we can really get our back against the wall. And yeah.
00:29:52
Speaker
You know, some of the folks I run into these days, they'll ask me, have you ever done any of the
00:30:00
Speaker
you know, the really competitive races and stuff like they're really long foot races and they've got all kinds of and what do they call those things? They have a special name for them. Adventure races or ultras. Adventure races. Yeah, I always say does you know, it's running or cycling or whatever these adventure races say. Yeah, does racing against death count? Because we've definitely done that.
00:30:27
Speaker
And that's when your back's against the wall. And I always feel, yeah, you know, a marathon or 100 mile race, you can quit and step to the side. And when you're on the side of a mountain and it's getting aggressive with you, which usually means a storm, and you're, you know, you're probably going to survive, but at that moment in time, you can't guarantee you're going to survive. So you're using your whole toolkit and everything you've ever learned.
00:30:57
Speaker
And then the mountain is often asking you for something more, and you've got to come up with that more if you want to survive. And for a lot of us, that will be certain leads where you know the consequences are falling, are lethal, period. You're going to die if you fall, and you don't have the option of climbing down. And the only way to survive is use whatever skills that you have to continue and get to the end.
00:31:28
Speaker
And some of those things in your toolkit are intuitive, and that intuitive stuff has come gradually over time.
00:31:40
Speaker
with your exposure to bigger and more complicated mountains for albinists. We definitely have a best before date. I think there's a number of things that cross and one of them is athleticism. And at this point in time, you know, one of the ways I tell people is my reflexes are not what they were as a young man. And that's just, you know, you can observe that scientifically. Just facts.
00:32:05
Speaker
Yeah, those are facts. And there's a reason that Muhammad Ali changed from sticking his chin out there and saying, try to hit me when he had reflexes that one person who studied this stuff told me that his reflex actually probably came from the spinal cord. It didn't have to go to the brain first.
00:32:28
Speaker
So just that, and these are just, they're beyond nanoseconds. So yeah, as a climber, we get to places where reflexes really how quick we can move and make decisions and move intuitively and reflexively as part of it. Those days are gone for me. They're behind me now. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But one of the, so, you know, just.
00:32:54
Speaker
An admission here is that part of my exploration with this series, and with Uppalaphi generally, is that, you know, and I think of this so many times when I think about our friends that aren't here anymore.
00:33:12
Speaker
And I just think that so many of them had so much more to give. And, you know, this connects to the theme that I wanted to explore specifically with you, which is that, you know, mountains tell the truth, one of which is each of us is special. And, you know, I don't think the specialness has a pull date or a sell by date, right? Like it just changes, like what you have to offer
00:33:41
Speaker
when you're young and your reflexes are super fast is something different than what you have to offer now. And arguably Barry, I would say that what you have to offer now is more powerful for more people than those reflexes were. Just a, just a hunch. And I think that that is part of
00:34:06
Speaker
you know, part of the mountains that I want to, you know, part of the culture that I know you're already doing this and I want to be part of where we, you know, winning isn't about, you know,
00:34:25
Speaker
Today's results, winning is about as you once told me when we were in a snow cave on the East Face House Peak, you know, dying of old age in bed surrounded by loved ones. That was your, you know, goal. And, you know, and that's my goal too. And that should be our goal as alpinists generally, right? And that's, and not just because we want to die a peaceful death versus a violent one,
00:34:54
Speaker
But rather that I think on that second half of that journey, there's so much to share and so much to teach. And you're a teacher. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No. And I definitely agree. And thinking back to, you know, the early part where the reflexes were fast and the physical abilities, you know, there's, you can list them. We're there.
00:35:23
Speaker
It was very much kind of about me and a very specific group and never a huge group, you know? We both know this. We're talking about we maybe had five or six important partners that we could go into these mountains that we wanted to go into and attempt these climbs.
00:35:46
Speaker
that we wanted to attempt. It was never a huge tribe. It was pretty small. Yeah. It's really small. Yeah. Mostly about one handful, right? And now, uh, you know, that I am a father and I have a 19 year old daughter and a 16 year old daughter. Um, my hands are much more full and recently
00:36:13
Speaker
you know, another mountain guide asked me why, how I want to be remembered. I think it was a little shocked because we were talking a lot about climbing and stuff and guiding. And I just said, I want to be remembered as a good father. That is the most important thing that I've done in my life that I will do in my life. And it's number one, you know, all the climbing and the alpinism is great. The writing was great and all of that, but I'm proudest and
00:36:45
Speaker
in my fatherhood and now into community. So, you know, the hands are full. It's not a small tribe anymore. There is, you know, uh, climbing culture globally is huge. And yeah, as much as I can share stories and things that I have experienced
00:37:10
Speaker
and including, you know, the death that has come into my life through climbing, like friends who have died in the pursuit and fellow guides who have had, you know, myself had clients lost and fellow guides who have clients lost and other guides who have been lost. You know, it's like within those hands, there's these balls and the balls
00:37:37
Speaker
are spherical and they're like tribes, but the balls stack up on each other. And, you know, we actually reach, you know, into just even my community of Canmore, you know, that type of sharing and helping.
Community Impact and Diverse Mountain Tribe
00:37:55
Speaker
It's not just climbing culture, you know, those types of challenges are universal.
00:38:04
Speaker
So, you know, with my background, um, if I can help those stacking out of spheres, that is, that is a great thing. And within our group, the mountain muskox membership, you know, someone asked me, uh, you know, I think we're four years into our program now and, uh, um, you know, someone asked me, is it worth it? And the one thing I can,
00:38:34
Speaker
I replied to was I saw a couple of people smile for the first time in a year. They hadn't smiled in over a year and I was there when they smiled. It's called circle. And that is, that is the most beautiful thing I think that humans can do for each other, help each other. So.
00:39:00
Speaker
Yeah, and it's, you know, it is the way I see it. From my perspective, for when I'm looking at you, Barry, it started as this kid that we talked about. It was a fighter and it was impoverished and had all these things stacked against him.
00:39:21
Speaker
who turned himself into a climber of incredible, you know, let's just say power and, you know, agency, and you did incredible things. And that built you to be who you are now, being able to do these things for others that you are. And without any one of those layers, you know, you wouldn't be who you are. You know, it takes all of it, right?
00:39:48
Speaker
And this is the journey of mountain sports. And this is one of my hypotheses is that mountain sports could have, and I'm speaking broadly here because I think it could be, I think there's lots of
00:40:07
Speaker
possible paint brushes besides ice axes, there's probably skis, there's running shoes, there's other things. And I think that my hypothesis is that we have so much to teach broader culture.
00:40:20
Speaker
Because broader culture is so much obsessed with competition and there's a time and a place for competition that's a different podcast, a different argument, a different discussion that's coming up shortly. I've invited a guest on for that discussion.
00:40:41
Speaker
that there's so much more nuance to life and to society and to culture than just winning and losing, right? And your life is arced over so many of these phases of life. When did you know that you were a climber? I think I, well, yeah, I knew I wanted to be a climber even before I knew, you know,
00:41:09
Speaker
wanting to be a hero, a climber was a way to be a hero. And I said, even at a really early age, I want to be a mountain climber. Even before I knew what I was saying, I didn't, you know, I had cartoon ideas and media ideas and the media was different back then. And I had an idea of what a climber was, but I didn't really know. I hadn't had hands-on experience. And some of my first hands-on experiences
00:41:37
Speaker
stuff that was available to me, like climbing buildings and, you know, rappelling out of the second floor of the condo that we lived in, you know, that kind of stuff. And then finally, when I was in grade 11, being able to go to Wasage Slabs right here in the Kananaskis where I've taught, I don't know how many days since, lots and lots of days, but, uh,
00:42:04
Speaker
Yeah, touching the rock for the first time and actually climbing up the rock and using the equipment and techniques that I'd learned from Royal Robins and basic and advanced rock craft. These books, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Like, you know, learning to eight climb on the stringers of the basement, you know, unfinished basement. Yeah. Slinging those off and standing on them and going, you know, stringer to stringer. Then you will
00:42:33
Speaker
Yeah, repelling off buildings and what was available to us. So finally I got to go and do it for real. And that's when I, you know, so much of the calling came and the teacher was in my hands and I was being taught by the teacher. Rock was teaching me. I was starting to have as measure would say, conversations with the rock. And then in
00:42:58
Speaker
1980, Kevin and I quit our jobs in Calgary and in the bigger course of life, you know, we're all encouraged. We have to make a certain amount of money to live and survive. But I can say I've never been motivated by money and I make enough, you know, I've never made a huge amount of money. And if I did make some money, I never
00:43:28
Speaker
hung on to it for long because I wanted to go climbing, so I'd spend it to go climbing somewhere, like say K2 or something, but anyways. Yeah, in 1980, Kevin and I left our jobs in the city, took what money we had, and committed to going to Chamonix, the birthplace of alpinism, and learning in the French mountains in the Alps.
Choosing Alpinism and Heroic Aspirations
00:43:52
Speaker
And was that the moment, like, for you that you were like, I am a climber now, I am a mountain climber now? I mean, I heard you say that, you know, you wanted to be a hero as a kid, you know, and that for you manifested as wanting to climb mountains. And, you know, one of the things that you've probably seen when your daughters
00:44:17
Speaker
is how young, not as teenagers anymore probably, but especially as young kids, they have this just completely natural
00:44:29
Speaker
self-love. They belong. They know they belong. They know they should be there. They have no qualms about it. They have no shame about it. And they know they're special. And then at some point we lose that, right? And then you wanted to regain that through becoming a hero, becoming a mountain climber.
00:44:50
Speaker
You know, when you and Kevin, you know, left Calgary for Chamonix, was that a moment where you're like, we're doing this, that make you feel special? That make you, that was a, that's a pretty unusual choice. So I can imagine it may have, but what, what was your actual experience? Well,
00:45:11
Speaker
It was special on a number of levels, even before that, you know, my brief appearance at university largely because the guys I went to school with, one of who was the first guy I ever climbed with, they were going to university. So I went to university and I was the first person in my family history, period, to go to university.
00:45:38
Speaker
So that added challenges. So I didn't know what a registrar was. Right. So I went in and, you know, if I could go back to my younger self, I would have talked to a bunch of people to learn this stuff, but I just tried to pretend, you know, fake it till you make it. And University, I didn't make it. So. Seems like everybody else knew what they were doing. So you must have must be supposed to know too, right?
00:46:04
Speaker
And so that made me feel special in my family. But yeah, it felt really different to be leaving the template of what Kevin and I were raised to do, leaving that template behind and going to start to find our own template, which was going to be alpinism. And that felt special. And where I really knew
00:46:32
Speaker
I was a climber, and I committed to my path of alpinism, was after the hardest climb we did there was the North Face of Le Duat. It was the 99th hardest route in Gaston Oriba Fats, 100 finest mountain climbs of the Montblanc Massif, starting at the easiest one and ending at the hardest, which was number 100 was the central pillar of Frenet, which Kevin did go and climb the next season. But we went for the North Face of Le Duat.
00:47:01
Speaker
And it was the time when the mountain asked for everything and then more. And we came down and we were in our little illegal campground, you know, and I just remember sitting down with my back against a tree, a very mature big tree. And that's another ancestor. That's another living being. That as soon as I put my hands or my back against this tree, that is, you know, we all recognize a tree as a life.
00:47:29
Speaker
And there is, you know, energy and communication between me and this tree. And I'm looking down at my deeply, deeply tanned forearms with their grid work of veins from all of the forearm training and strength from climbing. And that deep brownness of being in the sun so much and just realizing that, okay,
00:47:56
Speaker
I am going to pursue alpinism. This is what I am going to do. And this is the course that, you know, at that point, that was a decision. This is the course of my life. Does your life work out like that? I guess mine largely has. Some people will be an alpinist for a certain amount of time, then leave it and maybe come back to it later in life and then maybe never come back to it. But that was where it happened and it was really
00:48:28
Speaker
I got the picture of the tree I was leaning against. Really? You kept a picture of that tree because it was such a powerful moment. Yeah, a picture of our campground. Kevin and I took pictures of each other. Yup. Came down from that. From the Duat, yeah. We had World War II woolen pants that we would shrink down in the dryer.
00:48:56
Speaker
to man eating clam pants with suspenders. That was our warmth layer. And, you know, I had a cotton t-shirt on that was the label of the gym I was working out at the Family Fitness Center. And, you know, it was looking at that picture, it's just such a reiteration of
Determination Over Equipment
00:49:20
Speaker
What you need is heart. Heart is what got us up the North Face of Lake Duod. It was heart and it was a fighter's heart. And we both did some fighting on that. And the equipment and all the stuff we have now, it's great. It's all lighter. It's all works better. It does all that stuff. But really, you don't need that. You know, you can accomplish things in these mountains with just heart. Hmm. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
00:49:50
Speaker
That's so true. And yeah, and I think that did you know that you had that heart? Would you have known that you had that heart without the mountains? Um, I don't think so. I didn't, you know, that route was one that, you know, made equivalent special because before we did that route, I was really intimidated by it.
00:50:19
Speaker
because I thought you had to be superhuman. Someone like Mezner who had sold it in 69 or someone like, you know, people who put the first route up, which I think were corno and divide. You had to be especially gifted at birth. And I actually think Kevin had a bit of those special gifts at birth, his sense of balance. He was gifted with, right? But anyways, I thought he had to be superhuman. And then Kevin and I,
00:50:48
Speaker
these two guys from Southern Alberta, you know, my baseball cap said raise power tongs, Pintry Creek, Alberta, which was a girlfriend gave them to me because it was a, you know, an oil field power tong company. So yeah, you know, these Hicks basically, yeah, had just done something that Mesner did. And it made me realize, okay,
00:51:16
Speaker
Mezner isn't superhuman. He's just really dedicated and he works really hard and did that for a large part of his life. And that was a gift for me. And then two years later on the Cassine, when Kevin and I did the Cassine, I would never suffer as hard as we did on that route. We had six days of storms and it was fighting all the time.
00:51:45
Speaker
One point our tent was flattened by the wind and nearly ripped off the mountain. And, you know, it was a very trying ascent and I thought I'd frostbit my feet, but it was so happy to find after an hour or two hours of not feeling them that, you know, I think I've frostbit my feet and then having them rage back to life. But getting down and having tea with Peter Habler, who was guiding with a group that trip.
00:52:17
Speaker
And he's a really, you probably know, he's a really classy guy. And, uh, you know, we're, we're talking about him and Mezner and we're just like eating it up. Like, like this is one of a guy we thought was a super human. And we still think he's like pretty special.
00:52:35
Speaker
And we're having tea with Peter Habbler. And Habbler is so classy. And he says, oh, yes, that's what we are doing. So what have you and Kevin been doing? He asked us, oh, we just did the casino. And it's like we slapped him. Because he did a double ticket. You did the casino in this weather? And we said, yep. He said, you've done an incredible thing. Yeah, yeah, incredibly. You know, I'd never suffered.
00:53:04
Speaker
Yeah, but he was, you know, going back to one of the things I think that, you know, I know I have a hard time with and I think you have a hard time with is when people tell you what you've done is something special.
00:53:20
Speaker
And, you know, that's what Peter just did for you, right, in that moment with the tea. And I can see Peter doing that. Peter is one of the loveliest men. He would absolutely do that. I'm sure he was always that way.
00:53:38
Speaker
you know, but to trace it all the way back, you know, you're sort of, you know, to Le Duat and Chamonix and then two years later to the Cassine and then a few years later you're on Everest and...
00:53:51
Speaker
You were showing up for yourself. You were like, yeah, these people aren't gods. These people, as you said, they just are dedicated and they work really hard. And I can do these things too. And you did do these things. And then you go and do something that one of the gods himself says,
00:54:09
Speaker
You just did an incredible thing because of course, like, you know, climbing the casino in
Acceptance and Validation in Climbing
00:54:15
Speaker
bad weather. I mean, I can't imagine, I've only been up there on the upper part of it in perfect weather and it was still really hard. So, you know, at what point does it like, at what point as, as alpinists,
00:54:36
Speaker
You know, do we accept that? Are we, do we know that we're special? Is it something that we always have to, do we, are we just so self-deprecating and shy of any kind of praise that we don't want to believe it? Is our drive to sort of prove ourselves to something, to whether it's that we're worth it, worthy,
00:55:04
Speaker
belong, whatever it is, so strong that we don't want to acknowledge it. Like for me, when, as you pointed out, Scott Backies came up with this nickname, you know, I hated that because I didn't want to have to live up to that. Like if I accepted that moniker, like my job would be done. I wouldn't have to climb anymore. And I didn't want that. Like I wanted to have to prove it.
00:55:31
Speaker
And I was worried that if I was accepted an award or praise or a title or a nickname, that that would take away my drive to need to prove again and again and again. And you know, you and I were climbing together decades
00:55:51
Speaker
After these stories you're telling you know, like we were climbing together in the 90s and 2000s mostly mostly the 2000s and so This is Yeah Where did that where did that land on you when Peter told you that did you just brush it off? Did it hit? Can you remember? Yeah, yeah, it was It was so
00:56:20
Speaker
You know, for him, it was just something he blurted out because he was actually, I think, astonished because it had been in the same weather. How challenging, you know, the mountain was at that time. He had a very good understanding of that because he'd been on way more mountains at that time than Kevin and I had been on. Sure. Yeah, it was very much a blur. It was like he sucked in air and then he just blurted it out.
00:56:49
Speaker
It was just really complimentary. He didn't, you know, intend to give us a compliment, but it was so encouraging and complimenting that even as just a blurt, like a reflex.
00:57:07
Speaker
You know, Kevin and I, you know, our chest came up and we went out and, you know, say waving goodbye to Peter and we got on the crappy skis that we had, which were World War II vintage, actually. And we started ripping off down the glacier. And we both waved and stuff and we made a point of not crashing until we were out of fuel with Peter.
00:57:40
Speaker
And Peter was a ski instructor for many, many years, both in Jackson Hole and in Austria. So he's an incredibly beautiful skier. Oh, man. I could imagine. Those hickory, you know, painted white, hickory white for winter camel or something with metal edges that were screwed in and a bear trap binding. He could turn them. Yeah, I'm sure he could have, though. That would have been embarrassing.
00:58:10
Speaker
because you know that, you know, alpinist alpinism from someone who truly understands what that's like, you know, that it actually really meant something to you.
Spiritual Connection with Mountains
00:58:20
Speaker
And, you know, one of the things that I think that I've always, you know, looked up to you for, and I think that you've always led the way for me around is I felt like you've always been much more connected and, um,
00:58:40
Speaker
connected with your spirituality and you've, you know, I think people can even hear it and how you talk now or how you talked about this tree a minute ago or like, you know, and that was something I always had a hard time with. I always felt like I was afraid of sort of admitting it might be melt might sound like I'm weak. I need to be tough. Like these kinds of things that go on in our heads, right? And, you know, how did,
00:59:08
Speaker
this this idea, you know, is this true for you that that the mountains tell you that you're tell the truth? Do you find that is this are the mountains truth tellers? Is that how you know? Do they help you know the world in a unadulterated, pure way? Yes, definitely. A teacher. And a mentor, but also, you know,
00:59:38
Speaker
I believe in the creator and I believe in, you know, the indigenous structure of belief that I, you know, I get exposed to it. I wish I could be exposed to it more, but as much exposure as I have, which is
01:00:07
Speaker
you know, attending sweat lodges and practicing Indigenous prayers and ceremonies. I wish I knew more, but yeah, the mountain definitely is part of that. And do they tell the truth? I think they tell, ah man,
01:00:38
Speaker
the earth and the sky tell the truth and they tell the absolute purest truths that we as humans need to interpret and try to understand and the initial understanding may just be with the eyes and the ears but eventually we're trying to do what we're doing now we're going to put it into words
01:01:08
Speaker
and try to relay words with stories to other humans. But a lot of those stories, they're all coming from the earth and the sky and the sun. That's where it's all coming from. And what do those stories tell you about you? What do you
01:01:31
Speaker
Bring it back to you. Well, the stories that they tell me are when I am interpreting and following the right path. And they also tells me when I'm on the wrong path. And
01:02:02
Speaker
Yeah. You know, when you say path, we, we immediately look, think of a road or a street or something, but we can look, think three dimensionally, a number of other dimensions too, but we can think of lines going out and coming in and the mountain is presenting those lines. The earth is presenting those lines and we're following those lines. And for me,
01:02:33
Speaker
You know, the moments of grace that I've experienced when I'm absolutely on the right path at the right time, I can feel grace. And that is a word. And what I'm trying to communicate is my mind, my brain, my body, knowing that everything is right in that instant in time.
01:03:02
Speaker
And if I could extend that period of time longer, I might be some kind of master, but I'm not. Those periods are really minutes and seconds, and even broke down from seconds. But every so often, the mountain lets me know.
01:03:32
Speaker
Okay, this is for one, you know, what I'm supposed to be doing, probably why I was put on this earth to do, and I'm doing it, and everything is right right now. And the mountain tells the truth. So other times, you know, it'll tell you, which is also a truth, hard to call it grace,
01:03:57
Speaker
But it'll tell you that, you know, at this point in time, you know, it's in the balance right now. You have to do something. You have to perform or make some different decisions. And those goalposts of success and failure are just so limiting.
01:04:25
Speaker
And really, so much of human life is on the field in between if we want to think of football field or hockey rink or whatever. But, you know, think more globally. Trailhead. Trailhead and summit maybe would be the bottom and top. Yeah, those so any grace I've had, sometimes it's on the summit. Sometimes it's leaving the car. But more often than not, it's somewhere along the path.
01:04:53
Speaker
I hear it, you know, I know I'm on the right path at the right time. I absolutely had moments like that. And one of them with you on House Peak after having climbed the hardest part of that route, but before I got to the anchor,
01:05:13
Speaker
I have this super vivid memory of just oneness, I guess. And, you know, like that's it's like what you were describing, feeling like everything was right. Like I was doing what I was supposed to be doing with the people I was supposed to be doing it with. And I didn't understand it. I didn't know why it was just right. And it was all it was all right.
01:05:43
Speaker
Yeah, and then the mountain asked you,
01:05:51
Speaker
Here's some more truth. That anchor had 11 pieces of gear in it. It took me a couple of hours to put that anchor together, as I'm sure you will. Remember, those must have been painful minutes for you and Scott to wait for me to get that all strung together. I was terrified because I knew you guys were going to be Jew marring and I just had these visions of you guys both Jew marring on this anchor at the same time and me hanging from it and just to load.
01:06:20
Speaker
Yeah. So I made sure it was strong, but that was, that was, that was one of those, one of those moments that for me. Yeah. And interesting because, you know, I, I'm, I'm speaking for you, but to Scott and my eyes and we just looked at it, we didn't climb it. Um, you know,
01:06:53
Speaker
surpass whatever high watermarks you had in your past, this is new watermark. So and along with that, I think a lot of that, if you had fallen off, would you have survived? I don't know. You know, I don't know. We didn't have to test that thank the creator. But having to have come up with that ability
01:07:23
Speaker
And then over so much time, um, you know, I think you get to the place, um, where fear doesn't really mean anything anymore. You know, it's great to have fear initially, cause it keeps us alive. And we learned to, is it as, as an ally actually, you know, fear is here because I have 100%. And then you perform for so long that fear is out of the picture anymore.
01:07:53
Speaker
And yeah, you got, you got your, you know, I don't know, a minute or two of grace where the creator, everything made sense, right? Everything made sense. And, and, you know, like you said, there was, there was no fear in any of that, right? Like there was, there was just doing and experiencing and like there was, yeah, there was no,
Exceeding Limitations and Finding Truth
01:08:19
Speaker
Action and reaction it was all it was all it was all just flow and I think that you know This is one of these things that I you know I've also experienced this in other places like powder skiing for example or or skiing in general where You know I don't think I've ever experienced it in and running personally, but I know people do and You know these are these these these moments where
01:08:46
Speaker
I think they're so powerful if you acknowledge them as truths, that you are special and that you can do that because it's what allows you. That's when you exceed your own limitations, what you would have defined as your limitations, you're suddenly
01:09:09
Speaker
exceeding them but even without really planning to and and you know, I think that that's one of the things I love so much about alpinism was especially when we were climbing new routes or variations the old routes and without much information is we never really knew where the punchline was we never really knew we how hard it was going to be and
01:09:33
Speaker
that felt really important to not know because on climbs where I had a topo and I knew exactly where the hard pitch was going to be. By the time I got to the bottom of that pitch, I was all butterflies and elbows and I couldn't perform. Whereas when I was more in the moment in my flow and didn't know if these next meters were the hardest or not, I wasn't thinking about that. I was just thinking about the next handhold or the next foothold or the next piece of gear or
01:10:01
Speaker
where my friends were, how I was going to make it safer, you know, all the things that, you know, you think about, I think you defined it pretty well. Like when you go into that, that area, everything is turned up, like all your senses are turned up. And that's, that's such a, such an incredible experience. And it's something that I don't find. I can't, well, I shouldn't say I can't, but I find very hard to access in everyday life. I think for myself,
01:10:31
Speaker
You know, some of the places that I have accessed moments of grace in more everyday life would be from the heart. So love, both the love of my family, the love of my children, the love of my partner.
01:10:57
Speaker
an image that I have, but one of those ones that is just so universally and humanly powerful is when, you know, I put my finger down to Rosemary's little gray colored hand for the first time. And there's a picture of her little fingers wrapping around my trigger finger, my index finger. And
01:11:25
Speaker
There's so much grace there looking into those little astonished eyes. And the miracle of the fact that she just within the hour started breathing. Like we come out and we start to breathe. Good God. Talk about the creator. Holy. You know, all mammals do it, but oh my God, what a miracle to see. And then those little fingers, you know, that's it. Yeah. You've got my heart.
01:11:55
Speaker
Yeah. You had it for a while, but now, you know, you're, you're, I think that's it. We're, we're together and this is beautiful. And more recently with my traumatic head injury where I had suffered 11 skull fractures, if you could believe that, I couldn't find names for, for anyone's name, you know, even my partner Nicole and not even be able to recognize her face.
01:12:25
Speaker
and thinking that one of the two weeks I spent in the hospital there in the ICU and stuff, thinking she was someone else, that it was this really attractive brunette-haired young nurse who was being really nice to me this one evening. And my sister and Nicole were splitting time in the hospital because COVID, only one person could be in my room at a time. So they split the morning and the afternoon shifts.
01:12:55
Speaker
So she's there in the afternoon shift and suddenly this person goes to hug me. And I'm like, you know, I became a cornered little animal, but one who wants to run away.
01:13:09
Speaker
And it's like, whoa, whoa, we can't do that. You know, I have a girlfriend and she's in Kenmore and she's older than you and I won't even look at this person. And this person is Nicole. And Nicole, you know, starts to freak out thinking, what if he never recognizes me again? And she, you know, you know, calls my sister to try to get my sister to talk to me or no.
01:13:36
Speaker
I said to her, can you call the other woman? Can you call the other woman? It's still not having eye contact. And yeah, the other woman is my sister. So she tries to call my sister and she doesn't get my sister. So she calls my mom and she gets my mom and she says, Barry, someone wants to talk to you. And she hands me the phone and I'm still unregulated, panic flight.
01:14:04
Speaker
And I couldn't get up and walk. So I mean, but, you know, my whole being here, I was looking at me and studies this stuff and teaches it. And as a counselor, it's like, I'm an unregulated little animal. And then I get the phone, I put it to my ear and I hear, Oh, bear. And everything relaxed. And I went, Oh, mom, the very first word that I came up with.
01:14:33
Speaker
And I didn't even see my mom's face. I just heard her voice. My longest connection with a human is my mother until one of us passes. That's just so poignant to me. And so telling of some of that grace and some of it I found in
Identity and Connection Post-Injury
01:14:54
Speaker
life. And then Nicole, her girlfriend had to come out from
01:14:59
Speaker
Prince Albert and spend the night with her in the farmhouse and talk her through all of it. But then the next day she came into the room like, oh, you are Nicole. It's OK. You can hug me. So from neurological, some of the synapses got reconnected. Yeah, yeah, that's right. Let's stay at that moment for a minute, because I think that that moment is the moment
01:15:27
Speaker
of truth, of knowing you're special, like you have a connection with, in this case, your mother. You segwayed to that so beautifully from the story of, was it Rosemary?
01:15:47
Speaker
you know, this is, so yeah, we do experience this outside of the mountains, thankfully. I mean, I think that this is how we got on to this. And it's so interesting that you're talking so much about
01:16:04
Speaker
fatherhood and your daughters and your mother Nicole, because a lot of the essay that I've been working on, it sort of starts from the premise of being a father. And, you know, how kids have this, you know, this unshakable knowledge that they are
01:16:25
Speaker
I don't know what the right word is, but almost maybe divine, but certainly special, right? And that we go through life forgetting that and then trying to reconnect with that, both through people and through sports and through being in the mountains. And I think that that's, you know,
01:16:46
Speaker
a lot of us, and one of the reasons I wanted to pull on the thread of your early life was also because I think so many of us who are in the mountains, whether it's running or climbing or whatever it is,
01:17:09
Speaker
We are there because it's sort of our therapy, right? Like, because we're finding something, we're finding out that we're special, we're finding connection with other humans, we're finding emotional regulation, we're finding these things there, right?
Mountain Sports as Therapy
01:17:25
Speaker
Like, that, you know, on the nine to five, we both know people that are, I would say, let's say normally, normal, whatever that means, but, you know,
01:17:36
Speaker
They seem to have it all together, and it seems so effortless, and they sort of seem like they follow that recipe version of life that is sort of talked about or, you know,
01:17:52
Speaker
idolized a bit in Western civilization. And that seems just flows for them. And I think for so many of the people that I've known in climbing, none of us fit in that mold for whatever reason.
01:18:07
Speaker
You know, I mean, you think about, especially the, you know, you talked about that small group of people that we wanted to go and could go and climb these routes, whether in the Himalaya, the Canadian Rockies, or Alaska, or the Andes, with, was such a small group, and everyone in that group was some sort of a
01:18:25
Speaker
a misfit, for lack of a better word. I mean, I say that in the kindest possible way, right? But somehow, we're, I think, there because individually, personally, what each of us is, is getting something from that. And we're providing that for one another.
01:18:45
Speaker
Think of Joseph Campbell's book, A Hero with a Thousand Faces. And yeah, you know, there's lots of criticism about Campbell and all that kind of stuff. But I think some of the stuff that really rang true for me is, you know, if you want to be a hero, you have to leave the security of the herd. You separate from the herd and you go off into the wilderness.
01:19:12
Speaker
And you have your adventures in the wilderness, you learn from the wilderness, and then you take that knowledge back into the herd. And that's one way of structuring it. Tribe would be another. You leave the tribe, you go off into the wilderness, you find some truth, and you bring that back to nurture the tribe. And yeah, yeah.
01:19:41
Speaker
I think a lot of us, we left the herd, obviously. A lot of the alpinists that we've climbed with, and you know, you probably say alpinists in general, have largely left the herd and gone out into the wilderness and learned from the mountains, yeah, connected with the mountains.
01:20:05
Speaker
mentored by the mountains, taught by the mountains, and have bought some of that learning back. And at this point in my life, you know, I'm trying as much as I can share whatever truths I have with the tribe and then the bigger tribe, the nation, and, you know, try to help as much as I can. So, yeah. And I have to say, though,
01:20:34
Speaker
In my experience this last eight years now, working with athletes in different parts of different mountain sports, I think that the tribe is a lot bigger than I used to think it was. I think it's the whole spectrum of mountain athletes.
01:20:54
Speaker
I think that the particular flavor of Kool-Aid that we were interested in drinking with hard alpinism was one flavor, but there's a lot of flavors and there's a lot of people. And I think that alpine climbing is such a difficult thing to get into, but there's so many people out there
01:21:20
Speaker
on the skin track and on the running trail that absolutely fit into the same mold. All of us were choosing a lifestyle. I think it's sort of part artist, part warrior.
01:21:42
Speaker
And when we're doing any of that, each of us is special, right? I think all of that is outside of the main herd. And maybe it doesn't matter the reasons, whether we have something to prove or chip on our shoulder or it's healthy or unhealthy adaptation. Maybe none of that matters. What matters is that each of us is special. And one of the things that has been really
01:22:09
Speaker
brought this home for me and my own healing journey of this last sort of five years is You know the the ones that are gone, you know and I think that though the one that actually affected me the most was losing Hayden Kennedy and Most recently as well and
01:22:31
Speaker
And I think his youth was a big part of that. He was just so young when he, when he passed and he just had so much more to give, you know, and he, he wasn't, he wasn't anywhere close to having the opportunity to, to bring it back into the herd as you just so eloquently described. And, you know, he was such a gift. He was such a incredible,
01:22:59
Speaker
person. And Barry, you know, you are such a gift and you are doing this, this work. And, you know, I just, I don't know how much, uh, how many chances I have to say this. So I'll say this now. I just, you know, I know that we've said this to each other before, but I want you to know, I really love you and I really value you. And I'm so, I think about you all the time and I carry you with me all the time. Yeah. Well,
01:23:27
Speaker
Likewise, likewise, buddy. And, uh, yeah, just, uh, saw the trace of you just when I was out skiing yesterday, because I went right by one of our, you know, when Bonatti wrote the great days, I went right by one of our great days that we had together on Nemesis. And it took me so long. It's kind of embarrassing. I was 42.
01:23:57
Speaker
I think, or 43 when we were on Nupsi.
Breaking Barriers and Embracing Unconventional Paths
01:24:01
Speaker
And, you know, it was when we were prepping for one of our bivvies with Marco, and it was a blurt. It was kind of like, you know, what Peter Habbler did for me and Kevin. It's like I just, you know, Steve House, I love you, man.
01:24:24
Speaker
I hadn't had the ability to say that to other men. I could say it with, with women in my life, but I hadn't had the ability to, especially with a fellow alpinists, my climbing partners. So yeah, yeah. Now I don't have a problem with it. I love you, man. I love you too. Yeah.
01:24:45
Speaker
I don't either. And can we just normalize that? Can we just make that a thing that we say to each other? Because I think I need it. I'm sure we all do. And I think that that's part of my hypothesis and part of what I want to bring people along with this conversation that what we do out there,
01:25:13
Speaker
It's the doing, it's the racing, it's the climbing. It's also the training and the road tripping and the buying of the plane ticket to go do the thing and making the unorthodox decision to commit yourself fully to something that from the outside doesn't necessarily make sense to a lot of people, but you know it's right for you.
01:25:38
Speaker
You know, I think that that's I want people to know that that That's important that they do that and that they don't second-guess themselves because I know I second-guess myself so much, you know You know who I wanted to be when I was a kid Barry. I wanted to be an astronaut
01:25:57
Speaker
That was one of the choices and I was going to go be an aeronautical engineer because that was one of the paths to becoming an astronaut. Obviously that didn't happen but that was how I saw that.
01:26:16
Speaker
you know that was still much more conventional because being an engineer that that that was like not too far outside i wasn't coloring too far outside the lines right if i could go be an engineer um so that worked for me and so many times i was like i should you know i'm just this mountain guy i'm climbing all this stuff i you know i don't know if it really matters i could have i'm not solving any great problems or working on anything important to humanity or you know i always had those self doubts but
01:26:45
Speaker
It was the right thing. It was all the right thing. And I just want people to not doubt themselves. If I could tell the younger Steve something, I would tell him not to have so much self-doubt about his path. And if it feels right, then it is right. Yeah. Well, another Joseph Campbell quote, follow your bliss.
01:27:05
Speaker
REM also saying, trust in your calling, make sure your calling is true. Yeah, I, you know, in very simple speak, just be, follow your heart.
01:27:19
Speaker
Yeah, and share your heart. And I think that that's one of the things that... I spent a lot of time talking about aerobic adaptations to endurance training stimuli.
01:27:38
Speaker
And that's all well and good, right? Like, and I love that stuff and it's fun and people get to watch themselves progress and change and evolve and become capable of doing things that they were never able to do. And I feel like it's just, you know, it's just a sliver of the story, right? Like it's, it's an important sliver, but there's just, there's a human on top of all of that. And each of us is a human. Yeah. With the toolbox and a toolbox that we're
01:28:08
Speaker
getting stuff into. And then we go out and use our toolbox. And, you know, a lot of time we're using it as soon as we use it in our sleep. But when we wake up, whatever is us, that's what we're bringing out into the world. Is everyone special? Man, it's just so amazing to me to think that
01:28:34
Speaker
you know, the template for a human being, for one, somewhere in ourselves is the knowledge to build ourselves. And that's, I don't think we've, we've got a ways to go on that one. Yeah. Yeah. It makes my mind spin just with that concept, but that template, no two are the same. It's like our fingerprints. There is this template for life, but in the human
01:29:04
Speaker
you know, are part of the tribe. None of us are the same. So, yeah, we're all so uniquely, vastly varied and special, as is the rest of all the living things that are around us.
01:29:24
Speaker
Well, thank you, Barry. That was a wonderful conversation and you did not disappoint my hopes for what we could talk about today and what we could share. And I'm really grateful for you being here.
01:29:40
Speaker
helping people that are listening understand that they're important each of them and they're special in a way that is meaningful and rare and true and they're out there following their hearts. So thanks for following your heart, Barry. I'm so glad that our hearts crossed paths in this life. It's been a great, it's been one of the highlights for me.
01:30:08
Speaker
And even though you're way over in Austria and I'm here in Cammar, Alberta, those connections go across this small little ball that we're separated by. They sure do. They sure do. Yeah. Well, we'll get together sooner rather than later. I think so. Thank you very much, Barry. You're welcome.
01:30:31
Speaker
Well, I knew that kicking off this series with Barry was the perfect choice. He has always been, for me, one of the purest, most sincere, and most self-reflective people I have met in my life. I want to thank him again for his openness about his past, the challenges he has faced, and his journey to reach a place of real acceptance. There are no words for the gratitude I have for him.
01:30:57
Speaker
I hope that you listeners share my sentiments, and I hope that the time I spent with Barry illustrates what I want Voice of the Mountains to be. A space where we can explore together our journeys and their meaning, whether they're on the trail, the trek, or on the face of a mountain.