Calgary Journal Online

Questioning the reasons climbers risk their lives

I’ve often imagined the phone call. The stranger who asks if I’m related to Wade Suvan — my brother — then tells me there’s been a climbing fatality.

It would be similar to the phone call I got four years ago. Wade’s weary voice woke me at 2 a.m., telling me he’d just got home from a climb. “So you’re still alive?” I muttered, half-asleep.

“I am,” he said.

Wade Suvan solos Pilsner Pillar, a 46-m frozen waterfall on Mount Dennis.

Photo: Kim Suvan/Calgary Journal

Wade had performed CPR and emergency first aid before strapping Brodribb to a ledge and rushing down to get help. A rescue helicopter recovered the body in the morning.

Autopsy results revealed that Brodribb, 27, an athletic, experienced climber, had an unknown and undiagnosed heart problem. In mid-pitch, and roped to my brother, Brodribb just collapsed. Apparently his heart sped up too fast. Then it stopped. (Wade published a full account of his story in the 2008 Alpine Journal).

Brodribb died while climbing, but it wasn’t an accident that killed him.

He left behind a widow, siblings and parents.

This death seemed to support something I’ve believed since my brother started climbing 15 years ago: climbers are selfish.

They place themselves in dangerous situations for no good reason. Sometimes it works out, but sometimes it doesn’t. They risk it all for an adrenaline rush.

I stopped listening to my brother talk about climbing years ago. I didn’t want to know any more about grapefruit-sized pieces of ice smashing into his nose or forehead, causing yet another trip to Canmore’s emergency department for stitches. I didn’t want to know how many more teeth he’d chipped from biting into frozen food bars in -25 C.

But last month, I broke protocol. I went to the mountains with my brother. Not because I changed my mind about climbing. Nothing as noble as that. I wanted some splashy photos for my newspaper.

We stayed in a secluded mountain hostel that had no running water, overheated dorms with eight bunks to a room, and an outhouse with its door frozen open.

The next morning we ended up at a 46- metre frozen waterfall called Pilsner Pillar, just outside Field, B.C. It was the height of a 12-storey building. A giant hill, far too steep to toboggan, was at its base.

Then Wade climbed Pilsner Pillar — without a rope.

Taking pictures from below, I could hear aluminum carabiners, cams and nuts as they dangled from his harness. It sounded just like the tags on a dog’s collar, and I kept turning my head to look for some mountaineer’s mutt galloping through the trees.

As Wade moved up the waterfall, crampons crunched and axes tapped into the thick ice.

He later described his attraction to climbing: “You know exactly who you are and what you’re supposed to be doing. Everything there is to know about life, period, is moving your axe from there to there so you don’t die.

“Everything is so simple and so pure and so perfect for the process of moving through that moment, that you are at peace with yourself while you are doing it.”

Keeping my feet steady, I listened to gentle pops and thuds of small ice chunks as they sprayed and dribbled down the waterfall.

Wade crept up the ice slowly, step by deliberate step. Tentative pulls on axes to test holds. Spiderman progress with occasional pauses for rest. Then, the final push over the top.

The entire climb took 12 minutes.

A video of this climb will be on YouTube by mid-April; search “Wade Suvan.”

“If you’re being challenged enough, you have perfect purity of thought. And that, for me, is what climbing is all about,” he said.

I learned that, for my brother, climbing is about the silence, not the rush.

Allan Derbyshire is a lifelong climber and the program co-ordinator for Mount Royal’s Applied Ecotourism program. Derbyshire agreed with my brother: “Climbing is more of a life wish than a death wish.”

He added: “You do get quite absorbed in what you’re doing. But also I have to say it becomes a bit of an escape from the mundane, every-day routine sort of world. So that’s one of the reasons why I do it: you just forget about really everything apart from that one moment.”

Even Tom Brodribb’s father has paid tribute to the life-affirming qualities of climbing.

In an interview with an Edmonton Journal reporter, he said: “(Tom) died doing what he loved. He lived a short life, but he lived every day to the fullest.”

So much grace under pressure.

Both my brother and Allan Derbyshire agree with me that climbers are selfish people. No matter how good it feels to have a view from above, taking risks is self-indulgent.

But some risks seem more palatable than others — at least from the view below.

Since that day in the mountains, I’ve decided to trust my brother when he says: “Some would say (climbing) is taking life lightly. I believe I do it because I take life seriously.”

That doesn’t mean I’m Zen about his lifestyle. But the reality is, I’m not Zen about anything. And until he started climbing, neither was my brother.

If another phone call comes at two a.m., I won’t be at peace. But knowing that my brother is, I will try to answer with grace.