The Current - Born to climb: Mountaineers named to Order of Canada

Episode Date: January 13, 2025

Barry Blanchard and Chic Scott are two world-renowned mountaineers who have just been appointed to the Order of Canada. They tell us about feeling like they were put on this earth to climb, and surviving a death-defying ascent with an avalanche that continued for 27 minutes.

There is a political firestorm burning in America. We're gonna walk down to the Capitol. The flamethrowers tells the story of the radio broadcasters who started that fire and kept it burning. Here is Rush Limbaugh. Broadcasters who clawed their way from the fringes of American politics I've had enough of all of it. I've had enough of it. to the very center of power, the flamethrowers. available now on the CBC Listen app or wherever you get your podcasts.

This is a CBC podcast. Hello, I'm Matt Galloway and this is the current podcast. Over the past couple of weeks on this program, we have been meeting some of the outstanding Canadians newly appointed to the Order of Canada. Today two more members of that exclusive club. They know each other well. Both are from Alberta, grew up a few blocks from each other, and they both feel the pull of the mountains.

Barry Blanchard is a world renowned alpinist and to quote the Governor General's citation, he has initiated numerous complex and demanding ascent in the Rockies, the Alps, the Himalayas, some of which have not been repeated. For more than 40 years, he has been a guide, resource, and mentor to countless mountain enthusiasts. He lives in Canmore, Alberta. And from Banff, Alberta, Charles Scott, who goes by the name Chick, he has climbed and skied around the world from Mount Logan to the Himalayas, was a trailblazer in mountain climbing and ski mountaineering in Canada, and made notable first ascents and ski traverses nationally and internationally. A dedicated author and historian, he developed a lasting catalog of Canadian expeditions. Barry and Chick are in our Calgary studio this morning. Good morning,

good morning, and congratulations. Good morning, good morning. Congratulations to you both. Thank morning, good morning, and congratulations. Good morning. Good morning. Congratulations to you both. Thank you. Thank you. I said that you both know each other. How well do you know each other, Barry? We've known each other since the mid-70s and yeah, have climbed together and skied together and shared writing projects together and having both grown up in Calgary. Yeah, I think we know each other pretty darn good.

Chick? Yes, I'm 14 years older than Barry and I've watched his career progress from outstanding novice climber to now he's an elder statesman. So it's been marvelous to watch his career progress. Trevor Burrus What does it mean to you, Chuck, to be given this recognition? Chuck Ligato Well, it's huge. To be honest, it is. This award is really special.

It's really different. Both Barry and I have received awards from the climbing community in the past, but this is from the people of Canada. I think it's an appreciation or a recognition of our contribution to the country. So that's really special. Peter Van Doren Barry, what about for you? What does it mean to be given this acknowledgement and this recognition of the work that you've done over the course of your life and career?

Well, I haven't got many emails from the Governor General, so when I got one... Yeah, I got one in October. Like a lot of people, I had to reconfirm that this wasn't a scam. And I made contact and as I said to the gal I was talking with in Ottawa when she kind of laid it on me that I was being awarded the Order of Canada, I told her as it happens with me right now, I said, okay, my heart is pounding. And then 30 seconds later, I said, okay, now I'm crying. And it made me so proud to be a Canadian. And I love the fact that I am a Canadian and I'm proud of our country. And yeah, the heart voice is

right there. Pete Slauson That's awesome. Can you describe, I want to talk about the things that you have done, but Barry, describe the feeling that you get when you are climbing. I mean, there's all sorts of things going on. There's a physical element of exertion, there's an emotional thing, I'm sure, that's tied up, and people talk about a spiritual aspect to this as well. I mean, what does climbing give you? Pete It gives me guidance, mentorship. It gives me direction. It has defined the way I've lived, you know, half or three quarters of my life. And yeah, it starts having those little bits of grace right from getting out of the car here and getting on the land and seeing the land and traveling up through the land and going to

sometimes the height of the land, the summit, sometimes not. And oddly enough, a lot of my most cherished climbing experiences, we didn't get to the top of the mountain. We were trying to climb. And at this point in my life, looking back on those experiences, it was the mountains and the people I was there with. Those are the things that define the greatest moments in my life as far as being in the mountains. Being a father is another side of the greatest things in my life, but that also happened in the mountains.

But yeah, yeah, the mountains, they're ancestors for me and I have connection to many of my ancestors and one of the ancestors are the mountains. Pete Slauson trick, what do the mountains mean to you? Richard Pate Well, since my first trip to the mountains on the May long weekend in 1962, mountains have been my whole life. I've climbed in them, I've skied, I've guided, and for the last 30 years I've been a historian and I've researched and written books about them. Mountains and books have been everything to me and just my whole life has been built around mountains.

But it didn't start out that way. I mean you started out on the golf course, which you can have some elevation on the golf It's just my whole life has been built around mountains. But it didn't start out that way. I mean, you started out on the golf course, which you can have some elevation on the golf course, but it's not a mountain. No, my father used to joke that the only experience he had of mountain climbing was climbing up to the elevated T's on the golf course. But yes, I grew up on a golf course. But yes, I grew up on a golf course. My father was the secretary treasurer of the Alberta Golf Association. So I was swinging in a club when I was five

years old. I was good. I was shooting in the low 70s. As a teenager, I made the Alberta Junior Golf Team, but on that weekend in May in 1962 when I went to the mountains, it was like that moment in The Wizard of Oz when it all goes from black and white to colour and a whole magical world opened up for me. Peter Van Doren Barry, when did you figure out that this was – it's fascinating hearing Chick talk about that moment of black and white into world opened up for me. Barry, when did you figure out that this was, it's just, it's fascinating hearing Chick talk about that moment of black and white into colour, when did that happen for you? It happened initially through literature,

through reading some of the really classic, you know, editions in the climbing canon. And some of them are really, really good. Black and white. Well, one for me is the White Spider by Heinrich Herrera, which is about the first descent of the North-Ace of the Eiger and was read to me on a Greyhound bus coming back from my grandmother's house in Medicine Hat, Alberta when I was nine. And this gal just took time to read to me from the White Spider. There was a heroism in that book where men were helping

each other out and sacrificing comfort like sleeping on the side of this mountain and sacrificing their sleep so they could support the back of their fellow climber. And that kind of heroism just wasn't real evident in males in my life at that point. So, yeah, me and my friend Kevin left for the Alps, kind of the birthplace of alpinism. And we climbed with Chick the weekend kind of before my buddy took off to the Alps. And my commitment and realization as one of my buddies has asked me, so when was it that you figured out you were put on this earth to climb? Happened in Chamonix in 1980 and it was leaning against my back against another ancestor, a big tree and I don't know what type of tree it was.

But I leaned my back against the ancestor and I wrapped my hands around the ancestor and we'd just done this wild amazing climb that Reinhold Mezner had done. And yeah, it's right there that I said, okay, I'm going to commit my life to alpinism and this is the moment where it was all in colour for me from the beginning, but the colour intensified for sure. You've used that word a couple of times, the ancestor. Why do you use that word in particular? I'm very proud to be Métis and my people come from the Coppell Valley in southern Saskatchewan.

And I spend a fair amount of time going to sweat lodges and learning about indigenous worldview. And one of the things I am learning and I'm challenged with is right now at the CBC, I look out and I see all my relatives and they're all alive. None of them are dead. They all have a spirit. And one of my most important ancestors in the mountains is, we call it Mount Yamneska, but the Stony Nakoda would pronounce it Ia Manuthka.

And it is an ancestor. I've spent over 500 days of my life on this one cliff and learned to climb up there and have learned so much about life, having contact with this mountain that has a spirit and is alive and when I put my hands against the mountain, I can feel the pulse or the energy of the mountain and yeah, one of the other ancestors up there, one of my relatives, is a tree that was right. It's a tough place to make a tree. It's a really tough place to make a living as a tree. And this tree is maybe eight, 10 inches in diameter at the base of the trunk now. But if you were to cut it in half, you'd see that it's been

there longer than I have been alive. And I've seen it grow over time and I go to this tree every time I'm on that side of the mountain and I look at that ancestor that has roots in a deeper ancestor, Yamnuska, and I feel those roots in me. And yeah, all of my relations. Tell me about a climb that stands out to you, Barry. I mean, one of the things, you've been up and down more than most, but tell me about one of the ascents that you'll never forget. Well, one happened here in the Canadian Rockies

on a very remote peak called North Twin. And it's actually the remote peak called North Twin. It's actually the north face of North Twin is the way it's referred to, but it's Twin's Tower. It's one of the 11,000 foot high peaks at the Columbia Icefield. It still is a peak that is more seen by grizzly bears than humans because it's a very remote place to get to. You have to, you know, arduous hike of a day just to get to see the

mountain. And I climbed it in 1985 with a very dear friend, a guy named David Cheeseman who unfortunately passed away on Mount Logan the next year in 1987. And it was a very challenging climb. It's been repeated once. And the thing is so significant to me now is it was time I spent with David. And we only had five years together, and I wish we had more. But those five years that we had, we did some amazing climbing and developed

a really strong friendship. And I'm embarrassed of the fact that in 87, when we were going, I was going to Peru, he was going up to Logan. I didn't have the wherewithal in my being to tell him, David, I love you. And I'm embarrassed of that, but that doesn't happen anymore.

The people I love in my life, some of whom are my climbing partners, like my partner, Kevin, you know, I barely hang up on the phone with them without telling them that I love them. It speaks to the danger of the life that you have as well. And you've seen that firsthand. Is this right? You were in an avalanche that went on for what, 20-some minutes? in an avalanche that went on for what, 20, 20 some minutes? Yes, that was probably the second most memorable. To a lot of people, that would be the most memorable, but continue.

It's a mountain called Nanga Parbat. So it's the 11th highest mountain in the world. It is actually the RuPaul face is the largest mountain escarpment in the world. So when you leave the bottom of what we define geographically as the crease between the valley bottom and start going up the mountain flank, it's the biggest flank in the world. It's 15,000 feet, you know, 5,000 meters. So it's big. And yeah, we were on our fourth day going into a feature called the Merkle Gully, which is a tight gully and actually a route that was climbed by Reinhold Mezner and his brother Gunter way back when.

And yeah, we had a very violent storm hit the top of Nanga Parbat and starting, you know, snowing amounts of snow that we don't even measure in Western Canada as far as snowfall. Very quickly, the first huge avalanche that the mountain had to release, it can't contain that weight and amount of snow for long, hit us in this tight little canyon. It's 10 or 15 feet across at the bottom and it's ice and then there's rock walls that tower for 100 feet up either side. So we're in a funnel and this avalanche comes through and just blasted all four of us.

There was four of us. We're in the process of retreating, repelling, blast us all off our feet and we all snapped tight to the one ice screw that we had anchored into the mountain and just the math, we came very close to having that fail, what we were clipped to, but it didn't. And then the avalanche continued for 27 minutes and it's a type of avalanche that would be similar to having just dump loads of sand dumped into a funnel like hourglass and you're in the throat of the hourglass and all this sand is coming down on you. So much of it is coming down that if you pull your face up, you start to suffocate.

You have to put your face down and just stare down into this vortex of swirling snow and get a channel to breathe. All of those little snow particles are taking heat from you. After 27 minutes, we're getting hypothermic. It's kind of weird to think inside. This would be really ironic if we passed away because of hypothermia rather than what is usually the violence of an avalanche. It passed and we sorted ourselves out and started getting out of there and we dodged avalanches for the next six hours getting out of this gully and 24 hour push to get up there and get back to our tents and one of my partners dropped one of the tents so I'd dig a snow cave.

And it's a big story. And it's not the kind of thing, just the last point on this, it's not the kind of thing that would leave you thinking, yeah, I'm done with mountains. Thank you very much. We're going to stay in the flat ground. We're going to go to the beach or something like that instead. Pete Slauson Well, long before going to Nangaparbat, even you know, around the time I first met Chick, I had been in, even on Iyamnathka, I had been

in, you know, tight situations that extended the day and got my mother very alarmed and she called anyone who had a hat, the police, the fire department, the National Park Service. If you were an ice cream guy who had a hat, you've got to call. And yeah, I started making deals with God at that point, saying, just get me off of this one, I promise I'll never come back up here again. And then I'd go back again. So finally I just said, okay, God, you know, I'm not going to make any promises, because we both know I'm coming back up here. And 11 days after that avalanche on Nanga Parbat, the weather cleared

and we tried again. And we got up close to the same high point and the storm was coming in. Storm was coming in again and we turned tails and ran away. We said, we gotta get out of here. And for a while I thought I'd go back and now at this point in my life, I'm never going back to Nanga Parbat. In 2017, it felt like drugs were everywhere in the news.

So I started a podcast called On Drugs. We covered a lot of ground over two seasons, but there are still so many more stories to tell. I'm Jeff Turner and I'm back with season three of On Drugs. And this time, it's going to get personal. I don't know who sober Jeff is. I don't even know if I like that guy. On Drugs is available now wherever you get your podcasts.

Chick, you've seen some things as well. I don't need you to top that story, but tell me about a memorable experience for you. Well, I can honestly say that I have never pushed the limits the way Barry has done. I've had a few serious adventures, but actually probably the greatest mountain experience I had. Nothing went wrong.

There were no fights. Nobody fell in a crevasse. It was in 1967 and me and three of my pals, we skied about 350 kilometers down the spine of the Rockies between Jasper and Lake Louise. We skied along the continental divide, across the big ice fields, all along that stretch. We were only about 20 years old and it took 21 days and it was magical. It was so beautiful. There were no communications devices, so nobody would ever know if we were in trouble. And you know, it wasn't life-threatening in any way at all.

It sounds life-enhancing in some ways. It really was. It was life-enhancing. You know, it was my first really big adventure, 1967. It was actually our Centennial project. Remember, everybody had a Centennial project and that was ours. And it's still, what are we, over 50 years later, 55 years later, and it's still the most memorable experience of my life.

Pete Slauson Even more so than working with Clint Eastwood? Pete Slauson Yes. Pete Slauson Tell me about working with Clint Eastwood. Pete Slauson Yeah, Clint. Well, Clint, big tough Clint. He was actually a great guy to work with. He was very strong, very quiet. He was very respectful. Pete Slauson This was on the set of a movie? Pete Slauson Yes. This was the set of a film called The

Eiger Sanction and I spent seven months in Switzerland part of the time on the north face of the Eiger with Clint. But you know Hollywood is about fantasy and the mountains are about reality and those two worlds met on the set where we spent two days filming a scene where one of the climbers get hit by rock fall and dies a few days later. And then we were just about wrapping it up, filming the last scenes and a real rock came down and killed one of our climbers. Oh my goodness. And I was standing right next to him

15 minutes before the rocks came down. And I can't say I had a premonition, but I didn't wanna be there. And they didn't need me because the other two guys there were both better climbers than me actually. So I excused myself. And yeah, 50 minutes later, better climbers than me actually, so I excuse myself. And yeah, 50 minutes later, the rocks came down and killed Dave.

It's just in Hollywood films, all the dead guys get up at the end of the scene and wipe the ketchup off, but that's not true in climbing. Peter Van Doren Barry, have you seen in the time that you've been in the mountains, in this country, have you seen them change? Barry Slauson Yeah, yeah, quite dramatically. Pete Slauson

I just ask this in part because of, everybody's going through this right now and noticing changes and the cliches, oh, there used to be more snow, now there's more snow in different times and what have you. Tell us what climate change has meant for, for the thing that you love so much. Well, um, you know, kind of globally, some of the, uh, large, uh, granitic failures in the Alaska range and in Chamonix where granite, when it, uh,

tends to fail, it fails in big, big solid chunks. And in our mountains, even in the Bugaboos, we've had that type of failure. A lot of that, the granite is kind of like onion skin. In between the layers of onion skin, there's often ice that keeps the granite connected. The ice is disappearing. The permafrost into the middle or the center of the mountain is getting deeper and deeper. So it just exposes more loose rock, whether that be sheets of granite that are failing

off or like the Canadian Rockies sedimentary, it kind of has dandruff. It sheds it not usually in big proportions, although occasionally in big proportions. We've seen some of that. I've even witnessed it traveling around the mountains. You don't see many rock failures, but when you do, they are impressive. The biggest thing though is another ancestor would be Mount Athabasca that I've climbed over a hundred times usually as a mountain guide and just seeing the recession and retreat of the glaciation Places that we used to ice climb quite happily on these beautiful waves of ice on the edge of a glacier below Athabasca That offered, you know

Alaska that offered 50, 60 feet of really good ice climbing on a glacier, not in a frozen waterfall like I was doing a couple days ago. But that is now gone. It is air now where we used to climb ice. If you put us there now, we would drop a couple hundred meters and hit talus like rock. So that edge of the glacier and that depth of the glacier is hundreds of meters gone. And to see that change in my lifetime is not the way most human life in the mountains has been experienced because climate change and study has taught us that ice ages happen and glacial retreat and advance happens but it usually happens over a thousand, ten thousand, hundred thousand years time

spans and I'm 65 years old and I've witnessed this glacier and its change. Yeah, it's just shocking to see and it's… Well, it also speaks to what the next generation may or may not be able to do. Yeah, exactly. We've already had to alter seasons and routes and ways that I used to provide a really great avenue of transport up to the top of a mountain that it's now really bony and anemic and it's full of crevasses. It's like human beings as we age and, and

wrinkles show up on our skin. The same thing happens to a glacier, except, you know, the wrinkles are, you know, two, three, four meters apart and they can be quite deep and, you know, take human life if you fall into them. Chick, just finally, you have, you've spent so much time, not just being out in the mountains and in the natural world, but writing about it and documenting it as an historian, but also

bringing people into that world through your writing. I mean, in some ways, this world in this country, it's part of our mental identity. Why is it important for you to write about Canadian expeditions, to share these stories? What do you want people to be thinking about in the work that you do? Well, we Canadians, we are a mountain nation. Probably 20, 25 percent of our country is big, real mountains. So what I've done for the last 35 years is collect together and tell the stories of the exploration of the mountains, the climbing of the mountains. And you know,

I'm very pleased and proud that I've sort of given Canadians a segment of their history, of their national story. And I've given us an identity as mountain people. When the Alpine Club of Canada was formed 120 years ago, one of the founders, Elizabeth Parker, said that someday we should become a nation of mountain lovers, loving the mountains with a patriot's passion. And I hope my books have contributed to Canadians truly becoming a nation of mountain lovers. Matthew Fahey The books, but also the stories that you've both told in the conversation as well. Congratulations on the recognition, but also on the work that you've done over the course of a lifetime. Thank you very much for speaking with us. Thank you. Thank you, Matt. Happy trails.

Barry Blanchard is an alpinist, mountain guide and author of The Calling, A Life Rocked by Mountains. He lives in Canmore, Alberta. Chick Scott is a retired mountaineer, now historian, author of numerous guidebooks, biographies and history books on mountaineering, including Pushing the Limits, The History of Canadian Mountaineering, Chick Lives in Banff, Alberta, and both are new appointees to the Order of Canada.