OURAY BOUND

I have trained very, very, hard this year I anticipation of the Ouray Invitational an odd proposition as being an invitational with no qualifier I never know if the invitation is to be forthcoming or not. As of late it has become fashionable to carp ceaselessly about 2009 a year of great personal transition for me not to mention indirect tragedy. I took the Guy Lacelle killed during the Hyalite IceBreaker tourney particularly hard Guy having been my hyperactive partner in two Festiglace du Quebec events in 2006 and '07. Guy was not a man to shun risk in the name of adventure nor competition during one turn at the rope in 2006 he bouldered up after a distant bolt even as I offered to stick-clip the anchor for him no sooner had he scraped his way up the suspect wall of tottering shale when BOOM down came Guy cradle and all flat on his back atop an ice boss. He swarmed back up but no doubt a man already in his fifties would have been feeling a tad stiff later that night.

But it was not Guy's own drive that slew this Geant du Cascade rather the combined hubris of individuals athletes and organizer alike at the aforementioned IceBreaker an event billed as "this ain't Ouray..." by event author Joe Josephson. Indeed, Guy withstood many spirited runs at Ouray largely unscathed only to perish in his second turn in the now infamous IceBreaker, senselessly consumed by an avalanche triggered by a party in the gulley above. That high winds, snowfall and bitter cold had drastically altered avalanche conbditions in Hyalite in the preceding 24 hours advancing a "moderate" risk to patently suicidal seems to have escaped the attention of both Joe and the participating athletes. From the 5th floor of RC2 NOAA forecasts for Hyalite and the surrounding mountains were quite express, I watched the impending grinder take shape relieved to have been snubbed for 2008.

Accidents certainly happen and while there may be no "blame" per se there is culpability galore to go around. The following week I hit town mostly to retrieve my daughter Simone a freshman at MSU but also to climb. In conversations with some of the competitors one of whom actually was involved in triggering the slide that swept Guy to his destruction it became apparent that neither in the athlete meeting nor in the pre-dawn start was any discussion of the avalanche potential undertaken an omission of near-criminal proportions. Even still the party of Josh Wharton and Sam Magro who set off the fatal slide had in fact endured one near-death experience moments earlier when JW was swept down the gulley leaving an ice tool in the ice above.

Now many persons (including me) would have promptly and correctly asserted THIS IS FUCKED and retreated but no the lure of one's name engraved on the golden piolet on display at Barrel Mountaineering was so great these blokes opted to continue and they weren't the only ones as Guy despite decades of experience in the Candian Rockies that included a harrowing near-miss under Gimme Shelter in the '90s pressed on right into the cross-hairs of what Sam described as being struck by "18 sheets of dry-wall". That this wasn't a double or even triple fatality seems to have escaped everyone's attention in the subsequent rush to memorialize the late Quebequois before returning promptly to the leisure-based lifestyle of non-stop climbing. After all, the show must go on, oui?

Perhaps, but only just. Having ice-climbed my entire adult life I really know no different as even my son Cormac succintly stated "what else are you going to do all winter!?', indeed. But the world just got a little bleaker the Ouray event a shade gloomier without the fierce Lacelle to compete against. We were after all both of an earlier era one of sodden wool and ice-glazed primitive implements where the consequences of error could be immediate and exceptionally violent. In glancing about the ranks of such veterans has thinned considerably to the point where I feel conspicuous there are old climbers, bold climbers, but no old, bold climbers, correct?

Yet Guy was the exception proof that the old saw was just another load of crap his perceived risk enormous as he completed breath-taking solo ascents of creaking frozen Leviathans across three continents. After a 1993 ascent of Curtain Call with Susanne I noted that some cat named Guy Lacelle had sent the line solo an effort that no amount of training or leashless wizardry would prompt me to undertake to this day.

So what went wrong? In a word, competition... As one particpant of this fateful event pointed out to me en route back to Bozeman from Hyalite, in competition the athletes involved are blind to the hazards roiling about them they see only the prize and no one exposed to a new partner as the draw ensured wishes to be the chicken the one to pull the plug. I know this because this is precisely what I had done in the same event in 2007 when paired with an individual I quickly ascertained to be not only incompetent but plainly a danger to my well-being. For a year I wore the "no-score" I opted for an albatros about my thick hairy neck only now feeling poorly vindicated for my cantankerousness.

So who missed the flags? Certainly anyone hosting such an event must have the safety of the athletes firmly in mind above any lingering gripe against oragnized "sport" events represented by the likes of Ouray or the Ice World Cup. Simply put no half-assed adventure comp' is worth the life of a man like Guy nor any other soul. In short a little humility shown by all might have gone a long way that black day even saved a man's life...

Then Ouray 2010 would have been like old times Gut and me toe to toe in the comp' friends yet rivals old bulls off in some meadow snorting and pawing antlers locked in some farsical contest then the obligatory arm around the shoulder self-portrait of us both one more for the scrap-book.

Not this year though, nor any other for all time.