The simple life

For the last few years we have been part of a wonderful Family Day-weekend get-together that combines the opportunity to spend time in the mountains with a fun group experience. We – Johann, Maya and I – first took part in 2006 when Maya was only eleven, and Magnus and Courtney plus our “third son” Ben and his wife Steph came along a couple of times as well.

Usually the group – varying in its complete constellation, but with the same core – spends Friday night to Monday morning at the Ribbon Creek hostel in Kananaskis Country west of Calgary. This year, however, the hostel had been booked by a different group already, and we had to find other accommodations. As we like to have the whole place to ourselves for the thirty or forty people the range of possibilities isn’t all that big, and we ended up renting Mosquito Creek hostel north of Lake Louise. All any of us knew about it was that it was supposed to be ‘rustic’...

It's a loong drive from home (Kananaskis as well, but this even more), and we could only leave after Maya came home from school. By the time we were on the road it was almost five: another hour of sunlight, another hour and a half of decent light; after that there were four more to be driven in the dark, much of it on mountain roads. It was a beautiful night, however, and the roads were fairly good. We had chosen not to take Hwy. 2 south to Calgary and then go west to Banff and Lake Louise, both very busy roads, but go cross country and get to Banff Park via Rocky Mountain House and Nordegg, then arrive at the hostel from the north. I drove after the first hour and a half, and for much of the last three hours the other two were asleep, which suited me just fine. Going west on Hwy 11 I was all alone in this moonlit mountain landscape, and it was magical! There is the small issue of wildlife on the road, of course, and I was very aware of that, but the snow is deep in the ditches, and it was very cold; the only animals we saw was a herd of elk very close to Nordegg.

We weren't totally sure where the hostel was, only knew that it was north of Lake Louise and should be pretty close to the highway. National park campgrounds and hostels are usually well advertised, however, and finally the headlights lit up the yellow letters "Mosquito Creek" on their brown background. By then it was 10:30, and my "crew" had just woken up again. The turn-off looked a bit adventurous, with two tire tracks leading downhill in very deep snow - not like something one should tackle with a Toyota Corolla! 'Wait', said Johann, 'don't drive in there! I don't think we'd get back out ...'  Great! Now what? Only a few yards further on, however, there seemed to be a second access which looked a lot more promising upon inspection. A bunch of cars was parked in a cleared space below, and we had indeed arrived at the right place. The first access was for the campground, only used in the summer, obviously, except for some tough back-country skiers with 4-wheel drive vehicles.

Well, we had found the right parking spot (and saw somebody we knew unloading his car right away) - but where was the hostel? All we could see at first was a wall of snow. Once we got out we spotted a couple of entries into this wall, pathways through waist-high snow that, after 100 m or so, ended at a few dimly lit buildings: we were there, thank goodness!

Most of the others had arrived already; some were in bed, some huddled around a not very warm fire in the common area, some busy putting their stuff away in the kitchen. Somebody had a sled, which proved to be very handy to get our things from the car, including a cooler and a tub with foodstuff. But why was everybody puttering around in the near-dark? Well ... this place is rustic, as I mentioned before, with no indoor plumbing, no electricity, and only a small tap providing water for the kitchen from a reservoir, and we were supposed to use the solar-powered LED lighting sparingly, which makes sense, of course.

So Maya and I, aided by the small cone of the flashlight, followed another path in the labyrinth to the ladies' dorm, Johann a different one to the guys', and we made our beds with the bedding provided, encouraged by one of the people already in bed to switch on the light for this purpose, which made it a lot easier. Every dorm had twelve beds, not all of them in use, and another building housed the three families with little kids.

The main building consisted of the kitchen (with wooden tables and benches), closed off quite effectively from the cold entrance with a comforter nailed to the frame, and the common area with the aforementioned fireplace which, as we found out in the next couple of days, was able to heat up the room quite well if one started the fire early enough. Here, a few people were talking, the flames dancing behind the window of the iron stove giving just enough light for us to make out their shapes. We greeted friends we had met on these occasions in previous years, but also a few strangers who we'd have to look at more closely in the daylight to be able to recognize them again.

A glass of wine helped to counteract the effect of the copious amounts of coffee I had drunk during the drive and made me think of sleep, and by midnight the group split up and went their different ways. Now it became inevitable to check out the one building still missing from the assembly: the - brrr! – outhouse. The thought of having to get up in the middle of the night instead held no appeal whatsoever. At close to -30 this took a bit of determination, of course, and the fact that the beam of the flashlight revealed a toilet seat sparkling with a furry covering of ice crystals didn't make it any more inviting to dwell there - but what can you do? It was either that or the snow bank, and the toilet at least had - if thin - wooden walls and was off the ground. I hadn't registered it then, but a toilet seat cover cut out from a foamy hanging on the wall proved to be the peak of luxury on subsequent visits to this place. Necessity is indeed the mother of invention.

This first night was ... hmmm ... a little challenging. It's never quite easy to share a room with a group of people for the night, and when your feet are like two lumps of ice seemingly not belonging to your body it is really hard to fall asleep. The blankets, too, had a tendency to slip off into the dark, and I lay there listening to the quiet but consistent snoring coming from the next bed over, trying to get my feet warm without rubbing them vigorously which, I was afraid, might result in a mass-waking. How would I ever fall asleep? And how, for that matter, had the others managed? After what seemed like hours of lying awake, I came up with a solution: I retrieved my fleece jacket from the bottom end of the bed and stuck my feet into the sleeves as far as they would go, wrapping the rest of the jacket around my calves. Finally! It wasn't a ticket to hours and hours of blissful oblivion, but at least it got me warmed up.

I must have fallen asleep, too, because I was startled from some dream or other twice after that, once by an angry shout - somebody else's dream, more violent than mine - and again by a quiet whimpering which I took to be Maya's at first. She was in the bunk above me, and I carefully screwed myself up to be able to reach her. My probing hand found a face relaxed in sleep, however (and I'd hear about that in the morning: 'whatever for did you touch my face tonight, mom?') Twenty-five years of being a mother made it easy enough to go back to sleep when I was reassured that the child needing a mother was not my own ...

The next time I woke up the pale light of morning was seeping in through the windows - thank goodness this night was over!

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While the sun took its time to find its way to the hostel itself, tucked into a loose spruce forest, the snow-covered massive wall of the mountain across the road was soon touched with a glorious golden glow: the promise of a beautiful day ahead. Now we could get an idea of the outlay of the place, too, and as always things looked a lot different in the daylight. What a charming place this proved to be, huddling in the deep snow, roofs pulled low! The buildings were a lot closer together than they had seemed the night before, and we marvelled at the tunnel-like paths connecting them and leading out to the parking lot. Somebody had done a lot of shovelling!

The kitchen area bustled with activity, every burner on the two gas stoves covered with pots filled with water for coffee and tea or bubbling porridge, and pans in which slices of bacon sizzled beside generous amounts of scrambled eggs. The windows had steamed up, and a chatter of cheerful voices indicated that everybody was getting ready for a day of outdoor activity. As usual, some were off to the slopes of nearby Lake Louise for downhill skiing or snowboarding, others – Johann, Maya and I among them - wanted to make use of the groomed cross country ski trails in the area, explore the country on snow shoes or just go for a walk. We had no extreme back-country skiers among us, but many come to the mountain parks for that as well, even though the danger of avalanches is ever present, and this year seems to be particularly bad: several people have been killed already when they ventured where it wasn’t safe.

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Once the sun had disappeared behind the mountains the hostel filled with its inhabitants again, returning from their various adventures. Everybody had had a good day, even though it had been fairly cold with a high temperature in the mid teens and some wind. Soon the kitchen was once again filled with the sound of clattering pots and happy conversation: time for one of the highlights of this weekend, the first of two potluck dinners. These are no ordinary chilli and meatball affairs, however, although those, too, can sometimes be found alongside such exotic delights as dolmadakia, spanakopita, tahari, and a variety of salads, to be followed by the most wonderful desserts.

Washing dishes was a little more complicated at Mosquito Creek than it would have been at Ribbon Creek: water, carried over to the sink in buckets from a small tap in the opposite corner of the kitchen, needed to be heated on the stove first, and some planning was involved to get the work done as efficiently as possible. It is not such a bad thing to “do without”, however, not only for the teenagers who might have never experienced this before but also for us baby boomers, so used to our comforts that we most often take them for granted.

How good it feels to share in this sense of community, be it by cooking and washing dishes together or clapping to the lively strains of fiddle and guitar music afterwards, by playing games and catching up on the events in the lives of friends we see but once a year!

We learned that we indeed can get by with a lot less luxury than we are used to, which doesn’t hurt anybody – but I’m sure nobody will complain if we have to make do with indoor plumbing once again when we meet at Ribbon Creek next year!

Wind - Torres del Paine

 Last time I wrote that it was getting harder and harder to find back to the summer landscape we had left only a short time before, and today it seems farther away than ever. After another brief mid-winter thaw that left the deck glistening with rain when I went to bed last night I woke up to the silence that comes with a fresh snowfall, when sound is muffled and doesn't carry very far. Funny that it should be noticeable from inside, but it is.


Soon the snow was moving by the window almost horizontally, and silence gave way to the wailing of the wind.It fiercely attacked and tried to shake loose everything that wasn't firmly attached, rattling window panes and shrieking in the chimney. And suddenly I was back in Patagonia ....


When we were in Argentina two years ago, we spent the bigger part of one night hanging on to our tent stakes because we had foolishly thought we had outsmarted the wind by putting up our tent in the protection of a hedge. During the night the wind shifted directions, however, and showed us that we really didn't know what it was capable of. Since then we have learned that, when travelling in Patagonia, there is no use complaining about too much wind: it simply is a fact of life there, and it is best to embrace the wind as a sometimes annoying but loyal travel companion.


Of course, it sometimes sleeps during the night, even forgets to get up in the morning, which happened on the first day of our stay in Torres del Paine National Park in southern Chile. We had travelled from Puerto Montt through the Patagonian channels on a "Navimag" ferry and disembarked three days later (and about 1200 km further south) in Puerto Natales, where we arrived in the late afternoon of January 3rd. Our friends Wilfried and Doris had booked a hotel in the Park, and we had hoped to find a place at the Refugio Las Torres, not far away from their hotel. My attempts to inquire about the booking process and availability were met with the same standard package in two different emails, which didn't answer my questions at all, and we finally decided to trust that there'd be room. If necessary we could sleep in Koch's SUV: we had our sleeping bags with us, after all, even though we had opted against a tent for Patagonia this time.


We were late getting off the ferry in Puerto Natales, had to pick up the vehicle, do some grocery shopping, get a message out to friends and family that we hadn't even noticed the earthquake near Temuco earlier that day, and still had a one and a half hour drive ahead of us. My confidence that we'd certainly find a place to sleep was waning with the fading light - even if there were still beds available, would they let us in close to eleven at night? And if not, and we needed to sleep in the car, would they ban us from the parking lot of the fancy hotel? And was it even permitted to just sleep by the side of the road in a national park in Chile? Suddenly I saw a mountain higher than all the snowcapped ones awaiting us. Johann was unperturbed.
A bridge so narrow that we had to fold in the mirrors to cross it had all of us worried about reaching our destination that night, but with the encouragement of some kids in the car behind us we overcame that obstacle, too, and soon arrived at the refugio.

How could I have doubted that a place that calls itself a refugio would take in weary travellers? Yes, they did have room for the two of us, in a six-bed dorm in which four guys were snoring quietly already, and we just had time to go through the check-in process before the generators were turned off for the night and we were left in the dark, me scrambling to climb up to the top bunk without knocking anything over and waking everybody up. Big sigh of relief!


The view I had from that top bunk the next morning made up for all the worries the night before: I was looking straight at the three "torres"  after which the park is named, glowing in the early morning sun!

One of the things I had tried to find out with my email inquiry was if there were kitchen privileges at the refugio. It turned out that there was no kitchen use available, although one could eat any or all of three daily meals prepared there. Thus we gathered our bread and cheese and palta, avocado, and had breakfast under the low-hanging branches of a small tree outside, guarded by a circle of thorny calafate bushes. An abundance of birds, from the funny, long-billed bandurria to swallows and chipping sparrows, entertained us with their morning songs, the sun was already warm, and the slightest of breezes stirred the long grass. A perfect day to go hiking up to the foot of the Torres!


Some of the men in our dorm, Americans about our age, had done the hike the day before, and we knew to expect a partly strenuous but very rewarding climb that would take us most of the day. The four of us were on our way at nine, so it would be no problem to get back when it was still light.


The path led by the fancy Las Torres hotel through fairly level terrain for a little while before it started to get steeper. A group of about twenty German tourists with walking sticks soon overtook us. Johann, who had, together with Doris, climbed Villarica volcano with a guided group the week before, showed us what he had learned about pacing oneself and conserving energy, and we made very slow but steady progress during that first ascent. I was much too excited about the wonderful flora to be much concerned with anything else on that stretch of way: there was the strange pale beauty of the Porcelain Orchid, the vivid golden calceolaria tenella, better known as slipper flower for very obvious reasons, and, weirdest of all, its cousin, the sand lady's slipper (calceolaria uniflora) that looks more like a creature with telescope eyes and a wide open mouth than a plant. It's especially funny to come upon a whole group of them: no caricature could
give a more perfect impression of a choir in action!

   

                                                                                                        

                                                                                 

After a lunch break away from the crowds gathered at Refugio Chileno we entered a beautiful old-growth lenga forest. Lenga, ñire and cohüe are the three varieties of southern beeches that can be found in Patagonia. Their leaves are much smaller than those of the European beech, and they are very slow growing, but they can get up to 800 years old. The walk through this forest with its widely spaced trees whose branches formed a closed canopy over our heads reminded me of early summer walks in the beech forests of my native Germany, the sun painting patterns on the forest floor where it was able to penetrate the green umbrella shielding us from its heat. Here, walking was easy, the soft ground under our feet a welcome change from firm rock and small rubble. Small glacier-fed creeks tumbled over rocks, sometimes disappearing underground for a while, their banks lined with moss and lush green plants.

Slowly the grade increased again, and became quite steep for the last ascent. Here, we scrambled over rocks big and small, and the sun, unfiltered by any trees since we were above the tree line now, beat down mercilessly. I was starting to feel the shortness of breath I have to contend with for the first day of strenuous hiking when we go backpacking in our Rockies in the summer, although I didn't carry even a small pack this time. It was hard work, and as always the uncertainty how far we had to go made the final leg challenging.


Looking up, we had seen a few people on a big outcrop of rock which seemed to take forever to reach, but suddenly a little army of "inukshuks" greeted us from a flat boulder, cheering us on, or so it seemed, and in less than five minutes we were gazing at the milky blue surface of a glacier lake at our feet, from whose far end the mighty towers jutted up into the almost clear sky: we had made it!

Together with about thirty other hikers, tucked in a niche between some big rocks away from the wind that had started to pick up and from most of the crowd, we enjoyed the view that presented itself to us. As always in the presence of these ancient mountain giants that have weathered so many storms, have stood silently long before any human being ever laid eyes on them, I became silent, too, and again was aware of how small and insignificant we are, swarming like ants on that mountainside, forever drawn upward to stand as close to the sky as those peaks. I had been hot on the way up, but now I was shivering, and my hands were almost numb: the wind drove the icy glacier air right at us. It was time to turn around.




Again the challenge lay in the steep section we had to traverse first. The gritty surface didn't afford much hold, and we stepped carefully, every once in awhile loosening small rock slides with our feet. Johann again led the way, and at one of the steepest sections had missed the only barely recognizable path, taking a shortcut across the scree. We had followed, not paying attention to the markers either, and I suddenly found myself slipping, looking down the steep slope at my feet and at the small figures of other hikers far below me. A brief moment of panic, but Johann's outstretched hand helped me to gain firm ground again. There had not been any real danger, but the mind sure can play strange tricks!

As usual, the descent was a lot faster than the ascent, and a lot less strenuous. Now we could enjoy the view of the valley opening up before us, the mountains on the other side, waterfalls  hanging from their sheer rock face like strings of pearls.


As long as we stayed in the shelter of the ñire forest we were protected from the wind, but on the short climb after the Refugio Chileno the wind got ever more forceful. When we turned the corner at the top it suddenly hit us so fiercely that I felt it could lift me off my feet with only a little more effort. It was an uncomfortable feeling on the narrow path, the steep mountain flank below, and I was glad that the gusts were not very frequent, and I not a featherweight. Resting for a moment to enjoy the view we noticed that the wind was playing games not only with us: a small waterfall on the opposite side of the narrow valley was turned into a “water rise”, the water actually blowing upward before falling down!

No wonder they put up warning signs like these here:

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