Except it had dumped snow overnight. There’s no appreciable avi hazard above the route, so it should’ve been fine. But then at the bottom of the route we watched two big sluffs come down off the face beside it, the powder clouds wafting over us. And then as I walked up to the base of the first pitch, a 5m wide sluff came down the middle of the route. I convinced myself that was great, it had just cleaned the snow accumulation off the route.

But then I was a pitch up and Katherine was calling a heads up. I shifted my focus from placing and clipping a screw to the route above me in time to see the powder cloud of a big sluff bearing down on me. I sucked in to the ice as the snow rushed over me, momentarily struggling to draw breath from the snow saturated air.

What the fuck am I doing here?

As the air cleared I went to hastily clip my momentarily forgotten screw but no slack came, Katherine just yelled at me to hold. A shoulder check at my climbing partner showed me that while I had avoided the worst of it, Katherine, in her exposed belay stance was nearly getting knocked over by the air and snow rushing past her – she simply couldn’t feed me slack for my clip while maintaining her balance. These are not small sluffs. These are getting big. Seriously, what the fuck am I doing here?

We’d chosen a hilarious conservative line in light of the cold temperatures (-25oC overnight) having made ice brittle and the significant avi danger due to the fresh snow. Conditions were tough, but we’d make it work. Who’s ever heard of avi danger up Evan Thomas? We saw the sluffs and we kept going – it’s just sluff, it’s loose, not deep enough to bury us. Being primarily a skier, I barely think about sluff, you just pull to the side and let it wash by when it gets bad. But ice? I can’t get out of the way, I’m committed to a line. What are the odds of one coming right down on top of us when that line had already gone? Hazard cleared right? We can manage this. Soft people spend the day in the city when conditions aren’t ideal. Real mountaineers mange the hazards and make shit work.

As mountaineers, the name of the game is moving through terrain that necessitates significant technical skill and experience to survive. It’s part of the fun. It’s liberating to realize that you can get dumped in the middle of nowhere in the mountains and with a pack of gear you’ll just make shit work.