ADVENTURE GAME CHANGER
Banff Mountain Festival kicks off
Kit DesLauriers grew up on Long Island. She ended up skiing off the summit of Mount Everest — and the highest peaks on six other continents.
Growing up in New Zealand, Lydia Bradey was so bad at sports, she used to have anxiety attacks, anticipating sports days at her school — three months in advance.
Bradey ended up becoming the first woman, in 1988, to climb Everest alpine- style, without oxygen.
It took going up a mountain — where, on any given day you might just die — for Bradey to discover that, once you get beyond the pursuit of ribbons, medals and other shiny objects, there are, in outdoor adventures, a lifetime’s worth of precious experiences to be had.
Bradey and DesLauriers — one ( Bradey) based in New Zealand and one in Wyoming ( DesLauriers) — are both visiting Banff this week to speak at the 2015 Banff Mountain Film and Book Festival at the Banff Centre.
“It wasn’t until I went to the mountains,” says Bradey, “and realized ... the marker of ( athletic) success, when you are hiking or tramping or backpacking, as we call it, or climbing, is your experience.
“Once you’re climbing,” she says, “it starts to be summits and routes, but when I ( first) started to get into the mountains, the marker of success was ( simply the) the experience of walking along the top of a ridge, or the experience of ( seeing) a sunset from a sleeping bag.
“I found an ( athletic) medium,” she says, “in which I could access something that was physical and something in the outdoors — I wasn’t thinking it, but it found me and I grabbed hold of it and took off.”
For both women, their adventure took them to the highest peaks on the planet.
DesLauriers ascended Everest in the off- season — after monsoon season — when her expedition was the only one on the mountain.
The window for climbing was briefer and the going slower than she anticipated, requiring her and her team to spend seven weeks at deliriously high altitudes.
“It’s so high,” DesLauriers says. “It takes a long time in that time to keep yourself mentally fluid in the game — working hard towards your goal, yet ( also) practising some level of detachment, because you’re not in control of the weather or any other condition of the mountain, really.”
DesLauriers chronicles her experience climbing and skiing off the Seven Summits in Higher Love, her first book.
Nowadays, she spends as much time as she can in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska. It’s a Wi- Fi free zone she where she was camping with her adventurer husband Rob DesLauriers ( one of the pioneers of extreme skiing) and their two young daughters last summer when they spotted a grizzly coming towards the camp.
“Six of us were ( standing) shoulder to shoulder,” DesLauriers says, “banging pots and pans, blowing an air horn — and we were ready with bear spray, a .44 magnum and a rifle if that bear swam the last channel of the river and landed in our camp.
“Yet it didn’t,” she says. “We were able to stop its approach at the very last minute, by following the ( safety) protocol that we all know — but it’s a whole different game when I’ve got a six- and seven- year- old sitting behind me on their chairs.”
That said, DesLauriers says her daughters adore the Arctic as much as she does, even if they all had to leave the phones and laptops home in Wyoming.
“It was priceless that we had that interaction,” she says, “and they could see that you could move in this ( still wild) country.
“You just keep your awareness fine- tuned,” she says, “and you enjoy yourself, and you understand that you’re a visitor — and that’s a priceless experience.”
While death continues to be an occupational hazard for adventurers, despite technological advances, the possibility of it doesn’t diminish the thrill, for Bradey.
“I just loved experiences,” says Bradey. “It didn’t have to be about climbing — but the experience of staying in a house out in the woods, or the experience or climbing something, or the experience of retreating in a storm — they were experiences for me and I gathered them as enthusiastically as I may have gathered summits.”