Adventures with Dave Campbell
The year 1997 was drawing to a close and fall was darkening to winter. Dave Campbell and I’d heard there was a new M8 on the Stanley Headwall, a bolted start to the unfor med Suffer Machine. We had no idea what M-anything meant but we had to have a go at it. On a pale, cold morning we slogged up snow-covered scree to the base of the route. I craned my neck to look up at the ice missile hanging from the lip of the roof, with a line of shiny bolts leading up to it. An hour later I was 10 metres above the last one, pecking at the br ittle chandeliers. Spiralling onto the front of the dagger, I looked up at a glassy sheet easing in angle. I swung, there was a dry crack, and my world dissolved into freefall.
I bounced to a stop a bodylength from the ground. Shattered remnants of the huge dagger washed over me then all was quiet. “I’m OK! I’m OK!” I shouted, euphoric I was still alive. From out of sight on the ledge above came the groan of someone who’d just been propelled into the wall. Dave lowered me to the snow and rappelled off. We coiled ropes str ipped to the core and stumbled down toward the valley. A few hours later, we were back in the city; bruised and stiff, we struggled to get out of the car. Another adventure with Dave Campbell had come to an unlikely happy end.
I first met Campbell in the mid-’ 90s at the Calgary mec in one of its earlier, smaller incarnations. He worked at the store and I haunted it in search of climbing gear and partners. At this point I’d been ice climbing for a couple of years; Campbell, with first ascents like the striking emf above the remote Elk Lakes to his credit, was a veteran by comparison. These were the early days of “modern” mixed climbing, by which I mean scratching up snowy rock for its own sake, rather than to get up a peak. Campbell and I were keen practitioners of that strange new discipline, and in our zeal committed some bizarre transgressions.
The first snowfall had blanketed the bony limestone spines of Kananaskis Country and we raced west to the hills to look for fresh ice. A climbing day with Campbell always started with a stop at a doughnut shop. A dutchie for him and an apple fritter for me, and we’d hit the darkened Trans-Canada. Highway 40 over Highwood Pass wasn’t closed for the winter yet, and we parked where Opal Creek flows under the road. Peering up the drainage between tall, dark pines, we could just glimpse water launching itself over a cliff where Whiteman Falls should’ve stood. We were young and not yet easily deterred by reality. We shouldered the packs and boulder-hopped up the creek. An hour later we were back at the car; the approach pitch was still a waterfall, merely edged by a decorative lace of ice.
We couldn’t bear to return to the city without at least dulling our picks. As the sun broke through the clouds and the previous night’s snow turned into wet streaks, we stepped into our crampons – may rock climbers forgive us – below Wasootch Slabs. Have you ever tr ied slab climbing with ice climbing gear? It’s truly a dark art. We quickly discovered that rock-climbing grades are no indication of drytooling difficulty. We strolled up a steep, pick-swallowing 5.9 crack, but never did puzzle out the adjacent 5.6 slab.
The lessons learned at Wasootch paid off just a few days later on Shampoo Planet, a tricky mixed route above the Banff golf course. Arriving at the base we found the climb occupied, the leader laboriously aiding up the notorious (or so it was back then) first pitch. With an icy corner on the left and a featureless slab on the right, it was rumoured some people resorted to wearing a rock shoe on the right foot to provide a modicum of friction. After a couple of hours the team ahead of us got up the pitch. Campbell and I took off, lie-backing the corner crack and pasting our Footfangs confidently on the smooth limestone. After the impossible 5.6 at Wasootch, the crux of Shampoo Planet seemed ridiculously easy. The other two watched wide-eyed as we made short work of what had taken them hours to climb.
But Campbell’s creativity wasn’t limited to finding novel uses for picks and frontpoints. Working at mec when ice climbers still encased themselves in three-ply Gore-Tex ar mour, he started a small company that made softshell clothing. On early tr ips to Colorado, while figure-four ing in Vail and competing in Ouray, I wore a navy Schoeller ensemble with the distinctive swirl of Wicked Gravity. The clothing line soon died, but the logo lived on above Campbell’s shop of the same name. I was skeptical when he left mec and opened a small climbing store in Calgary’s rundownyet-hip Bowness. How could he hope to compete against a nationwide chain? Campbell didn’t str ive for mass appeal; Wicked Gravity survived by attracting a small but loyal following.
It was in his shop that we experimented with yet another mixed climbing innovation. We were attempting ever-harder M-grades and pull-ups only got us so far; we needed more specificity in our training. What better place to get it than on the small climbing wall in the back of Wicked Gravity? I was near the top of the wall, contorted in a figurefour and reaching for the finishing jug, when the hold spun. I had no time to react before I hit the ground – hard.We used crash pads after that.
As I wrote this, Campbell and I hadn’t shared a rope in over a decade. Our worlds diverged: while I grew ever more obsessed with climbing, Campbell expanded his interests. Still, whenever I was in Bowness, I’d drop by Wicked Gravity for a chat. His fr iendly, slightly squeaky “Hello” always made me smile.
This February Campbell died of a freak heart attack. He was 47. The Bow Valley climbing community lost a good, quiet man. For a self-centered, goal-dr iven individual, such as myself, Campbell was an inspiration. He ran a successful business without becoming consumed by work; in climbing, companionship mattered to him more than ticking off routes. His memorial on a cold Saturday night showed just how many fr iends he’d made along the way. I left the gather ing with a hold from Wicked Gravity’s climbing wall engraved by the pick of an ice tool, a memento of Dave and a joyful piece of my youth that’s been irretr ievably lost. I will miss him.