Northern Exposures

When I was an early adolescent and my climbing dreams and desires were starting to take shape, my brother and our friends would frequent the river valley and climb its steep eroded banks in winter. We imitated the legends, used a combination of geology hammers, hardware store ropes and long wood screws hammered into frozen soil, our toes wooden in the - 30 C temperatures. As knowledge increased, we moved to city bridges of cobblestone and concrete and any other climbable structures we could find and soon began our first forays onto real rock, snow and ice. It was a magical time, a mix of fantasy and reality and heroic crazy deeds coupled with the usual way finding challenges of life, of first love and all we gain and lose as we move into young adulthood. Regardless of any “authentic and serious” climbing I came to do in later years, those were the days that arguably contain the richest memories.

And so it was with surprise, nostalgia and, ultimately, admiration that I read A Youth Wasted Climbing, the new book by David Chaundy-Smart. As someone who spent a good deal of his youth and adult life focused on climbing (“wasting his life” was more the sentiment of counsellors and teachers), Chaundy-Smart has the credentials to explore the terrain. As climbing historian Chic Scott writes, “David and his brother Reg were the leading figures of the Ontario rock climbing scene throughout the 1980s.” He would climb a lot over the years throughout North America, build a reputation, author guidebooks and later co-founded Gripped magazine. As a skilled writer, I suspect he could have produced a pretty interesting book just about the totality of his experiences. But instead, Chaundy-Smart gives us a selected personal archeology that takes slices through just the right moments in time. This is a book about adventures in coming-of-age, fighting suburban boredom in Ontario during the mid-late 1970s and how it leads to the growth of a climber, of character. The two are interwoven. At one point in the book he says, looking back, “I realize that it isn’t the cliffs but my life that would lack form if I gave up my history as a climber.”

By focusing on those earliest experiences of an isolated youth – the scrappy crags of Mount Nemo, the Niagara Escarpment, then Yosemite and the Gunks – Chaundy-Smart shows us where the rocks and boulders were in the river of his life: the people, the moments, the climbs, the losses that parted the current slightly before they happened and forever afterwards. He spends not so much time talking about every detail of the climbs. That is simply history, so instead he focuses on the important stuff. We see the seeds of character and longing, we see the fabric of family and society and how it leads us for better or worse to the people we become.

With a style that is modest, elegant and ref lective, yet never wallows in nostalgia, A Youth Wasted Climbing is a wonderful read. There are pages that will make you laugh and chuckle and some that will make you a bit teary-eyed. David Chaundy-Smart has taken us on a journey into his life, capturing those things that have the most impact and always managing to draw them into an overall plot line. In the 1980s, he put up difficult climbs; with this book he makes similarly bold and creative moves on paper. In both cases, he has set the bar high.– Jon Popowich