Notes from the Top
Nemesis and Tokkum Pole
Two Kootenay Classics
It wasn’t my first time up either of these classics, so it was a reminder that no matter how good you think you are, things can still go very badly. Highway 93 south connects Castle Junction on the Trans Canada Highway west of Banff with Radium Hotsprings south of Golden, B.C. The road is busy in summer with climbers from Alberta travelling to destinations like the Bugaboos, Lakit Lake of the cliffs around Nelson. In winter, however, climbers often don’t venture too far beyond the Alberta/b.c. border to find climbing adventures.
From Storm Creek to Haffner Canyon, there are hundreds of pitches of world-class ice and mixed climbing, but perhaps two of the most sought-after routes are Nemesis and Tokkum Pole. They are steep, challenging, cold and have been the scenes of countless painful mid-winter ascents. My first climb up Nemesis was in 2004, it couldn’t have gone smoother. My partner and I were fit and the route was in picked-out early-spring shape. The biggest challenge was finding fresh ice that wasn’t filled with screw holes to protect ourselves. The same can be said for Tokkum Pole, which I climbed with little dram that same year.
Every time I’ve visited both of these routes since my first lap, however, myself and my partners have suffered the nearly the worst of what the mountains can throw at you. My next trip to Nemesis was in 2007, I was taking my visiting friend up to experience one of the “easier” WI6 classics in the Rockies. Other routes at the grade, like Curtain Call and Pilsner Pillar, were hardly formed and looked dangerous to climb.
At the base of Nemesis, I offered to take the first lead. The ice was brittle. It was mid-february after all, and there was little evidence anyone had climbed it recently. You see, back then, climbers used online forums to talk about ice conditions and after everything was formed, little chatter took place. Unlike nowadays, when there seems to be constant photo updates of ice conditions on Facebook
and Instagram, inspiring others to repeat the route. I should have known Nemesis was going to be challenging based on the lack of any trail into the base. The first pitch was brittle and more than once I bashed my knuckle off an ice bulge. I hadn’t upgraded to more aggressive ice tools yet and was still clipping in with leashes.
After my partner led the second pitch, I started up. Their hour-long lead left me standing on a ledge bombarded by spindrift until I could no longer see my feet. After the first few swings, it struck: the screaming barfies. I’d had them many times before (having started my ice career in northwest Ontario in -45 C) but something felt different. I yelled up, “Dude, take me tight.” He yelled down, “What the?” I clipped directly into an ice screw to not weight his anchor. For the next 15 minutes I hung, suspended above a small ice roof, my leashes still bound to my wrists, with my iced-up hands firmly stuffed beneath my arm pits as I squeezed inward. It felt like an eternity. I put my hood up and screamed into my chest; spindrift muffling the noise. I could hardly squeeze my ice tool. It was the worst case of screaming barfies I’d had up until then. We bailed.
The next winter, I returned to Tokkum Pole with a group of friends. The route is found below ground, in Marble Canyon, a one-of-a-kind feature in the Canadian Rockies. The canyon was carved by Tokkum Creek and is a popular tourist stop. The edges of the canyon were once lush forests, but a fire in 2008 left a barren landscape. There are a number of climbs in the canyon, but Tokkum Pole is the best and most impressive. The 40-metre WI5+ offers a number of lines that you climb while standing next to the cascading river at the bottom of the narrow cleft. The climb is hard to assess unless you rappel in to the base, which is what we did.
On the way down, we noticed there was some freshly formed daggers and old ice screw holes had started to fill with ice. Once at the base, we found big pools of open water downstream, so we were sure to keep our ropes high and dry. On my previous visit, I had toproped the route, which most climbers do because it’s much easier to exit at the end of the day. The ice doesn’t reach the top of the canyon, so there are some mandatory mixed moves. But we pulled the ropes so I could lead up to the top of the ice and we could rappel from their and exit via the WI3 exit ice ramp west of the main falls.
Less than 10 metres up my lead and I encountered steep and brittle ice that was dinner-plating. I was using dull picks on my ice tools, a mistake that worsened the dinner-plating. Not long after I sunk my second screw did a small sheet of ice break free, skip off my right hand and slice my forehead above my right eye. The ensuing injury sent blood into my eye and down my cheek. It was too much of cut than I cared to push on with. I bailed off my screw and we hurried out the exit ice and back to town for stitches.
No matter how good you think you are, ice climbing is dangerous and every trip out presents hazards and situations that could send you home early. I’ve found many over the years, but the ones on Nemesis and Tokkum Pole are two of my most memorable.—bp