Sharon Wood: Canadian Alpinist
Canmore’s Sharon Wood was the first North American woman to climb Everest and her climbing journey before and after has been rich, diverse and full of lessons for living
In1985, Canmore’s Sharon Wood and her partner, American alpinist Carlos Buhler, planned what she called “a practice joust” in Peru’s Cordillera Blanca to prepare her for a fast and light ascent of Mount Everest. For the first eight weeks, however, bad weather blocked their attempts on every peak they tried.
Finally, on Wood’s suggestion, they decided on the unclimbed east face of Cerro Huascaran (6,768 m). The climb was hard, but went well until, on the third day on the route, Wood was struck by a rock which broke her shoulder.
“This,” she wrote, “must be what it feels like to get shot.”
The pain was excruciating, but instead of thinking about retreat, which would have been a multi-day epic of its own, she felt, in her own words, “fully extended and alive, where the only option is to start moving.” The climb lasted another two and a half days, with tiny bivouac sites separated by steep and difficult climbing that she got through with “painkillers and denial.”
The thought that it was a rehearsal for Everest helped her to keep going. “I have to be ready,” she later wrote. “Climbing a new route on Huascaran is essential to earning my place on the team. There was no one I needed to prove this to more than than myself. Only Huascaran can resolve my doubts.”
What makes the kind of climbers who can endure barely survivable conditions? Is it bred in the bone? Are there signs of it at an early age? In some ways, Wood’s journey to the mountains began in her difficult school years, not because she discovered climbing then, but because she discovered the inner qualities that would lead her, one day, to the mountains.
She was good at sports at school, and quick to be chosen for any team. While at high school in Burnaby, B.C., she was a promising athlete on the track team. Team politics, however, soon turned Wood off athletics. As for school, she said “I didn’t fit in, I didn’t conform to the social mores of 3,000 teenagers crammed into the same school, and the teachers were burnt out. It seemed like a waste of time.” She was attracted to the misfits and the kind of kids who were wild inside and out. She was expelled for skipping class and, in her own words, “made her own rules.” These allowed for some petty crime, shoplifting and minor drug peddling.
“I could feel the thrill of breaking rules,” Wood says. “I would sashay out of stores like I belonged there, even though I had shoplifted something. I liked the buzz, the boldness.”
Unfortunately, she was eventually caught in the act with a friend who was innocent, but the police took them both to the station. She was sent to a juvenile holding centre. Her mother considered leaving her there overnight to teach her a lesson, but was convinced by an official from the centre that her daughter didn’t belong there.
Things, however, still weren’t quite right. “That same summer,” she says, “I had a bad acid trip and called my mother to get me. I could not stop hallucinating. After that, I began to see a pattern in myself. When you’re working at your edge, sometimes it takes something to get you away from it. If I spent too long in that zone, I’d be dead or a criminal.”
After that, she knew she had to find another place to be. She left school for the Rockies, a place Wood had idealized in her mind after family ski trips. On a rainy day, her mother drove her down to the highway to hitch a ride. She tried one last time to talk her out of leaving, but Wood was adamant.
In Jasper, Wood walked into the employment office and said she wanted to be a mountain guide. The closest thing they had was tour boat guide at Maligne Lake, but you had to be 18. “I lied, and said I was 18,” says Wood, “and that my ID had been stolen. I lost two years of my life, but I got the job, lived at Maligne Lake and became known as an 18-year-old. The winter of my 16th year, I got a job in a bar.”
She lived the life of a ski bum, skiing harder and harder on steep terrain in the winter and hiking in the alpine in the summer. She had seen climbers on The Chief in Squamish on family trips to Whistler, and when she saw climbers in the Rockies, she was intrigued. In her first summer in Jasper, she took a rock climbing course from Hans Schwartz, the ski patrol director. She was
hooked and mail-ordered pitons, bongs, nuts and a Whillans harness and dragged her friends to the cliffs. She taught herself how to lead from Royal Robbins’s Basic Rockcraft. At an Outward Bound course in Keremeos in 1974, a climber named Laurie Skreslet was her instructor and her first contact with the serious Rockies climbing scene.
“Immediately, I saw a strength of character in Laurie, compared to other instructors,” says Wood. “He took me and one other girl climbing. It was just as if he was showing us a home he was proud of. I found my tribe and had seen what I wanted to be when I grew up.”
In the summer of 1977, Wood got a job at Camp Chief Hector as a rock climbing and hiking instructor-in-training. There she started a lifelong association with other counsellors and instructors who would go on to transform Canadian mountaineering, including John Lauchlan, Chris Miller, Brenda Critcheley, Jim Elzinga, Dave Mcnab, Dwayne Congdon, Marni Virtue and Dave Dornian.
In the late 1970s Wood started hanging around with the Calgary Mountain Club, the mix of hard-core British expats and upand-coming Canadian-born climbers who climbed hard on the weekend and met to drink hard at the Cecil Hotel on Wednesday nights. “I was never much of a drinker,” says Wood, “but I was attracted to how intensely and fully they lived, and I wanted to live that way, too.” Chic Scott, Urs Kallen, Lloyd Mckay and Bugs Mckeith were just a few of the old school climbers in the club. Young guns Jim Elzinga, John Lauchlan, among others, were collectively called the Boys’ Choir, in mock derision.
When Camp Chief Hector closed every fall, the crew of instructors were out of work. “We thought we could teach climbing yearround,” says Wood, “so we started running our own courses. At first it seemed we were just one step ahead of whatever skill set we were teaching.” That was the humble beginning of the Yamnuska Mountain School, now known as Yamnuska Mountain Adventures.
In 1977, she climbed the West Peak of Mount Logan via the King’s Trench with a women’s team. They made the summit, but she realized that she didn’t want to choose her climbing partners purely on the basis of their gender, but on the basis of compatibility, drive and proficiency. She turned 20 on that trip.
John Lauchlan, the outstanding Canadian climber of the era, was a mentor, and they were romantically involved for a time. “I learned some of what Lauchlan had by climbing with him,” says Wood. “He was motivated to be the best and had a meticulous approach to his clothing and gear.”
Tragically, Lauchlan fell to his death in 1982 while soloing Polar Circus, a 700-metre WI5 ice climb in the Rockies, at the time, one of the hardest ice routes in the world. The loss rocked the climbing community but Wood told herself in that denial typical to an ambitious 20-something-year-old, “It wasn’t going to happen to me. Most significant though was the way I saw John’s life as an example of living big. I asked myself, if I died today would I have felt I had lived life to the max like he had, and the answer was no. I wanted to be as committed and live as fully as John.”
If anything, she became more determined, in her words, “to step out into the lead. I would rarely step down.”
“I also realized,” says Wood, “it was way better to have guys you climb with not be your boyfriend. It was way easier without the emotional dynamic.”
Wood didn’t just climb with the male climbers she knew, she grew up with them, working, training and enduring guide certification courses together. “We were all treated equally badly on those courses and exams,” she recalls, half-jokingly.
She started ice climbing, not just as an end in itself, but in the hope that it would allow her to take on more technical routes at altitude. She also wanted big wall experience to increase the scope of her skills. To call her approach focused and intense is an understatement. While fixing to Sickle Ledge on The Nose in 1979 with Albi Sole, Wood took a lead fall: “I grabbed a fixed 9 mm rope on the way down and didn’t let go until I could smell my skin burning. Rather than miss out on climbing El Cap, I slathered Polysporin on my hands and wrapped them in tape. That would last the three days it took for us to top out.”
In 1982, she put the love of altitude and her burgeoning technical skills together in an ascent of the Cassin Ridge on Denali with Greg Cronn, a colleague from Yamnuska Mountain School. From then on, she focused on more technical routes on big peaks. “I loved the problem-solving,” she says – inspired by a necessity to be impeccably economical with strength and energy. I had to be scientific about getting the clothing and gear right, and strategic with the route-finding to do things light and fast. I loved the mastery, which was slowly evolving. I had just been dabbling until the Cassin.”
In 1984, she joined a five-person attempt on the West Ridge of Makalu led by Carlos Buhler. “I reached 26,000 feet,” says Wood, “carrying a load without supplementary oxygen over technical ground or knowing if I could spend the night at that altitude. I was thrilled to have had the experience.” It was also important experience for fellow Canadians Albi Sole and Dwayne Congdon. Buhler and Congdon climbed within 100 metres of the summit.
“I earned a reputation for doing well at altitude,” says Wood, “I was very strategic about movement and I tweaked every detail in order not to just survive, but thrive up there. I had some advantages. I could eat, for instance, when others couldn’t. Altitude was the great equalizer – it was a crap shoot when it came to who did well and who didn’t. Some climbers, despite being physically stronger than me, weren’t so lucky. And like many of my teammates, we cut our teeth on Yamnuska, which was a no-fall zone [because of the quality of the rock], and in the Andes or Alaska, the rock was better than it was on
Yamnuska on the technical pitches.”
As Wood progressed, she became more proficient, but also more interested in performance than ambitious to be fearless. “I used to have a motorcycle,” she says, “Super fast and powerful. I tricked it out to ride long distances. I was trying to live life intensely, even when I travelled from A to B. I used to take corners at double the speed limit. I had close calls but no mishaps, but when a friend was killed on a bike after the Cassin Ridge, I sold my bike to improve my odds of survival. I was mostly alone on the bike, but once I took a friend to Yosemite on it. I was a ruthless friend – I dumped her after a week for a partner who climbed harder and to help further my goals. Selfish is another way of putting it.”
In 1986, Wood joined the Canadian Light Everest Expedition to climb a new route – the West Ridge Direct from Tibet. The leader, Jim Elzinga, a native Albertan with considerable expedition experience, handpicked 12 of Alberta’s best alpinists based on their track record as team players and their commitment to a bold vision. Running with the best and climbing with her peers was Wood’s primary motivation. Some of Wood’s oldest climbing partners and colleagues, James Blench, Albi Sole, Laurie Skreslet, Dwayne Congdon, Dave Mcnab and Barry Blanchard, as well as admired peers, Kevin Doyle, Chris Shank and Dan Griffith would come along. Jane Fearing came as basecamp cook and Dr. Robert Lee as the team doctor. The decision would call all Wood’s skills into play and lead to the defining moment of her climbing career.
Everest was still a mountain reserved for elite alpinists. It was very different than the commercial circus it has become. In 1984, only 17 climbers had made it to the summit. In 1985, 29 had summited.
Progress was slow, since the Canadians had no Sherpas to carry loads and would only end up using oxygen on their summit bid. They had arrived on March 19 and spent over 60 days fixing ropes, establishing camps and carrying loads. The winds were so strong that they blew 200 lb. Jim Elzinga off the mountain; luckily, he was caught by an anchor.
There were only two other teams at basecamp with the Canadians, one from Spain and one from the U.S. American Annie Whitehouse and Wood were the only female climbers on their respective teams. Women on Himalayan expeditions were still a novelty and thus open to undue scrutiny from the media. Although Wood was accepted as an equal by
the men on her team, being a woman opened her up to sexism by the press. Her ex-boyfriend, Carlos Buhler, was on the American team and he was now in a relationship with Whitehouse, who was also a member of his team. Some newspapers ran headline stories on competition between Whitehouse and Wood.
On May 24, Wood and Congdon were finally in a position to attempt the summit. They started unroped up the Hornbein Couloir, where the year before, two Australian climbers had fallen to their death. For speed, they continued unroped, even through the difficult section known as the Narrows. After a snow slope above, the reached the final obstacle, a rock wall known as the Yellow Band, 120 metres of difficult mixed climbing protected by the odd soft steel piton left by the Americans who made the first ascent of the West Ridge in 1963.
They left a rope in place to expedite their descent and kept slogging up the snow slope above toward the top. They reached the summit at 9 p.m. “I hold up one flag after another,” says Wood, “Canada’s, China’s, our sponsors’.” In a picture in which Wood became known to the whole world, she sits on her pack and waves a mittened hand in the last sunlight of the day. She is smiling but she was unsure of whether they would survive the nighttime descent to Camp Six. It is truly one of the iconic images of Canadian climbing and a haunting reminder of what Everest once was. The summit is deserted, except for the two alpinists who had just reached it by a hard new route – the only successful ascent via
any route that pre-monsoon season of 1986.
Exhausted and suffering from hypoxia, they made it back to Camp Six. Just when they thought they were safe, however, their stove blew up. “What irony,” says Wood. “We’ve made it all the way to the top and all the way back to Camp Six to die in a fire.” Over the next 24 hours, they descended 3,000 metres, with the help of Laurie Skreslet, Albi Sole and the rest of the team. Other than Congdon’s and Wood’s superficial frostbite, her scorched eyelids and eyelashes and a few less brains cells, they were all right.
They had made their climb in what Wood calls “the ultimate of fast and light – night naked style.”
That was the pinnacle of Wood’s career as an alpinist. It was, however, a disappointment for climbers on the expedition who wanted to attempt the summit. There would be rewards, but at first, she was preoccupied with guilt about her teammates’ lost shot at the summit and having split up with Congdon on the descent.
In her own mind, Wood’s success on Everest created a gap between herself and the other climbers on the expedition who were some of her oldest friends. Soon after she got down, she had moved on to thinking about her next climbing goal: crag climbing on warm rock. For her team, however, the trip didn’t provide much closure in their Himalayan dreams. Before she even left basecamp, Barry Blanchard asked her if she would like to climb Nanga Parbat with him and Albi Sole the next year.
On her return to Canada, a new kind of fame and public attention awaited her, mostly as the first North American woman to summit Everest, rather than for what her ascent of the mountain said about her character and alpinism. She received so much attention that it was difficult to decompress from her trip. Other team members were not given the same treatment, which, from a climbing point of view, was unfair, but from the point of view of the mainstream media, was to be expected. A new career in public speaking awaited her.
In 1987, she climbed the difficult Paragot route on the north face of Huascaran in the Peruvian Andes with James Blench. Four days before the end of the climb, she was struck on the helmet by a falling rock and temporarily disoriented. For the rest of the climb, she was distracted and nervous. It was to be her last major alpine route.
In 1989, her first child, Robin, was born, and two months afterwards, she soloed Cascade falls, a 300-metre moderate ice route in the Rockies. Having climbed the route dozens of times, she started out with her tools in her holsters, using only her crampons to ascend the lower angle ice to “get her feet on” before reaching the steeper ice. Wood slipped and fell five metres before stopping on a ledge. Despite having suffered a separated shoulder, she considered herself lucky. If she were any higher on the climb, the same mistake could have been fatal. The near-miss was a game-changer for Wood. Despite her years of winning at the game of high-stakes risks, bad-luck and even death were still possibilities
Motherhood and the most recent near-miss lowered Wood’s risk threshold considerably. She had the choice of continuing to climb less-demanding routes or giving up. “My partner and friend, Barb Clemes, had started easing out of climbing,” says Wood. “She quit ice climbing before me. I had other friends who had moved on as well. I went through an uncomfortable stage, when I wondered whether I was a climber or not anymore. For me, it was too much a part of my life to let go. I was still tied to that world. I had to reframe my perspective on climbing as something I simply loved to do instead of seeing climbing as my identity, which in the long run was a healthy.”
In 1992, Wood’s second child, Daniel, was born. In 1993,
when Robin had trouble learning in the public school system in Canmore, Wood started Mountain Gate Community School. “It was the first project outside of climbing to light a fire in my belly. At the time, Robin did not adapt well to the school. I went to a school board meeting to check out what was happening, and what I saw was cut backs and reaction, and I wanted to have a more proactive model. So, me and a group of like-minded parents started our own.”
Between her new career as a public speaker and the school, Wood says, “I realized that I wasn’t going to see regular improvements in my climbing.”
Twelve years later, she’s still climbing. “I still absolutely climb a lot,” says Wood. “I’m more laid back. I’m not climbing as hard, and I have lower risk threshold on the rock. I love the feeling of knowing that I can still move. It’s a craft and a puzzle, if it’s 5.4 or a Grade VI. I love the companionship, intensity, constantly making decisions. For now, I’m not super into sport climbing. I don’t work routes. The hardest I ever flashed is 5.11d. I’m very content on 5.10.”
Wood wasn’t overly eager to get a book out after Everest, partly because she wanted to take her time with the process of writing. The world’s patience paid off when Rising (Douglas & Mcintyre, 2018), a frank and exciting account of what it was like to be one of the leading women alpinists of the 1980s, came out. “It’s about the human condition,” says Wood, and it is, but it is also a record of what Everest was like before commercialization.
“I’ve had a lot to say about that,” says Wood, although much of it is beyond the scope of her book. “The mountain has been desecrated through commercialism, reality TV, circus acts. The problem I have now is that people on Everest are mostly inexperienced. Get experience and put in the time, so you can climb without endangering other peoples’ lives.”
Wood, however, does not want to come across as putting even the hordes on Everest down. She has come a long way since the days she was known for intensity, drive and expecting the most of herself and her partners. “I was intense,” she says. “My old friends tell me I am much less intense now – nicer even.”—ds
I was very strategic about movement and I tweaked every detail in order not to just survive, but thrive up there. I had some advantages. I could eat, for instance, when others couldn’t. Altitude was the great equalizer – it was a crap shoot when it came to who did well and who didn’t.