Announcing Two New Sponsors

With only 42 days before I embark on the World's Toughest Boat Race, I am proud to announce that Spirit West Outdoor And Adventure Store has agreed to become an official sponsor of Team Chinook. Spirit West is a store specializing in outdoor adventure and are one of the largest carriers of Mammut and Navarro in Calgary as well as in-store outdoor books and maps. Spirit West will be contributing specifically designed and measured dry-bags that will be function as a back-pack. Having looked at the prototype, these bags will be fast to put on and fast to take off and will benefit in long portages by removing weight from the canoe. The padded straps and adjustible hip belt will provide stability when running with a canoe overhead. Created from a lighter-weight rugged vinyl, these dry-bags will be able to withstand scraping, pulling, and tugging that foliage of rough portages can provide.

They will also be providing lightweight, gusseted, fast drying white leggings that we will wear during the race. These leggings will be made of a high-performance microfibre-polyester material and will prevent sun-burns. The colour will provide a cooling effect as light will be reflected as opposed to absorbed by the fabric and the fast dry-ing action/fast wicking, will ensure that we remain comfortable. The gusset will provide a more natural fit and will help increase mobility when we are on land.

Spirit West is responsible for presenting the Calgary Outdoor Festival as well as providing an online community for adventurers and outdoor enthusiasts. Although mainly local to Calgary and Southern Alberta, Outdoorspirit.ca site provides blogs, forums, user-entered trail reports as well as an online gear swap.

I am also pleased to announce that Out There has agreed to help Team Chinook. They have donated two Thermarest Neo-Air sleeping pads to minimize weight and bulk during the race. The Neo-Air is the world's lightest sleeping pad available (weighing just 14 oz while being 2.5 in thick). The patent-pending internal triangular core matrix creates an internal truss system that produces the most stable inflatable mattress allowing you to sleep on uneven terrain and not be kept awake by twigs and little stones. When we are done our few short naps, the Neo-Air will pack down to the size of a 1L (1 quart) water bottle an be virtually invisible while canoeing.

Started by Jamie Clarke (Professional Adventurer and Everest Summiter) Out There has grown to have the largest selection of the premier outdoor brands such as Arc'Teryx, North Face and Mountain Hardwear in Calgary. It is also the home of liveoutthere.com, a growing online community of avid adventurers from around the world providing live updates, stories, photo albums and videos of their travels via integrated twitter, facebook and login features as well as soon to come gear reviews and contests.

I would ask everybody to check out the two communities that these companies offer and if you are ever in Calgary and need gear. These two stores come highly recommended from me for their levels of professionalism and quality of gear.

42 days until the start of the 2010 Texas Water Safari.

A Tale Of Two Practices

The past two practices were met with varying degrees of success. Our April 11th training run was supposed to take us 40 km (25 mi) from Ghost Dam to Bowness Park in Calgary. This is a fast moving river with currents in some places as fast as 4kph (2.5 mph) and involves a few ripples, a small step and a fun small class II wavetrain. In fact it is this little class II that made us decide to run this section - we plan to run the slipway at the Rio Vista dam along the race. Its a place where a vast majority of boats that attmpt to run, flip.

The day started off as any early April day in Southern Alberta would. A nippy -5C (23F) morning greeted us. By the time we reached Cochrane the temp had warmed up to a balmy -2C (28.5F). Donning an extra layer of leggings and a chillguard we portaged the canoe down the old washed out road, dropping about 35m (115 ft) over a distance of about 500m (1650 ft). When we put the canoe in the little bay beside the dams outlet, there was still ice on the surface of the water (due to it being standing water) and the water temperature being a fraction of a degree above freezing. As we pushed out - breaking ice like an arctic icebreaker) the sun decided to pay us a visit, and soon we reached the high of 4C (39.2F) that was being called for. Unfortunately this didn't last long. Within 8km (5mi) the temperature dropped back below freezing, the sun disappeared and the winds from the rockies was beginning to bear down on usm magnified by the river valley.

Having run every wave train, both Tyler and I were soaked. Within 5km (3.1mi) from Cochrane (the half-way point) headwinds were in around the 30kph (18.5 mph) and the temperature without windchill had dipped to -9C (15.8F), wind generated whitecaps all around us. When using a windchill calculator those conditions equate to a temperature of -19C (-2F) - severe hypothermia conditions. We decided with reason this time and pulled out in Cochrane, cold, wet without a ride and still 22km (13.5mi) short of our original goal of Calgary. Suffice it to say, we didn't finish this leg, we chalked it up to resostence training in the wind and the asked ourselves this one question: We have to go to Texas and race in there hot conditions..but how would a Texan or Belizan coming to Canada deal with our paddling conditions for a race? That's some food for thought.

Now fast forward to this past weekend. Having been shut-down early the previous run, Tyler and I decided to make this practice count. we had only done 45km (28 mi) in the previous two runs combined and we knew we were nearly 2 months behind on other teams, so we decided to make a run from Content Bridge to Drumheller - a total distance of 122km (76mi). Having never run this section of the river and having temperatures predicted to be in the 20C (68F) range, we allotted ourselves 17 hours to finish, meaning we would have to travel an average of 7.2 kph (4.4 mph), something that should be attainable on a river flowing about 1.7kph (1 mph).

Again as we woke up, had breakfast and took the 40 minute drive to the put-in we were greeted with a brisk -1C (35F), but with no cloud in the sky and no frontal movement, we knew it was going to get much warmer. Into the water at 8:30 and we were on our way, along a route that would take us from the aspen forests to the heart of the Canadian Badlands. This trip also provided us an opportunity to try out or TWS diet: Boost Meal Replacements, Nuun Electrolyte Tablets and misc. bars and jerky, the Nuun tablets proved to be key to replenish and keep us hydrated. The Red Deer River here is fairly wide, shallow and slow moving, except in a few places where the gradient steepens and the one short class II, from what I understand its similar to the Guadelupe (minus the shallowness). As we entered the Badlands we felt compelled to pull out and have a snack amongst the coulees, hoodoos and other badland terrain, and under the early spring desert sun. We also decided to rig up or lighting system for the night part of the paddle, which consisted of two 6-volt I-Beams...which without going into too much detail, failed about 4 hours after being turned on. So our night navigation was put to use - back to the drawing board on that configuration. The night wnet fairly uneventful, we paddled 95km (60km) before nightfall then another 27km (16 mi) at night. We ended up pulling into Drumheller 16 hours and 16 minutes of paddling time after we started.

Being the first long run of the season and equal to 2/7ths (28%) the Texas Water Safari, we were happy with our finishing time, but we also both recognized that we could probably shave an hour off that time with slightly more efficiency, but that is what practicing is about. I ended up sleeping about 2 hours after getting out of the boat and going to bed at 10:00PM Sunday.

Stay tuned as this is going to be a busy week, I'll not be practicing this weekend as its my Anniversary, but the weekend following we are planning a 200km (125mi) trial run.

GO TEAM CHINOOK!!!

Official Team Chinook Home

As of today this blog is temporarily turning into the official home of Team Chinook on the internet, this doesn't mean there will be won't be more updates on facebook, on the contrary, facebook will still play an important role for keeping people updated. This blog will link all three forms of our media together (facebook, twitter and blog). It will form the backbone of our attempt to finish the "World's Toughest Boat Race" providing a singular place to follow real time updates during the race from the water and from the shore, follow our practices and learn more about the team, our preparation and our fundraising attempts. You'll also find a new twitter update on our right hand menu. This will keep you abreast of small updates, mostly sent remote from the field or just Out There.

In recent team news, we unveiled our team t-shirts yesterday. These shirts are available for anybody that wants to purchase them, the proceeds for these shirts go to help us cover some of the costs of getting to Texas and purchasing some new gear that is needed to participate. The shirts are pre-shrunk cotton and are available for $20 each. They are available in sizes S-XL. To the right is a view of the shirt displaying our logo and the following below the logo. HONORARY MEMBER 2010 texas water safari. If interested in buying one please e-mail cfac2010@yahoo.ca

Keep visiting for updates and sending e-mails with questions, this site is about to get much more active as training becomes more intense and frequent.

Dry Training Coming To An End

With scrambling and mountaineering shelved until early July, today marked the true end of the dry-land training. Tyler and I went out for a short 16-mile (27 kilometre) jaunt on the Red Deer River. Our put-in was Three Mile Bend in Red Deer and out pull-out was at Canyon Ski Hill. The day was spent basically just getting the arms, back and core into shape and provided a good opportunity for a portage practice. So we hit the river at 9:00 AM with our 17" Prospector with a 38" beam...a barge! But to our surprise, the river was in good shape, some ice shelves stil existed on the river left bank and water temperature was about 5C (41F), and eventhough it was quite shallow and slow in some locations, we did also experience class I rapids in a few locations..

The forecast for today was calling for a partly cloudy and a high of 8C (47F), a mere 32C (61F) cooler that we are expecting to experience in Texas. However, the gods smiled upon us, it ended up being mainly sunny and a high of 10C (50F). That's right, the tempertaure hit the double digits. In fact, it was so sunny that both Tyler and I ended up getting a bit too much sun, the first sunburn of the year. This really wasn't smart of us and reminded us, if 3.25 hours on the river with a UV Index of a moderate 4 can cause a minor burn what will 4-5 days on the river in Texas with a UV Index of 11 do to our face? Let me use this as a time to remind everybody...wear sunscreen. I am personally a fan of Ombrelle, arguably the best on the market using both chemical and physical blockers. I know I have decided to use Zinc Oxide on my nose for the Texas Water Safari as it won't sweat off and will provide a full protective barrier.

Anyway, back to the run. Today's run was 27km in length (16 mi) and took us just over 3 hours. Our speed ranged from 6.1 kph (3.7 mph) to 13.4 kph (8.3 mph) with an average speed of 8.3kph (5.2 mph). The current of the river averaged 2.1 kph (1.3 mph) where we decided to measure it. This means that our average speed over the 3 hours and 15 minutes was 6.2 kph (3.85 mph). This is very similar to our run that took place last October where we averaged (minus the flow) 6.4 kph (3.97 mph) over a time of 10 hours and a distance of 82 km (51 miles). For a little fun we extruded those times at zero fatigue and concluded that we will finish the TWS in a mere 66.9 hours. A whole day and a half before the finish. We also know that zero fatigue is impossible, but we can pretend.

Next week we'll be looking forward to a 95km (60mi) run from Ghost Dam to Calgary, which will provide a 200m (220 yd) portage around Bear's Paw Dam.

An update on Team Sponsor's, we have asked several corporations and local businesses to become offical team sponsors. There have been a few good responses, but no concrete answers as of yet. I will update these as soon as possible. I will also give a shout out to my Live Out There network and thanks for your moral support in training for such an adventure, and good luck to Jamie on your Everest attempt.

See you all soon and GO TEAM CHINOOK!

From Summits To Surf - A Year In Review

So, another year has come to an end. Sure it's almost April and 2010 started nearly 3 months ago. But for me, the end of March marks the end of one year, and the start of another - my Scrambling and Mountaineering year. You see, my first ever successful summit occurred on the date March 28th, sure there were a few haphazard attempts before that day. A very erroneous Mt. Baldy winter attempt and an unprepared and late day summer Nigel Peak attempt come to mind, both thwarted by severe inclement weather and lack of necessary gear). Amateur mistakes really. I guess practice makes perfect.

So as the '09-'10 year came to an end this past weekend, I found myself staring at 24 summits and 19 mountains, all ranging from easy 7900' to demanding 11400' that took all will power to continue. I also came to the realization that m '10-'11 year will come no where near that total. Several things make this difficult: much of my free time lately has been taken up by my training for the Texas Water Safari, many co-climbers are in the midst of exams or waiting for avalanche conditions to abate, and the fact that the Bow River open. I've decided to put away the crampons, ice axe, climbing helmet, rope and dedicate the next few months of my life to canoeing. But before we get to there, I would like to look back a bit on The Year of The Orogeny.

For me, I think '09-'10 will always be known as the Year of the Orogeny. It was this year I decided to venture out of the realm of scrambling and enter the realm of mountaineering. Taking a Snow and Ice long weekend course at Yamnuska Climbing School with some good friends (and partner for the SDKC and Texas Water Safari) opened a whole new world for me. I never thought that I would be standing on top of a technical mountain, using ice screws, belaying people, being tied in with a rope and crossing crevasses. This is stuff of the IMAX, of Vertical Limit (which is a horrible movie btw) and extreme sports. But here I was, August 3rd 2009 standing at the summit of my first technical mountain, Mt. Athabasca. A mountain that pretty much fought us most the way. Being very enthusiastic, we asked (bugged might be the other word) our guide to see if we could go up a route called the Silverhorn as opposed to the novice North Glacier ascent. Now to put it in perspective, every route up Athabasca involves a glacier crossing which puts it in the realm of mountaineering, but the North Glacier Route is no more of a moderate scramble once you cross the glacier. Having done Mt. Temple and Nigel Peak the two previous weeks and spending two days with in depth training, we were all wanting a little more...technical. A little more is what we got.

The day started with a extraordinary mountain storm. What should have been a 1 A.M start ended up being delayed til 4 A.M. During the approach we were with another group of about 10-15 that were heading for the Glacier Route. Before diverging from them, due to a miscalculation in rope slack, I ended up falling into a crevasse and having to climb out (thankfully it was a smaller one only 15' - 20' deep). As we continued and split from the other group (we exchanged "good lucks") we began post-holing. Eventually we were standing at the base of the Silverhorn. The Silverhorn is a 400m high 50º ice slope which involves a technical crossing of a bergschrund and being susceptible to serac fall and as put by an experience mountaineering friend "a very ambitious route for first-timers".

Save you a description of the ensuing 4 hours of climbing, anchoring, belaying and having your life literally depending on a rope and two screws in the ice...rinse and repeat, we finally, exhausted and wondering how much further, crested the Silverhorn and headed along the summit ridge to the true summit. Ten minutes later, there we were, on the 20th highest peak in the Canadian Rockies and second 11'00oer in as many weeks. So excited/tired were we that no one thought to take a summit photo...believe it or not, we do not have a summit photo of us on our first technical ascent. I decided to stand on the summit a little longer than my team, looking over the Columbia Icefield with no sound but the light wind and my breathing, I decided that I was going to go for all fifty-one 11'00ers in the Canadian Rockies. A lofty goal for someone who has just started mountaineering, but a goal none the less. If I make it, I succeed in a very difficult , if I don't, I will get to visit some of the most beautiful and rugged places on the world while trying. In fact, such a hard goal is this, that only seven people have done it to date, each one taking several years to do so, many took decades. After that I joined two groups. The University of Calgary Outdoor Adventurers and the Calgary Scrambling and Mountaineering Club, both of which I am now an event organizer.

During the next few months with both groups, I scrambled such mountains as:

1. Midnight Peak
2. Mt. Allen
3. Vermilion Peak
4. Snow Peak
5. Middle Sister

The vast majority being winter ascents in varying conditions. From blizzard caused white-out Midnight Peak with a summit temperature of -42ºC to a solar-warming caused class II avalanche on Snow Peak I had the opportunity to experience the mountains in ways that very few people have. And it is my goal to help share those experiences with you all via this blog, as well as answer questions that people may have.

So it's understandable that it is with a bit of a heavy heart that I put my mountaineering gear away as the conditions improve. But alas, it is only temporary as this year I have at least 2 more 11'oooers on the list....Mt. Willingdon and Mt. Joffre, both with epic approaches. Stay tuned for a video of my 19 mountains and 24 summits of '09-'10, I will compose one in the not to distant future.

And stay tuned for Team Chinook and the Texas Water Safari...updates are about to come streaming in as we transition from Summits to Surf.

How's The Water Up There?

So I'm going to pose a question to you. What do you do when you are 2 months behind on training and counting with one of the hardest endurance and adventure races in the world looming less than 3 months away?

While our southern counterparts have been canoeing in preparation for the TWS for the past few weeks, or in some cases months, we've been in the grips of winter with an average temperature from December 16th 2009 to March 16, 2010 of - 11C. Mild by winter standards, but still cold enough to freeze water fairly quickly.

In fact, up to three weeks ago, the Bow River running through Calgary was fairly covered in ice, but over that time temperatures have been well above seasonal, setting record highs three times now we are seeing some quick progress in the thawing process. Unfortunately, not all rivers are at the same stage of opening up.

This past weekend my wife and I drove up to Edmonton to relocate a domesticated painted turtle to a co-worker. Along the way we drove over the Red Deer river. Now, Red Deer is a mere 150km north of Calgary, yet the river showed no signs of thaw. Ice coverage was 100% and I could have probably walked from one side to another without much worry of breaking through. This poses a bit of a logisitcal hurdle for our training as the Red Deer river is to be the staging ground for our endurance training, the reservoirs being flat water are still further behind the rivers.

So you might be thinking to yourself, what about the Bow River? Why not do some paddling in there

and get out sooner? I can't say that hasn't been ruled out yet, but what we have to remember is that the Bow River is a mountain fed river, meaning that even though it is open, its flowing at a quick pace, in some places I'd estimate the flow to be close to 10kph (7 mph). Add to that an average temperature of likely less than 2C (5F) and abrupt ice bridges we have a recipe for disaster. It gets really frustrating knowing that you are doing all you can in the gym, but reading about other teams who are in the water already. This makes you question how your performance will stack-up, but I remain optimistic, I've been sticking to a regimented work-out, increasing my endurance, and testing my body in different states of fatigue. But cue Yoda to remind me "there is another."

Lake Okanagan, nestled in the beautiful Okanagan Valley of B.C. is a large, deep, glacial relic of a lake. It measures 145km (90 mi) in length and in some places 5km (3 mi) in width...and it never freezes. Okay, maybe not never, but I think it has only frozen over twice in the past 150 years or so, and the lake is only 600km to the west. Yes, sadly, the only place that is paddleable is a 7 hour drive through the Canadian Rockies. Now for the good news, this month ends in a long weekend and I already have confirmed free room and board in Kelowna, so the only hurdle that exists is finding a canoe to rent at this time of year. With the weather in Kelowna being above normal this year and the water being fairly calm, the lake becomes very enticing.

Whatever happens in the next little bit, there are signs all around that dry-land training is slowly coming to an end. Both my partner and I have agreed that when the waterways of Alberta become navigable, we'll have to be out every weekend to compensate for our glaring major disadvantage...a below freezing winter.

Now my answer to the original queston: Train harder, keep positive and don't sweat the little things. When the time comes that you get into water, you'll find your other training will have helped dramatically.