Seeing as the impetus for this project was largely born of time spent moving amongst the hills and sticks lining the Pacific Northwest Coast, we judged it fit to conclude this transmission with a slice of piety to those very trails. As with the old impressionist masters, the task and trick is to make visible the ways in which we are touched by the world.
The initiated know that the verb “running”-when used to refer to bipedal travel in these mountains- is a highly relative term, an umbrella under which a whole constellation of movements and speeds shimmer. Sure as the name suggests, in trail and mountain running, “running” is subordinate to and situated within the topography upon which it unfolds: it is with the mountain that one always moves- never the other way around.
On the Coast, the runner develops a unique tool kit for navigating the impossibly steep aspects so often rising directly out of the sea skyward: of moving through trails and old logging roads that have become reclaimed by alder and chunder; of picking their way through oceans of unstable talus and treadmill scree; of the tactics of ‘subalpinism’, a niche genre of vertical tree/shrub/root pulling (a grading system even exists for denoting the density and technical demands of particular ‘schwack); of smearing up smooth granite expanses, trusting their tacky outsoles to dime edges or minute crystals for purchase; of running using one’s hands, jammed in cracks or stemming up corners; of two-feet or two-cheek slides down massive snow slopes, the sorts of which often result in rather crimson derrieres; and, every once in awhile, of floating down the type of pristine singletrack that weaves the very fabric of dreams.
Emma Cook-Clarke, PC: Michael OverbeckWhile metrics generally serve but to corrode experience and rupture immediacy, on the Coast, the runner knows that time on feet and vertical meters earned serve as superior quantifiers than mere distance traveled. Running in the coast mountains is an endurance sport after all, and duration here always eclipses distance. Indeed, few are imaginable the places where traveling 2.9km in 40 minutes is deemed noteworthy, yet there are several such instances in Squamish alone where making it up or up and back down such a minute distance in so protracted a time warrants genuine fanfare! Let us not turn movement in the hills into accounting, but from time to time, a little quantifiably backed pride demands relish
It is arguable that, in the many millennia that humans have transformed the earth’s matter into artifacts and artworks, that none of these have equalled the simple beauty of sunlight dancing upon the ocean’s surface, or of a Spring canopy set aglow in the waning light of evening. Writing of his beloved Cascades, the poet-mountaineer Gary Snyder once mused that “those unearthly glowing snowy summits are a promise to the spirit”. This sentiment is similarly well known on the Coast, wherein the boundary between the worldly and transcendent is at moments strikingly porous, as sea and sky are brought together as one, linked by the vertical relief of our finest peaks.
How the soul stirs in Spring, no? The rivers run white with diurnal melt, the great orb lingers longer in its sky, and the trails leading on high will themselves out from ’neath wintry coats. The promise of vernal resplendence that the Coast Mountains unfailingly offer us each winter is enough to make even the most dismal of days seem altogether lighter. It's something we’re holding onto as we once again resolutely zip up our Shakedry shells, dive out into another deluge, and swim up our local trail qua creek.
We’ll be seeing you for the equinox?