Barry Blanchard has spent more than 6,000 days of his life rock climbing, ski touring, mountaineering, alpine climbing and ice climbing. At this point, he says, he’s very intimate with those environments, and can recall the textures in the snow, the ice and the rock he’s encountered along the way. Combine that familiarity with his long memory, the notes, journals and dozens of articles he’s written for various magazines and 10,000 slides he’s taken throughout the decades of his climbing career, and the end result is The Calling: A Life Rocked by Mountains.
From the opening line, the harrowing declaration, “I saw the avalanche coming,” Blanchard recounts in gripping detail a lifetime of mountaineering experi ences, and some of the winding routes that led him to, as he says, paint lines up unclimbed peaks.
Blanchard now has more than 40 years of mountain climbing experience, including 35 overseas expeditions and a generous stack of first ascents. His mountaineering career began in the Canadian Rockies before expanding to Alaska and the French Alps, and eventually to Mt. Everest and challenging peaks in Peru and Pakistan.
While for many other climbers, the pursuit of Mt. Everest and the other tallest peaks in the world bred a military siege-style of climbing that means many of the people who climb Everest today do so on fixed ropes, in staged camps hauled up the face by sherpas, Blanchard has spent a lifetime playing that game by very different rules.
“A rope, a rack and a pack — so what you can physically carry is all you get, and you commit to the mountain with that amount of equipment, which is very minimalist and simple, really, and you rely mostly on your skill base, the skills that you fought hard to achieve or accumulate and develop and nurture through all your days in the mountains, and hopefully you’re up to the experience,” he says. He calls its alternative a bastardization of mountain climbing.
“It’s a large, cumbersome, guaranteed outcome — you’re pretty much going to succeed — and lacks the commitment and poetic grace, in my opinion, of classic alpinism,” says Blanchard, who is one of few climbers to finish the West Ridge route on Mt. Everest, a challenging route with a low rate of success, or even survival.
His memoir begins with an avalanche that swept over him and his climbing partners, Kevin Doyle, Mark Twight and Ward Robinson during their attempt at the Rupal Face of Nanga Parbat in Pakistan. The Rupal rises 15,000 feet from its base to its summit at 26,500 feet — as Blanchard writes in the calling, “No other mountain wall presents more relief. For mountain climbers, it is the biggest face in the world.”
The book then moves back to his childhood in a aging, poor, industrial corner of Calgary, touching on formative experiences with the Scouts and Horse Army Cadets, which saw him clipping in for his first rappel off a tower built for military use, and becoming so immersed in reading rock climbing books he was summoned to the library to return them more than 40 days past due.
What he hopes, he says, is that The Calling will transport people to places few have ventured — clawing up mountain faces where the rock is shielded in ice and snow, traversing under séracs and shoveling tent platforms at 22,000 feet. But he also hopes the memoir will let them understand how the more relatable experiences, like growing up with a greatgrandfather whose military experience inspired him and rappelling off an abandoned building as a teenager, made him into the kind of man who would venture into those peaks.
“It sounds egocentric to me, but when people look at the climbs that I’ve done, I think they’re curious about what makes me tick, and I think all of that, a 360-degree view is really what makes a human being tick,” Blanchard says. “Going for it on the side of a high, icy, cold, snowy mountain and risking falling isn’t really common to most people, but a lot of the other experiences are very common to everyone, or to a lot of people. There’s commonality there, so I think what makes a human being is what we share in common with other people, and then we specialize — often a lot of us specialize in something — but I think the commonness is really what will get people to know me through the written page and perhaps understand some of my motivations and desires and my calling.”
The story, particularly that of the Nanga Parbat attempt, plays out over a soundtrack of rock and punk music — The Clash, The Sex Pistols, The Pogues, The Sisters of Mercy, Skinny Puppy, Joy Division, Trisomie 21, SNFU, The Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin. He’d grown up a diehard country western fan (“Jerry Jeff Walker was my man,” he declares), the climbing partners he was roping up with were also handing him a Walkman and commanding, “Listen to this.” They brought a new back drop to his life as it became that of a career mountaineer and mountain guide and instructor.
“A lot of my world view was influenced by the music, and the rebelliousness and iconoclastic irreverence of punk really set us up well to try as hard as we could on these mountains,” Blanchard says. “A lot of what we listened to were theme songs for us while we were up on the mountain and soundtracks that would play through our head and keep us going up, as amazingly as that sounds for a musical genre that has a lot of negativity in it, but also has a lot of kind of courageous rebellion. … Not only in the punk genre, but I hear that very much in the music of Bruce Springsteen, and wider.”
Climbing was kind of counterculture back then, too. In Calgary, where he lived in the late ’70s when he started climbing, of the 700,000 people in town, maybe 1,000 climbed.
“There’s a rich history of mountaineering clubs in North America, a lot of very prominent citizens and leaders of community participating in mountain climbing, but into the ’60s there starts to be kind of an undercurrent of counter culture, definitely in Calgary,” he says. “The first mountaineering club I joined was Calgary Mountain Club, often described as a drinking club with a climbing problem, but kind of alternative to society, being able to get into our backyard, the Canadian Rockies and get wild and get free.”
Now, he sees climbing in high school curriculums, and estimates more like 100,000 of the million people in Calgary have climbed in the local gyms.
When and who he’s chosen to climb with has been among the more influential of the choices that have let Blanchard follow his calling into the hills.
An early mentor told him, he says, “If you want to do good climbs, you’ve got to climb with good guys, so you need partners who have accumulated a similar skill base to what you have, and the pool becomes quite small, it gets smaller the more you develop your skills and the bigger mountains you want to try to climb.”
Chapters of the book are devoted to influential climbing partners, the first of whom was Kevin Doyle, the brother of a friend Blanchard met when he was still working as a salesman and dreaming of being a climber. His affection and admiration for these climbers is visible — not just in moments when he admits to high-altitude spooning for the sake of warmth, but in the way he recounts watching moments of their strength, athleticism and skill. The recounted terse and profanity-laden conversations — there’s no time for worrying about hurting someone’s feelings when lives are hanging on three crampon teeth in bad ice — are somehow a testament to their understanding and the resiliency of those friendships.
“It’s so much more than the rope that connects us,” Blanchard says. “I think one of the gifts of the pursuit is, like on Nanga Parbat where I went up there with three of my partners and good buddies and good friends, is that the intensity of the experience, it’s kind of like living a lifetime in five days, just the amount that you experience and the volume of it,” he says. “It’s like a lightning strike hits, the cartoon lightning strike hits behind the guy you’re tied to on the rope and you can see his skeleton just like in the cartoons. But this is an emotional lightning strike or a spiritual lightning strike, and you get to see his heart, and yeah, I love those three guys that I went to Nanga Parbat with. They’re some of the greatest bonds I’ve ever formed with adults.”
They’re on the phone these days talking about everything from tech advice to spouses and kids.
“Those are the guys I call and get advice on whatever challenges life’s coming up with or whatever joys life is throwing my way,” he says.
Getting other people to seek out experiences in the mountains, or any that create deep bonds, broaden knowledge and build an intimacy with the world or otherwise stokes a sense of purpose and fulfillment in life is what he hopes The Calling might inspire in its readers.
During a recent presentation of the book in Banff, he saw a dozen kids from the Stoney Indian Reserve in Alberta, close to where he lives.
“Knowing those native kids, some of them are going to school after sleeping in the car because it’s too rough in the house, so if there’s some encouragement for one of those kids to continue on and try to go up instead of go down, that’s more than enough reason for me to write the book, and that’s a very specific population, but in a broader sense, it’s kind of like Bruce Springsteen says about his music, if you can get a little something for yourself, that’s great. So hopefully there’s something in the book that people can take away and keep,” he says.
Blanchard, who drops references to and quotes from Leonard Cohen and Springsteen minute by minute, later adds, “There’s a great quote from Joseph Campbell that says ‘Follow your bliss.’ That would be some of the encouragement that I hope people take away from the book. And REM put it, ‘Trust in your calling, make sure your calling is true.’”
Barry Blanchard will speak about his book The Calling: A Life Rocked By Mountains at 7:30 p.m. on Friday, Nov. 21 at Patagonia Denver, 1431 15th St., Denver, 303-446-9500.
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