chris volkart mountain life: where have the months gone?

What happened? my last post was back in august and all of a sudden we are half way through november...

Well I suppose I just got caught up in life and neglected things like my blog. Well too much has happened so I wont go into great detail ill just sum up the past few months and try to make a better effort in keeping up with this thing. After my work ended at COE for the summer I actually was quite busy. I headed out to Tofino and relaxed for about a week with a couple days of surfing at the end....let me just say it, surfing is amazing! After my little break in Tofino I quickly returned to red deer for the wedding of an old friend. It was great to see all my high school friends that I had lost touch with and see what they were up to. While in red deer I was also able to manage getting my learners license, something I have been neglecting for awhile. Next it was back to Kamloops to rack up and zip off to Squamish for my first and only field course of the year. I spent a week on the beautiful granite rock of squamish learning guiding techiniques and realizing how much I need to spend a bit more time learning to crack climb! My next priority was to get to golden for my sisters wedding! I caught a ride with a couple of my fellow students who were heading to the rockies for a mountaineering course. My familly settled in to a nice condo at the kicking horse resort and as the girls began preparing for the big day, the boys spent the day before the wedding mountain biking on the resort! Now for those who dont know I used to do quite a bit of mountain biking and have even spent a day riding at kicking horse. It was good to be on a bike again but I sure felt a bit rusty. The wedding was beautiful and I am very happy to have new people in my family! After the wedding I headed to banff with alpine objectives in my mind...unfortunately the perfect conditions that had been around for most of september crumbled away the moment I arrived and after one night in the bow valley, I headed straight back to Nordegg where me and my co worker Ian had a project on the go developing a new sport climbing crag. We spent the next five or six days cleaning the rock and bolting new lines. The outcome? 10 sport climbs and one trad climb all under 5.9 making it Nordeggs premier intro sport climbing area. For route descriptions and topo head out to COE and pick up a copy of the guidebook. I spent the next month helping out around COE, rock climbing, scrambling, making an attempt at an alpine rock route, guiding a few days and most of all hoping the alpine climbing would come back into condition...which it didn't. Well as much as I wanted to stay in Nordegg near the end of october the time came to head back to school for the dreaded month of classroom!

My classes this semester are accounting, marketing and buisness. A little dry, but my teachers are excelent and I have been learning alot that may come in handy some day. Ive got two 3 hour classes a day monday to thursday so does that mean that my adventure life is over? Well sort of...however two weekends ago I was able to get out to marble canyon with my roomate and take him on his first ever multi pitch rock climb ever. We climb Sisyphus, which if you have read my blog youll know ive climbed it about 4 times before...Though you would think it would get old it is one of my favourite rock climbs ever and it provides a really interesting guiding problem. I think that through all my previous ascents of this route I have finnally figured out the best way to climb it and also the best way to guide it. We climbed the route in good time and had a really smooth rappel as well. It was a great day of climbing and really good to climb my favourite route with one of my best friends! Unfortunately the smooth day of climbing ended with a not so smooth drive home where our borrowed truck died and had to be towed to cache creek and then another friend had to come rescue us....id like to thank the lady who invited us into her home and found us a tow truck out in the middle of nowhere, the great tow truck driver who dropped us off at a coffee joint, danielle for the use of her truck and most of all eddie for dropping everything he was doing and coming to get us out in cash creek.

Well I am now trying to let school consume my life as the shoulder season in kamloops is finnally here and the rock is too cold...it is too warm for ice and skiing is just starting to come in...so the next time you hear from me I hope to have swung my axes which I have already put in the hours sharpenning!

Here are some photos!