How an Emergency Plane Landing Led to Climbing a Mountain in Canada

Running Out of Fuel in the Sky

This is the first time in a while I haven’t started one of these write ups with something akin to “it was really early and dark and I was gonna run up a mountain.” Actually, this tangential adventure began with me falling asleep on a plane listening to Sturgill Simpson. I was on my way back to North Carolina to see my nephew who had just turned two and to get some much needed recovery after running the Crazy Mountain 100. A little rattling in the sky, some chatter amongst the crew, and we were landing. Good. Except it wasn’t good. It turns out we were preemptively landing in Boston instead of pressing forward for the final half-hour or so it would take to get to Newark. The captain announced that we “just needed a little fuel,” which sounds a lot to me like “we were running so low on fuel, we couldn’t manage to make it to the very next airport that basically neighbors this one.”

Long story short, this mishap lead to a series of other mishaps, a long, 4:00 AM wait in line to talk to customer service, a proposed three day delay on getting me into North Carolina, and me eventually convincing the airport to just send me back to Montana. I found myself back in my van after a long 30-some hours of darting across the country without my bag of camera and running stuff and without any plan for what to do now that I wasn’t going to see my family. “Maybe I’ll take a drive to Canada.”

Meeting a Friend in Canada

It was only nine-hours and a few red bulls later before I arrived in Calgary to a warm greeting from another ultra runner I’d met during the Crazies, and by the following morning I found myself climbing up on Forgetmenot Ridge in the Kaninaskis Wilderness by Banff. It. Was. So. Sick.

We saw rams and cows beside a pristine, crystal-blue alpine lake as we pulled into the trailhead and began our ascent. Trails in this part of the world are a little bizarre, and somewhere between the loose, unmarked creek crossings and unlabeled trail intersections I began to feel spoiled by all the infrastructure we have in the American trail systems. The good news of it was our goal, generally speaking, was to go up, and so as long as we were doing that we would get close to Forgetmenot Ridge.

A sprawling series of mountains made up of sharp, broken-glasslike rock appeared as we ascended above the tree line. The all-encompassing bowl and its feeder streams shot up in every direction like tendrils reaching for the melted snow in the mountains above. If I had my camera on me I would’ve spent the entire afternoon capturing the beauty of this landscape while the sun cast dramatic beams of illuminance through the space between the peaks, but armed with just an iPhone I settled for a few snapshots and descended off the ridge for a cold drink and a pretty tasty vegan dinner (affectionately referred to as “lesbian food”) with my host in Calgary.

Stream Bed to Mountaintop

While my host had to get back to work I was planning on bagging another peak. My goal, originally, was Mt. Cornwall. This was a prominent peak tucked more than ten miles back in the Kaninaskis Wilderness and stood very impressively when I last saw it atop Forgetmenot Ridge. My prep included a brief review of the trail segment on AllTrails which said little more than it was rated difficult and should take most of the day, but this was the designation for pretty much every mountain I’d been running up in the last six months, and without any more beta than that I simply confirmed the existence of a trail on my Garmin Explore map and set out into the woods. There has never been a time in the US where I needed to do much more than this for a day hike, but what wasn’t included in this beta was how even though there is a standard “path” for folks to take to the mountains, there is no trail.

Two miles on a service road led to eight miles of clunking about on a dried up, boulder-choked creek bed. The creek bed eventually led to a brief bouldering problem up a bubbling waterfall, through a sandy, sunny slot canyon, atop a grassy meadow, and then dancing around a small creek that ran underneath a snowfield. I don’t know if I’ve ever written so much adventure into one sentence, let alone in just ten miles of running. I came to the massive, thousand+ foot wall that protects the snowy rivulet from the Summer sun and stood in amazement. Were I still in college and climbing every week, this quickly would’ve become my next objective. The top was covered in loose, sharp rock. Sure, but the banding on the low cliff climbed so perfectly up to a crack that I just knew I would have a blast ripping my hands open on. Most of the snow above was already melted, so it looked rather dry and was simply stunning as it peered above the snowfield I was taking lunch on.

By this point I was already an hour behind schedule as the miles on the creek bed boulders slowed me down, but I was determined to bag a peak and refused to simply follow that same way back. Bedside Mt.Cornwall was Mt.Glasgow that stood almost as impressively. This peak was pyramidal and had a beautiful, scrambly band shooting out of its Western ridge like the back of some earthen stegosaurus. It was also about a mile closer which meant I could still get back in the timeframe I’d given my host (spoiler alert: I wasn’t even close to making it).

Mistake #1: Being that I was now going off-route, the only mapping data I had access to was my Garmin Explore, which was always served me perfectly in the states, but this was Canada, and I had already seen that Kaninaskis mountaintops were more rugged than even my beloved Northern Rockies.

Mistake #2: I had told no one where I was going to be today, and had only given a timeframe for when I’d be back. This was topped off by me going in a rugged wilderness area where I knew there’d be no cellphone signal all day, and without my usual SOS GPS carry to boot.

Mistake #3: Being that my GPS assured me there was a trail atop the ridge, and with only ten miles left to go, I felt more than comfortable beginning my ascent out of the river with little more than half a liter of water.

Ok, so now that we’re all caught up to speed on how amateur I was acting, let’s climb a mountain. The first 1,000’ came in under 3/4 of a mile. It was all scrambling shin-deep in stacks of loose shale while trying to get to any bush or large enough rock where I could grab hold and rest. It honestly came and went pretty quickly, and before I knew it I was standing at eye-level with that beautiful cliff I was appreciating earlier. The next objective was accessing that spiny ridgeline. It felt about the same as the first scramble, except this time I was in direct sunlight and was only about thirty yards out from a small herd of rams.

The Ridge Walk

Up onto the ridgeline and the fun finally started!! There were cairns about every half-mile, and so without a proper route to keep me going I opted for climbing up and over the spines until I made the summit. I don’t much consider myself a mountaineer. I’ve always been interested in learning that game, but the constant motion offered by thru-hiking and trail running has always been more exciting to me than the slow, uphill dance of the mountaineer. This was a moment I considered having done what a mountaineer does. No trail on that side of the peak, just a raw, uphill hand over foot rush to the top. I should note that this is where my mapping data said the ridgeline trail began, so the thought was that once I summitted I could join the real trail and make up for lost time. Further proof I’m not really a mountaineer.

Massive, dusty-white mountains sprang from the Earth below like never ending digits on the hand something much larger, more eternal than you or I. They were reaching toward the heavens, and I was standing on top of them, just another insignificant being riding their coattails into the sky.

I came off the ridge following more very sparsely-placed cairns. I came off the side of another spine as I traversed down the ridge back in the direction of my van and was making what felt like solid progress. Progress, that was, until I realized what I’d done. In the same way those small indentations in the forest resemble trails (“gulleys,” as we call them back home), so too were segments of what appeared to be flattened, traversed rock paths on top of Mt.Glasgow. I descended well over 500 feet before the sudden, bone-chilling realization that I’d made a mistake kicked in. I blew out a rock, backstepped, blew out another, and started riding a rockslide at alarming speed. The massive bowl below widened as my eyes brought the reality of the situation into laser-focus. My two thoughts for how this could play out were both less than ideal. My first thought was I’d keep building momentum as I rode a mat of shale stone down the side of the mountain only to ultimately slide straight off a cliff further down in the bowl and bury myself in a field of boulders. My second thought was that during my scrambling attempt to fight out of the rock slide I’d manage to get one of my legs jammed in between the rocks and the force of the slide would break one of my ankles, forcing me to overnight on the side of the mountain without any water or means to call for help. Both of these thoughts were very sobering, and I don’t think I’ve ever had such a powerful sigh of relief as when I managed to get my hand on the lip of a larger boulder, stopping me as I slid past.

Elvis legs were in full effect as I clung to the rock, and I took a few minutes to compose myself before committing to the climb back up from where I slid. I had nothing sizable to hang onto as I made my way back up, so I made it a point to keep myself lined up with that same rock that’d already saved me in case I needed to call upon it for a second favor. It took every bit of half an hour to make my way back up to the ridge as I played a game of forward inches. Once back on the ridge I thought I’d take a moment to breathe and appreciate having come out of the rockslide with nothing more than a cut ankle and a rock to the head, but as I remembered I was out of water and already hours behind schedule I decided to keep moving forward.

The ridge was generally accessible from that point on. There were a handful of downclimbing sections, but even they were usually followed by joggable straights. I got off track a few times, but as long as I maintained my bearing with the ridgeline I thought I could make it back down into the forest. In the grassy segment below I could see an indentation that resembled a trail, the first I’d seen in over ten miles. It was a welcome sight, and became the next major objective for me. “Even if I never saw a trail on the ridge, as long as I get down onto that meadow I’ll be able to run back to the van.” I made it there in about 45-minutes, but found nothing more than an interspersed game trail to follow. The GPS said I was still “on trail,” whatever that meant by this point I wasn’t sure, so I followed it as best I could.

More scrambling and down climbing followed by a few frustrating blowouts, and I was finally to the wood line. GPS said I was absolutely on track, but I can assure you from my thousands of miles on trails that this was no trail. I found a loose water vein through the woody knob and barreled through the forest as best I could, eating innumerable spiderwebs and calling “hey bear!” at every twist and turn. GPS showed a field in just over a mile, and surely once I made it to the field there would be a real trail. Wrong Again.

A treeless patch of belly-high bramble turned out to be what I’d been working toward, and I couldn’t help but burst into a fit of laughter for how sideways this whole day had gone. I swam through the shrubs until making it to the river, and to my delight there was a genuine trail. So simple, just a soft indentation of dirt and horse tracks, but even such a basic piece of infrastructure meant the world to me. It meant I didn’t have to focus on navigation or continue hopping between boulders. I could simply press on all the way back to the van.

By the time I’d gotten to the parking lot I was already 2 hours behind when I said I’d be home, and I was lucky to have gotten a very brief call out about why I was late. The day ended as most do in the mountains; I ate a fat meal, enjoyed a stout drink, and quickly drifted off to sleep, and not too worse for the wear.

Thanks for the love, Calgary. The experience was humbling.