Mt. Waddington, Human-Powered
ByMultiple Authors
Nov 20, 2024
In the summer of 2024, Langdon Ernest-Beck and Benjamin Spiers, two twenty-somethings who met during college at Montana State University, set their sights on British Columbia’s Coast Mountains. Their goal? To climb 13,186 ft Mt. Waddington, the tallest mountain in B.C. and one known for its inaccessibility.
The challenges of the climb begin long before the actual mountain. Notoriously inaccessible and remote, just getting into the Waddington Range presents a formidable challenge in the form of a heinous, 18-mile bushwack, which most climbers forgo in favor of flying into the base. But not Ernest-Beck and Spiers. Their trip would be entirely human-powered, starting with a 750-mile bike approach from their home in Ellensburg, WA, tackling the infamous bushwack with packs that weighed over 100 pounds each, and then biking home along the Pacific Coast.
A journal entry on Ernest-Beck’s blog written during the bushwack, titled “The day from hell,” offers a window into what their adventure entailed, describing how after a 12-plus hour day in which they barely covered three miles on foot, Spiers collapsed in a pile of ash, curled up beneath a rock. An accompanying photo shows their faces entirely blackened by soot from the burned trees they had slogged through.
At least for Ernest-Beck, the Waddington trip was not the first time he’d pushed the limits of self-supported adventuring. The previous summer, he and a friend climbed all the 100 highest mountains in Washington, a challenge known as The Bulger List. The catch: Of course, they accessed all the peaks entirely by foot and bike.
We caught up with Ernest-Beck and Spiers to chat about their Waddington experience, the allure of human-powered adventure, and what they learned from a month spent chasing beauty and suffering in the mountains.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Jenny Abegg: Everybody flies into the Waddington Range, but you guys chose not only to walk in, but to bike from Ellensburg. So, why the human-powered adventure?
Langdon Ernest-Beck: I wanted to find a way to recreate that's more environmentally responsible and to do these big trips in a more sustainable way. I feel like so much of our lives is consumed by doing things that are not environmentally responsible or sustainable. And so it's nice to get joy from doing something that’s not terrible for the earth.
But probably the bigger thing for me is just that the adventure is way better. You notice more details than you would if you were driving or flying, and the relationship you have with the places you go and the people you meet are much richer. And then when you finally get to the place you're going, it's a lot more rewarding, knowing that you did the entirety of the journey under your own power.
JA: I love how you can trace the line from your doorstep to the top of the mountain with these sorts of adventures. Langdon, I know that you have a history of doing human-powered adventures, but how did Ben enter the equation?
Benjamin Speirs: I don't really have a history of doing human-powered adventures other than the occasional ski tour using a bike or something, but Langdon and I met in college and we had just done a lot of skiing together. We had spent a decent amount of time in the mountains together.
LEB: Ben was like the only person I knew who was badass enough—and maybe stupid enough—to agree to go on the trip with me.
JA: How long had you been thinking about Mount Waddington?
LEB: My introduction to big mountains and mountaineering was the Waddington NOLS Mountaineering Course when I was in high school. So I'd been into the range on foot. We took a float plane into the west side of the range, to a lake, and then traversed the range and hiked out. I had all these fond memories of those mountains and thought one day I'd go back up there and do some more climbing objectives. After the Bulger trip, I thought I’d just do it via bike.
JA: Give us an overview of the trip. How long did you expect it to take? What were the known challenges etc.?
LEB: It was a 36-day trip—20 days biking and 14 days on foot. On the way in, we started in Ellensburg and rode up to Bellingham, crossed the [Canadian] border at Sumas, WA, and then biked up through Chilliwack, B.C. From there, we took Highway 1 up through Lytton and Cash Creek, and then Highway 97 north to Williams Lake. And then west on Highway 20 to Tatla Lake, which is the closest town to the ranch where we were starting on foot into the range.
We were 14 days on foot. It took us a week to get to the Combatant Col [the base of Mt. Waddington]. We were there for about four days including the summit push, and then it was five days back to the ranch. Then we biked back home. Originally we were just going to bike there and back the same way, but at some point we decided it would be way cooler to bike home via the coast.
In terms of stats, we did 65 miles and 23,000 vertical gain on foot. In other terrain you can do that in a couple days—but not in the Waddington!
JA: I want to get back to that, but let's go to the beginning. What were your feelings as you were biking away from Ellensburg? Were you scared? Excited?
LEB: Oh, we were stupidly naive! We have this great photo of Ben and me at my house in Ellensburg right before we left, and we're just smiling. We were so excited and thought it was going to be a super fun adventure. We didn't fully know what we were getting into.
BS: And I don't think it fully hit us until we started bushwhacking. A few days before we finished the bike we were talking about how we were so excited to get on foot and exercise different muscles. We just had no idea how much worse it was gonna get.
JA: It’s almost like there’s a certain level of naiveté required for trips like this. Looking back, would you have still done it knowing what it was like?
BS: I think knowing what it is in your head is different from having experienced it. Honestly, I don't know if I would have done it. It's a good question.
LEB: I thought I was super prepared going into it having done the Bulger trip. That project involved way more long-term fatigue, but day to day, the acute difficulty of the Waddington trip— at least on foot—was way higher. The first four days of bushwhacking were so much harder than any one day on the Bulger. I was not prepared for that.
JA: I mean, an hour is a long time to bushwhack. I can't even imagine four days. How heavy were your packs?
LEB: Sixty pounds with no food and I think starting out we had 45ish pounds of food, so the first day our packs weighed about 105 pounds. It was absurdly heavy.
JA: And what was the bushwhacking like?
LEB: Tons of slide alder, vine maple, devil's club. So much deadfall. A ton of log balancing—and falling.
BS: Lots of grunting.
LEB: It was pretty funny because the first day or two we couldn't really lift up our packs by ourselves. We had to help each other get our packs on. And then you couldn't carry it for that long. You'd go for like 400 meters or less, and then you'd have to sit down. And then there were so many times where you’d start to trip, or start to slide on a log, and then you’d be cruxing out trying not to fall. Then you would fall over, and getting back up was a whole process. You’d roll over onto your stomach, and then you do like a max effort to get on your hands and knees. And then you’d take a breath, and then you do another max effort, with maybe a power scream to try to get on your feet and stand up. It was pretty hilarious.
JA: What was driving you forward those four days of bushwhacking?
BS: To me, it felt like we had already put in so much effort, and we were so in the middle of this thing that it was hard to think about turning around. It was like, oh, we've gotten through this really gnarly section, let's just continue because maybe that was the hardest part. But, as we discovered, even after we thought we were through the hardest parts there were still a lot more.
For instance, the first day we had been going through a zone that was pretty heavily burned the previous year so that made travel easier relative to what it became later. But even that day felt really challenging. And then it just got harder.
JA: Are you just in it the whole time, or are you able to get some relief in the evenings?
LEB: When we were camping down low in the bush, I did not feel any relief at night. We would get to camp and the mosquitoes were so bad that we’d just get swarmed. Our tent spots were pretty shitty, especially the second night. We were just on a pile of burned roots, and everything was dirty. We’d get to camp at dark and just make some food as fast as we could, and then try to sleep. But then sleeping was kind of miserable because we had 0-degree bags and it was like 60 degrees out. We were super sweaty.
Honestly one of the coolest moments of the trip was the first time we got above treeline. Just to see a view of some mountains with a glacier was so rejuvenating. And then we had one full day up in the alpine before we went back down into the bush for another day.
JA: What was your footwear this whole time? Were you wearing mountaineering boots, or were you wearing trail runners or approach shoes?
BS: We were both in mountaineering boots.
JA: Would you do that again?
BS: I think with the sheer amount of weight that was coming down on our ankles combined with our exhaustion it was hard to be careful about where we were placing our feet, so I was glad for that extra support.
JA: Was that definitively the worst bushwhacking either one of you has done?
LEB: Oh, yeah, by far, but I think a lot of it was just the weight of the packs. It’s one thing to do some heinous bushwhacking with a running vest where you can duck under stuff. But it's another thing to try to crawl through bushes and walk on logs and step over stuff. The second and third days were probably 12 to 14-hour days each. And each of those days we only went 3 miles.
JA: Okay, let's get above treeline. Tell me about climbing Waddington.
BS: After we got done with all of the bushwhacking, we ended up at the base of the Scimitar Glacier and we walked up that, which was like walking on a slowly ascending ramp for eight miles. We felt like we were on a highway because it's just like flat walking, gently uphill, with nothing in our way. We were very psyched.
The Scimitar Icefall is this super imposing, terrifying feature that comes off from the Combatant Col above where we ended up setting up camp. We had to ascend these rocky slopes at the side of the icefall, and then navigate between a few smaller seracs.
Getting from the base of the icefall to the Combatant Col took us two days, which was like our base camp. That’s one of the places where people fly in to climb Waddington. We had a rest day there before our summit attempt.
JA: Were conditions what you guys expected?
LEB: Better. Well, the approach was really funny. There is this one section getting up to the col where we had definitely just slept in and we were going up this steep slope after it had been in the sun for a while. I had never been in such soft snow on a high glacier—we were probably at 8,000 or 9,000 feet and we were post-holing to our waists. It was absurd. I remember my journal entry from that day started as a “Never have I ever…”
BS: …crawled up a glacier.
LEB: I was basically on all fours crawling up. It was wild. Conditions weren't ideal, but Waddington is the highest peak fully within B.C. It's just over 4,000 meters and is notorious for being covered in rime ice on the summit block. But the week and a half before we climbed it had been dry and warm, and most of the rime was gone. The first half of the summit block was just bare rock.
JA: What was the energy like upon reaching the Combatant Col?
LEB: It’s one of the coolest places I've ever been. It's so beautiful. You have Waddington on one side, and then across the col you're looking into the ranges on either side of the Waddington Range, and it's stunning. It was a very big contrast from the low point in the trip.
JA: Which was?
LEB: It was probably night five. That day was a whole fiasco. We had done three days of bushwhacking and gotten to the alpine and had one really nice day that we took pretty mellow. We were rejuvenated. And then we went back down into the bush on day five and it was just super thick slide alder—I have some really cool photos from someone else who took a heli that shows the terrain really well. There’s a valley called Pocket Valley, which was our route down to the base of the Scimitar. It's not pleasant to walk through. We were just kind of swimming for a few miles and we got to the end of the bushwhacking on the moraine at the base of the Scimitar and I realized my helmet was gone. It had gotten ripped off my pack somewhere because I had it in one of those nets on the back of my pack.
So at first I was like, “Shit, I don't have a helmet—I'll go back and look for it.” I think I was looking for an hour or an hour and a half, but I couldn't retrace our steps exactly to where we'd come from because everything looks the same. I basically walked through the alder until I had come to the same place multiple times. I realized it was pointless.
BS: I think I was overwhelmed for multiple reasons. I was very exhausted and tired, and I had started realizing how many second thoughts I had about the scope of the trip we were doing and the scale of the climb that we were attempting. At least for me, I'd never been in mountains as big as those before. To be quite honest, they're beautiful, but they're also terrifying to me. And I think I had a lot of anxiety around safety. Even regardless of what happened with the helmet, I was just having a lot of second thoughts, like, is this worth it?
I totally broke down. And just before this we had a conversation about what we might do and we were erring on the side of maybe turning around. Langdon sent a message to his climbing mentor, Jeff, on his InReach.
When we woke up we had gotten a message back from Jeff and his advice was don't bail because of foreseeable danger—keep going as long as it feels relatively safe, and if you get to a point where it seems unsafe to not have a helmet then you can worry about making that decision. That’s what we ended up doing. So the next thing was walking up onto the toe of the Scimitar and working our way up. That in itself didn't seem overly dangerous to us. And then the next thing, which was getting to the col didn't seem overly dangerous. So we took it step by step, knowing that if something felt too dangerous, that’s when we'd make the decision to turn around.
JA: So, Langdon, you climbed Mount Waddington without a helmet?
LEB: Yeah.
JA: Holy shit. How did that feel?
LEB: It was definitely a little spooky on the summit block when there was lots of ice falling down. We were doing a lot of ducking. I was thinking, oh, maybe this isn't ideal, but the percent safety it increases is probably pretty small if you think about the amount of scenarios where wearing a helmet is actually gonna save your life.
JA: I want to talk about the climb. But I almost feel like my curiosity is so much more about all the other elements of this trip. And I'm wondering if you guys feel that way, too?
LEB: Most of my memories have pretty much nothing to do with the summit. I mean, the summit was amazing. But the summit was a very small part of the adventure; at the same time it was the driving force of doing everything. So it was the thing pulling us through all the hard times.
BS: Going into it, I felt like there was a high chance of it not really working out, or just having to turn back for whatever reason. There’s just so many variables that could have caused things to go wrong. So, going into it, the chance of failure was high. Just the fact that we were able to even try means a lot to me. It’s a good metaphor for approaching other aspects of my life.
JA: Your adventure stands in such stark contrast to the part of our climbing culture that is so summit-oriented, where people just hire guides and porters, and whatever else to get them to the top. It's actually the rest of what you guys did that stands as memorable.
But going back to the climb, what was the summit push like?
LEB: Summit day, we set our alarm for 10 pm. We were moving, I think, by around 11 pm, and we summited at 4 pm, so we climbed through the night. We were trying to get above the seracs before the sun came up, which we did just in time. We took maybe 30 minutes on the summit to chill out and enjoy the summit feelings, which was really nice. And then from there, I think at least, my attitude was like, “Now we just have to get back to camp without dying.”
On the descent it got dark maybe halfway down or two-thirds of the way down. We did a bunch of rappels and down-climbing through the night and then made it back to camp at four in the morning. I think it was a 29-hour push.
After we got back to the col, I had envisioned that I would have been feeling more fulfilled and more psyched about summiting and would have a burst of energy. But I was just so beat. I was so tired from the whole approach: the 10 days of biking, the 7 days to the col. It was all adding up to a very high level of mental and physical fatigue. Part of me wanted a rest a day and then to go climb Mt. Combatant, but we were just so tired.
The col was not a pleasant place to try to recover. It was hot. It was very sunny. I don't think temps were that high, but we’d get fried going outside because it’s like a giant solar oven. And then inside the tent was also not very comfortable because it was sweaty and we were on snow, so it was kind of wet.
In the end, we decided that we just wanted to get out of there.
BS: When we summited, I felt an immense feeling of surprise that we had actually pulled it off. When we got back to camp, I was so exhausted after having been awake for 29 hours that I just wanted to get some sleep.
JA: I don't want to gloss over the second half of your trip, but, how does it sit in your mind now as you think back on it? Was it like the denouement?
LEB: I don't think for me it was any less memorable. On the way out, on foot, I was trying very hard not to rush it and appreciate still being up in the mountains because it was super gorgeous. It was a little easier going out because it's net downhill, and we'd eaten 30 pounds of food so our packs were a lot lighter.
We chose to bike a different route home, so none of the biking was the same. Biking is so chill compared to bushwhacking and we met some really nice people up there. I was blown away by that. We took our time biking and went down Vancouver Island, where my aunt and uncle live, so I was able to hang out with them for a couple of days. And then the last few days from Victoria home, we were totally like, let's just get home and be done. So there wasn't much enjoyment there— the first day out of Victoria we rode 130 miles or something. And then the next day we rode home.
JA: Was it kind of anticlimactic rolling back into Ellensburg? What was the arrival home like?
LEB: We took a picture, and then I think I probably crawled into bed.
JA: I feel like every adventure has that moment when you're just so stoked on what you just accomplished. Do you guys remember when that was?
LEB: After we hiked out, we spent two nights at a motel in Tatla Lake, B.C. and there I was pretty stoked. I was on the phone with my family and friends back home. One of the big takeaways from this trip and from the Bulger trip for me was you do a giant adventure and tell people about it, and they say, “Oh you must be fulfilled for life.” I feel like I was fulfilled for maybe a few days. Long-term gratification post-trip is just not the reality for me. So I have to find the gratification in the process of going on an adventure like that. Honestly, getting home is the worst part of the trip. It’s not like I got home and I was super psyched and at peace. I got home and I was pretty miserable for a month.
BS: I came out with a different experience. The days and weeks after I got back I felt very satisfied overall. I was happy doing mundane things like sitting inside and reading. The contrast for me between intense adventure and ordinary life is what gives each of them more meaning for me.
JA: How do you feel about the question of, “What's next?”
LEB: I've been trying to answer that question. I want to do something similar, but more oriented toward rock, which is the exact same thing I said after the Bulger project—and then I went and did a bunch of bushwhacking! I'd like to do another big adventure next summer that has a lot of alpine rock climbing involved. But I haven't figured out exactly what that's gonna be.
JA: What about you, Ben? What’s next for you?
BS: I guess I'm trying to figure that out, too, but I'm not pursuing it as explicitly as Langdon at this point. I really want to do some things that inspire me in the future, but I'm going to wait until they do organically. I'm excited to see what those are and it’ll be fun to see what Langdon comes up with.
JA: I can't wait to get an invite from Langdon.
well-worn gear
