Alone now I sit on my pack, cigarette ember glowing in the dark. I think about my luck in finding such a wondrous place. In the four years since my first trip I’ve climbed most of the harder routes in the area, sampled many of the more moderate classics, and put up over twenty-five pitches, including the most difficult multi-pitch routes in the valley.
Above the sound of swift water, I hear voices and laughter on the breeze. Not ghosts this time; other climbers have rolled into the valley. They may be from Calgary, probably come to sample the more straightforward trad routes and moderate bolted lines. Folks from Canmore and Banff sometimes wander in, drawn away from their local sport routes in search of a more vibrant experience, but I’ve actually run into more climbers from abroad than Albertans in the Ghost.
A deer cautiously emerges in the dim, magical light, reminding me that climbers, myself included, are just visitors here. The Stoney tribe, descendants of the Great Plains Sioux, once roamed the Ghost valley to hunt. I imagine a shadowy Stoney hunter stalking the deer — and remember that I, too, have been stalked by death in this valley.
The story of my second trip to the Ghost is a darker one. Back in Colorado after that first visit, I sprayed all winter about the area and managed to convince a friend that, come summer, we should warm up the drill and get cracking! In August, Allan Porter and I headed north, quickly climbed Dreams of Verdon to the top, and hucked a rope off the lip farther out to the right, where the vertical stone gave way to an enormous overhanging bowl carved from the top half of the wall. The exposure made me pucker as I twirled in space, fifty feet out from the wall. There were no crack systems, but in my mind I connected corners and grooves up the tremendously steep wall and thought we had a route. Allan agreed.
The problem: we had only a vague idea of how to go about bolting such a steep and enormous wall. We decided the best way to equip the six-pitch line would be to work our way down, bolting just enough to get ropes fixed to the overhanging wall. Then we’d work out the details on the fixed lines, adding bolts. It seemed simple enough, and like most climbers who have never really thought much about how all those handy anchors get up there on a big, crackless wall, I figured the task would be straightforward.
The weather over our next ten days in the Ghost was poor, even serving up an August snowstorm in Calgary for the first time in anyone’s recent memory. The steepness of the wall allowed us to soldier on anyway, working, cleaning, and bolting through mist and snow. I pulled out the work ethic from my past big-wall days and set myself to the task, but the frustration with gear, bolt placement, and route-finding sapped Allan’s psyche from the get-go. The weather, jugging, and uphill approach with heavy batteries and bolts finished it off.
Several hard workdays into the project, Allan jugged past the fourth belay to put the finishing touches on the partially bolted final pitches. A few feet off the belay, while wrestling with some cruxy moves and worrying about where the pro should be, he decided he’d finally had it. Cold and annoyed, he rapped back down the fixed line, which ran up to an anchor that was still out of his sight. We both descended, leaving four pitches redpointed and two unfinished. The route was going to be magnificent, but our time was almost up. We needed to leave in just two days, and I, too, started to burn out.
The final day of the trip dawned warm and sunny. Allan emerged from his tent and said he wasn’t going back up. I was stunned. We argued for a few minutes, my ego taking some cheap shots at Allan. This was the sort of scene that should be played out in the Himalayas over some proposed suicide line — not over a sport route! Allan was usually a very motivated partner, but this morning a strong feeling was telling him not to push it any farther.

Finally, I conceded to his strangely adamant refusal, and angrily marched off to the cliff to rap in and clean our ropes and gear. Bitterly, I refused Allan’s offer to help.
As I gained the gully to the top, I sifted through what I had learned that trip. First, bolting a route this size is significantly more work than establishing a similar trad line. Second, it might be better as a one-man job. With a single drill, and with the rockfall caused by cleaning, there is little that two people can safely do at once. I organized all this information in my head as I humped to the top, already planning to return next summer, alone.
There was one more lesson to learn that day. As I rapped from our top anchor to the first belay, I noticed that one of the slings was in tatters. I knew the cause immediately: rats. The guidebook had warned us about the nighttime marauders, and we had taken pains to protect the gear we left at the base. Fortunately, this anchor point was only a backup, so the chewed sling had not been a serious threat to us yesterday when we worked on the route. Twenty feet further down, however, I sighted a length of rope that looked like a drag queen’s feather boa.
As I carefully slid down to inspect, a feeling of dread crept into my gut. The rope’s sheath had been shredded away, exposing about two feet of ghost-white core, and the nylon was flayed out like shag carpeting. Somewhere a rat was relaxing in a colorful synthetic nest. The core itself had four small strands left.
I thought about Allan — only yesterday he had dangled and rapped on this rope, out of sight of the damage. It was his bodyweight which had exposed the length of core, as friction from his rappel device tugged on the rope’s sheath. I tied off the sickening core shot and continued down, wondering if I should tell Allan at all. He certainly could live a long, happy life without contemplating the freefall to the talus he would have taken if the shredded rope had failed.
I cleaned our hardware, jugged out, and headed toward the decent gully. When I returned to camp, I couldn’t help pull out the rope and present it to him. “Welcome to the Ghost!” I said with a jack-o-lantern grin.
“Holy shit!” he said, eyes wide.
After thirty combined years on the rock, Allan and I had relearned climbing’s most important lesson: catastrophe always stalks the unwary climber.
“I knew it,” Allan said. “I just had this feeling this morning like I shouldn’t go up there.” Allan ran his fingers over the shredded rope, “Maybe it happened last night,” he said, in hopeful denial.
“Yeah, and the sheath just slipped down by itself,” I countered. “Face it, you just about took the ride!”I chopped the shredded chunk out of the cord and offered it to Allan, but he declined. I kept it myself as a reminder that life is indeed fragile.
We eventually named the route Premonition. Marco, on his honeymoon in the area a year later, in typical climber style, left his new wife waiting in the valley to join me for the first ascent of this amazingly steep and solid 5.12c line.
My argument with Allan had dissolved in nervous laughter by afternoon. As we packed up to head out, I silently promised the Ghost I would be back. I have a hard time leaving unfinished business. I had learned a lesson with the rodents, and our near fatal mistake had only made feel even more determined.