![]() “This is real,” he sternly emphasized, as he checked over my rappel. “I was concentrating too much on teaching and not enough on my own safety.” I dropped about 20 feet before one of the other guides grabbed the rope,” he explained. For some reason she decided to let go of the rope entirely. “A few years ago, I was teaching a group out here and I was rappelling down from one of the students. Rick checked each of us over while walking us through the set up, before waving to us as we leaned back and inched our way down the white and rippled slab. ![]() Next we moved on to rappelling, a slightly nerve-racking procedure combining prusiks, an ATC belay device, and solid nerves. Before then, we set up anchors with slings and cordelettes, practicing carefully to build solid anchors for top rope belay. The climbing part didn’t happen until after lunch. The clouds parted and the sun warmed the white slabs. Rick set us up, along with another instructor, Jeremiah. We hiked for five minutes to the slabs, and set up for the day at the anchor points for top roping. Just over the Athabasca River, we pulled over to our destination: the Morro Slabs, a single-pitch crag for rock climbing. The clouds had lifted and only a few loom over the low mountains near the town of Jasper as we drive east. He gathered us by our cars for his last minute announcement: “OK, so you have a helmet? Rock shoes? Harness? Three sets of prussiks? Lunch and water?” he asked. There were six of us-that is, students-under Rick’s wing for the day. But I later found out that he has been running the Summer in the Mountains course for 47 years. He’s an older man, but it was hard to gauge his age. He’s tall and large, with slightly long hair and a thin moustache, sporting what looks like an old officer’s trench coat on the cold morning. He’s a stern, confident presence as he trudges through the field in rubber boots, correctly predicting a soggy start to the day. Looks like conditions out on the slabs are clear and mostly dry, so let’s start to head out,” said Rick, an avid climber and outdoorsman, as well as the head of the Edmonton chapter of the Alpine Club of Canada (ACC). We grabbed some boiling water for coffee from one of our “classmates” of the day, a fellow participant in the Alpine Club of Canada’s Summer in the Mountains course, headed by life-long climbers hailing from Edmonton, Alberta. ![]() The weather forecast predicted shoddy conditions for the day in and around Jasper National Park, and the day began with low cloud and cool temps. Waking up to a damp tent and two crows battling each other for the loudest caw, we pulled ourselves out on to the wet field which soaked the surface of my boots after a few steps in the long grass. ![]()
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