The Klondike express
By Curtis Gillespie with photography by Derek Crowe
All aboard for the ride of your life on the White Pass & Yukon Route Railroad, which once carried gold seekers to the promised land
IT'S A ROOKIE MISTAKE, putting my trust in a single hold. We
are rock climbing half an hour outside Whitehorse. I am stuck
on the face, and need a place to put my weight. To my left, a small
knob the size of half a grapefruit seems to offer safe purchase.
I am wrong. Crack. Gone. It feels as if the Yukon itself is crumbling
under my grip. I drop. My fingers, still curled in a hold,
scrape along the craggy surface, shredding off a layer or two of
skin, and as I fall, I catch the faint voice of my daughter, sevenyear-
old Grace, shouting from a dozen metres above, “Dad! No!”
But there is only emptiness — nothing left to grab, nothing to
interrupt my fall. The next thing I touch is the valley floor.
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Luckily, it’s a drop of only about a metre — from a plastic
climbing wall in the forest, part of the Takhini Hot Springs
complex. I'm being belayed by a slacker kid saying, “Whoa,
hang on, dude.” But still. The fear is real for the microsecond
it lasts. I land pretty much upright and notice at my feet the
epoxy climbing hold that has come loose under my weight. The
kid peers at the thick bolt poking out the back of the hold.
“Loose nut, looks like.” He shifts his gaze to the bloody scrapes
on my fingers. “Bummer.”
Grace, Jessica and Cathy lean over the edge of the wall that they
had so easily scampered up. They are impatient, waiting for me
to get to the top so we can ride a wire zipline back down to the
bottom. “Dad,” Jessica half-shouts from above, “what are you
doing? You fell two feet. Why didn't you just keep going?”
When I finally get to the top (heaving myself up and over the
edge, prompting the other slacker at the top to say, “Hey, nice
walrus move right there.”) I display my injuries, hoping for a
bit of recognition of the bravery involved. “Ooh,” says Grace.
“You need a Band-Aid.”
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