FLIGHT OF THE IMAGINATION
“What has been your greatest inspiration?”
THERE HAVE BEEN SO MANY in the past, but perhaps the most inspiring experience of all for me happened recently.
In August 2011 a top class American rock climber and base jumper, Dean Potter, scaled the big rock face of Mount Bute at the head of Bute Inlet. He then jumped off the 9,200 ft. summit in a wing suit, making a three-minute, world record–breaking human flight, like a flying squirrel, and landed in the valley 7,000 ft. below. National Geographic was there to sponsor and film this elite achievement. The beautiful film, called The Man Who Can Fly, was aired on American TV in March that year but was not shown to the Canadian public until August 2012, when we had the honour of presenting it our local community centres.
I was lucky enough to have been invited along as a local guide and storyteller on this exciting expedition because of my knowledge and experience of the history and geography of this relatively unknown wilderness area. Over my many years guiding in the area, I have enjoyed the extraordinary hospitality of the old Homathko logging camp located two kilometres up the river from the head of Bute Inlet which we had used as a base for our Ocean to Alpine wilderness expeditions into the Waddington Range. There have been many polite but skeptical loggers who have endured my cookhouse ranting and raving about the place in which I apparently was heard to say, “One day the world will discover this place and jumbo jet loads of people will be coming to see the awesome beauty and climbers will be lining up to climb the 6,000 ft. near-vertical granite face of Mount Bute.”
As it turned out, one of those loggers was also a keen young climber from Squamish who returned a few years later with two buddies and made a very fine first ascent of the big face. Then another one of the three, Jimmy Martinello, heard, through the climbing grapevine, that National Geographic and Dean Potter were looking for bigger and better mountain faces to film their climbing and wing suit base jumping. He suggested they team up on Mount Bute.
Quite a bit of the 45-minute film is devoted to Potter developing the wing suit and preliminary training exercises for the Bute expedition, including spectacular ropeless climbing on the big rock walls of El Capitan in Yosemite and breathtaking tetherless high-line walking. The expedition team that assembled at the road end on Quadra Island, less than one kilometre from our home, included as well as Dean and Jimmy two other world-class climbers, two film directors and cameramen, another cameraman, a rigger, a sound man, Dean Potter’s girlfriend, his dog Whisper and me.
For the 10 hour, 50-nautical-mile voyage up Bute Inlet, we boarded Misty Isles, a converted fishing schooner run by Michael Moore from Cortes Island. In perfect weather, the visitors were suitably primed by the increasingly spectacular scenery, climaxing with their goal – Mount Bute, towering dramatically 9,200 ft. above the mouth of the mighty Homathko River at the head of the inlet. Finally, at the first sign of human habitation they had seen all day, the team stepped onto the dock at their base of operations, tired but highly stoked by the long exposure to the powerful elements.
A warm welcome and hearty refreshments awaited their arrival in the reinvented, industrial/tourism Homathko Camp. In the morning, and for the next four days, bad weather prevented any progress on the mountain. Though it was a test of their patience, the team used the delay to pay respectful dues to the dramatic mountain and ocean environment, and to ground themselves, both individually and as a group. It was impressive to witness how much affectionate camaraderie they generated among themselves and how much interest, respect and admiration they showed for the local environment, history and customs, including me. They even took their hats off, as loggers were expected to do, when they came into the cookhouse. This pause in the activities provided ample opportunity for the team to hear about some of the rich local history and folklore as well as some of my own climbing and ski touring explorations of the Homathko country. Even more special for me were the intimate conversations about the deeper motivations and passions that drove their extraordinary achievements.
When the weather finally cleared, because of the bad weather delay they had no time for practice or trial runs. So, organizing entirely on sight as they went along, the cameramen filmed the four climbers making a very fast ascent of the upper part of this impressive near-vertical granite wall, set against a background of blue sky and a magnificent expanse of peaks and glaciers at the heart of the BC Coast Range wilderness.
Then they had to rig a platform for Dean to make his sensational historic jump and breathtaking three-minute flight to a meadow in the valley far below. The other jumper, Wayne Crill, in an emotionally charged moment of decision, that for me was a highlight of the film, declined to jump. This scene, providing authentic, intensely moving human drama, accentuated just how refined and carefully considered Dean’s performance was.
“What do you think was Dean Potter’s essential motivation in making this film?”
EVEN THOUGH THE FILM IS ostensibly about extreme sport, in the film Dean answers that question by saying, “The film is not really about breaking records. It’s more about shifting perception, heightened awareness and extraordinary human power.” In private conversation I heard Dean say he was interested in conveying the message that we all have the potential to extend the limits of our capabilities and get more out of life simply by letting go of the psychological and cultural constraints that prevent us from doing so. He wanted to share the sense of freedom that he experienced and encourage other people to stretch the limits of their own possibilities.
“Does he have any suggestions about how to let go of the fear that holds us back?”
IN THE FILM, WHILE WALKING a tightrope hundreds of feet above the ground in training for the Bute expedition, with no safety tether, confronting the limit of his own capability, he says, “I focus my attention on breathing, especially exhaling deeply from the abdomen, like meditation and yoga.” Presumably the exhaling helps dismiss the fear. While climbing without ropes thousands of feet up on the vertical face of El Cap he also tells of how “I used to climb with aggression and fear. That only got me so far. Now I climb with love and passion.”
The film also dramatically showcases the rugged beauty and unmatched scale of the mountains soaring high above the turquoise mix of glacial rivers and ocean waters at the head of Bute Inlet that, as I’ve said earlier, I once heard described as “one of the world’s best kept secrets, Canada’s Grand Canyon, except bigger and better!”
It was this extreme verticality that attracted Potter as a suitable place to push the precarious and breathtaking limits of three extreme sports. So finely and with such intense drama and emotion is the line being drawn between life and death that the film also challenges the audience by stretching the limits of human perception in what Potter, very articulately, refers to as a “flight of the imagination.”
In addition to all of this, the film succeeds in capturing what struck me so vividly from my experience of spending time with these world-class athletes, which was the extraordinary manifestation of the power of love. It showed in their camaraderie, their respect for local people, their overt passion for their chosen vocation and its wilderness environment and the sheer joy of living and, ultimately, in their truly remarkable stretching of human capability.
A tragic sequel to this story is that Dean Potter was killed recently during a squirrel suit flight in Yosemite. Although I don’t know the details and can’t be sure, my guess is that Dean’s attention was distracted by the possibility of the park rangers waiting to arrest him on landing in the Yosemite Valley floor, where base jumping is illegal. To be less conspicuous required jumping at dawn or dusk when there are unfortunately more erratic up and down drafts. As well as facing a possible jail sentence Dean had taken on the political challenge of fighting to have the law changed, which must have entailed a significant load on his subconscious mind. In the high stakes game Dean was playing, there was no room for the slightest intrusion of subconscious distraction from absolute focus of consciousness in the moment.