All across Canada this year, climbers will be sending new climbs and old classics. I’ve been lucky to witness a number of important Canadian ascents, from new 5.15s to the opening of grade VI alpine walls. Most of the time, the sends are recorded and entered into an alpine journal, magazine or, at the very least, documented on social media. But for some strong Canadians, the send stops at the chains and few will ever hear about it. Every climbing area has at least one dark horse, the local climber who cleans up projects and repeats the hardest lines.
I was lucky to see a dark horse in action while in Skaha this spring. Willis Brown, a farmer in B.C.’s interior, was inching his way up Guy Edwards’s High Country…
