>>REVIEW
WAY OUT THERE: THE BEST OF EXPLORE
Edited by James Little
Greystone Books, 369 pp.
Way Out There: The Best of Explore celebrates 25 years of the Canadian adventure magazine, although all two dozen-plus pieces come from James Little’s past five years as editor. The first thing that struck me about Way Out There was: that I had no idea such good writing could be found in an adventure magazine. In the last few years, Explore has been nominated for 63 national magazine awards.
Only two writers show up twice in Way Out There and Geoff Powter is one of them. His "The Happy Tormented Life of a Mountain Legend" is a fascinating and welcome look at the life (so far) of Calgary-born alpinist Barry Blanchard. Powter’s other piece, "27 Funerals and a Wedding," is the perfect opening for Way Out There. For readers not familiar with the force that drives these mountaineers on, the first six pages of the book address the ultimate mountaineering question: why?
Ian Brown, familiar to readers of the Saturday Globe and Mail, made me laugh often, which I prize highly. Here is the first sentence of "The Boys and the Backcountry." "On the question of whether to include a single woman in a group of seven married men who are ski-mountaineering out of a tiny hut on a remote icefield in the Rocky Mountains of British Columbia, let me offer, dear reader, one small piece of advice: do not tell your wife, by way of pacifying her about the imminent presence of said woman on your ski trip, that the woman is a lesbian."
Canmore writer and photographer Jerry Kobalenko’s "Gruelling, on a Summer Afternoon" surprised me for its straight-ahead reportage of Quebec’s Traversée Internationale du Lac St-Jean. In the Bow Valley, Kobalenko is well known for his overland feats of endurance chronicled in The Horizontal Everest: Extreme Journeys on Ellesmere Island. By contrast, his piece in Way Out There is a harrowing account of one long, cold day (in the water) from the parallel sport universe of marathon swimming.
And from another Canmore writer, Christie McLaren’s "The Story of Bear 99" left me feeling queasy, the way only good writing can. Our young family was living in the Canmore neighbourhood of Cougar Creek during the rainy early summer of 2005. My wife took our one-year-old daughter on an almost daily circuit along the same trail where Bear 99 killed Isabelle Dubé. McLaren’s piece honours both Dubé and Bear 99, while asking questions that many of us in Banff, Canmore and Calgary are thinking about too.
Ian Brown, Jerry Kobalenko, Christie McLaren and Geoff Powter are all featured in the WordFest/Banff Mountain Book Festival event, Way Out There, on Saturday, October 14 at noon in the Vertigo Theatre Studio (Tower Centre). |
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