The Edge of Emptiness
June 03, 2025 at 03:30PM
Cassidy Randall | The Atavist Magazine | May 2025 | 2,041 words (8 minutes)
This is an excerpt from issue no. 163, “The Longest Journey.”
“It is important to affirm, and prove, that we go to the mountains to live and not to die, that we are not fanatics but firm believers, and that the few accidents which occur are hard but not useless lessons.”
—Italian alpinist Guido Rey
One
The tent quaked in the howling wind. The storm had raged for three days, trapping Lena and Ruby Rowat at a narrow notch in the mountain ridge. By now the ceaseless sound of flapping nylon had become maddening. When the storm was unleashed on March 25, 2001, the sisters had only just skied to this pass, called Manatee Col. They hastily assembled a tent; there’d been no time to build up enough snow to create a windblock. Snow now piled against the shelter’s walls, threatening to collapse and bury them. When the women went outside to shovel it away, they threw themselves through the door to keep their sleeping bags from being covered in snow, which could soak the down that kept their bodies warm. They couldn’t afford to be careless. The nearest town—the British Columbia ski mecca of Whistler—was at least a four-day journey south on skis, up snow-draped peaks and down unpopulated valleys.
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Lena, 28, and Ruby, 30, lit a stove inside the tent to cook food and dry their gear—a calculated risk, given that the tent wasn’t flame-retardant. But the heat from the stove and their bodies melted the snow beneath the floor, and it began to dip like the hull of a canoe, pooling water and pitching the sisters toward each other as they slept. Above the rampaging wind, they could hear the muffled roar of avalanches around them.
Such dangers might explain why no one had done what Lena and Ruby were attempting on this expedition: traverse North America’s Coast Range, a giant’s backbone of mountains stretching nearly 1,000 miles from near their home in Vancouver all the way to Alaska and the Yukon. Some veteran mountaineers and skiers thought that it was impossible to ski it in one go. The Coast Range was remote and glaciated, shot through with raging rivers, almost laughably difficult to access, and notorious for unholy elevation gain, from sea level to peaks as high as 13,000 feet.
Then there was the wild scale of it all: Many considered it the longest nonpolar ski journey ever attempted. Some called it the longest technical ski traverse in the world. It demanded months of arduous travel and route finding. Anyone who tried it would have to navigate crevasses, avalanches, and the storms that broke across the mountains like waves. Traveling the entire length was the equivalent of climbing and descending more than eighteen Mount Everests over a distance equivalent to nearly fifty marathons.
Yet Lena Rowat thought it could be done. Outwardly, Lena lived a life of epic adventure: skiing, mountaineering, through-hiking, cycling across the continent. She was known in Whistler’s ski community as a six-foot-tall powerhouse with insane endurance, game to try almost any mountain objective. She wore thrift-store clothes, preferring bright tights and flowery dresses over brand-name gear, and sometimes shed clothing altogether to ski naked. She dyed her short hair—once bright blue, now bleached white—and danced on tables at parties, without any need for alcohol or drugs to let loose.
But underneath the hard-charging, fun-loving exterior, she mostly felt lost and depressed. She had no structure in her life, no steady job, and was often overwhelmed by a bottomless feeling of isolation. The mountains were the only place where her brain calmed. Which was one reason she was excited to tackle the Coast Range traverse: It had the tantalizing potential to fill her inner emptiness.
She just needed her sister, equally capable in the mountains, to join as her partner. The two had had matching facial features, but Ruby was much shorter, with a gymnast’s compact body, and hair dyed a deep magenta. Lena liked the idea of achieving this first together. Other than their mother, she knew of very few women in the world of mountain sports, and sometimes struggled to find adventure partners—simply, she assumed, because she was female. Lena liked that she and Ruby could model the kinds of possibilities for women and girls that the two of them didn’t have growing up.
Except it seemed that it would be men who completed the Coast Range route first. Somehow, after so many years when a full traverse was thought impossible, a young Canadian alpinist had dreamed the same dream at the same time. His team of four men left four weeks ahead of the Rowat sisters.
The women had raced to begin their own journey, and three weeks later they were pinned down by the storm. Now, in the besieged interior of their meager shelter, Lena’s stomach began to roll with nausea. In the hours that followed, it worsened. She had to exit the tent repeatedly to relieve herself. The storm showed no signs of abating as Lena’s illness intensified. In that moment, dejected mentally and cut down physically, she considered abandoning the attempt altogether.
But she couldn’t go back now. Not after all the work that had gone into planning the expedition. Not when all that waited back home was crippling loneliness and the lurking sense that she’d failed.
Lena wasn’t the only one in adventure sports who’d battled demons. Such endeavors often draw the misfits, the slightly crazed, the traumatized. Acute levels of risk, like those found in mountaineering, ski touring, whitewater kayaking, and climbing, can offer a tantalizing opportunity to mask a void—or, for people like Lena, fill it. Walking the thin line between life and death demands the kind of focus that can cause the demons to fall away entirely, and help athletes feel part of something bigger than what plagues them. But many never take the next step and figure out what’s behind an interior wound, or do the deep work to heal it.
Lena would do both—but only after her Coast Range journey brought her face-to-face with death.
She felt useless, without purpose. She wished there was even one person who wanted to spend time with her or cared about what was going on in her life.
Lena was born in the aftermath of a snowstorm. In 1972, Nona and Peter Rowat spent Christmas and New Year’s in a rustic cabin at the base of the Whistler ski resort, north of Vancouver. Nona was nine months pregnant with Lena, and had sworn to press pause on skiing; she was due any day. As a family doctor and a pioneer of preventive medicine who’d publicly supported midwifery decades before it was recognized as a medical profession, she knew how to take care of herself and her unborn baby. But a New Year’s Eve storm delivered so much fresh powder that Nona couldn’t resist. At the end of a day on the slopes, she went into labor. Lena was born just after midnight on January 2, 1973.
It was a fitting entry into a family that prioritized outdoor adventure. Ruby and Lena learned to ski by the time they were school-age. Soon they were carrying their own backpacks on multiday trips on Vancouver Island’s rugged West Coast Trail, through rain and mud and mosquitos. With such activities came risk. When Lena and Ruby were in middle school, Peter took the girls on a winter backcountry trip. He taught them to dig a snow cave and melt water with a stove, which Ruby said released so much carbon monoxide they nearly suffocated. A few years later, as the family returned with friends from a wilderness hut in the Tantalus Range, a torrential storm brought flooding that caused Lena and another girl to be swept off their feet as they crossed a swollen creek. Lena still has a clear memory of being submerged in the water, desperately clinging to a branch at the creek’s edge, her feet hooking her friend to keep her from being carried away.
As Lena and Ruby grew older, they appreciated that their parents instilled in them the passion and the skill set—not to mention the capacity to handle themselves when things went sideways—that were key ingredients for staying safe outdoors. But it also seemed to them that their parents too often prioritized their own desires over the needs of their children. (Nona and Peter once left two-year-old Ruby tied to a tree, watched over by a friend’s dog, while they executed a nearby multi-pitch climb.) Lena often felt like she only deserved love when she was getting after it in the mountains. At the same time, she felt unprepared for regular life, with its responsibilities and rules. Worse, she lacked the ability to relate to others. Lena struggled to connect with people beyond her family. She had few friends growing up.
Things briefly improved during college. She made friends and experienced her first romantic relationships, which were with other women. One lasted a year and a half. When it ended, Lena blamed herself. She noticed her baseline mood lowering, her emotions sinking beneath the surface.
After graduating, Lena moved back to Vancouver, into the house where she grew up. Her parents had moved to San Diego when Peter, a neuroscientist, took a job at the University of California campus there. They leased most of the house to tenants, and Lena paid a nominal rent to live in the basement. With her family gone—Ruby, a talented gymnast, was traveling the world as a trapeze artist—Lena had next to no social contact. She lacked a steady job too, following a short stint planting trees and a brief try at medical school. She felt useless, without purpose. She wished there was even one person who wanted to spend time with her or cared about what was going on in her life.
The only thing that gave Lena relief was skiing. She volunteered on the ski patrol at Whistler, biking or hitchhiking nearly 75 miles each way from Vancouver. She soon bored of the resort runs and began skiing outside the ropes. Avalanche education was new and hard to obtain, and Lena’s parents paid for her to take the only course she could find. She slept in her car in the parking lot during the weeklong instruction, taking naturally to the dirtbag lifestyle pioneered by climbers and ski bums.
In the winter of 1998, Lena and one of her only friends, Merrie-Beth Board, ski-toured in the backcountry outside Whistler as often as they could. After she’d descended several big lines, people said that Lena was good enough to go pro in the burgeoning sport of big-mountain skiing. But being in the backcountry gave her an elusive joy she was reluctant to saddle with obligation. Plus, she could hardly handle everyday tasks let alone chase sponsorships.
And God, she was still so lonely. On top of Lena’s stunted ability to connect with people, the seasonal nature of mountain towns made social attachments ephemeral for everyone, contributing to a feeling of isolation in a place with few mental health services to turn to. Not that mountain culture in that era was ready to prioritize mental health. The mostly male community overwhelmingly prized strength, speed, stoicism, and infallible expertise. A willingness to show vulnerability was—and too often still is—sacrificed as the cost of belonging.
And so Lena sacrificed. By the late 1990s, her depression was so deep that she found herself sometimes thinking about suicide.
Then, in the summer of 1999, Peter took his daughters to climb Mount Waddington, the highest peak in the Coast Range Mountains at 13,000 feet. One day on that expedition, Lena gazed at the glaciers spilling out in every direction. She thought how easy it was to travel on them through the mountains. She pulled out a map of the range. The glaciers seemed to stretch from her home in Vancouver all the way to Alaska, into the Saint Elias Mountains, up and over Mount Logan (Canada’s highest peak), and down to the Gulf of Alaska. You could strap on a pair of skis and just keep going.
From that moment on, Lena’s plan was to connect the entire stretch over several years, in two-month segments. That’s how Peter tackled long traverses too, traveling in March and April when conditions were optimal. Here, she thought, was a project that would take three or four spring seasons to complete. A sense of direction that would span years.
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2025/06/03/coast-range-skiing-adventure/
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