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Mountains of the Coast: Photographs of Remote Corners of the Coast Mountains (Harbour $36.95)
John Baldwin is too modest. The unassuming mountaineer and nature photographer has logged more than 250 ascents and is the first person to traverse the Coastal Range from Bella Coola to Vancouver on skis. That's 800 kilometres and ten years of snaking over mountaintops and glaciers. With his skiing partner John Clark, Baldwin has achieved as much or more than anyone in the Coast Ranges according to fellow back country explorer Anders Ourom. His adventures have made him worthy of legendary status among B.C.'s foremost mountaineers, but he would never say so.
Baldwin credits his mother with teaching him to see beauty and his father for nudging him to explore. In Mountains of the Coast: Photographs of Remote Corners of the Coast Mountains (Harbour $36.95) he lets his images do most of the talking, using his lens to transform ice, rock, snow, light and shadow into something otherworldly.
"As you ski,"; he says during our interview, "you get swept into the rhythm of the place and notice all these patterns and weird shapes. It's like discovering little nuggets of gold in a sand bar. You come around a corner and there'll be this incredible swirl around a crevasse and the morning light will be just right. It's abstract language on a huge scale.";
The Coastal Mountains are dangerous, even lethal. Three of Baldwin's colleagues died in 1996 when they were trapped in an avalanche on the Monarch Icefield. As well, many of his excursions are extremely taxing, both mentally and physically. Some trips last up to three weeks, requiring careful plotting to avoid icefalls and avalanches, or special preparations to cope with gales that can pin skiers inside a tent for days.
Since Baldwin's journeys allow him to carry only a week's rations, airdrops can be necessary. In one case a grizzly bear arrived at the drop before Baldwin. Every last morsel was devoured, right down to the canned food. The bear had managed to puncture the tins with its teeth, sucking them dry. "There wasn't even a whiff of tuna left,"; he says.
There's a documentary quality to some of his photos, underlining the requirements of surviving in vertical terrain. In a two-page panorama, Serra II of the Waddington Range pricks the sky like a needle, set against a backdrop of peaks so numerous that most are nameless. A tiny figure, on the scale of a gnat, clings to Serra II's grey pinnacle. This scene, with the Tiedemann Glacier yawning 2,000 metres below, is vertigo defined.
The vast reservoir of wilderness stretching 1,500 kilometres from Vancouver to Alaska has pulled Baldwin back into its mystery for 25 years now. He says his sense of discovery has yet to diminish. He's drawn by "the simple, uncomplicated enjoyment of nature and its hidden treasures... It is the silence, the mist hanging over our jagged peaks, the curve of the snow slopes as they recede into the distance."; 0-55017-213-1
[Mark Forsythe / BCBW 2000]
Baldwin credits his mother with teaching him to see beauty and his father for nudging him to explore. In Mountains of the Coast: Photographs of Remote Corners of the Coast Mountains (Harbour $36.95) he lets his images do most of the talking, using his lens to transform ice, rock, snow, light and shadow into something otherworldly.
"As you ski,"; he says during our interview, "you get swept into the rhythm of the place and notice all these patterns and weird shapes. It's like discovering little nuggets of gold in a sand bar. You come around a corner and there'll be this incredible swirl around a crevasse and the morning light will be just right. It's abstract language on a huge scale.";
The Coastal Mountains are dangerous, even lethal. Three of Baldwin's colleagues died in 1996 when they were trapped in an avalanche on the Monarch Icefield. As well, many of his excursions are extremely taxing, both mentally and physically. Some trips last up to three weeks, requiring careful plotting to avoid icefalls and avalanches, or special preparations to cope with gales that can pin skiers inside a tent for days.
Since Baldwin's journeys allow him to carry only a week's rations, airdrops can be necessary. In one case a grizzly bear arrived at the drop before Baldwin. Every last morsel was devoured, right down to the canned food. The bear had managed to puncture the tins with its teeth, sucking them dry. "There wasn't even a whiff of tuna left,"; he says.
There's a documentary quality to some of his photos, underlining the requirements of surviving in vertical terrain. In a two-page panorama, Serra II of the Waddington Range pricks the sky like a needle, set against a backdrop of peaks so numerous that most are nameless. A tiny figure, on the scale of a gnat, clings to Serra II's grey pinnacle. This scene, with the Tiedemann Glacier yawning 2,000 metres below, is vertigo defined.
The vast reservoir of wilderness stretching 1,500 kilometres from Vancouver to Alaska has pulled Baldwin back into its mystery for 25 years now. He says his sense of discovery has yet to diminish. He's drawn by "the simple, uncomplicated enjoyment of nature and its hidden treasures... It is the silence, the mist hanging over our jagged peaks, the curve of the snow slopes as they recede into the distance."; 0-55017-213-1
[Mark Forsythe / BCBW 2000]
Submitted on July 11, 2003 in By David.
