Sadistic Sublime: the Mystery, Majesty and Ministry of The Grouse Grind

Canada’s most popular hiking trail isn’t really a hike at all. Or even a schlep. It is, well, a Grind.

From EXPLORE Magazine, Spring 2011

Matt Lauer didn’t commute every day by foot to his makeshift set atop Grouse Mountain. But at least once the NBC Today Show figurehead, and his co-host Meredith Vieira, trudged to their job, during the Winter Olympics, by way of the storied hiking trail the world now knows about too. The Grouse Grind inhaled the co-hosts at the parking lot and coughed them up at the summit, 2.9 km and 853 vertical metres later. If Vancouver was Heaven – as the anchors daily suggested it was – then they had discovered the Stairway. The makeup guy that day didn’t bother with the rouge.

Rotund weatherman Al Roker took the tram. But Matt and Meredith, see, they didn’t really have a choice. If you’re a reporter in Vancouver trying to take the temperature of the town, you must engage with the Grind. Must. Because the Grind isn’t just some local recreation option. It’s a crucible, a social phenomenon, a cosmic test of character. Hereabouts, your relationship with the Grind is a metric of what kind of Vancouverite you are.

People talk about their “Grind time”—which turns out, handily, to be about the same as their 10k time. A rule of thumb is that if you can do the Grind in the same minutes that you are old in years, you’re really fit. (But of course that only works beyond a certain number, like shooting your age in golf.) There are Grouse Grind dating strategies, Grouse Grind mix tapes, Grouse Grind swipe cards that trip a sensor at a timing post on the bottom and again at the top. Each year the Canucks hockey club tests its crop of prospects on The Grind. (The best time—and it won’t surprise you they had the same time—belongs to the twins, Henrik and Daniel Sedin, at around 32 minutes.) Wilderness-therapy programs have rehabilitated at-risk youth kids on it. Monks have carried a heavy brass Buddha up it, each taking a few steps and passing it along. The local realtor who completed the Grind 13 times in one day calculated, as his brain-fog cleared on the last gondola down at 11pm, that he’d burned 14,000 calories. It’s almost a rite of passage to go balls-out in the spring on the Grind and sustain some weekend-warrior injury. In summer, fireman from North Shore detachments are summoned to The Grind at least three times a week –usually to a stretch of the trail between the quarter and the halfway mark, where after a deceptively gradual start it gets ferociously steep.

Health, charity, pride, addiction: each for their own reasons, well over 100,000 people do the Grind every year. If you could harness the energy output of all those climbers you might not need the new 1.5 mw wind turbine just installed on the peak to help run the resort. In a way, Grinders do power Grouse. They amount to windfall for management—which never, truth be told, wanted a staircase up their mountain in the first place but are now quite happy to take a million bucks of Grinders’ money to the bank every year.

It’s hard to imagine Vancouver without The Grind. But you don’t have to go back too far in time to do it.

A TALE OF TWO FRIENDS

Don McPherson and Phil Severy meet every Saturday morning for a cup of coffee and a walk – or at least, as much of a walk as McPherson’s shot knees will allow. One recent Saturday they circled misty Deer Lake in Burnaby, then sat on a bench watching a guy in hip waders cast a flyline over the water.

Don is 67. With his close-cropped silver hair and lenscrafters glasses, has the air of a kindly pharmacist. (Actually, he works part-time, post-retirement, as a power engineer for the city.) Phil is 70. Hawklike and wiry, a little David Carradine-ish, with a torqued sense of humor, he is a psychiatrist. It’s because these two friends found each other that the Grouse Grind exists.

It happened in the emergency department at Vancouver’s St. Paul’s Hospital in 1980. Don was there because a stabbing bursitis pain had woken him up. Phil was there because, an emerg physician at the time, he was on duty that night. Phil spotted Don first. Don was reading an article in the waiting room about a rock climber with no legs. “Do you climb?” Phil asked. (He didn’t climb himself, but was itching to learn.)

“I used to,” Don said. There was, in that loaded exchange, all the explanation you need for the adage When the student is ready, the teacher appears.

Phil shot Don’s shoulder full of cortisone. And shot his heart full of … well, the desire to climb again.

Twelve years earlier, while scaling El Capitan in Yosemite, Don lost a close friend in a terrible accident. Jim Madsen, a climbing prodigy, spidered up to try to rescue a climber stuck on a tricky top wall and rappelled off the end of his rope — right through the knot. Don lost his stomach for the sport. He moved to Canada, built a cabin in the woods, lived in it for awhile. He became almost an isolationist – on the liberal hippie, rather than the right-wing nutjob, end of the spectrum. He got into EST, “trying to move forward spiritually,” he says. “Trying to improve myself as a human being.” A return to the mountains seemed less and less in the cards. “And then Phil shows up.”

Don took Phil bouldering at first, then climbing, patiently orchestrating his pupil’s progress. They became fast friends. “We found out that when we worked together we practically read each other’s minds,” Don says. By “worked,” he’s talking less about climbing than about the next project they fell into together – maintaining trails in the wilderness, and eventually building them.

Which brings us back to The Grind.

“We made it for ourselves, first of all,” Don says. It would be their own personal gym, this sneaky seam up through the fir and hemlock, a taxing cardio blast that would keep them in shape for their longer excursions together. “We never imagined it would be popular. We thought maybe hardcore climbers and hikers would go up when it was miserable and wet because you could get a coffee and change your clothes at the top.”

They worked for two years, clearing brush, moving rocks. They’d go up at night, after work, and on weekends. Often they’d arrive to find deer enjoying the new path. In winter they shoveled snow from the working area before getting down to business.

It’s a lot tougher, engineering-wise, to go straight up a mountain than across it. The sturdiest paths are usually gradual switchbacks built on the high side of trees, so the trees hold the trail. But here on Grouse that wasn’t the point. “We made it the fastest say you could go at a certain gradient,” Don says. “We said, if you’re up here for a workout you’re gonna get one. There’s not going to be a flat spot to rest.”

It was all bandit stuff, of course. The land sits on a buffer zone surrounding the watershed responsible for nearly half of the regional district’s drinking supply. Every day they were on it they were trespassing.

Grouse Mountain staff going up the skyride would spot them down there trailcutting and start hollering at them to get off. Don couldn’t quite appreciate the outrage. The mountain was going to get climbed anyway, so why not make sure the climbers were safe? He introduced himself to management. They took his name down. They made him promise at the very least not to use a chainsaw anymore. “So I promised. We’d already cut through the big stuff.” They continued on with hand saws. They used axes and grub hoes with a pick on one side and a chopper on the other. It was medievally slow going. They pounded stakes and built footbridges over gullies.

They were not strictly side of the angels, environmentally.

“I’m guilty of blazing trees,” Don says, meaning cutting strips in the bark as trail markers in winter, when the snow’s too high for the flagging tape to be seen. Blazed trees still live, he reasoned—and so do hikers who see them.

“I can remember one day we were out working and this young man and woman came up the path, the man with baby in his pack. They continued on up past us. I felt great. I thought: They found our trail.

Cut to: 1995. Many, many others had by now found the Grind. So many that it was now seriously chewed up and “becoming a creek in spots,” as Don recalls. Don and Phil put together a proposal, and got the resort’s tacit approval to rebuild the trail.

The Grind 2.0 was a degree of magnitude bigger in scope. It would widen the path to four feet all the way to the top. “We needed a passing lane ‘cause people were using it for races now,” Don says. This time the pair had lots and lots of help, including work crews co-ordinated by the Elizabeth Fry Society made up of kids putting in their community hours, and both men’s wives sometimes, and their kids.

But now Don and Phil found themselves scissored between two groups— those grateful to them for maintaining the trail, and those furious at them for further despoiling the forest. One day a guy approached Don as he shored up a staircase tie, and slugged him. Don chased him, “but I was in my raingear and couldn’t catch him.”

“I remember one guy passed me when I was working below the three-log bridge muttering “You’re fucking it up! You’re fucking it up!” Phil says. “I said, no, you fuck it up. You and the thousands like you who are eroding the biomass with your footsteps! We’re just trying to repair the damage that you cause!”

The rebuild took three years. Don and Phil worked both days on the weekend every weekend. The project stretched on and on. “Things,” Don says, “were getting really sketchy at home.”

THE COOK’S TOUR

These days the Grind is now undergoing even more orthopedic work – a rebuild of the rebuild, if you like. It’s a venture that could really be ongoing forever, like those bridges so large that the moment you finish painting them they need painting again.

Recently Phil and I decided to go up and take stock—“the cook’s tour,” as he put it. Don didn’t come. His body wouldn’t let him do the Grind, even if he were into Grinding these days, which he isn’t. (Don’s life at the moment is less Outward Bound than Inward Bound. He keeps such a low profile that several people I asked for a contact number for him thought he had died. “I’ve dropped right out of sight,” he admits.)

It was March. The Grind was officially “closed,” which to many Vancouverites jonesing for their Grind fix just means the slight inconvenience of routing around the locked fence. It was not much past dawn, but already there were plenty of people on the trail ahead of us.

A manhole-cover-sized rock stood eight inches above the path, right in the middle. “That stone used to be flush,” Phil said. Hundreds of thousands of tromps had pulverized the path around it. All up the trail, big lone rocks sat exposed like molars amid receding gums. “The Grind,” Phil said, “gets ground down.”

It had been years since I’d hiked the trail. It didn’t feel intuitive. Where to step wasn’t always obvious. It’s been well-documented that the more you do The Grind the faster your time. It’s not just because you’re getting fitter. It’s because you’re understanding the trail. “It becomes a reflex,” Phil said. “Go over the same ground multiple times and your body finds the most efficient way.”

Phil kept veering off the path, like a dog following an old scent. Every stone he and Don had laid in 30 years ago did double-duty: they were stairs and they were dams, holding the mountain back. Very few of those original rock steps are still part of the path. “What were steps are now obstacles,” Phil said. Hikers simply went around them, because it’s easier to walk on dirt than on rocks.

Phil and Don noticed, during the rebuild, that wherever their original trail had meandered at all, hikers had cut the corners. “People just wanted to juke on up the mountain,” Phil says. It was as if a hundred thousand people a year were serving as a kind of collective ruthless editor, paring the trail to something Hemingway-spare and single-minded: push up, up, up. If the Grind is the People’s Gym, the people designed it, or at least refined it, to deliver the purest possible high.

The current retrofit, helmed by a professional trailbuilder named Jeremy Power, is making the trail extraordinarily skookum. It looks like masonry. It is masonry, in places. There are retaining walls near the top that are mortared in to place. Broad flat steps backfilled with glacial till, a fine natural glue that sets like cement around rocks and makes those steps as flat and hard and jeweled as a Whistler patio.

Still, Don’s handiwork is everywhere evident. Basically, anything that looks like Lincoln Logs, rather than lumberyard product, is his. Deadfall notched and laddered over streams. Beautiful little fan spiral staircases. Stumps crosscut on top by Don’s chainsaw for traction. In some caprock are steps that Phil had chipped out with a maul and chisel in one long day. Phil recalled how he and Don would work out here, just walking and reacting. Seeing the next move and doing it. Digging a hole for the rock the other guy is already lowering into place. The oasis of silent male companionship.

We passed the spot where a young guy named Rory Manning was swept away in an avalanche in 2000. The spot were Phil himself almost lost his footing on the verglas and saved his life with a last-second ice-ax arrest. The spot where the district dealt with a precariously sitting, cabin-sized boulder by dynamiting it off the face of the mountain.

It began to snow. Still the hikers came, passing us, continuing on up. Phil and Don are of the mind that the Grind is a cool thing that, by becoming a racetrack for the masses has outgrown its original purpose.

“As soon as we realized it was going to be a thoroughfare, we started putting four or five other trails up here on the mountain,” Phil says. “They aren’t flagged and nobody knows about them.” Phil still hikes those trails. They’re happily deserted. But they’re not The Grind.

“I don’t know if we’re going to find something as wonderfully grim as this ever again.”