“Barry has been at the cutting edge of high altitude climbing for many years and his book is an honest and visceral account of a life devoted to climbing at the highest levels, both on rock and ice,” said Steve Dean, secretary of the Boardman Tasker Charitable Trust and Prize for Mountain Literature of this year’s prize winner, Barry Blanchard’s The Calling.
“This is one of the finest mountaineering books to appear for many years and it is destined to become a classic of that genre.”
Learning he had won the U.K.’s most prestigious award for mountaineering writing – and by extension, arguably the highest honour worldwide for a book of that genre – Blanchard said, was nothing short of moving.
“It’s hard to put into words what this means to me, and my family,” said Blanchard, a longtime Canmore resident. “Suffice to say that it means a hell of a lot. I don’t know how many Boardman Tasker winners cry, but I did.”
To collect his award at a ceremony on Nov. 20, Blanchard flew to the U.K. on short notice after the stars aligned to grant him time off from guiding – he is an internationally certified ACMG/IFMGA mountain guide and associate director with Canmore-based Yamnuska Mountain Adventures – and when his girlfriend, Nicole, offered to help care for his two daughters.
Hosted by the U.K.’s premier mountain gathering, the Kendal Mountain Festival, the Boardman Tasker award ceremony was worth the trip, he said, describing it as “a great, humorous and insightful event.”
Growing up in under-advantaged parts of Calgary, Blanchard was introduced to climbing, and climbing writing, as a teenager. With the Rockies lined up tantalizingly close on the western horizon, he discovered through the writing of great European alpinists Walter Bonatti, Gaston Rebuffat and Lionel Terray examples of men who acted with honour, contrasting starkly with the men who had thus far been part of his life experience.
Writing about his youth, Blanchard admitted any ambition for a fatherless Metis kid to be a mountain climber rather than a delinquent, “may as well have been to be an astronaut,” was not an easy task.
But it’s exactly those emotionally charged passages, along with the palm-sweating tension of dangerous climbs gone awry on the world’s most formidable peaks, combined with the youthful boundary-pushing, heartfelt deep soul-brother bonding between him and his climbing partners set to a backdrop of a young man’s yearning to measure up to great heights that give The Calling the depth and substance that makes it worthy of the award.
Created in honour of British alpinists Pete Boardman and Joe Tasker, who were lost at 8,250 metres on the unclimbed Northeast Ridge of Everest in 1982, the exact era during which Blanchard began to meet some of his own highest alpine aspirations - the Ł3,000 (CAN $6,077) award recognizes the author of an original work that is judged to have made an outstanding contribution to mountain literature.
As a long-standing admirer of both Boardman and Tasker’s own powerful, insightful writing, Blanchard said being awarded the prize carries extra meaning.
“I’ve always loved and admired the commitment and hardness in Joe’s (Tasker’s) writing,” Blanchard said. “He was one incredibly tough man who was determined beyond the common definition of the word. Peter’s (Boardman’s) writing was very descriptive and quietly determined, and his second book, Sacred Summits, showed me that I could be an alpinist and mountain guide and travel the world with my partner and not have to be wealthy.
“Both men delved deeper into their human-ness and emotional challenges, their inner lives, deeper than most other climbing literature that I’d read, and English was their first language and that was a change for me as most of what I’d read had been translated.”
With his first book being not just well-received, but highly praised, Blanchard said he’d added to his publisher Patagonia Books’ delight by signing a contract to write the sequel, picking up from the point in 1988 where The Calling left off.
“My publisher is calling the sequel, The Echo, but I’m leaning towards, Total Recall,” Blanchard said with a laugh.
No difference, if it’s written with the same heartfelt honesty, thoroughly enjoyable belly laughs and intimate humanity, it’s bound to be another winner.
