Under construction

I don't know exactly how I went down, but I knew right away that something was wrong with my arm. I screamed loudly until I saw Christian run towards me. I could move my fingers, but my shoulder really hurt, and I could feel the top of my upper arm bone outside its socket. My shoulder was dislocated. Luckily W was okay despite having gone down with me. She just quietly observed as we got the carrier off and wondered off to deal with the shoulder. It was only the second day of our holiday, we had only hike 3km of the trailI and I was sure this was the end of our holiday. I apologies to Christian  for ruining our holiday as we walked towards a big rock. Luckily Christian remembered from a wilderness first aid course he took more than a decade ago, how to gently pop in a dislocated shoulder. I lay chest down on a rock and dangled my arm freely downward - this already felt better and I started to relax. Christian started applying traction downwards to my arm and it quickly popped in to place with a loud pop. Christian said my arm became two inches shorter. I immediately felt better, but the arm still felt very sore. We found a comfy place to hang out a little further along the beach, got everyone settled down and I got some good painkillers. We contacted our emergency contact in town for advice, while we contemplated our options. It quickly became apparent that we would not need immediate rescue so we decided to set up camp and see how things were the next morning.

By Christian
We recently acquired a pair of Atomic Backland boots on the cheap (broken/missing hardware - which I fixed) that fit our oldest daughter, who's 7. The only problem is that she's a DIN 1.75 (or maybe 2, soaking wet). The tech bindings with the lowest release values I could find were the Dynafit Rotation 7 (2.5-7) and the Hagan Pure 8 (4 - 8). But neither of those quiet cuts it. Rather than spend another season hauling two separate pairs of skis around for her (one for up, one for down) I decided to try and swap the springs on a set of tech bindings to get a lower release value - and I feel like I succeeded.
Before we get started comes the obvious warning - I don't know anything about ski bindings. If you modify safety equipment based on a description somebody posted on the internet of what they did (for example, this blog post) and things go wrong you have nobody to blame but yourself. 
The first step was to pick the binding to start with. After looking at as many photos online as I could find, and making some guesses as to the internal mechanisms, I decided on the Hagan Pure 8. Also, it's a lighter binding and it's always nice to save a few grams.

I thought the easiest way was to just make a little slideshow of some images I took disassembling the binding. Assembly is just the reverse.

I thought, in this pandemic year, I might break my streak of taking the big kids snowcaving every winter. It's become a bit of a tradition. Usually we go up to Red Heather, but we've been sticking to our local mountains this year (fortunately there are a few places on the North Shore that are accessible, yet not overcrowded, if you know how to navigate). Fortunately the snowpack is pretty deep this season, so being stuck on the North Shore wasn't a problem. It was Line who came up with a plan for how to overcome our usual strategy of bringing along an extra adult to help dig and manage the kids - she'd just come up herself carrying W, then head back down for dinner/sleeping, and come up again the next afternoon to pick us up. Since W is only 1.5 years old we decided against her spending the night in the cave, as we'd be without the backup of a warming hut.

School was delayed by a week due to COVID and then the weekend before school started the smoke came into Vancouver for real. We had been watching the fires all down the west coast of the US. It seemed almost too good that we hadn't had a smoky season in Vancouver for the second year in the row and I guess it was. As we drove across the Lions gate bridge we could barely see the North Shore mountain and I wondered if we should be going at all, but the forecast called for clearer skis further north and the webcam on whistler showed mainly valley smoke. Maybe we would be better off in the mountains.

It was around 4.30pm when Christian announced that we had made it approximately 1/4 of the distance up the trail during our first 3 hours of hiking. I was discouraged to say the least, and a bit worried. Would we make it up before dark? At least we had done most of the elevation gain. We decided that it was time to start carrying N. The trail had been tricky for her so far - narrow with (for us) waist-high shrubbery and many fallen logs. N likes to hold our hand, and the narrow trail made that challenging for her and us. The (for her) face-high branches to push through didn't help (although we did bring pruners and the non-N-supervising parent did some trail work as we hiked). The rest of the way we alternated between Christian carrying N on his shoulders for the steeper sections and one of us holding her hand while she hiked on the flatter sections; both of which are hard when you are already carrying a big backpack. Luckily, F was bouncing along and the trail gradually became easier for us, although both Christian and I were huffing and puffing up the hills. Just before 7pm we saw the lake through the trees - needless to say we were pretty happy. The West side of the lake already had a reasonable number of tents, so we headed to the North side. At this time the mosquitoes were out in swarms.  Again I doubted whether or not the trip was a good idea. The kids started rearranging the sand in the little river flowing through the meadow right away, while Christian and I got busy setting up camp and cooking dinner. We almost managed to get the little kids fed and in bed before it was completely dark. Christian and F stayed up for a later dinner, sitting on the big rock looking over the lake, having some quality daddy - daughter time, and discovering caddisfly larvae. 

People routinely hike up to Berg Lake in Mount Robson provincial park and return in one day, but with three kids age 6 and under, we decided a week-long "expedition" was the way to go. Our friend and housemate Miriam would accompany us on the trip, evening out the adult:child ratio. Needless to say our packs looked and felt ridiculous, but we also knew that the real challenge would be getting our three year old, N, up the trail - whether it was on her own little legs or on someone's back. 

The Bowron Lake circuit is probably the most popular canoeing destination in BC.  It felt like one of those things that you just have to do if you live in BC and are at least remotely into canoeing. Most people probably wouldn't think to paddle 116km with 11km of portaging with three young kids though, but for us it seemed like the perfect first-ish multi-day adventure as a family of five. In the canoe you can carry a lot of stuff, our oldest daughters are old enough to sit nicely in the canoe at most times, and baby W is still too young to attempt to jump over board. As an added bonus a few other families would be joining us on the lakes.