Burger and Fries, Squamish, BC

March 30, 1999

My parents, Kim and I were invited for a weekend of skiing with my sister and brother-in-law in Whistler. Our condo wasn't going to be available until the next night, so we planned to stay the first night at the Super 8 in Squamish. (FYI: The Super 8 has a great 2 story water slide into their pool!) Since I knew we would be spending an afternoon in Squamish, I borrowed a climbing guidebook from my friend Gordon hoping to get a few routes in at this awesome climbing area!

After checking in and eating some lunch, we headed over to Burger and Fries to top rope a route or two. Following the directions in the book, we parked near an abandoned road and walked this "trail" for a while looking for the Burger and Fries area. I had hoped it was close, since my parents, sister, and brother-in-law were just going to watch. We didn't find it after walking some time, so I scoped out some of the nearby cliffs under some utility towers. They were all either too hard, too easy, or too short. We continued walking and finally found the Burger and Fries rock. It probably would have been closer to approach from the other direction. Oh well, it was a nice warm, spring day. There were a lot of other climbers on the rock, so Kim and I started to unpack at the base of the "Dusty Eyes" route (5.4). This would be a perfect route since this was the first time that my parents would actually see Kim and I rock climb, and I wanted to show them how "fun" and "safe" it was.

I scrambled up the far left side of the rock to set up the top rope, then rappelled down. Kim and I each belayed each other a few times on this fun, easy route. Since it took longer than expected to reach the climbing area, we were quickly out of time. So we packed things up and headed back to the Super 8, looking forward to climbing more on our next visit. Being that this was really a skiing trip, I was glad that we were able to climb at all.

The next two days were spent racking up 50,000 vertical feet skiing at Blackcomb and Whistler (which isn't hard to do with all their high speed quads). What a great weekend!