The Only Way Forward is Back

Located in the heart of British Columbia, the Purcell Range stretches with endless ridgelines and rugged scree slopes, terrain that rewards those willing to earn their way into adventure in it.

And when Margus Riga, Kevin Landry, Fraser Newton, and Andrew McNab set out on a five-day mission to link a series of technical peaks and ridgelines together, things didn't go as planned.

But that’s the reality of backcountry adventure. Conditions change, routes unravel, and sometimes you've just got to roll with the punches.

"We have been running trips like this for nearly twenty years, long enough to understand the difference between ambition and bad judgment.

This was the first time we did not finish one.

The route remained incomplete, suspended out there in the alpine like unfinished business.

A few things worked against us from the start. Logistics came first. We lost two full days to a vehicle drop that should have been simple but instead unravelled into a slow, absurd waste of time. Then came the heatwave. Relentless, oppressive, and perfectly timed to strip the high country of what little water remained. The alpine was dry, exposed, and indifferent. Snowfields had vanished. Streams were gone. What remained was harsh ground and long distances between uncertain water sources.

Day One

We climbed hard to reach the first ridge, already drained, only to discover that two of us had run completely out of water.

There was no choice but to descend again, losing hard-earned elevation to reach a stagnant pond below. We filled bottles in silence and climbed back up through the heat, burning more time and energy than we could afford.

By the time we regained the ridge, the day had already shifted against us.

We covered perhaps a third of the planned distance, but there was no sense of momentum in it. Only the feeling that the trip had already begun slipping away.

Day Two

The previous day had taken more than distance from us. Heat and dehydration had settled in differently for everyone, dulling pace, judgment, and morale.

One of the crew pushed ahead to scout the next ridge while the rest of us moved slowly behind. When he returned, his expression said enough before he spoke.

There was no version of this route that finished in four days.

Not in these conditions. Not at our pace. Not with what still lay ahead.

So we turned away from the line we had come to ride.

A thousand metres of elevation disappeared beneath us as we dropped back into the valley and committed to an alternate route, hoping to shorten the distance and reconnect later.

Instead, the valley gave us forty kilometres of gravel road. Dry, hot, and endless.

By evening we were too spent to finish even that. We stopped where we were and collapsed beside the road.

Day Three

Morning brought another attempt at recovery.

We finished the road and picked up a major hiking trail that, according to the map, would link us back into the alpine through a secondary route.

On paper, it looked clean. Efficient. Almost elegant.

But when we reached the junction where the trail should have begun, there was nothing.

No tread. No marker. No sign that a trail had ever existed there at all.

Just forest and steep ground, uninterrupted in every direction.

The map had offered certainty where none existed.

So once again, we turned around and retraced everything back to Radium Hot Springs, the nearest point where failure looked vaguely civilized.

That night, we camped in a town park, surrounded by sprinklers, distant traffic, and people entirely disconnected from the scale of what had just unravelled.

Day Four

We left early and pedalled south toward Invermere, still trying to salvage some fragment of the original idea.

There, through luck or generosity, we managed to hitch a ride from the owner of a local bike shop (Lakeside bikes) up another valley to the trailhead for Jumbo Pass.

We climbed steadily to the pass and camped high, surrounded by open terrain that finally felt familiar again. But by then the mood had changed. It no longer felt like pursuit. It felt like negotiation, as though the trip had reduced itself to whatever the mountains were willing to allow.

Day Five

In the morning we crossed the pass, descended the far side, and rolled quietly back to the truck.

No finish line. No summit feeling. No final reward.

Just an ending.

And in hindsight, that ending may have been the most important part.

The success of a trip like this is not always measured by whether the route is completed. Sometimes it is measured by knowing exactly when completion stops being worth the cost.

That judgment only comes from experience. Years of close calls. Years of learning that remote terrain does not care how badly you want something.

Trips like this demand the same discipline as ski touring or any serious backcountry travel. Conditions decide far more than intention ever will. If the terrain closes, if the timing falls apart, if the variables begin stacking too heavily in one direction, you listen.

You turn around.

You preserve the chance to come back.

Looking at it now, the original route would likely have taken at least eight days in those conditions, perhaps more.

And that estimate does not include the glacier crossings still ahead, cold moving terrain where mistakes become immediate and expensive.

We did not fail out there.

We made the decision the mountains required.

Sometimes that is the hardest part of all.