Welcome — explor8ion

Welcome and Intent

Welcome to explor8ion! If the site looks different than last time you were here — you’re correct, again. A couple of years ago I moved everything to a Google Site and turned every trip report into a PDF, and I said at the time that it was the final move. Apparently I lied. 🤥 Sue me. 😂 The PDFs did what I wanted for storage and overall cost, but they were a lousy way to browse or read my archive, the search was hopeless, and most of the links inside them were broken. So I’ve rebuilt the whole thing properly: real web pages again, every report searchable by any word in it, photos that load at a sensible size, and links that (mostly) work.

Explor8ion has decades of content and grew from very humble beginnings. I love hiking, climbing, skiing, scrambling, canoeing and many other outdoor pursuits. I also love taking photos, videos and writing blogs about my adventures. I do all this so that I can look back and remember good times. I love sharing my pursuits with others and love inspiring people to go beyond their comfort zones but this isn’t my primary mission in life or even the primary goal of this site.

I make no claims about being fitter, faster, more prolific or any other comparison metric that the Internet algos make us think we care so much about. The hubris of self promotion is not something that I’m interested in. I simply have too many years under my belt to care about that stuff. I do what I do because it gives me pleasure to do it. That’s it. No agenda, no lists, no goals, no side hustle, no influencing. When I feel like doing a trip, I do it. When I feel like posting a GPS track, I do it. When I feel like making a video, I do that. When I don’t feel like it, I don’t. Pretty darn simple, and simple is what I like.

How to Use Explor8ion

There’s a lot here — 900-odd trip reports covering hundreds of scrambles, dozens of canoe trips, ski tours, hikes and whatever else I’ve talked myself into over the past twenty-five years. Here’s how to find your way around it.

Search is the fastest way in, and it’s new. It reads the full text of every report, so a peak name, a partner’s name, or half a sentence you half remember will find it. There’s a box in the header on every page.
The top ten lists are where I’d start if you’re just browsing. Thirteen of them — best scrambles, easiest, hardest, most remote, best ski tours, best backpacking, and the ten worst days I’ve had in the hills.
The map plots every trip with coordinates, colour coded by what kind of outing it was. Useful when you have an area in mind but aren’t sure what’s in it.
Regions groups everything by where it is — Banff, Kananaskis, Yoho, Waterton, David Thompson Country and the rest.
All trips is the whole archive by date, newest first, with a year index down the side.
The ratings explain what SC6 or MN8 actually means before you commit to a day out. Every report links its own rating straight to the relevant entry.

Every report carries the same numbers in the same place — elevation, gain, distance, time and a technical rating — so you can compare two trips at a glance without reading either of them.

For the technically curious

Explor8ion.com has been rebuilt from the ground up. There is no database here, no PHP, and nothing running on a server when you load a page. Every trip report is a markdown file in a git repository, compiled to static HTML by Astro and served from Cloudflare’s edge network on the free tier. The photographs, roughly 8.6 GB of them, live in Cloudflare R2 behind img.explor8ion.com, where storage costs about $0.23 a month and delivery is free and unmetered. Search is Pagefind: the index is built at deploy time and runs entirely in your browser. The map is MapLibre over OpenTopoMap tiles, keyless and untracked. The old version of this site queried a database on every single page view, which meant the more people read it, the more it cost me — around $700 a year by the end. This one costs the same whether ten people visit or ten thousand. At least that’s the theory. 😅

Standard Disclaimer and Safety Tips

This is your standard disclaimer so that I don’t get sued when you follow one of my tracks or reports and get yourself into trouble. Use this site and the beta contained therein at your own risk! The author (Vern Dewit) makes no claim of authority or relevance of any of this drivel on the successful outcome of your trip. Mountains are a dramatically changing landscape and routes that I plotted 10 to 15 years ago will almost certainly look and feel completely different today.

Please carefully read my difficulty ratings and know what I mean by them. Always travel prepared for the conditions and terrain you’re on. Just because I didn’t use a rope on a glacier does not mean you shouldn’t. Conditions, personal risk profiles and stupidity levels are different for each and every one of us. I know I don’t wear my helmet enough for example. Wear a brain bucket — the Rockies are doing their best to fall down and often they wait until you’re around to do it.

About Me

Some basic facts about me that may or may not explain some of what you read or see over the decades of trip reports. I grew up on a small family farm in southern Manitoba — about as far from mountains or even hills as you can get. I was raised in a very strict Calvinist religious sect and grew up with a correspondingly strict and embarrassingly limited world view. I moved to Calgary in 1999 and my first mountain was Ha Ling on a work trip. I was immediately hooked. I didn’t know it at the time but over the next 25+ years the freedom of the hills would slowly work its way into my whole life and eventually set me free in many ways I never thought possible.

I have always struggled with my weight. My weight fluctuates terribly and mountains have always been the one way that I can somewhat regulate it — although eating always wins out in the end. I chuckle at well-meaning folks who think exercise is an automatic way to stay slim — I am living proof that it is most certainly not! I have managed to gain weight while exercising ridiculous amounts. Calories in / calories out folks. C’est la vie!

I am a hiker that dabbles in alpinism, rather than an alpinist that hikes. I wish it were the other way around but it’s not. I never had the luxury of wandering the world when I was young. I got married and started a family in my early 20’s and have always had to work to support them. All my mountains and trips were done on top of a full time job while raising my two wonderful kids (Kaycie and Niko) with my even-more-wonderful life partner (Hanneke). Sometimes the things you love have to suffer for the people you love. In case you’re wondering, Hanneke and I were childhood sweethearts and have been together since we were 13 years old which is pretty darn cool, I think.

Although my family is the joy and ultimate priority of my life, I’d be lying if I said it was always easy balancing their needs and my burgeoning passions for adventure and explor8ion. When the kids were young and we were a single income family there were many tough days trying to balance the two! Now that both my kids are living their best lives, I will have more time to pursue some of my other life passions. Hanneke won’t do sketchy scrambles with me, but she’s game for hikes, backpacking, snowshoeing and canoe trips which is pretty great. That’s enough about me for now. If you want some more of my philosophy you can check out some of my articles:

Feel free to reach out any time to discuss anything you read or see on my site or to ask me questions or make suggestions.

Vern