Chris and I went to grad school at UBC together, and his fondness for microbrews was formational for me. This memory, however, involves fieldwork: for one of my first PhD research trips to the Bridge Glacier, part of the Lillooet Icefield, I invited Chris and Faran Anslow to join me. The plan was to get dropped off at the top of the icefield by ski-plane, and to ski down the 20-km long Bridge Glacier, sampling snow depths and snow density as we went. We figured it would take just a few days. The pilot who flew us in looked at our gear on the tarmac in Pemberton and asked us how much fuel we had. We said 2-3 days, and he responded with "Well you might want to throw another fuel can in, just in case." So we did, and packed ourselves into a float plane fitted with skis, and headed into the mountains.
The flight in was perfect: long days of late April, and spring in the air, but still full winter on the glacier. After the plane dropped us I think the realization that we were up there, completely cut off except for a shitty satellite phone, sank in. We coralled the gear, and started our course down-glacier, making a few measurements before setting up camp in a tent that smelled vaguely of cow dung. And that was all the skiing we managed over the next 4 days - a storm blew in and dropped over a metre of snow on us for the next 72 hours. We played cards, made soups and dinners and did calisthenics in our snowy kitchen. The book about the night sky someone had brought was hilariously and completely useless, while the one or two others we had were read on repeat.
Chris was an absolute rock star the entire time. Calm, even-keeled, laughing at the ridiculousness of it all. And kindly not too critical of my choices. When we finally got a clearing and called the pilot, he came within an hour. We scrambled to pack everything up and blast a trail through the storm snow to a flat spot where he could land (and then take off again). And somebody whooped when we took over a sea of crevasses - maybe it was Chris, maybe it was me. But this is how I'll remember him - in the snow, in the mountains, with a perma-grin: thinking of the microbrew he'd get to enjoy that evening.
Wow, what an adventure! Thank you for sharing, Joe. It means so much to us.