Norm Winter
No ordinary dog
Vince wouldn't stop until he reached the top
Bruce Grierson Featured in our Winter 2009 issue.
The first thing I noticed about Norm Winter, the mountain guide I’d hired to help a group of us reach the summit of Mount Baker in the U.S. Cascades, was his strange calm. Norm was a B.C. boy, lanky as a cowboy, with a little billy-goat tuft of hair—a soul-patch, a flavour-saver—beneath his lower lip that drew your eye there, away from his bemused smile. He walked as if he were making an instructional video on how to walk so you are never off balance. In his commitment to restrained and deliberate speech and movement, he was almost Confucian.
The first thing I noticed about his dog Vince, a four-year-old mongrel with some husky, some spitz and lord knows what else in him, was his…strange calm. (No, the first thing was his crazy curled tail; the second thing was his strange calm.) Initially it seemed odd that Norm had brought Vince along. What was he going to do with the dog while we climbed? The question was soon answered. By the time we’d geared up and mustered at the Heliotrope Ridge trailhead, Vince was already ahead of us, way up the path. No car camping for Vince. He was coming with us. And he aimed, it appeared, to beat us to the top.
This was not ordinary. But then, as I would soon learn, Vince was no ordinary dog.
Vince came into Norm’s life one summer’s day in 1995.
Norm was walking along Commercial Drive in Vancouver, out with another dog that belonged to a vacationing friend, and he was literally thinking Man, I have no room in my life for a dog right now, when a woman walked past, with Vince. The dogs stopped to sniff each other. So their people chatted, too. It turned out that Vince’s owner was living on the street and couldn’t keep him. “She was actually at that moment on the way to the pound with him,” Norm recalls. Norm looked at Vince. Vince looked at Norm. Norm thought that, as dogs go, this one was really pretty beautiful. “I told her, ‘Look, I’ll take your dog for a couple of weeks until you find a home for him,’ ’’ Norm remembers. “And I never gave him back.”
Vince had a quirky personality—a bit standoffish, not all over you like so many pups. He could be aggressive with other dogs but he was timid with people. “He had big emotions, but he didn’t dole them out to just anyone. He chose individuals and did things for them.”
As a domestic dog, Vince was raw clay. Before Norm started taking him out into the mountains, there would have to be basic training.
Someone had obviously thrown Vince from a truck when he was a pup because he wouldn’t go near Norm’s pickup. This posed a problem. They weren’t going to the mountains—or anywhere—until Vince could be trained to get into Norm’s vehicle. “I worked on it for a long time—very, very systematically,” he says. A walk together around the truck. Open the tailgate and walk around it again. One paw on the bumper. “There were at least 20 steps in the process.” Eventually Vince learned to trust that this man with the soul-patch was a different species from the asshole who had tried to dispatch him. He committed to Norm, and the two became a buddy movie.
Vince was plainly an outside dog.
In a Squamish downpour, he’d go sleep on the lawn for seven hours. He was also a natural climber. That much became clear once Norm started bringing Vince on his treks—in the Coast Mountains, in the Rockies, in the Cascades.
“We’d get to approaches where it’d be fifth-class climbing,” says Norm. That’s the point where you have to start using your hands. “So what he’d do was back way up and take a run at it, and hit the wall as fast as he could and then start pumping his feet. One time he just got his paws over the lip and was hanging there, with a long drop beneath him.” Norm reached Vince just as the dog was gassing out, and pulled him the rest of the way up.
If the climbing got too technical, Vince would find another way, a less obvious way. While Norm was guiding on Polar Circus—a long ice climb in Banff National Park—Vince made it halfway up before he ran into ice walls. And then he was gone. Norm kept climbing. “All of a sudden Vince popped his head out and was looking down at us.”
In the really hairy spots, Norm would rig a harness out of a prusik and a piece of webbing and heave Vince up. Vince didn’t like that one bit—but he’d let Norm attach it if he figured it was the only way their day together was going to continue.
“I thought I’d lost him once in [Utah’s] Zion National Park,” Norm says. “We’d spent a day climbing and were camped at the end of the canyon, up in the dry ranchlands. Vince disappeared there chasing rabbits. It was a bad place. He was just gone.” Norm finally gave up waiting and started back down the canyon. “And then I could hear him howling. He’d backed out onto an outcrop and was cornered there, 30 feet up.” Norm brought out the harness. Vince did not object. “He actually took a wide stance to make it easier for me.”
Originally published in explore magazine. Copyright © 2010 by explore. All rights reserved. Reproduction of any article, photograph, or artwork, for other than personal use, in whole or in part, without the written permission of the publisher is strictly forbidden.
