Slow Cooked Huckleberry Ribs!? and visiting a Towering KING of the Rockies

So we're going to get right down to action today with some slow cooked huckleberry pork ribs. I'm going to start out by doing a spice rub on them. Normally I mix up my own with some smoked paprika, chili powder, garlic powder, salt, pepper, brown sugar, but today I'm going to use some pre-mixed stuff that I got from the grocery store, this pork privilege. So let's give this meat a good rub down and get her in the slow cooker. The huckleberry part comes in after the slow cooker and your mouth is going to be watering when you see it, but if you watch this channel regularly you know the pork ribs are easily my favorite thing to cook. It always turns out so good, but I think this new iteration is going to be absolutely groundbreaking. So slow cook this on low for six hours. A lot of you guys are going to have to be a bit patient waiting for those huckleberry ribs to come to life because we're heading off on a three-day backpacking trip in the Rockies now, so that slow cooker is going to be working overtime. I did a day trip that didn't really pan out, so it's tradition I need a hike to fill in the middle of the video while the slow cooker is doing its thing. So a three-day backpacking trip it is. So we're hoping to climb three different mountains up here. King George is a big prize, the Rockies 11er. Rocco and myself have done it years ago, but Mackenzie has not. It's a fantastic route, so I'm pretty excited to do it again. Then Princess Mary and Prince George are new to the both of us, so I'll try to do those as well. But every year I come up here with a chainsaw and I clear the first eight kilometers of this trail, but this year I'm trying to stick to my word, carry the chainsaw all the way up to the upper portion towards King George, which I'm sure has not seen maintenance in over a decade. Good morning. We are currently headed up to Mount King George and it is a beautiful day. Supposed to be a long stretch of good weather here, so thought it'd be a perfect time to get out and do a bigger mountain. Luckily for me, although Simon's already been up this one, he agreed to go up it again, so it's my first time heading up this mountain. I'm a little bit nervous. There might be, you know, a couple of technical spots, but hopefully it'll all turn out good. We're headed up the headwall now. Pretty steep. A bit of a grunt to get up this. This is where I normally turn around with the chainsaw. It's gonna be thrashed. We're gonna be minced pulp after we're done with this hike. Yeah, creatine supernova. It's kind of like a getting up this headwall. We're both out of water, dehydrated. You can see a waterfall over there coming down to the valley. We're almost there, just like 500 more meters. Nice cold water right off the glacier. We're just trying to decide where it makes the most sense to set up camp tonight. Either like we find this spot around here, or if there's something that's actually flat and not all gravelly, or try to keep going up into the valley below King George for the night. But yeah, I'm feeling the strain of carrying this chainsaw all day, so I think I'd rather set up a camp here, then after we get that set up, just like run up there and do a quick trail maintenance mission after dinner. So we just found this little fortress that someone has set up, so we're gonna plant the tent down right there tonight. So yeah, we're planning to go up there tonight, do some trail maintenance, then come back down to camp. Kind of fell apart, like why make a special trip up there when we don't have to. We're going up there tomorrow morning anyway, so carry the chainsaw up there and do the trail maintenance, try to get to Summit. So it's going to be a long hard day ahead of us, so I'll get some good rest tonight. Yeah, it's live. These are good meals. It's good. It wasn't a gag, that was a joke. Moments like these where you go from asking yourself what am I doing with my life, to saying no, this is exactly what I should be doing with my life. One moment you're bushwhacking in the pitch black darkness, and the next moment you're enjoying beautiful dawn morning glow in the Canadian Rockies. Got the chainsaw stashed back there, we'll do the trail maintenance on the way back out. We're starting to get into it now though, should have eyes on King George pretty soon. Doing something for a second time, I don't know, I feel just as excited as the first time right now, like how could you possibly be upset being in a place like this. I've repeated a number of smaller mountains just for the sake of getting out, getting some exercise, but the only other like big mountain I've repeated is Orient Point, just because like it's a fascinating and unique route that you have to like climb through this boulder tunnel, and it's all these really nice ridgelines on it. And then there's mountains like Mount Cairns, Mount Bryce that I've tried multiple times but didn't reach the summit due to conditions outside of my control. I don't know if I'd ever try Mount Bryce ever again, I think I've had enough of that mountain. Had an opportunity to go with a group back like a month ago and said no. I just had enough. That looks promising, the route should go up Mount King George today, there's a narrow strip of snow on the right hand side that we should be able to climb. Don't really see any bridge run of any kind either, which can be a gaper some years if there's not enough snow coverage. Yeah you can understand the danger, the exposure of this route, like if you slip and don't manage to self-arrest you could gain some momentum sliding down the glacier and bounce your way down these cliffs so a bit dangerous. It's typical Rocky's grunt work to get across all this scree. We're almost up onto the shoulder here then we'll traverse across reach the glacier, hopefully get our feet on some solid land for a minute. Wait and see if we can get Mackenzie's reaction on this. Her only feet? I guess we got here a bit too early today, snow is a frozen mass still. It'd be nice if it was just like a little bit mushy then a better chance to self-arrest if you slip. Right now if we go it's going to be front pointing the whole way so I don't know we might have to wait an hour or two just let it soften up. And away we go, it's go time. Snow is starting to soften up real quick. This first part is a little tricky because you're like sidehilling across this steep frozen snow but hopefully by the time we come back down it'll be nice and soft and we can just set our feet into it. Let's see ourselves around all these crevasses here. Gotta stay close to the rocks if we can. Gotta be careful how I set up tripod shots. Mackenzie's informed me that the seat of my pants is completely ripped open. I was wondering why it felt so drafty up here. You get a good view down there? Nice. All right onward, forward. I think we have everything we need to reach the top now. We can reach the top of the king. Is anything more refreshing than being on an 11,000 foot mountain having your pants ripped wide open having a nice stout breeze on your butt cheeks. Pretty crazy place to be. Mount King George just as amazing the second time around. We can't fly a drone here so I'll do a 360 degree panoramic and starting off looking to the north here this big monster towering over everything else is Mount Assiniboine. Then looking this way we have Mount Sir Douglas another leavener in the Rockies and down there is Prince Albert and Prince George which we may or may not climb tomorrow. Then around this way this signature ramp looking mountain is Mount Joffrey. I did that one many years ago. 42 kilometers on snowshoes, never again. Then you can almost make out Mount Harrison and Mount Mike in the haze towards the south. Then over there Desmet, Vermont and you can't quite see into the Purcells today you can almost see Farnham Tower over there. But yeah pretty amazing place. All right it's time to get the heck out of here. It's kind of a steep down climb on the snow so we're kind of keen to get it behind us. It's all wrapped up. Everyone's probably just wondering about the huckleberry ribs right now maybe I can give a quick preview of that. All right back to trying to get down King George. We decided against going up Princess Mary on the way back today and the viewpoint is not that far away from where we are right now plus it's 400 meters shorter so instead we're gonna save our energy so that we can work on that trail maintenance on the way out and possibly do Prince Albert or Prince George tomorrow. One more step and you're in the snow. There you go. Nicely done. Just getting started here on day three. Another beautiful day in the Rockies. Tell you what yesterday we went up that way for King George and today we're gonna go up this way for Prince George. But we got all the trail maintenance done on the upper portion of the trail but I don't think I'd ever bring a chainsaw all the way up here ever again. I think in the future I'll just focus my efforts on the lower half of the trail. Right now the problem is it's mostly just really brushed in and narrow so on the way down we'll try to widen that out as much as we can but right now we've got a mountain to climb. Did you make sure to lock the tent before you left? Yeah. Mount Prince George might not be as big and mighty as King George that's looming behind us right now but the approach on this one definitely the most scenic out of the two. Taking the cake. We're almost to the top here. It's a bit more scrambling to do. Well that just about wraps up this wonderful trip here in the Rockies. Just got to go back down, pack up camp and do a little trail maintenance on the way out but hope you guys enjoyed this episode. Hope everyone is doing good and thank you to Patreon supporters for helping keeping the channel rolling and let's go have some ribs. Alright so the time has come to make this unbelievably delicious huckleberry barbecue sauce so I have frozen huckleberries here that I picked last week. Put about a cup of them in here and a half cup of ketchup, a half cup of apple cider vinegar, splash of maple syrup, pepper, salt, chipotle chili pepper and garlic. I'm so excited for this. Oh god. I think I just hit the next level with these ribs. Holy. This could be the best thing I've ever cooked on this channel. That was absolutely everything I dreamed it was going to be. Just like my two favorite things combined into one delicious mouth-watering combination. Just like so beautiful that it hurts. I feel like a tear is going to come to my eye after eating that. Wow.