What you may ask, was a 57-year-old, moderately overweight, significantly under fit, burned-out refugee from a life of quiet desperation (inclined to angina pectoris and other gentler reminders of personal mortality) doing in such places?

There are many answers to the question: the simplest may be that I was climbing an inner mountain called Self-awareness and taking inner journeys in search or creative metaphors to build a story or two, a play or an essay around.

My companions were a dozen visual and craft artists of varied disciplines, younger and firmer than I but otherwise engaged in the same quest.

Our guide was Gernot Dick, the eccentric, obsessively focused and passionate founder and developer of a unique enterprise called the Atlin Art Centre, near the village of Atlin, B. C. (Population: 300), on the eastern shore of Atlin Lake.

A native of Austria, Gernot is a lifelong mountaineer and wilderness adventurer; a self-taught painter, sculptor, conceptual artist and photographer; and a forceful educator, now in his retirement year as a teacher of design, photography and ceramics at Ontario's Sheridan College.

Aside from its impressive alpine setting, the Atlin Centre isn't much to look at; a dormitory and workshop/studio buildings, a romantic log cabin, a few big wall-tents serving as studios and living quarters, all arranged casually around a tiny pond in a tree-lined bowl on a plateau of Monarch Mountain, overlooking Atlin Lake.

But the roughness and simplicity of the place, are deceptive. The program is as rigorous as the facilities are unpretentious, an unusual blend of Gernot's skills and experiences mixed with respect for artistic and personal integrity, spiced with intuition and a spirit of discovery, leavened with a touch of adventure and a passion for the direct and open experience of life as the basis of creativity, and discipline as the basis for art.

Gernot offers Atlin participants opportunities to "discover what is possible in art and life." Presumptuous as that may sound, it worked for me. I may or may not have made personal creative breakthroughs (time and hard work will tell). but I made it to the top of a physical mountain I never would have dreamed I could climb, and I caught a glimpse of the top of an inner mountain that had become obscured by clouds of habit and distraction. That's a good start.

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