works of wanderlust

Category: mountain tales

  • adventure: mountain kayaks

    The lakes of the Shuswap region of central British Columbia are deep and clear, mountain reservoirs nestled between the diminishing elevations of the rocky mountains that ripple through the middle of the province. According to Wikipedia the wandering many-armed lake has an average depth of over sixty meters, a deepest point over one hundred and fifty meters, and covers a surface area of over three hundred square kilometres.

    Our adventures in kayaks were barely a fraction of a fraction of that scope, but even so it gave me a taste of the place and the vibe with a kind of intimacy that is only found by moving through a space under one’s own muscle power.

    A lot of people live in the region marked by the shores of the Shuswap Lake, dozens if not hundreds of small communities line the banks. A few of those people are the relatives on my wife’s side of the family who, after living in Northern Alberta for most of their lives bought a permanent home a few steps from where they used to vacation each summer and moved. The family that we used to travel up to visit in a remote northern agricultural community now live an enviable life in the microclimate wine region of the country, boating and sunning and living their best days. And, as it was, hosting an anniversary party on the Saturday evening of last weekend.  

    We made the ten hour drive over the continental divide mountain passes and along busy summer highways through the national parks, and checked into a posh vacation rental down a remote road along the shore of one arm of the lake. The luxury house sat in the woods and opened with a view out over the water a few dozen meters below and the rolling mountain ranges a dozen kilometres to the north. And like some lucky fortune ready-made-for-an-airbnb-advert the beautiful home for which we had five days of exclusive possession also had privileges to a private dock on the lake and a trio of kayaks waiting on the shore.

    Of course in a span of five days the weather was not always on our side, but at least four times both time and climate were on our side, and we trod down to the edge of the water with our life vests in hand and clambered into our various watercraft. My wife is a fan of the stand up paddle-board. We bought ourselves one with our airline reward points during the pandemic when we were not traveling far and needed summer activities. I am more of a kayak guy myself, and did we not live in a landlocked city with naught much recreational water but a flowing river and a smattering of shallow swampy lakes I would likely have a kayak of my own strapped to my truck for the duration of the summer. 

    The Shuswap Lake is huge when one enters it in the protection of nothing but a yellow, plastic bath toy. I was not afraid of the boat ever really capsizing in the calm summer waters, but the lake is home to countless recreational motor boats ferrying sports fishers, or pulling water skiers, or cruising the coves. The area is also well known for a houseboating culture where two-story bricks like bloated RVs on floats toddle around the lake blasting party music and hosting happy families swimming from the sides or lounging on their decks. I was never worried about nature, but I was somewhat worried about getting trounced by a speeding motorboat that didn’t see my florescent yellow glow in the glare of the sunshine bouncing off the water.

    Yet I paddled around and around and out and back and around some more. I was out on the water for hours, baking my skin in the unshaded heat as I toured our little stretch of private coastline. All the while I tracked the progress with my Garmin and despite my untiring efforts paddling through the deep blue waters of the lake when I went back to the house and loaded my GPS map onto the screen the little squiggled line of my travels was barely a toe in the vast waters. It had felt like I had gone half way across the lake at one point but in reality it was no more than five percent of the distance that I’d covered with all my efforts.

    Given more time and a better plan, a lack of obligation to attend to family events or the other duties of adulthood I may have set off with a tent and supplies and spent the whole summer paddling the circumference of the lake. I would wager there is at least a few hundred kilometres of coastline to explore.  And as we were driving home, spending over an hour at speed driving along the arm of the lake that led us back towards the mountain passes, I pondered if anyone has ever thought of or facilitated such a thing. Certainly I am not the first to wonder about a month-long trek along the long lake shore, stopping to camp and enjoy, wandering into any of those communities to buy local fruit and wine, avoiding the houseboats and water-skiers, and paddling through the cool, deep mountain waters without a care. 

  • mountain campfire

    Atop a mountain this past summer, backcountry camping for three nights an eight hour hike from civilization, I spent an hour each day keeping up my writing by scribbling narratives of our daily advenutres into my smartphone. This is one of my entries.

    day four

    There is something about a campfire that brings people together.

    Perhaps it is just a primal urge to gather around a heat source, particularly in the cold, particularly when a second bear has been spotted foraging nearby.  But then maybe there is something more to it. The glow of burning logs signals a kind of control over nature. We are sitting atop a mountain, a still lake a dozen paces away, the towering peaks lurking in every direction. Even the sun dips from view earlier up here, and we are all left sitting in the shadows of hulking stone with a million trees, flowers, insects, and animals just out of view. Then we build a fire. We use our big brains to ignite dry wood and hold it captive for our amusement, and in doing so we all are drawn to the light and the heat and the community of it. So around the fire we sit, and strangers sipping tea from tin mugs, eating rehydrated meals from plastic bags, drying their socks, warming their hands, or just sitting, all of us strangers gather and talk. Soon the stories flow with ease, people talking over each other and interrupting to participate the drive to converse is so strong in the flickering glow of the fire.

    Together, alone atop a cold mountain.

  • the other day I saw a bear

    Atop a mountain this past summer, backcountry camping for three nights an eight hour hike from civilization, I spent an hour each day keeping up my writing by scribbling narratives of our daily advenutres into my smartphone. This is one of my entries.

    day three

    Bears have long held a kind of place of abstract mythology in my head. I’ve seen bears. I’ve seen bears in the distance. I’ve seen bears out the car window. I’ve seen bears in captivity. And all thru my life I’ve been taught over and over, with practiced regularity at the start of any adventure into the wilderness the core tenets of bear safety. Yet the bear, at least the bear as a beast of aggression and adventure ruining mischief has stood at this distance of a thing I’ve heard about but never had to deal with. And then, while backcountry camping we are in the position of making that bear drama come to a place of all too reality—in fact we suddenly find ourselves sharing a campground with a bear. A bear came through as we were eating breakfast this morning. Probably that bear has pooped all over the trails.

    That same bear was on the path between us and the campsite as we came back from our afternoon day hike and we had to stop for a few minutes and let him wander off to the side so we could pass.

    As I lay here in my tent recounting my day, there is the very real possibility that a bear will wander through our site and sniff around nearby as we’re sleeping tonight. This random creature which has been nothing but a subject of stories or a rhyme in a kids song, is suddenly our neighbour and everyone is just kinda okay with that What are we to do, after all?

    It’s the bear’s home first, right?

  • country fly, city fly

    Atop a mountain this past summer, backcountry camping for three nights an eight hour hike from civilization, I spent an hour each day keeping up my writing by scribbling narratives of our daily advenutres into my smartphone. This is one of my entries.

    day two

    Anyone in search of an example of modern evolutionary pressure look no further than the common fly. 

    Back in the city, like up high in the mountains, flies are ubiquitous.

    But unlike the mountains, the cities are filled streets, buildings, parks and coffee shops full of people.

    City flies need to be smart and fast.  Any fly that is not keenly aware of its surroundings and has not the instinctual inclination to leap into the air and off into the safety of flight is doomed to be swatted by any of a million people. Flies are not be dullards, and any fly born without the inbuilt drive to flee is unlikely to survive long enough to pass on its disadvantageous genome to a future generation.

    We will have spent nearly three days up high in the backcountry camping in the mountains where a million variety of insects thrive. In fact even high up above the tree line where even in mid-August patches of snow remain in the share of large rocks, there are so many flies that an adventure-seeker is bound to spend as much time swatting away bugs as admiring the views. And it struck me as curious—though probably less so for the fly which I smacked dead upon my bare forearm—that there must be significantly less pressure, evolutionarily speaking of course, for mountaintop flies to carry a genome that knows better than to get smacked by a human—which a fly may rarely, if ever, see in its short life on the side of a mountain—than for one of its city cousins who encounter humans as a matter of course and have no such luxury as to leisurely investigate a bare forearm on a Friday afternoon.

    Nearly every fly I encountered up on that mountain was indifferent to the risk of sudden death carried by my swiftly moving hand. Nearly every fly sat patiently and still as I reached over and snuffed it away.

    Smacking a city fly requires speed and agility on the part of a human, but one feels superhuman atop a mountain as the dull flies understand too little what awaits the looming shape and shadow of a hand moving towards them.

    Evolution at work.

  • cliffs and ladders

    Atop a mountain this past summer, backcountry camping for three nights an eight hour hike from civilization, I spent an hour each day keeping up my writing by scribbling narratives of our daily advenutres into my smartphone. This is one of my entries.

    day one

    The logic of the warning signs which were hung at either end of that certain section of trail suggesting the use of safety gear was irrefutable. That fact was doubly logical as I clung for dear life to the side of a cliff wall with nothing but the tension of my fingers and a tenuous trust of the laws of physics on my side.

    We had been hiking for literal hours, always aware that somewhere up ahead we were due flute an encounter with a technical section of trail that would bring us face to face with a climb requiring hand over hand up a series of angled steel bars pounded into the cliff face. A steel cable ran parallel to the mountain ladder, it self bolted at intervals into the same rock and intended for that aforementioned safety gear.

    Seasoned hikers would have carried helmets and harnesses and used a double-caribeener system tethering them to the cable as they climbed. Carefully they would scale the fifty of rungs always tied to a line to catch them if they fell.

    We free climbed.

    And to boot we were carrying weighty backpacks stuffed with all the gear and food we would need to camp for three days on the mountain. So I, fifty pounds heavier on my feet and being perpetually tugged backwards clung to the bars and took them as best I could, one ring at a time. One false move, one misplaced step, and I could have, would have, fallen not just to the starting point of our climb but a further hundred meters of the lower edge and onto the jagged rocks below. If you suspect I am exaggerating for effect, let me be clear that if anything I am failing to convey the deadly seriousness of this particular section of nature hike.

    My fear of heights kicked into overdrive and with sweaty hands and shaking legs and a heartbeat that would rival my run training sprints, I clambered to the top and all but kissed the ground.

    For what it’s worth, we’re taking a different route down to complete the loop and I’m pretty sure there are no mountain ladders.