The curse of social media and the blogger is how we come to believe 'everyone else is having a great time and I'm not'. Suicide rates are up, but before you read another thrilling instalment and head for the nearest bridge I want to tell you that it wasn't all easy and exciting. Some days I felt lonesome, confused about the whole damn escapade, anxious about where I was going to lay my head next. Whilst in the Kootenays I spent a few days at a cabin on the slopes of Mt Brennan, the highest peak at the edge of the Goat Range Park; I say 'cabin' as that's what Dustin, the Ops Manager at the Sentinel where I was staying, called it. It's more of a lodge, which his brother and the family built themselves, complete with hydro power, sleeping twelve easily. I was feeling weary, needed some down time, rested up, reading, writing, watched mule deer and a brief glimpse of moose, explored a little.
Coincidentally at the lodge there was a book about Findhorn written in 1990 by Carol Riddell, with a photo of the place I go often at the edge of the Bay; I felt homesick, especially as I play table tennis with Carol, who, although about 80 now, still packs a wicked backhand and only loses some games because she's not so great on her feet any more. I also dipped into a book by Adrian Cowell about time he spent in the Amazon back in the 50's, making my blogs read like a snooze in the park; I felt like a real wuss, thinking 'I should be tackling that mountain, just 5000 feet up to the summit, and the thermometer is only at thirty-five degrees'. I guess it's all relative, and I did make it half way up to yet another stunning glacial lake.
And I'd forgotten how much hassle travelling can be. Places to stay, connections, phone issues, arranging car insurance have all been challenging. For example I needed to book four ferry trips before my partner Pam's pending arrival and braced myself to spend some time on the BCFerries website. It suggested setting up an account, fair enough, I ploughed through that ... you know the usual details, yet another password to remember, plus grandmothers maiden name, date of first fuck, colour of favourite socks. Then discovered that only certain routes could be booked with an account. For the inside passage, north from Vancouver Island to Prince Rupert, a booking request was needed by email; but this included credit card details and would result in a firm booking .... I needed to know about availability on all the proposed routes to link them together. Couldn't get that info online, tried phoning a couple of times, to be met by a machine saying that due to high demand there would be a wait of about an hour. I sent off an email enquiry, and got a reply suggesting a response would come in about three weeks ... in fact it never came. Eventually I rose one morning at 0600 when the phonelines opened and arranged it all through a very helpful man called Patrick.
On top of all that I had a mouse making home in the car, eating through a bag to get to the cereal. I tried for three nights to catch it alive, using carefully balanced sticks, baited with peanut butter and suspended above a bucket, a method my colleague Tom had used successfully back at the bothy in Glen Affric last year. But it managed to take some bait yet avoid the drop. I resorted to the death trap on the fourth night and caught it.
Feeling happier, I went to a meeting organised by the Council of Canadians, in funky Nelson, about the proposed Site C dam, a long-standing controversial proposal further north in the Peace River Valley. 'There has never been a project in Canadian history that has as many negative effects as this' said the main speaker, Wendy Holm, a respected agronomist who has just edited a book on the issue, 'Damming the Peace'. The newish BC government, a coalition of NPD and Greens, reneged on an election promise to cancel the project ... there were various conspiracy theories around. The audience was mainly over 60's, with a couple of younger folk one of whom spoke passionately. I got talking to the chap next to me who thought the dam was unnecessary because we're about to make a breakthrough in understanding the quantum field and phenomenon of entanglement ... I'll leave you to google that. Why do I attract these folk?
Afterwards I went for a drink in one of the local micro brewpubs with Candace Batycki of the Yellowstone to Yukon Conservation Initiative, and her friend Doug Thorburn a local forester. My discovery of Y2Y a few years ago was part of the inspiration for this trip ... their mission is to conserve and enhance habitat connectivity throughout that 3200 km corridor 'so that people and nature can thrive' (see Y2Y.net). It was good to meet with her and hear about the major issues in BC, currently the dam, the proposed Trans Mountain oil pipeline and work to protect habitat for endangered mountain caribou. Candace hopes that the First Nations reconciliation process, which has given indigenous peoples more rights and power, will largely be enacted through renewed responsibility for the land and its conservation. In both cases, the dam and the pipeline, there are First Nations legal challenges.
Some days later I went out with Doug to visit one of his harvesting sites; the small company he works for have a relatively enlightened approach to forestry, avoiding clearcut as much as possible, (the norm in BC, described as 'rape' on one sign I saw elsewhere), leaving veteran trees, deadwood and other wildlife features ... there were some nice old western larch in one area of the site. However the selection system that he's working with depends on different skills of the machine operators, the guy we met that day having learned his trade in Germany where this approach is more common. Experiments in Britain with 'continuous cover' have come up against a similar problem.
The forest sector is big in BC, and the Ministry is 'taking action to maintain it as a driving force in the economy', their mantra stating that there will be no loss to the timber harvesting land base; this is ominous for the remaining old growth stands and Doug was rather despairing about the forest training system which still has a very narrow approach towards sustainability. Somehow we got talking about porcupines ... I'd seen a sign at a car park in one of the provincial parks advising the use of old chicken netting, left on site, around the car to prevent the beasts using those great incisors to chew through the tyres; indeed Doug related an incident where he and friends had driven off after a days hike, smelt gas and, after stopping, found that the fuel pipe had been chewed through, gas spewing out onto the exhaust manifold.
I'd also been in touch with Craig Pettitt of the Valhalla Wilderness Society, founded in 1975 to focus on saving areas of old growth interior rainforest, the rare cedar-hemlock forest type that I’d come across back in Glacier. There's an inspiring video 'Primeval' on their website about the Incomappleux (approx translation 'gee how it rains!'), that they've been campaigning to have included in a possible provincial park extension (see www.vws.org); luckily the logging road along the gorge into the site had been washed away and, along with the discovery of some rare lichens, this has saved the forest so far. It would have been a 35km hike in so Craig suggested a visit to another smaller site at the head of the Duncan Lake. We rendezvoused one morning and set off in his pickup, a long dirt road drive of about 60km; many years ago he worked for the forest service and told me that the trick to avoiding eating dust is to stay ahead of the guy behind ... not that there was anyone else on the track that day. The lake is actually a reservoir and its creation took out some 30km of valley bottom land and old growth. It was a hot, humid day, a few troublesome mozzies about, nevertheless Craig suggested long sleeves and gave me gloves ... the shrub layer here is dominated by devils club, a formidable plant up to 3m high with large palmate leaves, all leaf veins and stems covered in detachable spines, the club itself a spike of reddening berries much liked by the bears.
Wow, some awesome trees, western red cedars, those we measured that day were 2.5, 2.7, 3.2m in diameter (dbh); Craig has painstakingly analysed annual rings from rounds cut off fallen trees in the Incomappleux, some of which he showed me at his place in New Denver when I passed through a few days later, and had come up with a formula of 1m diameter equalling 450 years of growth. The trees we were with were up to 1500 years old! Usually these old cedars have rotted out in the centre and often have cavities at the base, much liked by hibernating bears; we found some recent bear scat and
tracks in the mud along the creek. There is relatively little timber volume/value here but the foresters consider these stands 'decadent' as they occupy ground that could be used for growing a fast crop. It's incomprehensible that this site and some other remnants have no protection, although the forest service have said they'll leave it ... they're currently building a new logging road from here down the western edge of the lake, a route that must be marginal economically. I got the impression that Craig must have been a dogged cookie to deal with over the years and came away giving thanks for people like him!
Kaslo the local town is another funky outpost, also a mecca for bikers with a procession of older blokes on shiny steeds, mainly Harleys, throbbing through town. I was sorry when I had to move on to miss the annual jazz festival there; however I did watch the semis and final of the World Cup in the pub .... we was not robbed. And one evening Sonny Rhodes, the last of the travelling blues men, played with his band at the Balfour Beach Inn, out on the terrace beneath a huge maple tree, overlooking the lake where the ospreys fished. They were great, and Sonny himself playing lap steel guitar, frail aged 77 now, dressed in maroon leather outfit, god knows how hot he was in there, still packing a lot of emotion into his songs.
The last few days of July the sky turned hazy, it had been unusually hot for weeks and fires had now started in the Okanagan to the west; it was time to leave the Koots, I was due in Vancouver, so bid goodbye to folks at the Sentinel. On my way I called in at the ghost town of Sandon, an ex silver mining boom town, once with 10000 residents, scores of hotels, saloons and brothels, an opera house, library and town hall, much of which burned to the ground in a big fire in 1900 and then was further devastated by huge floods. Now there are just four year-round residents and few of the old buildings remain .... the store, a museum, a couple of houses. Hal and Vida run the store, the Prospector's Pick, and generally take care of the place; I asked what they did in the winter and Vida answered 'lots of loving'.
Hal moved there in 1972 as he was interested in the mining through his family background; however, there were no jobs at the mine, which still operates down the valley, and he ended up working on the local river hydro scheme, which dates back to the boom time at the end of the 19th century. He learned about the system and machinery from the older guys there and since then has taken over, and maintaining it has become his life's passion. The old pipework (penstock) was made from finger jointed sections of Douglas fir, some of which he showed me, now replaced by poly pipes. The turbine was humming away, happily producing enough electricity for around 450 homes, most exported to the grid although he doesn't get a good price for it from BCHydro. He believes that many such hydro schemes could be developed, or some renewed, in BC, avoiding the need for the Site C dam. However we've seen in Scotland recently that these river schemes are not without their ecological impact, no easy answers apart from turning more lights off!
I camped the night there, no ghosts, just another beautiful river to lull me to sleep. Got up early and drove up the rough track to Mt Idaho, and at sunrise hiked the last section to the summit. There are old mine tailings around here, some of those mine shafts were at 6000 feet and it goes without saying how tough those guys must have been. This is a famed viewpoint in the Kootenays, although very hazy with mist and smoke that day, the New Denver glacier hardly visible.
Nice flora though, and I passed a few wizened whitebark pine, then a sign about provenance trials, with young disease resistant trees grown on from seed of parents that had survived the blister rust attack. Hopefully these will come through as the tree is a keystone species .... in particular it has a special relationship with the Clark's nutcracker, which I'd seen high up back in the Tetons, and which uses its slender, long, curved beak to extract and bury the large, calorie-rich seeds. Some of these caches are forgotten and their seeds will germinate; many are an important food source for grizzlies in the fall. At the summit there's a fire lookout cabin but nobody around, probably lying low inside meditating or working on the latest poems.
Drove on, passed through the Okanagan, didn't know that grapes and peaches are grown in Canada, although it must have been close to forty degrees that day so hot enough this year for sure. Started hitting more traffic, heading to Vancouver. Checked out a campsite, got lured by the name, 'Cedar Creek', some spaces but it was like sardines there. So I moved on ... 'where am I going to sleep tonight?'
Why is it always good to move on, ever closer to that destination where meaning and purpose might be found. Or is it the journey itself rather than the destination?
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