Mad, Bad & Dangerous to Know

by Sir Ranulph Fiennes

  After this inauspicious start, we settled temporarily in a rented cottage in Wester Ross where I buckled down to meet my deadline on a book about Norway and Ginny went for long walks in between dishing up Irish stew or scrambled eggs, the extent of her cookery repertoire. I never complained, since I liked both. We were both strong characters in our late twenties who had long practised doing our own thing. We were in love and had yearned for each other, despite powerful paternal opposition, for over a decade. But the institution of marriage closed about us like a cage and we began to fight like chained tigers. Having no money and no job did not help.

  One day out of the blue I received a telegram from the William Morris Agency asking me to go to London to audition for the part of James Bond. Sean Connery had retired, his successor George Lazenby had been pensioned off, and the prime mover of the Bond films, Mr Cubby Broccoli, was on the lookout for a new 007. Mr Broccoli, I was told over the phone, was looking for ‘an English gentleman who really does these things’.

  ‘What things?’ I asked.

  ‘Shoot rapids, climb drainpipes, parachute, kill people, you know . . .’

  The fact that I couldn’t act seemed irrelevant, and it was an expenses-paid trip to London so I went down. The final interview after all the screen tests lasted all of ten minutes, sufficient for Mr Broccoli to decide I was too young, most un-Bond-like and facially more like a farmhand than an English gentleman. He settled on Roger Moore instead, so the cinema-going world had to wait for my cousins Ralph and Joseph to come along before the Fiennes name made it on to the silver screen.

  In the new year we moved back south to Sussex, which didn’t make Ginny any happier, and I got taken on as a captain by the 21st SAS Regiment (Territorial) in London and spent most weekends with my new unit, very grateful for the pay packet. Then in February, a letter arrived from the Royal Scots Greys, on whose list of reserve officers I still figured. They had an expedition for me to lead.

  In 1971 British Columbia was celebrating the centenary of its joining the Canadian Confederation and wished to commemorate the early pioneers, most of whom had been Scots who had explored their impenetrable territory by river. The centenary committee in Vancouver had suggested a river journey by Scotsmen from their northern border with the Yukon to the United States border on the 49th parallel would be a feat to match those of their forebears. If successful, it would also be the first recorded north-south transnavigation of British Columbia. The route, along nine interconnecting water systems, ran deep through the Rocky Mountains and included some of the roughest rivers in the world. The Canadians approached the Ministry of Defence and they passed the suggestion on to the Greys, who liked the idea, especially since in June they were due to lose their identity and their famous grey berets through regimental amalgamation. The expedition would be a fine last fling but, as they had no regular officers available to lead it, my name came up. I was told the regiment would provide ‘two or three soldiers and some supplies’.

  British Columbia

  Ginny agreed to join as road party leader and radio operator, and when two of my old langlauf team volunteered I accepted both at once. One was an ex-butcher’s apprentice from Edinburgh called Joseph Skibinski (we used to call him an Oatmeal Pole); the other, Jack McConnell, was a skilled radio operator. My last acquisition was a tank mechanic called Stanley Cribbett who, though short in size, could, according to Skibinski, repair anything from a clock to a sputnik. The Observer sent their top photographer, Bryn Campbell, and the BBC World About Us supplied a two-man film team and a Yorkshire policeman, Ben Usher, with lifeboat experience was recruited to steer for them.

  An RAF Hercules flew us to Edmonton from where we drove our sponsored Land Rover and a four-ton lorry lent by the Canadian Army north-west to Fort Nelson. Here the plan was for the three boats to undertake a 400-mile trial journey before committing ourselves to the main expedition and attendant publicity. This seemed sensible since our UK training had only been on the Thames and none of us had wild water boating know-how. The trial goal was to reach the little known Virginia Falls, twice the height of Niagara, and 110 miles up the South Nahanni River. American river-runner and author Colonel Snyder, not given to understatement, described the South Nahanni as ‘the fastest river in North America and the most dangerous in five continents’. To reach the Nahanni itself involved a further 290 miles of river travel. It would be a fair test.

  We Royal Scots Greys wore our grey berets with their silver eagle badges as we left Fort Nelson. This was out of respect for our famous regiment which four days previously had ceased to exist after 300 years as Scotland’s own cavalry regiment. My father during World War Two had seen the last of the grey horses in the 1940s; I wore the last grey beret in the seventies.

  The three boats slid away, edging into the current as we gathered speed. A Mountie, two Indians and a group of press from Vancouver waved us off. Ginny stood alone on the bank, small and forlorn in her dusty jeans, soon a fading blur in the willows.

  The river was 300 yards wide, both banks were thickly wooded and the world passed by quite silently but for the rush of water, the soft plunk of paddles and the sudden boil of converging eddies. An hour from Fort Nelson things changed with a vengeance.

  ‘The current’s racing along,’ Bryn mused, ‘as though there’s a waterfall ahead.’

  ‘There’s no rapid on this river,’ I assured him.

  From up ahead I heard a sound as of breakers lashing a shingle beach; the same dull double boom and the rushing hiss of under-tow. The channel ahead curved right but the local current sucked us left. The other boats were out of sight.

  Along the left-hand bank fallen trees rose and fell in the water. Torn down by the force of the floods upon the elbow of the river’s curve, their gnarled roots clung to the bank and their trapped trunks threshed to the pulse of the rushing water. If a boat was sucked into this chaos of tangled roots, the tubing would be torn and punctured. We stabbed deep with our paddles, straining to move into mid-river. Before Stan could reach the outboard, a branch lashed across and cut his face. A splintered root dug into the hull behind Bryn and ripped it open. The port air tube wrinkled and subsided and the boat shuddered as we struck a grounded log. We bounced off. If the boat had been of wood, we would probably have foundered and been sucked beneath the mass of heaving vegetation.

  For a moment we were free, spun away from the bank by an eddy. This was merely a brief respite, for the shock of our narrow escape was soon eclipsed by the horror of the scene ahead. Now we could see the source of the earlier wind-borne roar, an island in mid-river on which, it seemed, every log borne downriver by recent floods was impaled. The whole force of the current, channelled by the acute bend, ran full tilt against the upstream apex of the island, and every piece of flotsam, from floating stumps of juniper to eighty-foot logs, was ensnared where the current split in two against the island.

  We could not go left because that channel was a moving mass of tangled debris. So we swung right, sweating over the paddles. Stanley wrestled with our outboard, swung its drive-shaft down until it locked vertically and tugged hard on the ignition cord. Again and again he pulled and twice the engine spluttered hopefully. Bryn stopped paddling to look over his shoulder, distracted by the shocking sound of log crashing onto log.

  The water about us was disturbed now by back eddies surging around the jam. We were sucked inexorably backwards to where the river rushed under the sieve of logs. I thought to myself: 2,000 miles to go and here we are drowning on the first day. Then we smashed into the logs, sharp branches whipped at us and the boat up-ended. Someone screamed and a heavy object rammed my chest. I felt a branch rip down my back and the shock of cold water.

  For a moment the boat was held by a branch and I scrabbled up from the floor to the mid-tubing. The branch broke and our bows disappeared, sucked inch by inch under the churning debris. Water poured over the bagged gear and the lashed fuel drums.

  A branch flailed at Bryn and tore him away. He
disappeared underwater, his hands clawing the air as he went.

  The boat was about to go under. We must get on to the logs while there was a chance or we would all drown. I shouted to warn Stan and tried to scramble on to the nearest log above us. But it was too large and too slimy to grip. Then the boat shuddered and I fell back among the fuel drums. Stan shouted with excitement. He had started the engine. All this time he had single-mindedly tugged at the cord, not noticing the disappearance of Bryn. Now he engaged gear and the forty-horsepower engine roared in reverse cavitation.

  There was hope. We both jumped up and down on the half-submerged craft to vibrate the trapped bows loose. A lashing line snapped, a ten-gallon drum broke loose and the bows shot free. Stanley grabbed the tiller and, with painful slowness, we edged away from the log jam.

  Then I saw Bryn, or rather his mop of black hair. An underwater surge had spewed him up further down the log jam and his smart denim ‘ranger’ jacket was caught up on a branch. As we watched, his head sank a few inches. The full force of the under-tow was dragging at him from the waist down.

  We donned life-jackets and Stanley nosed the boat as near as possible to the downstream end of the log. I jumped on to it and edged along its bucking length towards Bryn. Sometimes the tree spun through half a turn. Reaching Bryn, I held his jacket scruff firmly and, with our combined strength, he came clear of the water. He was white, cold and shaken, but managed a rueful grin. His frail stature and normally immaculate garb belied a tough and resilient spirit.

  The other crews both managed to keep clear of the great jam. We learned our lesson about the danger of snags and thereafter warmed our engine for a while each morning and started it at the first sign of any likely threat.

  At Fort Liard we stopped to visit the Hudson’s Bay Company store with the sign outside which proclaimed ‘HBC 1886’. The Scotsman who ran it told us the locals said this stood for ‘Here Before Christ’. He warned us the mosquitoes would be far worse in Nahanni country. ‘The upriver Indians say the air is so thick with them, you canna starve. Simply keep breathing with your mouth open and you will get your daily meat ration.’

  More practical was the advice of the local French priest who indulged in a fit of Gallic shrugs on inspecting our three inflatables and urged us, as he doled out moose stew and carrots, to get a flat-bottom river boat like his.

  I followed his advice as soon as we reached Nahanni Butte, the point where the South Nahanni River joined the Liard. Here I hired from a local Indian a thirty-two-foot river boat for $50 and a bottle of our sponsored Black & White whisky. It would make a more solid platform for the BBC crew and would also enable us to carry extra fuel for the two inflatables.

  Next day we entered the first canyon of the Nahanni. The towering walls acted as an echo chamber to every gush and twirl of the current, the sky above narrowed to a faraway strip of blue and we shivered in deep shadow, three waterbeetles struggling against the flow in a sheer-sided drain. The wiles of the river had to be watched at all times. There was no time to relax and enjoy the incredible scenery. To do so would be as suicidal as studying the Arc de Triomphe while driving round it.

  High above us soared sheer red walls with successive pine-clad tiers of rock teetering atop the lower cliffs. The sun seldom touched us as we inched along the gloomy corridors of the canyon. Elsewhere, fighting for every inch of progress, we had to tug the river boat upstream on tow-lines with the eight of us hauling knee-deep in icy shallows. Policeman Ben, the strongest of us, was built like an Aberdeen Angus bull and, when he slipped, we all went under. The rope ripped away, tearing free of my numbed grip. On our next attempt we lined her, the jockey-light Stanley stayed aboard and cleverly nosed the boat upstream as we took in slack on the ropes.

  Eventually we entered a region much favoured by the Canadian press due to its macabre associations. In Deadmen Valley, tucked between the Headless Mountains and the Funeral Range, three headless skeletons were found in the early 1900s. Canadian newspapers had been clocking up the unexplained deaths score in the area ever since and put the toll as high as thirty-two, but Ginny’s research at the Royal Geographical Society and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police records confirmed only seventeen unexplained deaths or disappearances. Which might be considered enough. We did not add to those statistics and left Deadmen Valley with our heads intact.

  In less than a hundred miles we had climbed over 1,000 feet. The final canyon was an impressive display of water force. A pocket of converging currents very nearly defeated us. We inched up the wall of water in the eddy-trap and water poured out of the butterfly valves in our boat bilges. Stanley zigged the tiller of our boat, shouting with relief as we crested the last rapid in an explosion of spray. Then the roar of pounding water intensified to an overall boom and from the heavens, or so it seemed from river-level, there appeared a waterfall of Olympian grandeur beneath a halo of high-flung spray. We had reached the Virginia Falls. Even the dour features of Constable Ben softened with pleasure at the majesty of the place.

  The current whisked us back to Nahanni Butte where Bryn and the film team caught a bush plane to Fort Nelson to film firefighting in British Columbia. The trial journey was over. We drove north-west to the Yukon border ready to launch the boats on our 1,500-mile attempt to transnavigate British Columbia.

  No sooner had we been rejoined by the BBC film crew than I sensed an overtly hostile atmosphere. Earlier they had fretted about not having a more definite timetable and again about not having enough time to sort out their gear at the end of the day. But I had been able to ignore that. Now I could tell I was in for trouble.

  The Hyland River took us gently over the Yukon border into the Liard River and all went well as far as the Cranberry Rapids, where the Jocks overturned and Stanley ripped our own boat open on a snag. Jack’s morale was dented by the experience, for he was sucked below by undercurrents, despite his life-jacket, and battered against submerged rocks.

  Not far beyond the Cranberry Rapids and above the Rapids of the Drowned, we entered the mouth of the Kechika (or Big Muddy) River. This tributary of the Liard was sourced from a high swamp in the Rocky Mountain Trench known as the Sifton Pass and every authority I had consulted assured me our inflatables would not penetrate very far upriver. When we could get no farther I planned to canoe or to walk with rucksacks and had brought from England two portable canoes which, when dismantled, would be divided between our four backpacks. The point at which we would have to give up on our inflatables was probably going to be a spot known as Skook’s ranch. This was the kingdom of Skook Davidson, skookum being the local Indian for The Tough One.

  Skook ran a camp for big-game hunters, all his clients, guides and stores being flown in by float-plane. When the film crew learned that Skook had pack-horses for hire they approached me with the, to them, reasonable-sounding proposal that they hire these for their heavy camera gear. They could not see my view that the ethics of the expedition precluded outside support. Either we travelled the river or, where we ran out of waterways, we walked. Ever since my use of a taxi on the SAS Long Drag I had developed a fixation about cheating. But as far as the BBC crew were concerned I was being wilfully obstructive for no good reason. From that moment my fate was sealed. I would be the villain in their documentary film.

  Skook was over eighty. Leaving Scotland as a teenager with £10 to his name, he became the finest rodeo rider in British Columbia and settled in his valley in 1939. Now he looked after twenty big-game hunters a year, specialising in grizzlies, bighorn sheep, cougars and mountain rams. The great man welcomed us from his bed, an old gnarled pioneer crippled by arthritis. He fumbled to light a candle. ‘Sit down, darn you,’ he barked. ‘You folk from the old country never seem to know what the Lord gave you asses for.’ Candlelight revealed a row of medals nailed to a log. Skook had done a stint as a sniper in the 29th Vancouver Battalion during the First World War.

  From Skook’s the boats went back downstream with Ginny, and the film team flew south to meet up w
ith us at Fort Ware.

  I asked Skook about the country to the south.

  ‘When you can canoe no further,’ he advised, ‘you’ll find my old trail beside the river, all the way to Sifton Pass.’

  The Rocky Mountain Trench and the Kechika both lie north-south and, on the far side of the Sifton Pass, a new river, the Tochika or Fox, flows south all the way to Fort Ware. Skook’s memories of his trail from thirty years ago were difficult to check and I found it ominous that a surveyor whose book I had studied described the trail, only six months after Skook had made it, as ‘requiring much work every season if it is to be kept open, due to washouts, rapid growth and windfalls’. I consulted a local Indian guide. ‘You’ll be all right,’ he said, ‘so long as you don’t follow a game trail by mistake. They’re all over the place.’ When asked how we were to recognise the real trail from the game trail, he replied: ‘Why, you just do.’ Then as an afterthought he warned us to watch out for bears. ‘You surprise a grizzly on the trail with her kids and she can get real mean.’

  We ran out of waterway at Gataga Forks where the river became too narrow and too powerful, so we collapsed the canoes we were then using, lashed them to our 110-pound packs and started following a trail blazed with old tree slashes. Jack fell off a tree-bridge into a thorn thicket and lay pinioned by the weight of his rucksack until rescued. Little Stanley Cribbett, not much larger than his pack, stumbled along, his face pale as he winced from a spasm of coughing and spat blood. Joe fell off a log and wrenched his back. Unable to carry his load, he had tried hauling it on a two-pole ‘sled’ but fallen trees made this impractical. Reluctantly, but unanimously, we agreed that Stanley and Joe should return to Skook’s ranch, our last point of contact with civilisation, and radio for a plane to take them south to Fort Ware to rest and recover.