by Rob Wood
“What happened to Quintano?”
THOUGH SHE HAD NEVER ONCE let us down and had carried us through countless adventures, I recently had a “senior moment” and carelessly left a piece of nylon cord smouldering in the cabin. The great Fiordland boat underwent a traditional Viking funeral when she went up in flames right down to the waterline while tied up at her home moorage in the same bay where she had been built and launched 25 years previously.
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MYSTERY MOUNTAIN
“Did you ever solve the mystery of Mount Waddington?”
YES, BUT NOT WITHOUT HEAVY dues being paid in a fascinating and exhausting investigation.
It was no coincidence that Laurie and I chose to build our home right on the edge of the biggest blank area on the road map of BC, so close to the entrance to Bute Inlet as to be among the closest permanent dwellings to Mount Waddington, some 80 miles to the north. Long before I arrived in BC, I had heard of the existence in the BC Coast Range of one of the world’s great mountains, hidden in a barely penetrable shroud of remote and rugged wilderness.
As if we were attracted by the mysterious power of this archetypal legend, it soon became time for us to find out for ourselves some of the secrets of what the pioneering couple, Don and Phyllis Mundy, who first discovered the mountain as late as the mid-1920s, referred to as the “Mystery Mountain.” Following their way, which was as they said, “more in the spirit of veneration than conquest,” we made many trips into the mountain wilderness over the years, starting with a reconnaissance in Shadowfax, leading up to many ski mountaineering expeditions with Quintano, including one successful visit to the summit.
Initially Bute Inlet’s coastal vista, though impressive and beautiful, is much like the rest of the lower part of the BC coast, with 6,000 ft. mountains. After you have cruised 45 miles to the head of the inlet with no sign of human presence, however, 9,000 ft. massifs rise high above the turquoise, glacier-fed waters. They form a vast three-dimensional panorama with steep forested shoulders, ramparts of vertical rock walls, hanging glaciers and sparkling snow-clad peaks. Sunlight shafts through the clouds, forming shimmering reflections in the final reach of the majestic fiord, which invert the whole magical scene and enhance even more the truly awe-inspiring grandeur which I have heard described as “Canada’s Grand Canyon, except bigger and better.”
Soaring high above the inlet, still almost 40 miles away up the Homathko Valley, the exceedingly graceful, 13,179 ft. (4002 m) spire of Mystery Mountain sparkles like a jewel in the sunlight. Though only a glimpse from this distance, its uncompromising presence stirs the innermost adrenalin reserves with tingles and shivers of excitement.
Bute Inlet’s beauty is only one side of its moody and unpredictable personality. The other side, which can present itself without warning, consists of violent winds blowing up the inlet, down, or out of side valleys, funnelling and even spiralling the katabatic air currents into alarming and chaotic maelstroms. The long and exposed reaches provide ample “fetch” for the sea to kick up a devastating chop. The situation is made even more serious by the shortage of protected anchorages. Although there are a number of spots which are good for one direction, the wind is quite capable of switching.
Now it’s time to find shelter and a safe place to leave the boat while we take off into the mountains. On this occasion, Laurie and I have a small group of six friends in Quintano with the intention of climbing the mountain in April. We had heard that living somewhere at the top of the inlet were some hand-loggers who might have a dock and be sympathetic to our cause. Sure enough, just a few miles down from the head, our binoculars pick out a lonesome cluster of buildings and a few boats tucked tightly in against the mountainside. They welcome us with impressive backcountry hospitality, gathered round a huge communal table, serving roast venison, home baking and all the booze we can handle.
“So much for surviving in the wilderness!”
They entertain us for most of the night with Bute Inlet stories, mostly centring around two notorious old-timers, Schnarr and Parker, who worked in the inlet for over half a century. Living with their respective families on opposite sides and being the only inhabitants of the inlet, though they had once been partners, they hadn’t spoken a word to each other for many years, even after one of their sons eloped with the other one’s daughter.
Another story the hand-loggers tell us is about a Halloween party they had at their place in which most of the local loggers from the various camps around the head of the inlet were whooping it up and having a good time. It being late in the fall, they had been having early snow on the mountain and heavy storms with high rainfalls at lower altitudes. When one of them went outside for a pee, shortly before dawn, he heard and felt a loud rumbling coming from high up the steep mountainside above. It sent shivers down his spine and pierced his inebriated and befuddled mind with sheer panic.
“My God!” he realized, running back inside the house and screaming above the bedlam, “There’s a slide coming down the mountain! We should all leave right now!”
“Ah, pull the other leg. It’s got bells on,” they all replied in unison.
“No! I’m serious! Come out and hear it!” he insisted.
Sure enough, they all soon got the message and ran down to the dock and into the boats just in time before a massive mud and rock slide took the deck right off the side of the house and hit the water with a thunderous splash that sent a tsunami out across the inlet. In the dawn light they could see bare stems of huge trees stripped clean of their branches popping up vertically out of the water like missiles all around them and hear the slide continuing to rumble in the depths below. Their dock, workshop, fuel tanks and the deck of the house had completely disappeared. The slide left a scimitar-shaped gouge 200 feet wide and 50 feet deep 5,000 feet down the mountain, pointing right at their place. Nobody was hurt but there was $20,000 worth of damage.
Next day we wait for the end of the flood tide before motoring into the Homathko Estuary. With the boat safely moored in a “hole” in the river, we hitch a ride with an empty logging truck 23 miles up the valley to Scar Creek logging camp, where we are wined and dined once again. The next day the loggers kindly run us up to the end of their roads, where with a cheery “Good luck!” they leave us, off and running on our own, looking directly into the jaws of a great granite gorge.
To get to the mountain we have a tough bushwhack ahead with no trail through the rugged canyon where the Homathko River carves a dramatic gorge from its source in the Interior Chilcotin Plateau, through the crest of the Coast Range to its delta at the head of Bute Inlet. Even though we know that the Chilcotin First Nations had a Grease Trail and August Schnarr had a trapline through to the interior, we are not aware of anybody in modern times having made it all the way through on foot.
Right from the start we are forced to make a 2,000 ft. detour up and over a band of bluffs that drop directly into the furious white water of the Homathko. Back down to the valley bottom, we camp on the river bank at a historic spot, the famous “Murderer’s Bar” where Alfred Waddington’s 1860s campaign to build a road linking Victoria with the interior gold fields ended with a bang. A band of rebellious Native Chilcotins, led by the fierce warrior chief Klattasine, killed nine of Waddington’s men. This incident triggered that inglorious chapter of BC’s history known as the Chilcotin War.
Meanwhile, it takes us five days with heavy packs to thrash through the ten miles of bluffs, boulder fields, devil’s club and lush virgin forest of the canyon and up a big glacier to our base camp at 6,200 ft. Dominating the scene is the intimidating grandeur of the 7,000 ft. northeast face of Mystery Mountain.
The weather is quite settled, so with four days’ food supplies, stoves and fuel but no tents, we set off, expecting to climb the mountain in three days. After two days of really slow going in deep wet snow up the lower face, we make our second bivouac in a home-dug snow cave. Next day, in order to save weight, we leave most of our gear behind at the snow cav
e, but we are only partway up the Final Tower before nightfall. We are forced in rapidly deteriorating weather to dig into a crevasse at the base of the tower for an emergency bivouac (our third night), without much in the way of food, stoves or sleeping bags. During the night a fierce storm rages. Fortunately, the crevasse, though icy cold, offers shelter from the appalling weather. We huddle together to keep warm. Dehydration is now our biggest problem because without fuel we are unable to melt snow for drinks.
Doug, a highly experienced mountaineer, keeps our spirits up with tales of horrendous hardship in the mountains that help make our situation seem better than it is with expressions such as, “This is no bloody picnic!” and “Stay loose and hang in there!”
Next morning, the weather is still bad so, as we breakfast on the last of the cheese, a decision is made for Doug and I to retrieve the fixed ropes while the others set off down. Laurie will stay at the cave and wait for us. As we emerge from the crevasse, it is with mixed emotions, then, that Doug and I set off up the fixed ropes in thick cloud. We are glad to be moving at last, and ground conditions for climbing are good. I can tell Doug is thinking the same thing as I join him at the high point.
“So near and yet so far,” he sighs.
“Yeah. We’ve come a long way,” I reply. “I wonder if we’ll ever get another go.”
In spite of our weakness caused by lack of fluids, food and sleep, we have an impulsive urge to keep on climbing and find out what secrets of the mountain lie hidden in this veil of cloud. Suddenly, as we gaze longingly upward we both see at once a patch of blue.
“Let’s go for it, youth,” Doug adds impulsively. “Do we have time?”
“We could probably reach the summit and at least make it back to the crevasse,” I figure.
Caught up in a rush of exhilaration, stoked by the release of all that pent-up frustration, I set off right away up a steep rock chimney choked with ice. Huge wind-carved ice crystal formations stick out horizontally from the rock. Shafts of brilliant sunshine pierce the clouds, illuminating distant peaks and glaciers and a nearby outrageous tooth-like spire.
Time races on and so does my exhaustion. The initial boost of energy I experienced earlier wears off, replaced by alarming spells of dizziness and a weakened ability to pull up, even on big holds. Movements cease being planned with clarity and purpose. Numb hands now jam themselves into cracks. Legs brace themselves against sloping rock. Eyes grapple to focus on holds, as if hallucinating. Is it an optical illusion or a stage of physical exhaustion that presents the surreal apparition of the Tooth, poking up through cloud, floating Pisa-like high above the distant glaciers? The more I try to focus and give myself a reality check, the more the misty light plays tricks, causing the outrageous Tooth alternately to melt away into oblivion and then zoom closer and clearer.
In this dehydrated, exhausted and apparently altered state of consciousness, I experience the dazzling, sunlit mountain landscape as a flowing continuous process, the pulse of my body energy merging like liquid with the fluctuation of clouds, rock and snow. I become so immersed in it all that I can no longer be sure where the mountain stops and the sky starts, or where I stop and the mountain starts. In some strange, dreamlike way I am completely absorbed in the precarious beauty and wonder of it all. Thankfully, the rope fastens me to Doug, so we can’t drift apart in the cosmic wind.
“Okay. Come on up.” A very faint and distant voice penetrates the dream. My reluctant body forces itself into motion and once again it feels possessed by some weird surge of energy, which carries it up that final pitch. In spite of piercing pain, agonized breathing and every fibre calling out for rest, the body somehow automatically works its way upward. The mind seems separate, looking on as an observer from a distance away, voicing encouragement and support.
“Up you go. That’s good. Up again. Move that foot up there. Now that hand. There you go!”
Slowly my conscious mind comes back into my body as the angle eases, though the exposure is formidable. There’s Doug just up ahead, sitting in the sun with nothing but intensely blue sky above him.
“He’s at the top.” Thoughts focus. “We’ve made it.”
I crawl on my hands and knees up those last few feet to join Doug on the tiny, precarious summit. We quickly and quietly embrace each other, then sit back in the snow, grinning. Our overstimulated perceptions attempt to absorb and savour the magnificent perspective. Layers of vaporous clouds below are punctuated by sparkling peaks and glaciers like jewels, with beams of intense sunlight shafting through from the deep space blue sky above.
Slowly our attention focuses on the 40 miles-distant inlet we had left ten long days ago, where our boat, we hope, is waiting for our return. There is the Homathko Valley and the 20 long miles of Tiedeman Glacier up which we’d skied. Base Camp is down there somewhere, tucked right underneath us. We search the lower slopes and find the tiny black dots which are our friends making their way down. Hopefully Laurie will be waiting for us at the ice cave and still speaking to us.
“It’s four o’clock,” said Doug, breaking the spell. “Sure could use a brew.”
“Yeah. Me too,” I reply. “Let’s get on down. Then we’ll get our brew.”
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DEEP WILDERNESS
“What is it about Canadian wilderness that is so important for us to defend?”
SINCE EARLY CHILDHOOD I HAVE been intuitively responsive to the ability of wild places to affect my feelings and state of mind. In the old country, the landscape was often beautiful because it had been “cultivated” for thousands of years by people (and sheep) who were more in harmony with nature, but its power was diluted and tamed in comparison to the pristine Canadian wilderness. The crags where we climbed were more powerful than the surrounding areas because they had not been worked over so much. By comparison, our home island on the BC coast, though relatively wild and beautiful, has been modified by logging and lacks the potency of the pristine landscape of the more remote, rugged and inaccessible parts of the BC Coast Range.
My first conscious experience of deep, uncompromised wilderness was in 1971, when the famous British climber, Doug Scott, and I met in a Cairngorm pub and devised a plan to climb clean granite rock walls somewhere far away from societal distractions. We wanted to experience the pure spirit of exploration and self-reliance free from the bureaucracy, commercialism and crowding of popular places like Yosemite and Banff National Parks. We found that isolation in abundance in the mountains on Baffin Island in the eastern Canadian Arctic, where magnificent granite peaks, glaciers and treeless tundra bathe in the crystalline clarity of magic arctic light. After spending six weeks in this pristine landscape with complete absence of societal noise and clutter, we became increasingly conscious not just of the pretty view but also of a subtle ambient presence, a vibration that interacted and resonated with our feelings and emotions. Beauty became love.
We learned that things went better when we paid attention to these feelings and tuned into the surroundings and each other; when we listened and read the natural signs with our body/minds open and free. Then meaningful coincidences (synchronicities) and intuitive hunches happened more frequently, assisting our judgment and critical decisions, especially those concerning navigation, timing, weather and avalanches. Conversely, things went badly when we were not paying complete attention to our surroundings and each other; when our minds and spirits were distracted and out of focus. Deep wilderness experience taught us that our well-being, safety and ability to survive depended on conscious awareness of our internal and external environs.
In Strathcona Park, on Vancouver Island, I discovered a unique and particularly powerful version of the hidden connectivity of wilderness ambience. In the alpine areas between the steep, forested valleys below and the barren tundra of the high peaks and glaciers above, an extensive web of interconnected ridges provided relatively accessible, multi-day hiking expeditions through exquisite pristine meadows with exotic flowers and shrubs and sparkling streams
and small lakes.
A dramatic example of the way this subtle energy of the pristine landscape can inspire love and conscious awareness and can move and shake us was demonstrated by the political battle to save this magical wonderland from the ravages of heavy metal mining in the late 1980s.
It all started for Laurie and me when we worked part time as wilderness guides for Jim Boulding at Strathcona Park Lodge & Outdoor Education Centre on Vancouver Island, leading hundreds of multi-day hiking journeys through the alpine paradise. Jim had been a great hunting and fishing guide, but when he discovered that killing game was not what his clients enjoyed, so much as the art of stalking (the state of mind of the hunter), he and his wife Myrna converted their hunting and fishing lodge into an outdoor education centre. Their mission was to teach people how to be more in tune with nature.
Jim was a big man with great charisma and a very commanding presence. You could say he had psychic power, with an uncanny shaman-like habit of thinking outside the box. Furthermore, he encouraged and instructed his staff to do likewise.
“The school classroom,” he said, “was an architectural expression of the box mentality, the root cause of most of the problems of modern society.”
Jim demonstrated the joy and power of sharing inspiration gained from interacting with the energy fields of the land in what he called “Generosity of Spirit.” When we share the “Natural High” and the experience of “being in the Zone,” the energy feeds on itself synergistically and amazing things can and do happen. Examples of this synergy are manifest in the safety record of the wilderness trips and the spontaneous music and dancing, organic architecture, delicious wholesome food and hospitality of “The Lodge.” Jim’s creation of Strathcona Rural Resource Village was as close as I ever came to a manifestation of my own thesis: a village on the edge of a protected wilderness park providing services, facilities and information for visitors outside instead of reducing the wilderness value by developing inside the protected areas.
