This summer I went down to my trapline, 60 km south of Tatla Lake into the Coast Mountains with my two sons, Junah and Shiney, and filmmaker Rick Magnell.
We were on a quest to check on the remains of the homestead my kids’ mother, Christine, and I carved out of the wilderness in the late 1970s, where our two children were born and spent their early years.
Last September a wildfire, known as the Twist Creek Fire, razed the West Branch Valley from Twist Creek to White Saddle Mountain. By the good graces our neighbours, Walt and Carol Foster’s Sand Creek Ranch was spared, but we heard that our homestead wasn’t so lucky. So my sons and I decided to go and find out for ourselves, with Rick Magnell in tow.
Actually I’m not too sure who was towing who. Rick is producing a documentary about my involvement in the counterculture movement of the 1970s, and it was he who insisted he needed film footage of my sons and I in that unique and marvelous location, a whistle and a sneeze from Mount Waddington.
So off we went. Rick booked four days at the end of August for the expedition and my sons and I followed suit.
Yes I was uneasy about this. In August 1977 I was 28-years-old when I moved from Williams Lake to live in the wildest part of British Columbia imaginable. And that was a more forgiving time of life.
I’m old now, but my part in this expedition was a guide who knew the way, and he who had knowledge of the unforgiving wiles of the West Branch Valley. This included the relentless winds that blow up from the coast where you have to be across the lake before 11 in the morning, or forget paddling on it. That’s on a normal day.
But this wasn’t a normal day. It was blustery from the start and that didn’t bode well for boating down the lake. Nevertheless we forged ahead and launched our canoe and kayak into the river for the km-long paddle to the lake. Sure enough there were whitecaps on Twist Lake. So that meant we had to walk.
Meanwhile there’s the matter of the fire. We encountered the fire-impacted landscape a dozen kms up the valley at Middle Lake where both sides of the valley from the lowlands to the alpine had been scorched. How the Foster Ranch escaped the inferno is beyond me.
At Twist Lake we tied our watercrafts in Nickerson’s Lagoon and started hiking through burned forest. It’s a good five kms to the south end of the lake and our homestead.
The thing about Mother Nature if left to herself, you can count on change. It’s the foundation of life. Sixteen years ago Christine and I hiked down there to check things out and we had a difficult time finding the homestead. So much had grown in, trees had fallen, and old trails had disappeared.
Then five years ago I took a flight with my sons and their families to show the grandkids where their dads were born and raised. We were shocked to see a new channel had forged its way across the flat putting our homestead on an island surrounded by rushing water.
So we had that to look forward to as well as we trundled through the fire-ravished landscape. Some parts of the trail were obvious but other sections had been vapourized by the intense heat.
We made it to a familiar south-facing beach we called the Swimming Place where the kids once waded in the water. Then we reached Dave Wilson’s Hunting Camp where the only recognizable sign was the old campfire pit with a few burned sardine cans left there by the hunters nearly half a century ago. And Junah found a rifle shell casing.
Now the fun began. We had to bushwhack through the burn to the homestead knowing that a vigorous stream of glacial water stood in our way. What we didn’t know was, a second channel also awaited us.
Thanks to an abundance of fallen trees we had a wobbly mess of bridgework to pick our way over the channels. But watching Rick balancing on a crosslog while packing his expensive camera and sound equipment was unsettling. Especially for him.
Once over the second stream we finally made it to the homestead, and yes it was toast. Six burned out rectangular footprints defined our living space. The Old Cabin, the storehouse, the shop, the main cabin, the barn, and the root cellar. Each building incinerated and their contents revealing their function. Canning jars, bottles, stoves, stovepipe, buckets, traps, tools, utensils, dishes, plates, a grain grinder, a meat grinder and tobacco tins with various treasures cached inside. One had rolling papers where you could still read the writing on the cardboard covers. Another had fish hooks that our trapping partner Richard hauled all the way from Ontario.
Junah shared how he grew up there at the homestead until he was six-years-old. We brought him to that place when he was a week old and we camped in Richard's brown army tent while we built the cabin.
Shiney pointed to the place in the cabin footprint where he was born 43 years ago to the day. Then he found the scorched remains of his mother’s treasured photograph of Bob Dylan. Melted glass and a few sprigs of snarewire were all that was left.
And we all brought some souvenirs home with us. Junah picked up the metal remains of an ice skate. I grabbed a small watering pail. Shiney found a chisel he might try to re-temper and affix a new handle, and Rick rescued a broken teapot infused with melted glass.
So our once marvelous wilderness retreat was no more. But it had served its purpose. My kids emerged from there as strong caring men. We called it the Hilton of our string of trapping cabins.
Wonderful memories are associated with that place where we rubbed up against what can only be described as the Sacred. We were blessed there.
Christine and I came there at a time when a bunch of idealistic young people across the world were bailing out of conventional society to START SOMETHING NEW. And for nine years we lived there with a quest to reinvent the wheel and rediscover fire.
The relentless force of glacial-fed Twist Creek threatened to wash away evidence of our dreams, but it looks like fire got to it first.
