A view from the canoe

Wow. On Monday we got back from our 8 day canoe trip on the Bowron Lakes a chain of lakes, rivers and over land portages in a provincial park 600 km north of Vancouver. It was exceptional.

Prior to the trip my only experience of the wilder side of Canada was from Dennis and Pat’s boat, and I was really excited to get out of the city and experience what is actually the majority of Canada – vast, unspolied landscapes with diverse wildlife and stunning views.

We were invited to do the trip by a childhood friend of Keli’s, Niki, and her husband Pat. In addition to the four of us there was Niki’s dad Wayne, her sister Heidi and partner Adrian, Niki’s brother Davy and partner Lyndsey, Pat’s mum Cathy, and two of Pat’s friends Nancy and Toni. 12 in all, a big enough group really for such a venture, and Kel and I were both excited by the opportunity and aware of the potential for group dynamic drama!

We drove up to Quesnel, a rural town an hour outside Bowron Provincial Park on Saturday evening and checked into a motel, roadtrip-style, before meeting as a group for a short orientation and then straight to bed for a final good night’s kip. The journey up was a beautiful drive through Whistler, Pemberton, and Lillouet on a road that wound it’s way through glacial mountains beside perfect rivers and lakes. Completely other-worldly to me.

Making a quick sandwich before our first portage

On Sunday morning we collected our rental canoes and equipment from a local company and headed to the lake for our safety briefing and registration. What followed was a hilarious insight into the differences between UK and Canadian attitudes to health and safety. The park staff member was very well meaning, but clearly in another orbit. The bear safety chat included gems such as ‘I’ve nicknamed the bear that lives on sites 2-7 George, he just seems to live there and isn’t dangerous as he doesn’t associate humans with food, yet. If he does show up just chase him away.’ The river safety was even better, our guide couldn’t remember the exact location of the dangerous rapids and waterfall, and always missed the signs when she was on the river, but we needn’t worry as she was sure it would make sense when we got there.

And actually on balance I think they’ve got something really right. The bears kept themselves to themselves for the whole week as campers use the steel storage bins provided at each campsite to keep food and scented products like soap and toiletries out of their way; and it was actually easy to make judgement calls about the rapids when we got to them. This was a relatively dangerous week long excursion in a remote area made available to anyone who fancied it and was prepared to use common sense. Simple really.

60 lbs, plus a little

Following our briefing we headed out to our canoes to begin our first overland portage to the first lake. We were weighed prior to departure and only allowed to carry 60 pounds of weigth (about 27 kg) in the canoe while portaging on dirt trails using small wheels that strapped to the bottom of the boat. Keli and I aren’t light packers, as evidenced by our 600 quid excess baggage charges on the now defunct Flyzoom on the way over – perhaps our fuel bill contributed to their demise? But the general rule was that you carried all your additional weight on your back until you got round the first bend, and then bucked it all into the boat for the rest of the week – that’s more like it.

As a provincial park the lakes and surrounding woodlands are very well preserved, and it was lovely to spend the week travelling around the park without running into plastic bags in hedges and left over sweet wrappers in the campsites. Canadians are known for their bend-over-backwards-to-not-offend-anyone style, and I really appreciate their care of the environment, at least in BC, if not in redneck Alberta.

All Canadians appear to be natural born outdoors adventurers, but this little Holywood boy was a slow starter! My kayaking lessons in Templemore Baths at age 10 did give me a good start at this one, although I don’t remember returning to class the week after it was discovered that I was responsible for the plop at the bottom of the pool that was beginning to disintegrate and flot to the top of the pool – I was anal-retentive in my earlier years and didn’t much trust foreign toilets.

Kel and I swapped ends of the canoe a few times before settling on me at the back doing the steering, and Keli up front providing the power. We made good progress, and by the third day were really confortable paddling on lakes, and looking forward to the challenge of rapids and chutes in the river later in the week. The sense of peace and deep quiet when paddling on the lakes was arresting. 46 people are allowed on the lakes every day of the season, and yet in the first four days we didn’t meet anyone apart from our group of 12. This meant that it was often just Keli and I paddling on our own as we set off from camp some morning a few minutes apart from the others.

Canoes are confined spaces, and some of our reflections on the trip as we drove home were actually that it had been an interesting experiment pre-sailing on how we do in confined spaces. It’s funny how quickly we resort to inflexible positions that create conflict, when actually there are always more possibilities to solve the problems we have arrived at. One person sitting at the back of the boat being responsible for steering, while another is at the front with better visibility created a few tense moments that we laughted about afterwards.

Preparing for a trip to the wilderness is a little different to preparing for a trip to Donegal for a week. We borrowed Dennis and Pat’s tent, and some sleeping bags from Keli’s cousins. We already had our camping stove and pots, thermorets, and long johns. I had checked the forecast for the week and saw all these nice high’s of 12, 14 and 16 degrees – lovely. What I hadn’t noticed however was that the lows were all 1, 2 and 3! Keli and I totally froze on the first night and didn’t really sleep at all, it was horrible. The next day we scavanged some extra warm clothes, an extra groundsheet and a foil emergency blanket and things got much better from there. The only other hitch was the all night downpour that essentially destroyed Dennis’ copy of Bill Bryson’s Tales from a Big Country… and I was actually enjoying that book too!

For future reference my top 10 things I must bring in future are:

1. Warm clothes for cold nights
2. Quick-dry trousers that zip off to become long shorts
3. My Arc’teryx shell jacket
4. Rope to tie things into the boat and make clothes lines in the campsite
5. Proper sandals for getting wet and not falling off (like my Birks did, never to be seen again)
6. Washing up bowl
7. Chopping board
8. Sub-zero rated sleeping bags (like these camping sleeping bag)
9. Water filtration pump to clean up the river water for drinking and cooking
10. Hot chocolate and hot apple cider sashets – warms you to the core!

Group dynamics are always tricky things on these type of adventures, and we had a few tense moments during the course of the week, which is totally normal. On the whole though it was really lovely to meet and be accepted by an established group of people, and be allowed into their lives. Each member of the group found a fun role that allowed them to be themselves and have their moments, Kel took to massages by the campfire, and I shamelessly played up to some Irish stereotypes, particularly scarcasm and comedy potty-mouth. We all went out for dinner in Quesnel when we got back on dry land and it was really nice to have a way of closing the week that cemented friendships.

One of the enjoyable and exciting parts of the week was Keli and my trip through a chute and rapids section on the Issac river. Much of the water was very still and easy to navigate, but the Issac river provided some excitment mid journey, and both Kel and I really got a taste for whitewater travel.

Keli and I are extremely grateful for the opportunity to get into the wilderness like we did. Niki and Pat did a great job putting the trip together, and it was another really unique way to see Canada. Hopefully just the beginning of adventures in BC, and beyond. I’ll leave you with my favourite image of the trip…

Looking north from the south end of Issac lake onto still waters and a blue sky