48 HOURS IN THE KOOTENAYS
by LARRY PYNN
"YOU SET THE PACE," OFFERS MY HIKING GUIDE, BRIAN McCUTCHEON, STRAPPING ON A DAYPACK IN THE PARKING LOT OF KOKANEE GLACIER PROVINCIAL PARK.
I take one last look back at his pickup truck, which we have surrounded with chicken wire to prevent hoodlum porcupines from chewing at the brake lines while we're away. Then it's a sharp ascent on a trail bordered by salmonberries, sweet clover, and alder, knifing through forests of fir and cedar en route to Kokanee Lake.
One hour into the hike and I'm already dogging it in the 30 C heat. I am not in the best shape for hiking. I gave it up four years ago after an assignment in the trailless Clendinning Valley near Squamish ended in arthroscopic knee surgery.
"How's the ticker?" asks McCutcheon, reaching for his satellite emergency phone like a twitchy gunslinger.
Better question: how will it be at day's end tomorrow?
I signed on with the Nelson-based eco-tourism guru for a six-day multi-sport adventure, an organized way to sample the region's buffet of recreational opportunities. I was to tag along with a family of five from the United States, but when they cancelled at the last minute, my weeklong exploration became a 48-hour adventure marathon. I'm here to cram as many outdoor activities as I can into just two days, hoping my cortisone-laced, 51-year-old body can hold up.
McCutcheon has guided actor Tom Cruise down the Colorado River, taken DKNY fashion designer Donna Karan on a Yukon raft trip down the Firth River, and fly-fished for coho salmon with business billionaire Jimmy Pattison on British Columbia's Wakeman River. Now he's got me, someone who served as a stocky movie extra in Clan of the Cave Bear, whose wardrobe is distinguished by two pairs of jeans and no fewer than 17 black T-shirts.
I may not be rich and famous, but I still have four years to reach the average age and annual income of McCutcheon's clientele'about 55 and $255,000 US. That's assuming I survive my two-day outdoor adventure blitz.
There are worse places to die trying than the West Kootenay. The region's heart is Kootenay Lake, southern British Columbia's largest natural lake, a landform best described as a giant bow and arrow. The bow extends just over 100 kilometres from the community of Argenta due south to the beginnings of the agriculture- and bird-rich Creston Valley; the arrow is the lake's West Arm, reaching 30 kilometres to the City of Nelson. Adding geographic drama to the landscape, the Purcell Mountains flank the lake's east side and the Selkirks the west, both part of the greater Columbia Mountains.
It all points to a wealth of recreational opportunities in Nelson's backyard. Paddling, rafting, or boating, not just on Kootenay Lake but also the Slocan and Salmo river systems. Recreational fishing for kokanee, a freshwater form of land-locked salmon, and other species. Backcountry hiking in vast parks, scuba diving for shipwrecks, back-road bicycling and motorcycling. And, at days end, soaking in local hot springs such as Nakusp, Ainsworth, and Halcyon.
Despite all it has to offer, Nelson remains a quaint geographic backwater found well off the major highways. Visitors arriving by air generally fly into Castlegar Airport and drive 30 minutes east to Nelson, or land in Spokane, Washington, and make the three-hour drive north.
“You still have to explain where Nelson is,” McCutcheon says. “That’s part of the charm.”
Those who make the journey are not disappointed. New Jersey retiree Jim Devers had ridden no fewer than 154 rivers (24 of them repeats), including waterways as exotic as the Bio Bio in Chile, the Upper Navua in Fiji, and Rio Pacuare in Costa Rica, yet the West Kootenay still wowed him.
“Wonderful trip, spectacular scenery,” he confirms of his multi-sport trip. “I even got introduced to some delicious B.C. wine while in Nelson – such a cool town.”
Nelson’s 10,000 or so residents range from plaid-jacketed loggers and paint-splattered artists to bongo-playing youths and high-tech urban refugees. It’s a politically and culturally diverse community that benefits from good restaurants, a dynamic arts scene (it’s said that you can find live music virtually every night of the week), and a core of restored turn-of-the-century buildings dating back to the town’s mining heydays. All this and wrap-around wilderness, too.
The Gibson Lake trailhead to Kokanee Glacier Park is a 45-minute drive northeast of Nelson and a world away from the city’s cappuccino bars and holistic healers. It is a well-marked route rising more than 1,500 metres; the trail eventually levels off, yielding vistas of treeless ridges strewn with granite boulders spat out during the last ice age.
“We get all three colours of paintbrush – red, yellow, and orange,” McCutcheon says of the luminous alpine plant. “That’s pretty unusual.”
We stop for lunch at the stunningly scenic yet melancholy Kokanee Lake. Michel Trudeau, youngest son of the late Canadian prime minister, Pierre Elliott, drowned here when a snow avalance swept him into the lake in November 1998. He was 23. His body remains submerged in the cold waters, a testament to the savage side of nature. McCutcheon points to the steep route Trudeau was forced to navigate early in the ski season, noting, “the lake froze solid” not long after the young man’s fatal plunge.
McCutcheon normally turns back with his clients at Kokanee Lake but we decide to soldier on, through Kokanee Pass to the new Kokanee Glacier Cabin, built with support from the Trudeau family, and, farther yet, to the original 1896 Slocan Chief Cabin. We see no bears along the way, despite a posted warning from the day before: “Encountered: one grizzly sow and two yearlings between Kalmia Lake and Slocan Chief Cabin.”
Six hours after our hike began, I crawl Gumby-legged into McCutcheon’s truck for the trip back. This is no limousine ride: the truck exudes the residual scent of a skunk that tangled with his dog two nights earlier.
No matter. I dine on coconut Thai prawns at McQ’s North Country Grill in Balfour, a half-hour east of Nelson, before returning to the city for a good night’s sleep in preparation for stage two of my adventure.
McCutcheon picks me up at 9 a.m. and drives to Balfour. There, we launch plastic kayaks at the point where the main body of Kootenay Lake meets the West Arm. The water is calm, clear, and unusually warm, and the mountains are mysteriously veiled by the smoky haze of a nearby forest fire. Three loons fish for juvenile kokanee just 10 metres from us, and an osprey wafts over with a twig for its nest.
Accompanying us is Chris Clarkson, who ran a seasonal eco-tourism company in Belize for eight years before returning to Nelson in 2001 and becoming a partner in McQ’s and Kootenay Lakeview Lodge in Balfour. Paddling alongside the Kootenay Lake ferry – fittingly named the Osprey 2000 – Clarkson motions toward McEwen Point to the north of us. It’s named after his grandfather, Mickey McEwen, a sportsman and conservationist who helped preserve Duck Lake in the Creston Flats.
“I have a photo of him coming back in a small boat,” Clarkson says over the soothing splash of our paddles. “He had four fish over 20 pounds and a big mule deer.”
Thirty minutes later we pass atop a marine buoy that marks the dive site where a Canadian Pacific Railway barge, towed by the steam tug Valhalla, lost part of its load in 1901. Six rail cars loaded with coal lie beneath us at depths as shallow as eight metres.
“You can snorkel it,” Clarkson remarks. “On a good day you can see them for sure.”
Maybe on the next trip. It’s time to depart for Crescent Valley, a 20-minute drive west of Nelson, launch site for a five-kilometre paddle down the Slocan River. This time I’ll be traveling in a four-metre self-bailing inflatable kayak, a forgiving craft that behaves much like a raft in rapids.
The river starts relatively slowly, allowing me time to look into the clear waters for fish and at the homes dotting the wooded shoreline. Our pace picks up as we approach Facchina’s Rapids just above the Kootenay River confluence, the Slocan’s biggest whitewater, rated Class 2 and up. Water levels this day are exceptionally low, which makes for smaller waves but plenty of exposed rocks.
McCutcheon knows I have negotiated Class 3 rapids in a tandem canoe, but rather than provide me with my own craft, he has stuck me in the bow of a kayak skippered by Clarkson. I might as well be a piece of stow gear. Clarkson effortlessly navigates the rapids, then turns back upstream to re-enter the white water while McCutcheon tuants “surf it” from the near distance.
I sense a conspiracy to dunk me. On the last and biggest rapid, the kayak nearly folds in half as we push through the envelope of white water. I lean all the way back and somehow manage to stay on the craft, whereas Clarkson is jettisoned off the side. Yet in the resulting photos, only I end up looking like a flailing fool in the kayak, legs stuck in the air.
It’s classic McCutcheon. The cocky, gregarious entrepreneur in innately mischievous. He once hiked up a mountain with a friend and, reaching the top, asked: “Want a beer?”
“You brought beer up here?” the friend replied incredulously.
At which point McCutcheon reached into the man’s backpack, extracted four beers, and announced: “No, you did.”
I’m not surprised one group of clients tossed him into the Firth River, tent and all. He had wakened them at 2 a.m. on the pretext it was time to rise – an easy dupe in the North’s nightless summer – fed them strong coffee, then returned to bed chuckling.
“My father calls me the world’s poorest millionaire,” says McCutcheon, who owns homes near Kootenay Lake and Crescent Beach, south of Vancouver. “I live the lifestyle of a millionaire – jet setting around and staying in fancy lodges – but I have no money.”
Are you crying for him? Me neither.
Now there is time to dry off during the 45-minute drive north to New Denver in the Slocan Valley. The final leg of our trip will be a mountain bike trip along the 13-kilometre Galena Trail.
The Galena follows a corridor that traces its roots to the mining-era, narrow-gauge Nakusp and Slocan Railway of the 1890s. The route was upgraded for recreation enthusiasts in 1998 and connects with a hiking trail up popular Idaho Peak. The trail proceeds through a leafy canopy of birch, hemlock, and cedar, and features several neatly constructed wooden bridges and precipitous sections marked “Caution, steep drops.”
We are not long into the trip when I discover McCutcheon has given me a mountain bike with no front brakes.
No brakes? Really? Though he feigns disappointment – “I wanted a good wipe-out” – the notorious prankster swears he simply forgot to hook them up.
All systems working again, we proceed to an aluminum cable-car crossing of Carpenter Creek. It’s named after the prospector who discovered silver in 1891 at nearby Sandon, a once-thriving frontier mining town that, today, is an important historic tourist attraction in the region.
The creek is our turnaround point. “From here, it’s a screamer downhill,” McCutcheon says.
The ride back to the trailhead is pure joy. We fly along so fast that the trees bend and shapeshift into elastic cartoon figures. Robins on the ground fly for their lives at our passing, and the width of the trail seems to shrink to a razor’s edge.
It is an exhilarating end to my brief, action-packed visit to the West Kootenay. I should feel sated from my outdoor adventures, ready to let my body rest and recover from the workout. In fact, I am hungry for more. The experience is not an end, only the source of inspiration for adventures to come.
