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* Kananaskis
* Brazeau Loop
* Rockwall
* Clearwater River
* Purcell Wilderness
* West Coast Trail
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 "The Rockwall"
Tim Madigan, Fort Worth
Star-Telegram
On a trek through the Canadian Rockies,
the
dominion of lofty peaks
strikes awe in the human heart.
KOOTENAY NATIONAL PARK, British Columbia I
began to notice the strange and persistent tug about a decade ago, sensing the
need for an antidote to the soul-numbing aspects of urban life. It was the
increasingly common `back-to-nature' thing, which for me included a dabble in
the works of Henry David Thoreau. This passage was among those highlighted
years ago in my paperback copy of `Walden.'
"I went to the woods because I wished to live
deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could
learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had
not lived."
Thoreau also professed a need to "live deep and suck
out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to
rout all that was not life. . . ." I have never really been into marrow
sucking, but I did receive a tent as a Christmas present several years back,
which inspired tentative week end forays into the state parks of North Texas.
On one of the trips, the kindly suggestion of a gentleman camping nearby saved
me from killing myself while trying to light a gas stove.
Car-camping along the back roads of the Colorado
Rockies came next as the tug intensified -- like an umbilical cord that ached
to be cut, a wilderness threshold that beckoned to be crossed. A few years ago,
I was struck by the wild mountain scenery in a television documentary on a
Canadian railroad and similarly enthralled by the landscape of `The Edge,' a
1997 film in which a persistent Kodiac bear stalks Anthony Hopkins and Alec
Baldwin through pristine stretches of the same territory.
Hence the key words in my Internet search last
spring: `Canadian Rockies, backpacking.' Which led in turn to the sunny day in
August at a trail head in Kootenay National Park, a wilderness enclave in the
jagged mountains of western Canada.
THE ROCKWALL
Bud Ettinger, owner of the Alberta adventure company
I found on the Net, guided a trail called The Rockwall, named for
the 35-mile-long cliff of towering limestone beneath which our path would
wander. A young back-country veteran named Jeremy MacKenzie would assist Bud.
Two other clients, my college roommate from Minneapolis, Jim Larsen, and Alain
Jolicoeur, a government employee from Quebec City, filled out our party. The
trek started gently, a mercifully flat stretch through an evergreen forest. But
even then the shoulder aches from hefting 50-pound backpacks set in before we
had walked a mile. We dropped our packs and slumped onto smooth boulders after
a couple hours, washing down candy bars with the clear, cold water filtered
from a gushing mountain stream into our drinking bottles. Our first of many
hard climbs then began, a 1,500-foot ascent through the trees and across sunny
avalanche slopes. For the climb, Bud suggested we shorten our strides, maintain
a steady heart rate, and try to think about something else.
"Think about something else," Alain repeated with
mock bitterness. "Like `I should have gone to the beach.' " Two hours on the
trail led to three, then four and five. Jim, Alain and I each silently
entertained second thoughts about our choice of vacations. Body aches graduated
from muscle to bone. Thoreau was a kook. Then, in early evening, with our group
on the verge of mutiny, the trees parted and we were delivered to the shores of
Floe Lake.
The sheer face of The Rockwall rose 3,000 feet above
clear blue water. A large glacier crept to the shore across the way, reflected
on the face of the placid lake. The sky turned pink above the mountains, and
night came in with a foreign stillness. I learned that the sight of a glacial
lake and a stiff dose of ibuprofen cure body aches. By the end of our first
day, as we climbed into our tents, only a triumphant weariness remained. This
is why people backpack.
THE QUESTION
Sometime in midweek, as we hiked through abroad
valley surrounded on all sides by the continent's most majestic mountains, Bud
reached out with his walking stick and stabbed a piece of white tissue paper
lying near the trail, casually stuffing it into his pocket. But it was a moment
worth noting. In the course of our 45-mile hike, that tissue was the only bit
of human refuse we saw. A few other backpackers, yes. Their garbage, no. I kept
expecting to see a random beer can, candy wrapper or pile of discarded tires,
for what is the country for if not for dumping your trash. The unspoiled nature
of our environment took some getting used to. But then, many parts of life in
the wilderness were that way.
Consider that for six days we lived without being
flipped off in traffic, nay, without even hearing a combustion engine. For six
days we didn't see a telephone pole. We lived six days without fax or phone.
Six days without looking in a mirror. This last posed an interesting
philosophical question, especially for a person prone to narcissism, one that
wore on me increasingly as the week continued: If I can't see myself in the
mirror, do I really exist?
PEOPLE IN THE PICTURE
There is something of an axiom in landscape
photography: Unless your name is Ansel Adams, put people in the picture, too.
Something about humans adding a sense of scale. The same principal probably
applies to nature writing. Hence this attempt to position our guides in a
figurative frame.
Jeremy MacKenzie is 25, tall and lean, with the
angular good looks of a model for L.L. Bean. A few years ago, he graduated with
a business degree from the University of Alberta, an unquestionably bright and
articulate fellow who could have followed his friends to graduate school.
Instead, he chose the outdoors as his workplace. During our August trek, Jeremy
generally took up the trail at our rear, strolling patiently behind three
huffing, flat-land desk jockeys like a shepherd coaxing new lambs.
It was Jeremy who was up with the sun every morning,
fetching water from the stream for coffee. He bandaged our blisters, cooked our
evening soup and cheerfully did the dishes, answered our dumb questions and
laughed at our jokes. His equanimity was such that during the week, Jim, Alain
and I wondered what it would take to get Jeremy ticked, even mildly irritated.
We learned later that friends who had known him for years still wondered the
same thing. I can only assume that Jeremy's serenity derives in some measure
from his choice of occupations.
"Sometimes I forget to look around," he confessed
early one morning, bent over the stove when just he and I were awake. A warming
sun rose over the mountains behind us. I was mesmerized by a 1,500-foot
waterfall that poured out the side of a mountain a mile or so away.
"But I love this place," Jeremy said. "I'm in awe
every time I see it."
Bud Ettinger, meanwhile, is a short guy whose old
nickname, "Truck," does justice to a imposingly powerful build. Though his hair
is still sandy, he reluctantly admits to being somewhere in his 50s. Scars on
his knees are remnants of five operations, and his back sometimes fails him.
But in our leader there was a palpable determination: No matter what the
inevitable physical betrayals, pain would not force him from this -- mountains
and streams and valleys and forests that have been his sanctuary for 40 years.
In that devotion to the wilderness, our guides were completely alike.
Bud had been a teacher and administrator in schools
across Alberta for most of his adult life, his many near-death experiences in
the wild (swimming out of avalanches, meeting grizzlies, skiing out of
blizzards, etc.) occurring largely on his own time.
A few years ago, he left education to found Back of
Beyond Adventure Co. in the small town of Canmore, Alberta. But on the trail,
the teacher in Bud was still very much in evidence. A dozen times a day he
interrupted our walk, pointing with the old ice ax he used as a walking stick
toward some obscure alpine flower, or variety of mushroom, or pile of wolf
scat, or the holes left by woodpeckers on the bark of pine trees. He taught us
the geology of the mountains, the origins of the glaciers, the mating habits of
elk.
But beyond any knowledge was a more visceral delight,
a wilderness rapture we all came to know. Bud said, in fact, it was stronger in
him now than four decades ago, when he was brash, when life was a competition,
when the wilderness was a challenge to be bested. Somewhere in midlife he had
learned to take his time, stop rushing down the trails, to look. He spoke of it
around the campfire one evening, of pausing to watch bald eagles and sea lions
while hiking Canada's Pacific coast a few years ago. These things, he said,
would have been lost on the brash young man.
"You just can't be in a hurry," he said.
As the week wore on, I found myself watching Bud
almost as much as the landscape, a mammal in his natural habitat. He would peer
up at the peaks and glaciers from under his floppy hat, or down at the
wildflowers, a boyish smile on his face, as if he saw these things as we did,
for the first time.
Gentlemen, this is an event," he said one day, when
we spotted four golden eagles, circling in a cloudless sky.
"Enjoy, gents," Bud would say at other times as we
pondered another great vista, a tour guide in paradise.
And so we did, immensely. But no one cherished what
we saw quite as much as Bud.
BEARS
On the first morning, while driving from Bud's place
in Canmore to the trail head, I mentioned that I thought it would be cool to
see a grizzly in the wild -- something about adding a dose of adventure for my
story about our trip.
"Then you're with the wrong guide," Bud said, without
smiling. "I don't care about any story."
Perhaps he was a little sensitive. He had gone
several years without seeing a bear himself. But only a few weeks before, while
Bud led several women on a day hike, a year-old grizzly (meaning one that
weighs 500 pounds instead of 600) ambled across his path. The bear evidently
was too young to be particularly irritable, or to be threatened by humans, and
continued into the woods with nary a snort. Yet Bud, not the kind to be easily
shaken, seemed, well, shaken.
It's true that most encounters with bears in the
Canadian Rockies end as Bud's did, peaceably. But not always. Grizzlies attack
because they're threatened, black bears because they're hungry. Almost every
year there are new tales of hikers killed in horrible ways or maimed or scared
witless. After supper one night, Bud regaled us with stories of bear attacks,
including the one in which a woman fled, climbed a tree and watched an old
grizzly eat her boyfriend.
Locals, in fact, seem to delight in recounting these
events to visitors, and sometimes it is hard to distinguish the reality of bear
danger from the folklore. But it can be safely said that grizzlies, which,
sadly, have been almost completely eradicated from the mountains of the United
States, still rule the upper elevations in Canada. Several times a day, Bud
pointed to a spot near the trail -- to large craters in alpine meadows, some of
them only a day or two old. With the efficiency of a backhoe, a grizzly had
gouged out massive amounts of earth in the hunt for small mammals or roots to
eat.
Black bears were prevalent at lower elevations. A few
days before we passed through, a black bear and her cub had approached a picnic
table at the Numa Creek campground and helped themselves to the food of some
hikers. A bear that has tasted human food invariably comes back for more. Hence
the yellow "Bear Warning" signs posted on the trees when we arrived.
The threat of bears indeed dictates a good bit of
wilderness life. Every night after supper we rounded up the uneaten meals,
candy bars, garbage, even toothpaste, stuffed it into a backpack, and hung it
20 feet off the ground on a bear pole, far away from our tents. Experienced
back-country hikers also know to make noise on the trail, giving bears notice
of their approach, thus avoiding surprise confrontations, which are the most
dangerous kind.
To this end, some backpackers we met had strapped
small bells to their belts, bear bells, as they were called, which tinkled with
every step. It was a small, pleasing sound, and to Bud, highly insufficient to
the task. In his mind, the little tinkle would make bears curious, not afraid.
He called them "dinner bells."
His method was far less quaint, but undoubtedly more
effective. Most every time we passed from the woods into a meadow, where bears
were most likely to be, Bud let out an atavistic bellow. "`YO, BEAR!' ," he'd
scream, the noise echoing through the mountains. If I were a bear, I wouldn't
want to tangle with the source of that sound. Little wonder that our week in
the wild passed without incident. Call me naive, but I was a little
disappointed by that.
AT THE PLEASURE OF NATURE
On the third day it rained, just a spit at first as
we climbed steeply through a forest. But then dull gray clouds began to tumble
toward us over the mountains, and when the trail emerged from the trees and led
up an exposed avalanche slope, we watched helplessly as thick sheets of rain
advanced our way down a long valley.
Within minutes, we were drenched to the bone despite
our so-called rain gear. We forded small streams that had turned into torrents.
We shivered in howling winds and temperatures in the 40s. All this as we
trudged along in the wilderness, seven or eight miles from the nearest
campsite, discovering a new meaning to the word despair.
But there was a point to this discomfort, too. We
were reminded that our excursion was undertaken at the pleasure of Nature, this
massive, occasionally brooding presence with whom a wilderness backpacker
acquires an intimate if respectful acquaintance.
Most days, our host was gentle and accommodating. The
days were sunny and warm, the nights crisp but not too cold. The water of the
streams and lakes was an almost fluorescent blue, and wonderful to drink.
Wildflowers bloomed gloriously in the alpine meadows. The bears left us alone.
But everywhere was evidence of Nature's shadow side,
its menace -- fresh bear digs, ancient trees upended like saplings by walls of
snow and left rotting in the forests with their roots exposed. And then on our
third day, Nature caught us miles from anywhere, wet and freezing, lonesome and
highly unnerved. As the downpour continued, I studied the faces of our guides.
If either Bud or Jeremy had betrayed the slightest hint of panic, I would have
begun weeping uncontrollably.
But they didn't. Instead, they took out a blue tarp,
tied it to three trees, invited us underneath and served lunch of bagels and
cheese. Business as usual. Not until later that day, when Nature had safely
made its point, when the clouds had parted and a warming, drying, cheering sun
returned, did the guides admit they had been cold and a bit despairing, too.
PEAK BAGGING
A few days later, the trail led steeply up through
another dense forest, then onto a grassy mountain pass, where we sat on
boulders and lunched on cheese and crackers, watching four golden eagles circle
in a cloudless sky. After eating, we climbed up the bed of a trickling stream,
then up a long snow mass to the rounded summit of a modest mountain.
It was the most beautiful place I've been.
Snow-dappled peaks were visible for 60 miles in all directions. Glaciers clung
to the shoulders of mountains. Carpets of evergreens rolled into the valleys.
For an hour, we sat and looked, struck nearly speechless by our hard-earned
perspective.
But another, slightly higher peak loomed nearby, and
another just beyond that, and another beyond that. I couldn't help but wonder
what the views might be from the tops of those. Jeremy smiled when I spoke of
it. It's called peak bagging, he said, part of the insatiable mountain quest
for new heights, new vistas.
"You're getting the bite," Jeremy said.
LOOKING BACK
"It's about this time on the trail that you begin to
wonder what you're going to appreciate most when you get back," Jeremy said on
the evening of our fourth day, "a soft bed, a hot shower or a cold beer."
None of us had bathed. A few strokes of the
toothbrush was the extent of trail hygiene. The ground at night was not getting
any softer. It was decided that night: Two days hence, we would celebrate our
return to civilization with hamburgers and beer at an Irish pub Bud knew in the
tourist mecca of Banff.
The last days on the trail were often an exercise in
looking back, observing distant glaciers and mountains beneath which we had
walked days before. It was gratifying to learn how much ground could be covered
in painfully plodding strides by flat-land desk jockeys.
We were up early on the sixth day. The trail traced a
wild river, sloping gently downward for most of the nine-mile hike, which we
covered at a veritable sprint, tasting hamburgers. About an hour from the end,
Jeremy paused.
"Listen," he said.
It was the sound of traffic rushing down a highway.
There was a certain sweetness to the Volvo waiting in a parking lot at the
trail head. We dropped our packs for the last time, exchanged handshakes with a
mixture of sadness and glee, and headed for Banff with the windows rolled down.
At the pub, a hostess seated us at a booth far in the
back, well away from other customers. In the men's room, I found a mirror to
confirm I still existed. The hamburgers and beer were sublime. As we discussed
our trek, Jeremy remembered a quote that had stuck with him. J. Monroe
Thorington was a British mountaineer who long ago had come to Canada as we did,
seeking adventure.
"We were not pioneers ourselves, but we journeyed
over old trails that were new to us, and with hearts open," Thorington said.
When Jeremy said it, five stinky men nodded around
the table. Somehow, that sounded just about right.
Tim Madigan is a staff writer for the Fort Worth
Star-Telegram
Click here to return to the
Rockwall Trip Description
Owners/Operators: Bud Ettinger and Genia Luchka
Address:
2010 3rd Avenue
Canmore, Alberta CANADA
T1W 2J8
Tel: (403) 678-6606
Fax: (403) 678-0910
info@backofbeyond.ca
Toll-Free Inquiries:
1-800-732-7251
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