August 2023
The year is 2023, I had just graduated university and bought my first vehicle – a sick white minivan. Kalum and I were planning to go to Bella Coola to paddle for about week before he started his Master’s. However, plans quickly changed as we questioned whether my van could make it down Highway 20 into Bella Coola, and a third member joined the party. Soon we were heading east towards Fernie instead.
My van is slow in the best of times; and it’s especially slow when there’s three people in it, hundreds of pounds of gear, and the world’s heaviest canoe strapped to the roof. The van is also a two seater and we were a group of three. We opted to fashion a third seat in the back of the van by bolting in an old Ford Ranger jumpseat that faced backwards. We’d gotten the seat for free and neglected to check if it came with the receiver for the seatbelt, so we used a machine screw to hold the seatbelt down. In all seriousness, it probably would have been safer for the third person to cling to the roof of the vehicle.
We began our trip by crawling over Highway 3 from Vancouver to Fernie, with a stop in Manning Park. I’d never been to Manning before and it was really interesting to visit the northern terminus of the PCT.
I somehow didn’t take a single photo in Fernie, but we were definitely there. Post Fernie, we had a few days to make our way back to Victoria before Kalum began school. We would have felt like fools if we’d dragged a canoe across the province without ever using it, so we pretty quickly decided on heading to Wells Gray Provincial Park and Clearwater Lake.
We spent two days paddling on Clearwater Lake; I hadn’t been in a canoe in more than a decade, so I spent most of the time slowing us down. After we got off the water, we had a day to kill so we opted to run up Battle Mountain.
This is where the questionable decisions began. Battle mountain is roughly 35 km round trip from car to car with about 1500 m of elevation, and a decent portion of the route is off trail. So not a short day by any stretch of the imagination. Because we’d camped on Clearwater Lake the previous night, we didn’t get to the trailhead until about 1 PM. Additionally, our navigational aids consisted solely of my nearly dead phone, with no topographic map, and a paper map out of a brochure.
We parked at the lower trail head where we ran into a group of TRU students who were preparing to do the same trip but over five days. This didn’t exactly fill us with confidence given the fact we’d done practically no research on the route. However, the terrain proved highly runnable and we even bumped into another TRU group near the base of battle mountain.
The trip was fairly uneventful, we never got lost despite our terrible navigational aids. We didn’t make it to the summit in part due to our late but mostly due to the fact I was moving incredibly slowly.