courtesy Tom Ryan

Twin Falls is a sweet piece of eye candy: water spilling through two grooved chutes at the top of the chasm, falling through air, then merging into the same flow farther down, before crashing over the rocks and becoming a frothing cauldron. There is a bench that offers a head-on view of the show, so I sit down and soak it all in. Tom hauls out his camera and snaps some shots, including one of the three muskeeters.

Within seconds, a golden-mantled ground squirrel appears and stands on his hind legs peering up at me. I suppose he figures this is his turf and he is looking for an admission fee. Feeling rather good about having survived the hellish hike to Twin Falls, I open up my pack. ”Do you like pretzels, little guy?” Turns out he does. He takes one of the salted snacks and begins munching away, holding it aloft in his paws like a steering wheel. To complete the picture, he even has a pair of snazzy racing stripes.

courtesy damclean; flickr.com

Since our rodent pal is eating, we decide to follow his example, devouring the lunches that the lodge packed for us. The spray from the falls is having a soothing effect and I am starting to feel very relaxed. Janice, however, is disappointed that the tea house isn’t open. Yes, out here in the middle of nowhere there is a tea house that serves scones with jam. It’s a national historic site, built in stages by the CPR, beginning around 1908 with a one-storey cabin for patrons taking backcountry tours. In 1923, the company added a two-storey log structure to create a larger and more attractive chalet. A woman named Fran Drummond has owned and operated the place since 1964. Constructed from local spruce, the chalet now houses a main-floor kitchen and eating area with bedrooms on the second floor. The menu includes a selection of soups, sandwiches and desserts, which are served daily during the summer months.

Denied her chance at high tea, Janice decides that that we should start back. Man, the girl just can’t keep still. But the phrase “start back” comes as a jolt. It is an unpleasant reminder that we have only reached the midway point of our circular 17-kilometre hike. Janice also mentions that we will be taking a different return route.

My thinking is that this trail has to be much easier since we will now be descending. Once more I am proven wrong. Ten minutes into the return hike, things are already looking grim. There is no trail. Instead, we must traverse a moonscape of huge, jagged boulders on an upward diagonal. Why “up” I don’t know, but we are climbing again, and once again trying to keep pace with the long, machine-like strides of Janice and André.

This time, however, the pair lose interest in stopping to let us catch up. They vanish over the ridge, leaving Tom to deal with the stragglers. ”Would you take a cripple up these rocks?” asks Joe, a reference to Tom’s earlier anecdote about the Filipina journalist. The moraine is unforgiving stuff and it is not long before Joe, despite his trusty walking stick, begins to complain. He says that he has a bum leg and doesn’t think he is going to be able to make it.

courtesy Tom Ryan

Since we’re not equipped to camp, I wonder how feasible it might be to get a helicopter in here for an evacuation. Would the Toronto Sun foot the bill for that? Tom calmly urges Joe to continue, promising that this nasty section of rubble ends shortly, while steering the conversation away from the current situation. He also begins offering Joe pretzels as a reward for completing each new stretch of terrain. The pretzels work their magic and Joe, his lily-white knees glowing like headlamps in the afternoon sun, makes it through the moraine.

From there we descend through the forest, where I quickly remember that descending is no easier than climbing. I start gobbling ibuprofen tablets, but by the time we finallly make it back to the car my legs still feel like someone has been pounding on them with ball-pen hammers. Janice asks everyone what they thought was the highlight of the hike. I spoil a unanimous vote for Twin Falls by stating that I liked Takakkaw Falls best. “Of course, we saw that in the first five minutes,” I point out.

We dine that evening at Cilantro at Emerald Lake Lodge, overlooking the lake of the same name. The upscale resort attracts a large international clientele and, judging by the fleet of red canoes tied up at the dock, a healthy contingent of Japanese tourists. The restaurant’s location is stunning and everyone’s mood is upbeat. Even silent André has started talking, his tongue loosened by several glasses of fine Okanagan red.

Joe has made a miraculous recovery from his ordeal in the Yoho Valley, either that, or the experience has tipped his mind over the edge. He is still carrying his walking stick and he goes around the tables with it, chatting openly to total strangers. “I almost died today,” I hear him tell one couple in a happy voice. “I hiked for 55 kilometres.”

I must admit, the guy has a writer’s instincts. Never let the truth get in the way of a good story.

(To be continued …)

Part 5

Part 3

Part 2

Part 1

Takakkaw Falls, courtesy Xevi V; flickr.com

We are trudging up a forest trail somewhere in the Yoho Valley, just west of the Continental Divide. I am sweating buckets and gasping for air. We are on the hike that Tom and Janice earlier described as “pretty easy.” I now know that these two can’t be trusted. The lone consolation, and it isn’t much, is that Joe is having an even tougher time of it than me.

The hike might not be so bad if we didn’t have to keep up with the maniacal pace that Janice and André are setting. The duo appears to be competing to see who is fitter. As for Tom, a former college track athlete, he comes and goes, merrily firing off wisecracks and taking pictures along the way, and, hopefully, keeping watch for bears.

“Bears?” Joe repeats loudly when informed that some had been spotted recently in these parts. He seems genuinely astonished to learn that bears inhabit the wilds of B.C. I suppose he figured the big fellows only show up to beg for sandwiches along the roadside, like you see in the postcards. At any rate, the struggle to keep within eyeshot of the two marching metronomes has made it too difficult for him to talk, which is a blessing. But then again if he had enough wind to converse, we would have less reason to worry about bears. The booming sound of his voice would have sent them scurrying.

Admittedly, the trail started out promising enough– the first kilometre of it was paved. The route took us past thundering Takakkaw Falls, a long, narrow, horsetail-shaped slice of glacial melt water that makes a spectacular plunge down a narrow channel fed by the Daly Glacier. Takakkaw Falls has a height of 384 metres and a vertical drop of 254 metres, making it Canada’s second-highest waterfall after Della Falls at Della Lake, B.C., which has a vertical drop of 440 metres. In comparison, Niagara’s famed Horseshoe Falls drops a pitiful 57 metres, though it has a much greater volume of water.

The sight of Takakkaw Falls was certainly uplifting, but what I didn’t realize then was that “up” was going to be the operative word for the day. The trail we are on does nothing but climb. This might be fine if you run a few miles every day, not so good if you job keeps you chained to a desk. Thankfully, there is some beautiful scenery enroute to relieve the pain. The water at Laughing Falls, for example, was an amazing milky green colour. Even knowing that the hue is caused by silt deposits carried down from the glaciers didn’t detract from its magic.   

Our destination is yet another waterfall-–117-metre high Twin Falls. The view, according to Tom, is supposed to make the hard slog worth it, but then this is the guy who called this a “pretty easy hike.” Meanwhile, the sight of all this dazzling, glacier-fed water has stirred up a fresh obsession in Joe. He desperately wants to stick his feet in B.C. mountain water. “How cold will it be?” he asks. “Will I be able to stand it?”

“It will be this cold,” says Tom, making a tiny circle with his thumb and forefinger.

Kicking Horse River, courtesy Feffef; flickr.com

Another kilometre on, we cross a babbling creek and Joe indulges his wish, taking off his shoes and socks and jumping in. He then bends down and begins happily slurping handfuls of the stuff into his mouth. When Tom, who has paused to take some shots of a trio of pretty female hikers, catches up with us and spots Joe in the water, he says, “OK. Just tell me that you didn’t?”

“Didn’t what,” asks Joe.

“Didn’t take a drink.”

“Yeah, I did. Why?”

“I’m guessing you haven’t heard of ‘beaver fever,’” replies Tom, who promptly launches into a very detailed, gory and highly exaggerated description of the intestinal infection’s effects.

Joe’s exuberance over his mountain-water baptism is instantly swept away. “How long before I know if I’ve got it?”

“Could be a couple of hours. Could be a couple of days,” says Tom.

We plod on, eventually reaching the base of a series of steep switchbacks that lead up to Twin Falls. The climb is a killer. Halfway up, Joe drags a branch out of the brush and uses it as a walking stick. Dripping with perspiration and caked with dust, we finally make it to the top and stare out across the yawning gorge.

(To be continued …)

Part 1

Part 2

Lead image by Keith Young; wikimedia.org

//

courtesy woodchuckiam; flickr.com

Now that his cellphone is no longer functioning, Joe is forced to converse. He begins tellling us about the celebrities that he has interviewed for his newspaper column, or, in the case of Ben Affleck, tried to interview. Joe collared Affleck at a Toronto Blue Jays’ game, but the actor blew him off, so Joe sat behind his subject and glared at him for nine innings while Affleck kept calling him nasty names.

We are all pumped to be in the B.C. Rockies. This is Joe and André’s first time in these mountains, and I was last here several decades ago, so the drive is stirring up some fond memories. Crossing the border through Yoho National Park  is a spectacular way to make an entry. Named for a Cree word that means “awesome,” Yoho was declared a UNESCO world Heritage Site in 1984. Despite having 28 peaks higher than 3,000 metres, several amazing waterfalls, including Takakkaw Falls, the third tallest in Canada, 400 kilometres of hiking trails and an array of green alpine lakes and roaring rivers, the park has a low profile. Despite its close proximity to Banff National Park, it attracts far less traffic than its famous counterpart, which draws about four million visitors a year, making it Alberta’s number one tourist destination.

courtesy meironke; flickr.com

Just inside Yoho, we pause to admire the Canadian Pacific Railway’s famous Spiral Tunnels, which were built to solve the problem of running trains up Big Hill. To complete the CPR as quickly as possible, a decision was made to delay blasting a 430-metre tunnel through Mount Stephen and instead build a temporary 13-klilometre line over it. That required scaling Big Hill, whose 4.5 percent grade was the steepest in North America.  Trains going up the hill required four extra engines to push, while several runaway spur lines greeted the trains on their way down. As one might guess, disasters were common. After 25 years, the Spiral Tunnels finally replaced the “temporary” route in 1909. This new route added 10 kilometres, but reduced the grade to 2.2 percent. Today, from a highway viewpoint you can watch a train disappear into Mt. Ogden. The train then exits the 890-metre circular tunnel, crosses under the highway and enters a 992-metre circular tunnel in Cathedral Crags.

Our next stop is the town of Field (population 300). No more than a few wooden houses, backed by an amphitheatre of sheer mountains, it looks like an old-world pioneer settlement, little changed from its 1884 origins as a railroad-construction camp. The town was named after Cyrus Field, an American financier who led the company that laid the first transatlantic communication cable in 1858. Field later invested heavily in railroads in New York, and evidently the CPR’s executives felt he might be inclined to the same in B.C. if they named a pioneer town after him. But Field didn’t invest, and so for no particular reason we have this tiny mountain town named after a Massachusetts entrepreneur.

Even though we are going to be dining in style at Cathedral Mountain Lodge, Joe appears to be concerned that he is not going to have enough to eat. At the general store in Field he buys an armload of junk food: twizzlers, ding dongs, Doritos, beef jerky, chocolate bars and a bag of cookies.

“Had your cholesterol count taken lately?” I ask him.

He chuckles. “I’m no health nut.”

Cathedral Mountain Lodge www.cathedralmountain.com/ has a rustic look, but it is high-end rustic. The resort’s 29 log cabins feature wood-burning or gas fireplaces and deep soaker tubs. The timber frame lodge was constructed of re-claimed Douglas fir posts and beams and was designed by Vancouver architect Brad Lamoureux. The dining room has an indoor/outdoor river rock fireplace, 24-foot vaulted ceiling and 18-foot high windows.

courtesy cathedralmountain.com

Our dinner, hosted by lodge owner Nancy Stibbard, is sensational. As we demolish the meal, she tells us about the various hiking options available in the area. We decide to make a trip tomorrow through Yoho Valley to Twin Falls. “After all this food I don’t think I’ll be able to hike very far,” says Joe.

“The hike is nothing too serious,” Janice assures him. 

As Janice polishes off the last of the chocolate-dipped strawberries, Tom tells us about a writer from the Philippines who he squired through the Rockies a couple of years ago.  She was writing  a piece on wheelchair accessibility. At one point in the trip she asked him, “Mr. Tom, what is another word for handicapped?” The story she later published in the Manila Bulletin was entitled “A Cripple Visits the Rockies.”

After dessert, Joe invites me to have a beer with him on the porch of his cabin, where he confesses, “You know I’m really having trouble with this cellphone blackout. I’m addicted to my cellphone.”

“You gotta relax, man,” I reply. “You’re not in Toronto anymore.”

The lodge is scenically situated beside the Kicking Horse River and directly beneath Cathedral Mountain. Joe looks up at the stony peak and asks his favourite question. “Do you think that mountain is taller than the CN Tower?”

“That mountain is 2,766 metres high,” I tell him. “The CN Tower is 553 metres. It’s no contest.”

“Maybe,” he says, “but it doesn’t look higher.”

I have to wonder about his bizarre attachment to the CN Tower. Is it just that he has no sense of scale, or is he having trouble accepting that Toronto doesn’t have all the biggest things in the country? We sit there gabbing for awhile until Joe’s next-door neighbour ambles over. He doesn’t speak a word, but simply stands there with a grimace on his face. Finally, he says, “Are you guys having a good time?” It’s only about 10 p.m., but then again Joe’s voice does pack quite a wallop. We decide to call it a night. I start dreaming as soon as my head hits the pillow.

(To be continued …)

Part 1