THE MARCH AGAINST DEATH

This entry is dedicated to Kelsie, who seems to be the only person still reading about our adventures.


A real wilderness hike

We awoke on the morning of Monday, May 21, exactly eight weeks since we started backpacking, anticipating a challenging but fun hike with real wilderness camping. We had been told the Cape Fife Trail didn’t have any good water sources, so we bought a two-litre bottle of water and filled up our Nalgenes and insulated mugs with water. We also phoned the provincial park, hoping to get more details about the hike from a park ranger, but nobody answered, so we left a message with our names, hike plan and expected return date. We wanted to be as safe and smart as possible. By the way various locals talked about the trail and the way our tour book casually described Cape Fife in several places, we assumed (yup, first mistake) that the path would be well marked. Little did we know . . .

We hitchhiked from our campground near Masset all the way to Agate Beach, a provincial campground within the Naikoon Provincial Park. One of our rides was from a couple and two children in a right-hand drive Delica van. They fed us cookies and told us to visit their bakery/café in an old school bus in Tow Hill (the hippie community about 20 kilometres northeast of Masset) when we got back from our hike.

From Agate Beach we walked about one kilometre to the trailhead, which was marked with a sign and map, and eagerly snapped some photos in anticipation of our successful hike. The map included the entire provincial park with a small dotted line representing the Cape Fife Trail, so we assumed (yup, another mistake) the path would be fairly straightforward. We took a picture of the map, though, just in case we needed it for future reference. At least it confirmed that the hike from the trailhead to the shelter at the trail’s end was 10 kilometres. The guide book had been rather ambiguous on whether the hike was 10 kilometres one way or in total. This wasn’t the first time we would be misled. We set out at 2 p.m.


Rachel says:
During our first hour of walking, we had to do some bushwacking; either because the parks people hadn’t cleared the trail yet or maybe because they never planned to. Luckily, Eric was able to find ways over and under and around the fallen trees and branches that allowed us to keep our packs on.

During the second hour, the trail changed to more of a path, with fewer roots and lumps to trip on. When we took our second break, after hiking for two hours, we were feeling tired, but still upbeat. The sign said the hike should take three to four hours, so we figured we must be about three-quarters done the hike.

So we plodded on and after 30 minutes of our packs getting heavier and heavier, I expressed my weariness to Eric and he encouraged me by saying “We’re almost there.” At precisely that moment, we saw a brown sign poking out of the ground rudely announcing in white letters that we had only covered five kilometres.

Half way!?!?! We were only half way?!?!? That sign robbed the remaining energy from my body and then stomped on my spirit until it lay crushed on the grass beside the trail. I started crying and told Eric that I couldn’t keep going, that I was done. The pack was chafing my hips and shoulders and my legs were sore and rubbery. But somehow, between sniffles, my fury at this kick in the teeth gave me the power to trudge on.


The pain increases

The trail didn’t get any easier. The ground was muddy and spongy and in many places we sank up to our ankles. I think the surrounding forest was probably beautiful, but I didn’t see much of it because I had to keep my head down and eyes focused on my feet so that I didn’t trip and fall.

My pack was rubbing the skin on my hips, shoulders and chest; my lower back ached, my legs were throbbing, my neck was tense from looking at the ground and my feet hurt in so many places I thought for sure they must be bleeding.

Women should be able to carry 1/4 of their weight and men 1/3 of their weight, meaning that I should have been able to pack around 30 pounds and Eric about 67. When we weighed our packs after the hike, we realized that I was actually carrying about 45 pounds and Eric about 75.

We half stopped two more times, but I never took my pack off although my hips were so tender I wanted to die. I thought that if I took the weight off my back, I would never get it back on.

Around 6:20 p.m., we passed two men with regular backpacks on heading in the opposite direction. They said they had wanted to do a short day hike – only 20 kilometres in total! They were obviously in much better shape than we were!


Relief at last

Out of the blue, the trees opened up and we came down a hill and there was the shelter marking the end of the Cape Fife Trail – we had hiked 10 kilometres in 15 minutes less than five hours.

We walked into the little cabin and I literally collapsed onto a bunk. With my pack off I quickly became cold, but I was physically unable to move and strip my sweat-soaked base layers and put on a sweater. Eric untied my boots for me and made sure my feet weren’t falling apart in raw strips of flesh.

The room had two bunks, a picnic table, a wood stove and random emergency supplies other hikers had left over the years. It was kind of dingy and dark, as the three windows didn’t let in much light. The cabin was in a low-lying area with trees around.

We ate supper and then Eric roamed around outside, trying to find access to the East Beach. I was wrecked and stay curled up on a bunk. He finally came back and said he’d found the path to the beach and also a nice place to set up our tent, but it was probably a 10-minute walk away. Although I desperately wanted to camp outside and feel close to nature, I was physically incapable of putting those boots back on my feet, much less walking with my pack on. So, Eric built a fire in the stove in the cabin and I crawled into my sleeping bag on a bunk and zonked out to the cozy sound of a crackling fire.


Death March, Round 2

The next morning, although I ached and my stomach was behaving a little strangely, I was doing much better mentally. I knew that today I wouldn’t have to kill myself to reach a certain destination. We had enough food to last a couple days and thought we could hike maybe four hours today and maybe another three or four the next day. Nice and easy.

But then we hadn’t thought very much about our water situation. We did have an amazingly heavy water purification system, but it wasn’t a desalinator, so we went out looking for fresh water. We found some in a slough area and filtered it, but it was pretty strange looking. Then we found some in a lagoon and filtered that and it looked somewhat better. The guidebook and the sign at the trailhead said the water would be brown-coloured, due to various minerals or something like that, but we were both still unsure as to its safety (see the photo; you might be too!). So, very stupidly, we didn’t refill all our empty containers, thinking, surely we would come across a stream somewhere running to the ocean.

It was close to 1 p.m. when we finally set out and we had to walk for probably 30 minutes just to get to the beach. But once we got on East Beach, the chilly wind was at our backs and while the ground wasn’t great, either soft sand or rocky gravel, it seemed easier to walk with the open ocean and huge sky surrounding us. And I didn’t have to keep my eyes glued on my feet.

Also, quad tracks were all over the sand, so although this was probably the most remote place we’d ever been to in Canada, we felt slightly comforted realizing that even if we had problems, someone would eventually come by.

And then somebody did. Two guys drove by on a quad and Eric waved them down. They were working on setting up and taking down meteorological stations and seemed to know the area. They told us that going up to Rose Spit and crossing over to North Beach would add hours onto our trip. However, if we kept following the quad tracks, they would eventually turn onto a road, cutting through a forested area a few kilometres below Rose Spit. We might even find some swampy water that would be OK to drink if we purified it.

Well, that buoyed our spirits until, about 15 minutes later, I looked down to the waist belt of my pack where my mitts should have been clipped onto my zipper pull. They weren’t there. The islands had taken them. I had used my mitts almost constantly on our trip and I didn’t know how I would survive without them.

I plummeted down another spiral of despair and took my pack off and sat down on a pile of driftwood and cried. It felt like these islands were out to get us. The silver lining in this incident was that about two weeks earlier, I discovered the grippy pad on the palm of the mitt was made of PVC (the most toxic plastic), so in the end, it was OK that I no longer had them.


Questioning our direction, then our intelligence

On we trudged until we finally came to a place where it looked like the quad tracks turned into the bush. But then we noticed that quad tracks crisscrossed the entire sand dune/forest area and worried that if we started on one path we might get lost in the bush. We thought we could see the end of the trees in the distance and decided to keep going. At least we knew where that path ended – on the ocean.

But as we pushed on I started to get worried and yelled at Eric that we were being stupid because we were running low on water and weren’t sure of our path. I was scared, in pain, and angry. Good thing I wasn’t a bear, or I might have mauled my poor husband who appeared to be undergoing this struggle with no difficulty whatsoever.

The trees were thinning out, although the land on our left (west) was still grassy, and Eric climbed onto a bluff and said he could see the pile of driftwood indicating the north beach and suggested crossing right there. I suddenly panicked and said we didn’t know if the tall grass was hiding a swamp or other dangers and at least the beach we knew. But, thankfully, Eric’s logic prevailed and we headed out. The rough grass and scrub bushes were knee- to thigh-high and covered a lumpy and hard-to-traverse ground.

We came to worn tire tracks running through the grass and leading to a tower in the distance, which we thought marked the start of the ecological reserve. (We later discovered that where we had walked was in the very middle of the ecological reserve, despite the lack of signage.)

We made it through the grass and over the driftwood and onto the North Beach without any problems and immediately our spirits were lifted because we could see our destination – the protruding bump of Tow Hill – in the distance (see photo).

Unfortunately, this beach was much stonier and thus harder to walk on, so after about 45 minutes I just had to stop. We found a decent area in the rocks between the driftwood, about 20 metres from the ocean, and set up our tent, piling rocks over the pegs to make sure the wind wouldn’t take it.

And this time I wasn’t wrecked. My feet were sore and I was tired, but I was still able to help set up camp and I felt like I might even be able to enjoy sitting around a campfire or playing crib or something. I even had romantic visions of watching the northern lights while we lay in our tent with the fly off, slowly being lulled to sleep by the sound of the crashing surf.

But our first priority was water. After rationing out enough to cook supper and drink that evening, we had one litre left to satisfy the two of us for another day of hiking (which we estimated would take us five hours; surely it couldn’t be more than 10 or 12 kilometres to Tow Hill and fresh water). That meant no brushing teeth and only dry cereal for breakfast.

So, Eric set me up to make supper (he was the pro stove lighter) and headed off into the bush in search of water with instructions on what to do if he didn’t come back. And there I sat on the rocks, in the middle of nowhere, the ocean behind me, driftwood all around me and cooked two packages of rice. Alone. With only the sound of the wind and the water and random birds to keep me company.

Just before I started panicking, Eric walked back into camp, but unfortunately he hadn’t found any water.

By this time, the clouds were rolling in and the wind was getting colder and blowing harder, so we quickly cleaned up and prepared to batten down the hatches of our tent. We dug a hole in the rocks and lined it with a plastic bag to collect rainwater. But would it rain enough to satisfy our thirst?

We had just started playing crib when I thought I heard an engine – could there be a quad out this late in the evening ripping down the sandy path in the trees?


Rescued by a famous opera singer who is trying to poach a deer

Eric says:
Rachel looked up at me and went quiet mid-sentence in the middle of our crib game. I looked back at her and soon I too heard the reason for her silence. Engines … could it be? On my search for water I did find a type of 4X4 road. But it was 9 pm and who in their right mind would be out this far when it was getting dark?

I looked at Rachel and asked, “What should we do?” Realizing at the least these people might have fresh water to give us, I brashly made the decision to run towards the faint engine, which sounded like it was coming from the other side of the 200-foot wide ocean of driftwood.

Now, take a moment and picture this. My dreads had become wooly and I may have had the odd piece of nature caught up in them. I had, by this time grown a beard that could arguably challenge the size and ferocity of Paul Bunyan’s and matched the look of my dreads quite nicely. My clothes were covered in mud and sweat, I stank, and obviously I was in a hurry so I didn’t tie my boots. I leapt from the tent and began hobbling over the wasteland of driftwood between the now visible truck and me. I flailed my arms like a maniac, making faces as I tried to yell something but no words, or should I say English, came out. The driver had obviously seen me though because the vehicle finally stopped. I kept running until I was looking at a man in his mid-thirties driving a Toyota 4 Runner with his family.

He cautiously rolled his window down, looked at me in astonishment and finally exclaimed, “How long have you been out here?”

I have since that moment tried to imagine what they must have thought when they spotted my hairy figure painfully stumbling over the driftwood, dreads flying around, boot laces whipping around like angry snakes, my arms waving around like I was trying to catch money falling from the sky.

“A couple of days,” I said between breaths. “Do you guys have any extra water?” They had none. But I learned that the man’s name was Gavin and he was taking his family out in the new SUV he had just bought. He told me another vehicle had passed before him with his friend in it and that they had hopes of poaching a deer. Gavin also told us that his friend had lots of room in his truck and if we wanted a ride he would be happy to give us one on the way back in about an hour. I told him that if we wanted a ride we would wait in the same spot. With that he drove on through the sand.

As I ran back to Rachel I tried to make a decision. Did I really want to pack up our cool little campsite in the middle of nowhere just because we were running out of water? Then I thought about what it would be like to strap my 75-pound pack around my bleeding (literally) hips and do another day of hiking. That was all it took. I had tried to be the tough guy for Rachel during our hike but the pack and the daunting task of walking for five or more hours with no water, didn’t only seem like no fun, but be downright dangerous.

So when I got back to the campsite I told Rachel to pack up, we were heading out. I don’t think we’ve ever packed up so quickly. Although as we waited by the sandy 4X4 path with our packs, we did have some regret about not actually camping in the wilderness. Our little place between the driftwood had been a pretty sweet campsite.

Soon, we heard the rumbling noise of a motor, followed by two bright headlights. I once again, like I had so many times before, stuck out my thumb and waited for the ride. This vehicle was also a Toyota 4 Runner and out of the driver’s side jumped a man with a big beard, longish wavy hair and a round belly, carrying a four-litre milk jug full of water and said in a rich baritone voice, “Here’s some fresh water.”

I opened the passenger door and saw first a rifle, then a bunch of beer bottles, everything covered in sand. Our saviour’s name was Miche. He lived in Tow Hill with his wife and four daughters (between the ages of 9 and 1 ½). Miche was originally from Germany and he and his wife had moved to the Charlottes after visiting another friend on the islands. We chatted while we bounced down the sandy path

I asked the typical questions and got typical answers until I asked what he did for a living. He responded by saying, “I work seasonally off island.” This peaked my interest and I probed further, thinking that he must be into construction or the oil field. “Actually I sing opera,” he said. What!? Did I hear that right? I couldn’t figure out how someone could make a living singing opera in Canada. When I asked where he performed he listed off a bunch of European cities that included Paris, London and Vienna. We later learned that Miche was a rather famous opera singer, when he bashfully admitted that, yes, he did have fans running after him, asking for his autograph.

The 4x4 path finally led to the open beach where Miche accelerated to about 90 kilometres per hour. We drove on for what seemed like an eternity watching the silhouette of Tow Hill slowly get bigger. I couldn’t help but imagine how long it would have taken us to walk all this way. After later doing some calculating we figured that instead of the 10 to 12 kilometres we thought we had left to walk it was closer to 25.


Chitchat, coffee and a converted bus

Our original plan had been to camp at Agate Beach in the provincial park, but Miche invited us to set up our tent on his yard. It didn’t take us long to say yes – free camping, easier to get rides back to Masset and beyond and more time to chat with this interesting person. After we set up our tent, Miche invited us inside to meet his wife and enjoy some hot tea before going to bed.

As we packed up the next morning, we were finally hit with two unwelcome guests – rain and swarms of bugs, and the latter didn’t leave until we left the Queen Charlottes.

Miche then also gave us a tour of his house and a cup of stove-brewed coffee. The home was beautifully hand-crafted with wood found on the local beaches (see photo). Miche offered to drive us down the road toward Masset and we took him up on the offer. He dropped us off near a payphone and we quickly phoned our families and the (still-not-answering-their-phone) parks people to let everyone know we were safely back from our hike. We also phoned the Morseby Explorers tour company to book our $360 boat tour of the Gwaii Haanas National Park Reserve for Saturday.

As we were talking, a vehicle drove past us and turned into a driveway. We suddenly noticed various landmarks around us and remembered the couple in the white Delica van and their description of the location of their bus café/bakery. We walked down the same driveway and there in the middle of the forest was a school bus housing a cozy kitchen, a woman baking cookies, a comfortable eating area and Gavin, the fellow who had been taking his new 4 Runner for a spin on the North Beach when we were in desperate need of water.

We bought fresh baking and coffees and sat and enjoyed the comforts of caffeine again. When we were about finished we heard a huge crash coming from the road and upon investigation found Miche once again. He had pulled over to pick up a piece of garbage that had fallen off his trailer. He offered us a ride again, this time a little further but still not all the way to Masset.

This was not the last of many coincidental meetings with various people we met on the islands.

Eventually, through the course of a few more rides, we ended up in Masset at a hitchhikers bench carved by an off-islander in a competition (see photo). We were finally back in civilization after our wilderness hike that turned out to be a little too wild for us. Luckily, we still had our amazing tour of Moresby Island to look forward to in a couple of days … or would the islands thwart that too?