Wild Paddling Adventures With My Mom
Things just seem to happen when I go on paddling trips with my mom. Williwaws, bugling moose, thunder and lightning, wildfires, mysterious wildlife screaming around the campsite at night, and bears. My mom? Unfazed. I’ll be crying; she’ll be laughing, and we’ll both be complaining, but we’ll have fun all the same.
She’s where I get my sense of adventure from, and I think it’s the best part of us.
The trip around the Bowron Lake Circuit was my idea. I’d been working in the area all summer, and around a month before our trip, I crashed my car after a moose ran me off the road. Since someone needed to come up and get me at the end of the season anyway, why not do the loop? It was September, so there were plenty of spots available. Since Mom is an explorer at heart who is always up for an adventure, she threw the kayaks on the roof racks and drove up.
On the Bowron Lake Circuit
Drifting down the Cariboo River in the failing evening light was eerie. On the shore, we passed the occasional wreckage of a canoe, which didn’t do much for our morale. There were dead heads and other submerged hazards, and my mom had made me go first. I liked to think it was because I was the trained guide, but in reality, she was thinking she could rescue me if I hit an underwater log and tipped, which was exactly why I wanted her to go first instead.
It was our fourth day on the Bowron Lake Canoe Circuit. A few metres into the first portage, Mom found it so difficult that she wanted to call it quits right there. Our first night was spent in a frosty bog at the end of Indianpoint Lake, and we’d spent two more days battling Isaac Lake’s headwinds and waking up with a mini lake in front of our tent pad from all the rain.
It had been a long, wet day, and the first views of Lanezi Lake were an instant mood boost. Backed by mountains that plunged right down to the lakeshore, it was a stunning vista. I decided that it was my favourite lake so far, and that I was going to thoroughly enjoy paddling the rest of the way down it the following day.
Boy, was I wrong.
Buy a Kayak? Not On Your Life
As women go, my mom is pretty badass. Since our unofficial family motto is why buy it when you can make it, when my mom decided to take up paddling, she roped my dad into making a kayak. The first ones were stitch-and-glue kayaks made of thin sheets of wood, but then Mom fell in love with the strip-built kind. Buy wood? Not in this family. My dad went up in the bush, ripped planks off a long-fallen old-growth cedar log, hauled them down the mountain, and milled them into strips with the table saw.
Oh, and they built them in our dining room over the winter. This was because the garage was too cold for the glue to dry quickly. In the spring, they pulled the boat’s halves outside through the front window, which must have been a weird sight for the neighbours. With Mom’s help, I made my own this way during the winter of 2007. Being something of an artist, she came up with the swooping pattern for the deck.
I got into paddling because of Mom, and eventually, I became a professional guide. I love adventuring through the wilderness.
I do not like wind.
Helicopter? No, That’s a Williwaw
Around the next point from our campsite, little walls of water spray spun out onto the lake. We’d been told when we set out that parks staff were working on one of the campsites and that there would be a helicopter in the area.
“Look,” I said to Mom, pointing. “Must be rotor wash from the helicopter.”
That was exactly what it looked like, but as we paddled on down the lake, I began to grow uneasy, because there was no helicopter. We dubbed the little walls of water spray tornadoes, but I later learned that these were williwaws. I should mention that yes, I had worked as a sea kayak guide for several of the previous summers at the time of the trip, but I’d never heard of this specific type of katabatic wind. It fit with the conditions, though. The air was a mix of warm and cold that day, and the gusts were rushing down the mountainside and across the lake.
Right, as it happened, into our path.
When one of the devils hit us, the force of it ground us to a halt. If our kayaks hadn’t been fully loaded, we’d have been sent careening down the lake. Instantly, I was terrified, not for myself, because I was confident that I could self-rescue, but for my mom.
Shaking and horrified, I looked over at Mom. She was laughing like a lunatic. I thought she’d lost her whole damned mind. Meanwhile, I was eyeing the wheels on the backs of our kayaks and wondering how on earth I was going to get her back in if another one hit.
We decided to find a spot to land and wait for the wind to die down. The shores of Lanezi Lake are rugged, all piles of jagged rock backed by forests of beetle-killed pine trees, so there really wasn’t any good place to pull out. We passed an avalanche chute where the wind was barrelling down the mountain, birthing the williwaws that raged down the lake. By then, they were starting to come from all directions: little swirling, spraying gusts all around us.
And then Armageddon happened. Suddenly, there was a white wall of water to my left where two gusts were colliding. On the right, a dead tree came down on the shore. It was dramatic as heck. Mom screamed to get to shore and flooded her boots as she jumped out of her kayak and onto the rocks, and I was right behind her. It’s amazing how fast you can find a spot to ditch when faced with the sudden fear of death.
“Yeah, fuck that,” Mom declared, once we were safely on shore. “That is scary shit.”
The danger of being struck by a dead tree was far more preferable in that moment than getting hurled ass-over-teakettle down the lake by the wind. We watched the winds duke it out while the forest groaned behind us. I’d seen some crazy stuff in my guiding days, and my parents had been pinned down by wind on plenty of trips, but this was one of the most insane things we’d ever seen.
After a few hours, Mom wanted to make a run for it. We pushed through the wind with the monsters all around us, somehow eluding their wrath. The camp was full of beetle-eaten pine trees, many freshly snapped, so we pitched our tent on the beach. It was a sleepless night as we listened to the dead trees moaning and the mountain roaring, even when the wind on the water fell quiet.
Get Your Head in the Game!
The next day, my nerves were shot to hell, and it didn’t help that our next campsite was covered in moose and cougar tracks. We were woken in the night by a moose bugling. Mom turned on her light, and a brief argument ensued over whether a light would attract the beast or help it not run us over. Look, we don’t know anything about horny moose behaviour, okay? We’re coastal dwellers.
For our final day on the circuit, we were once again blessed with wind. It was nothing near the williwaw level, but it was capping pretty good and my rudderless kayak was weathercocking, which is one of my biggest pet peeves. Looking back, I was probably dealing with post-traumatic stress from the car accident the month before, because I did what any tired, traumatized woman would do and started crying like a baby.
“Get your head in the game!” Mom shouted at me, while I sobbed.
We ditched again. My head was not in the game despite Mom’s best attempts at encouragement. We did finish the circuit late that day, and Mom affectionately referred to the trip as Boot Camp. You’d think the experience would have put her off going on another paddling trip with me, but it did not.
Thunder, Wildfire, and Bears
I had planned to go on a paddling trip to Clearwater Lake alone, but Mom wasn’t having it. She didn’t like me going way out there by myself, and anyway, there was no way that I was going on an adventure like that and leaving her behind. Not after I’d gone without her to Jedediah Island. So off we went up to Wells Gray Park in late August, years after our Bowron Lake trip.
Now, I absolutely love Wells Gray Park. I think it’s one of the most gorgeous in the entire province, but damned if it doesn’t thunder and lightning every time I set foot in the place. This time was no different. By the time we arrived at the boat launch, it was pouring rain, and there was a thunderstorm that started a small wildfire across the lake.
The trip was off to a great start.
Thankfully, it fizzled out, and by evening, we were set up at Cariboo Beach. It poured rain all night, which is okay if your tent seams aren’t disintegrating like Mom’s were. The campsite flooded a little bit, but by morning, the sun was peeking out, the water was flat calm, and it was promising to be a beautiful day.
We paddled up the lake. Honestly, it was pretty but kind of boring. I really wanted to get to the end, but Mom wasn’t into another round of Boot Camp, so I chilled out. She was already annoyed at me for not lounging around the campsite all morning to dry things. We stopped at Diver’s Bluff for lunch, tried to hike up to the lookout but never reached it, and continued on.
We parked at Archer Creek for the night, and it was just perfect: sandy beach, panoramic views, and plenty of tent spots tucked up in the woods. Idyllic, right? Wrong. At around five in the morning, something screamed in the forest behind us. You know, there’s really nothing like mysterious wildlife screaming in the woods around your camp to really add to the ambiance.
An owl hooted right after, but Mom was not convinced it was the source of the noise, which haunts her to this day. At random times, she’ll bring it up, wondering why we’ve never found a sound that matches it on the internet.
The next day, we paddled across the lake, intending to camp at Bar View, but on the way, we ran into two other paddlers who informed us that they’d had a bear sniffing around their tent the night before. When we stopped there for lunch, the beach was covered in fresh bear tracks, and it was obvious what they were after: berries.
Since neither of us is dumb enough to set up in a camp full of hungry bears, we paddled back down to Cariboo Beach for our final night. All in all, it was one of the quietest paddles I’d ever been on, with few other people, and the ones we did see were all other women. I liked the idea of us gals having this whole kingdom of a lake all to ourselves.
“There’s the sun, you son of a bitch,” my Mom said, as we packed our kayaks the next day. Did I mention that she’s hilarious? She really knows how to make a memorable statement. And a memorable trip.
Nowadays, she complains that she’s too old for kayak trips and talks about selling her camping gear. Me? I tell her to get her head in the game.
