Suddenly, I saw the head of a horse above the willows of the overgrown trail.
Riderless, and coming towards me. But it was mistaken identity. This was no horse, it was a grizzly bear—and he wasn’t stopping.
I did. Well one does when you’re brought up short in grizzly country by the squire of the land.
I shivered in my boots, wondering what to do. Fortunately griz made the decision for me. He peeled off up a slope, away and gone. Phew! Good riddance. I hitched up my trousers and carried on. I was wondering what I’d have for supper when the bushes beside me exploded. It was my old pal again.
I’m standing there quivering like a cold Chihuahua. He’s stalking me. What the hell do I do now? The fire department miles away. Turn around? Creep back home like a chicken? Let a big hairy brute foul up my plans? If only I had a gun, but all I had were two shiny stones that I’d been clicking together to alert all the beast in the kingdom that I was coming through.
I shuffled from one foot to the other, turned around, turned back again, doing the grizzly foxtrot on the spot trying to calm down.
Well I ain’t staying on the trail any more; I’ll hike up this dry creek bed. I was on automatic pilot, going in the direction of oblivion, out of cussedness, stupidity, or plain out of my mind. As one wag wrote about me when I didn’t leave Dodge on cue: I wasn’t safe to be left on my own..
As I put distance between me and the bear—thank God he’s cleared off!—I started thinking about finding a spot for the tent. There were patches of snow in the trees now. I went up a bank to see if there was a flat spot. Nothing. I came back down to the creek bed . . . and there he was, just up ahead crossing the creek from one side to the other. It put the wind up me like a full gale.
Third time’s a charm. He’s playing games with me He’s doing this deliberate. Had he now mooned me and gone HA!HA! I would not have been surprised.
Night was coming on. I sure as heck wasn’t going back down the trail in the dark. There was a bluff high above the creek, and I made for it . . .
Liam had heard all this before of course (and told me so), but I still had to bring it up as we came to the very spot where I had my first encounter with Moccasin Joe. For we were heading to the same basin, but this time to climb the mountain I’d scoped out from my eyrie six years before.
“Mind you, that bear was nothing compared to the one we saw in the Yukon. Those bears up there are huge, stuffed to the gills on salmon and huckleberries.”
Liam said not a word. Probably thinking about supper. He’d learned a long time ago to tune out his father.
We were walking back to camp after climbing a mountain in Kluane National Park, along one of the loneliest roads in North America when Liam spotted a bear—a very big bear—sitting on a bank beside the road. We had to go by; there was a big drop-off the other side of the road.
On the Boone and Crockett Club official scoring scale this fellow would have had a half-dozen official measurers rushing out with callipers to check the length of the skull to get it in the Record Book, once one of the good old boys had dispatched this magnificent fellow to the salmon rivers in the sky.
“What should we do, Dad?”
“Just keep talking low, like we’re talking to him.”
“What should we say, Dad?
“Bloody hell, Liam! We’re standing at death’s door and you’re asking what should we say. Say whatever you like. Just don’t shout it.”
We walked by, telling him what a lovely chap he was even though “you stink to high heaven!”
He looked down at us, uninterested. And as we passed, he yawned, lazily scratched himself, and both of us would swear that he broke wind.
(Not all bears are out to get you. They just want you to know that this is their country, and that they have no intention of ending up as a trophy on an atrium wall of some Texas oil company.)
It rained in the night but had stopped by morning, so the climb was on. I had pointed out to Liam the route. He figured it would go. First, head towards the basin, bushwhack up through the trees to some cliffs then climb onto to the ridge and on to the summit.
We first heard the thunder as we hit the ridge. Black clouds to the south; and as we followed the ins and outs of the ridge the rumble of thunder became constant, as if the gods were moving furniture around.
Patches of alpine potentilla became vivid yellow framed against a sky turning midnight black, and mountains vanishing even as you looked. A different day to when I’d first climbed this mountain from a different side.
It was 30 degrees Celsius. I’d come up a slope of boulders, heat blasting off the rock, and I’d run out of water before I got to the top. Fortunately, there was a small patch of snow just below the summit cairn where I filled my bottle and ate my lunch. There was a register in a pipe, brought up in 2018 by Curtis from Carrot Creek. He had named the mountain Thoughtful Peak, wrote that this was his favourite mountain; and said he’d been up 8 times since 2016. The day I signed his register was July 27 2020.
Kami Rita Sherpa has climbed Everest 32 times; Brent Okita has the record for climbing Mount Rainier in Washington State 600 times; and Curtis, I’m betting, has the record for climbing little Thoughtful Peak.
Ahead of me I could see Liam on the final stretch of the ridge, about to disappear from view to tag the summit. I was only 15 minutes behind when the first fat drops of rain spattered the rocks—a warning from the heavens that we had tarried too long on the mountain. Then came the hail.
With an avalanche you hear death coming: with a lightning strike you’re dead even before your ears start ringing. Summits and ridges are the most dangerous of places; the hairs on my arms and legs weren’t standing up yet nor was my metal water-bottle humming but the storm was all around us now, and lightning hung in the air like a Sword of Damocles.
I stood rooted to my spot on the ridge, looking up. Where the hell is Liam?
Silhouetted against an electric sky, he reappeared and scurried down to where I was. “We’ve got to get off this ridge, it ain’t healthy up here.”
“Where do you reckon, Dad?”
“Let’s go down the slope a bit.”
We stopped in a hollow but it didn’t seem safe. It was a big slope, and apart from a few little trees exposed all the way to the valley. “I’m not going down there.” I was hoping the storm would pass and I could have another go at the summit. Liam suggested a small copse of trees a hundred metres down where we could shelter.
Every authority is clear: There is no safe place outdoors when thunderstorms are in the area. “When thunder roars, you go indoors.” We didn’t have that luxury, the copse and a yellow tarp would have to do.
We had sheltered under a tarp when we got caught in a late-summer blizzard on the Skyline trail. That was 33 years ago. On our thousandth mountain that we have climbed, father and son for only the second time were sheltering under a tarp.
Strange how our lives go round in circles.
David Harrap // info@thejasperlocal.com
Jasper’s David Harrap is the author of The Littlest Hiker In The Canadian Rockies. Get it at the Jasper Yellowhead Museum and Archives.
