Gord and Nick
DAY 3
After another night of relentless
rain, we woke early, ate, packed up (in the rain) and jumped into day
three. For the first time this week, Gord took the lead and lead the group
out of Camper Creek at an aggressive pace. The hiking was like our first
day's-difficult and demanding drudgery over, onto, along slippery roots
and through knee-deep puddles. Along the way, we ran into Uli, a well-travelled
and intelligent German student Norm and I had picked up hitchhiking to
the trailhead. "How's the trail ahead of us?" we asked after
a few minutes of chatting. "It is not good," Uli replied. "Very
difficult. Shitty." He had started the same day as us, trying to
complete the trail in four days as he had to be in Vancouver later in
the week to get student housing. He had hiked 22 km of the toughest portion
in two days, only to turn around and do it all over again in the other
direction.
After only five km, we stopped
for lunch. We were all exhausted. This was just like day one and we all
ached from head to toe. Gord's furious pace was short-lived as his hip
began to shoot pangs of agony up his side from the monkeying we had endured
so far. We took a good look at our map and had a meeting. Gord wasn't
sure how much longer he would last and none of us wanted to hike much
further. Our options were either hike another 2 km to the Logan Creek
campsite (which Uli reported to have been washed out the previous night),
hike another 6 km to Walbran Creek, or take the beach access to Culite
Creek, just a few hundred metres away, and add an extra day to our hike.
At first, the discussion revolved around the chances of Logan being campable.
That just didn't make sense to me. We had to assume that Logan was not
an option. "Gord," I asked, "can you make it another 6
km in this shit?"
"No"
"OK then, we camp here tonight. We'll get some rest and a fresh start
tomorrow morning."
Culite turned out to be our finest, most relaxing camp. As the day had been cut short, for the first time in 3 days, we had an opportunity to relax. We spent the first hour, as had become religion by now, hanging clothes and sleeping bags in an attempt to dry them out. It seems funny now. As we are all accustomed to the arid climate in the mountains and prairies of Alberta, we didn't know that clothing could take a week of rainless days to dry out in this climate. I sat and wrote in my journal, sulking because of our potential lack of food. Norm whittled a cool design in his newly-found walking stick, and Nick and Gord enjoyed a cold shower in a minuscule waterfall that originated from a cliff 150' up and just steps away from our tents.
At this point I realised that we had, for the time, lost all sense of time and numbers and dates. It was "early," not 9:00 a.m. "Day three," not Friday. "Kinda cold and damp," not 14 degrees C and 80% POP. As well, from our first evening on the trail and on, our wants and needs had been focused on base needs only: food, water and shelter. (And maybe booze) Little else had occupied us up to that point.
This time, we were the lone campers at this cove and had the entire cosy and well-sheltered site to ourselves. Our first evening around the campfire we sat with socks impaled on sticks above the fire and enjoyed the magnificent view. We giggled like teenagers when Nick found one of Norm's leather insoles (set on a rock by the fire to dry) had been incinerated in the fire.
© Jim Knutsen 2001
Jim and Norm Edelmann
Log walking
Ladders and more ladders
Mud
Camp at Culite
Shower time