Stopped on the way up in Williams Lake to check out the log house my parents built and go gold panning. Yup, I guess the boys figured while we're on a silver streak we may as well got for all the metals. Oh, and by this time we had somehow all adopted Tenessee accents. Good times. If you've never been gold panning, it's crazy and cool that in every single pan we found gold... just tiny pieces of it like pin heads. No big nuggets this time. But yeah, there's a bunch of it out there. Who knew?
The house that mom and dad built
Gold prospecting
Then on through Prince George to Smithers, then a few hours on a dirt road to the strangest town I've ever been in - Kitsalt. I always think of ghost towns as old wild west-type places. Kitsault was built in the 80's to house 3000 people for a mine. After 3 hours on a dirt road, suddenly you're in a town with paved streets, subdivision, parks, a bowling alley, swimming pool - everything! All from the 80's. Then the price of Maligdanum collapsed and they shut the mine and town after just two years. Four people now live here and one guy maintains the place, so all the lawns are mowed etc. Freaky. So we drove through the (empty) town, setup the RV on the (empty) dock and camped. There were loons and cayotes, generally the perfect setting for a horror story.
Here's the inlet you boat across to get to Alice arm
Unfortunately the next morning proved to live up to that expectation. We were up drinking coffee at 7am watching a helicopter when it crashed about 300m from where it took off, falling like a stone into the Kitsault River on the other side of the inlet. So fast. Dad peeled up to the helicopter pad to get help. They got another helicopter out super fast to the crash site, where the first helicopter was in the water with the tail up. Simon was previously an EMT, and went out in a boat to help. Unfortunately they weren't able to access the cabin in time and all four guys died. A sad start to the trip.
Later that afternoon we barged across the (salt water) inlet with all our crap and the gator floating on a small 6x10 barge, leaving the RV behind. On the other side of the inlet is alice arm, an old town that now has about 5 houses and a camp where the helicopter driller stay while they are working remotely. We're rode the gator to the base of a mountain about 12 km from Alice Arm, and setup camp.
Leap of faith swinging the gator over the side
Letting her down.
Gator - fully loaded (Si's taking the pic)
We based out of this camp for 8 nights, of which unfortunately 5 were in the rain, and our tents proved less than trustworthy :( From the camp it's about 4.5 hours hike to the claims STRAIGHT UP, so our main focus was building/clearing a road to get us closer to the claims so that in future we can camp near or on them. There was at one stage a logging road cleared on one side of the mountain, so fortunately we were cutting down secondary growth instead of some of the virgin trees we later walked in... massive. We spent about 4 -5 days clearing road.
Dad, Simon and I also tried exploring the claims to see if we could see the strike lines (my grandpa's files have some old maps showing drawn in galena strikes seen, with description of apparantly 150 feet of it exposed, width 4-14 inches. Well, we didn't see the strikes, but did realize how crazy prospectors are.
This was HARD hiking. Vertical, through messy brush. Going us, we used picks since you couldn't just walk it... that's how vertical it is. Going down, just slide on your bum. The virgin forest parts were super since the old trees minimize brush ... however they are virgin forests since they were too steep to log! Also, the old trees fall down and are so big it's actually hard to get over them, and going around on these slopes sometimes isn't an option.
That's dad and me, bottom right
However, it's the landslides that were the worst. These areas are now cleared of big trees, but have lots of rocks, and most yukkily (?), devil's club (as bad as it sounds) and salmonberry bushes (thick + thorny, but with delicious berries!) cover them. Without the option to go around, we walked through probably a few km of this landscape (think fields of blackberry bushes, but vertical) in a day. At one stage, sliding down scree ahead of Si and dad, I remember entering a salmon berry/devil's club patch and yelling back that "yay! there's stuff to hold on to here)... never mind the stuff is inpenetrable and thorny.
Fortunately, we had great company. My dad and Si were amazing, we had a best attitude, and actually had a fabulous time on these exhausting days. To walk to the other side of the claim, we would leave between 8 and 9 am and come back around 9-10pm, exhausted. But instead of looking at the thorns, we appreciated the berries, and somehow this attitude kept through the trip. We had a wonderful time. Can't ask for better hiking partners.
Dad had dropped his gear from a helicopter last year, and in four days couldn't find it. We got it this year (chainsaw started up first time! although a bear? had eaten the chain oil). Best of all, he'd dropped a sixpack of cider - 5 of which were still good. Can't imagine what it's like after hiking for 8 hours to unexpectedly get a nice cold drink!
Prospectors do this kind of hiking for fun, without even knowing that there's something there. They are amazing, crazy people.
I apologize to the bears for eating all their berries. After seeing what they have to go through to get to the berries, I almost felt like leaving our food out for the bears to eat. BTW, we did see bears. The salmon were running, so we saw lots of salmon in the river we camped beside. Saw some black bears fishing, and dad and I actually chased a grizzly down the road for a while before he finally went off the road into the bushes. Don't know what we would have done had he turned around.
See below how high the bear claws on these trees are. Them's big bears!
Next time, we'll have a much more convenient camp setup near the bottom of the claim, hopefully reducing the round-trip travel time just to get to the claim by a few hours. And now we have the infrastructure a bit better in place, we'll take a prospector to show us what we're looking for, get samples etc.
All in all, a fun trip!
Pics:
It was Si and my first anniversary on the trip.
For paper - he cut me a tree, engraved it and made a vase out of it.
One year in, so happy.
but wait! it opens - and there's a present inside
Camo sexies - yahoo!
Toby fishing
Dad showed us a whole new standard in making camp. Check out the shower below!
btw, the steam is from the fire - not the water! However, dad brought some copper coil which we put in the fire. If you get the water flow just right, it's warm water. I wasn't so good and alternated between boiling and freezing
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