HANGING LAKES A fly-out canoe trip on British Columbia’s Turner Lakes CANOEKAYAK.COM
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ying on my stomach, I looked over the edge of the falls. A heavy white mist rose from the base of the canyon, 1,316 feet below. I couldn’t see the bottom. Looking up, I watched the wind silently gusting through the pines, scattering the mist.
Not your usual start to a canoe trip, I observed. My three companions and I were standing at the decidedly abrupt end of the Turner Lake Chain, a series of seven remote alpine lakes cradled beneath the glacier-clad peaks of British Columbia’s Coast Mountains at the eastern end of Tweedsmuir Provincial Park. White clouds floated above us through a blue sky as the wind-whipped water of Turner Lake, the last in the south to north-flowing chain, cascaded dramatically over the largest vertical waterfall drop in Canada: Hunlen Falls. 2 CANOEKAYAK.COM
Story by Dave Costello Photos by Aaron Schmidt, Dave Costello and Parker Meek
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“I love canoeing!” shouted Parker, my designated bowman. A graphic artist from Southern California with a full sleeve of tattoos and a wry sense of humor, Parker was a good friend. Three days into his first canoe trip, he had yet to set foot in a canoe. 6 CANOEKAYAK.COM
It had become a running joke. We’d flown into Ptarmigan Lake, a splash of blue one valley to the west and, at an altitude of 6,000 feet, about half a vertical mile above Turner Lake, where our canoes awaited us at the top of Hunlen Falls.
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That first night we camped under the stars, swarmed by mosquitoes, with only a handle of whiskey and what little gear we could each fit into a single drybag. After a sobering dip in Ptarmigan Lake’s icy waters the next morning, we began the six-mile bushwhack to Turner Lake and our canoes.
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Hiking up the pass that morning—sweat beading in his eyes and drybag straps digging into his shoulders—Parker first proclaimed his love for canoeing. He still hadn’t touched a paddle, and I wasn’t entirely sure he was serious.
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C&K photo editor Aaron Schmidt and his father, Alan, a habitat rehabilitation expert and lifelong canoeist from eastern Washington, rounded out our foursome. We had rendezvoused in Vancouver, B.C., and rallied north to Stewart’s Lodge on Nimpo Lake. The lodge is the nearest outpost of civilization to the Turner Lakes, which can only be accessed by seaplane or an arduous seven-and-a-half-mile hike.
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Knowing we’d have a few hundred pounds of gear between the four of us, we had booked the plane well in advance. That was before our host Duncan Stewart, owner and operator of Stewart’s Lodge and Tweedsmuir Air Service in Nimpo Lake, began to sing the praises of Ptarmigan Lake. The end result was that we paid for a floatplane drop—at Ptarmigan—leaving us with the brutal hike in to Turner. We laughed about it, and decided we wouldn’t have done it any other way.
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The Turner Lakes, linked by a series of shallow, burbling streams and a few short portages, were allegedly full of trout thanks to a local fisherman named Ralph Edwards. In the early 1950s, as the story goes, he put two spawning pairs of cutthroat trout into a five-gallon bucket, packed it with snow, and hiked the cryogenically frozen fish up to Turner Lake. The relocated trout had no natural predators and, once thawed, reproduced prodigiously. CANOEKAYAK.COM
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Now they’re a powerful tourist draw, and Stewart makes his living ferrying visitors to the Turner Lakes and servicing the region’s wilderness campsites and portage trails. The fishermen and paddlers come and go, but the canoes stay for the season. Duncan flies them in each spring, one at a time, strapped to the pontoon of a de Havilland Beaver seaplane. CANOEKAYAK.COM
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After checking out the falls our first morning on Turner Lake, Parker found himself sitting in the bow of a 17-foot, bright red Royalex canoe paddling into a 30 mph headwind through twofoot waves toward the south end of Turner Lake, into the mountains; the snowy crowns of the Talchako Range rising in the distance like a wall.
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I could see he was grinning from ear to ear—cold water splashing in his face as he paddled as hard as he could. I was in the stern, trying to keep us in the lee of a tiny headland. Looking over my shoulder, I could see Aaron stopping to snap photos while his father, a capable canoeist, seemed to be having no problem keeping them from getting blown broadside to the oncoming waves.
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We paddled upstream through the narrow feeder creek at the south end of Turner Lake to a well-marked portage trail, shouldered the boats, and made the carry in two easy loads. The next body of water, Cutthroat Lake, was significantly smaller, and sheltered from the glacial winds still whipping down valley. After five carries, paddling across a series of two more narrow mountain lakes hemmed in by towering lodgepole pine, we found ourselves on a white-sand beach on the north end of Widgeon Lake, the fifth lake in the chain, staring into a massive headwind directly up at the Talchako Range. Desperate to fish, I waded out into the shallows and casted feebly into the gale, only managing to catch the hook of the fly in my hand. We spent the rest of the evening playing cribbage. 24 CANOEKAYAK.COM
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“Did you notice,” Aaron said that night while we stood in the sand, looking up at the stars over the black horizon of peaks in the distance, “We haven’t seen anything but birds.” He was right. We had seen one bald eagle and a handful of loons. “No bear scat, not even a squirrel.” Nothing. “We really are the only ones up here, I guess,” Alan observed. 28 CANOEKAYAK.COM
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We spent two more days paddling south, deeper into the mountains, casting our flies from our canoes into the shallows and hauling in small, but fierce-fighting silvery cutthroat, until we reached Sunshine Lake, the headwaters of the entire Turner Lake Chain.
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We climbed to the top of a fire-scarred hilltop, and ate our lunch as a light drizzle set in along with a low cloud layer, obscuring our view. Pinkcolored fireweed covered the otherwise charred ground scattered with white and black skeleton trees.
“I love canoeing,� Parker said to no one in particular. A loon called out through the fog, as if to acknowledge him. Or, perhaps, laugh.
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