Chaunigan Lake Missed

There were warning signs that trouble was brewing from the beginning. We were off to a late start because the last minute details had taken much longer than planned. When we finally rolled into William’s Lake on Saturday evening to purchase supplies, we were surprised to discover that the entire town was shut down for both Sunday and Monday. This set our time table back by two days. To make the best of the situation, we spent the time exploring the local country side playing with some of our shiny new “wilderness gear.” We found an empty gravel pit to test fire a high-powered rifle that we had brought along for protection, we tried to break in our mountain boots, and we generally strutted around like we thought real mountain men should. Tuesday arrived and William’s Lake came to back to life. We purchased our supplies, and gamely headed up the Bella Coola highway towards the tiny Indian outpost of Hanceville.

Fools rush in...

As a young man I wanted, more than anything else, to gain my independence from authority. As a senior in high school, I was naive enough to think this was actually possible. I turned eighteen in 1972, and I was very influenced by the back-to-nature movement of that time. Peter Callison—my best friend and partner in assorted minor crimes—and I decided to spend the better part of a year living in the wilderness before going off to college. We had access to a log cabin in central British Columbia because Pete’s Dad, Doc Callison, had been partners in the cabin with a colleague years earlier. The two Doctors were also partners in a seaplane which served to get them to and from the cabin. Nestled on the banks of Chaunigan Lake, the cabin was located at the 6,000 foot level of the Coast Mountain Range. Chaunigan Lake is two miles long and one mile wide, and is much like hundreds of other remote lakes in the mountain foothills.

The cabin itself had been built many years before by a local Indian and was well suited for the rugged area. Dr. Callison had long since sold his interest in the cabin to his partner, but they remained friends and his former partner was willing to let us use it. His only restriction was that we could not use the cabin during the Summer months. We, as it turned out, would be the first people to ever use the cabin at any other time. Part of our plan was to figure out how to fortify the cabin to protect us from the harsh Winter weather. Another part of our plan was to spend a month at the cabin during the Spring of our senior year in high school. Our plan was to take stock of how things went for that month, calculate needed food stores, and begin cabin modifications. We would return in the Fall for a nine month stay. We had managed to talk our teachers into extending Spring break by three weeks so that we could accomplish this plan. Although I tried not to read too much into it, I was surprised at how quickly—almost eagerly—our teachers extended our leave of absence from school.

Although readily accessible by floatplane, the cabin was inaccessible much of the year by land vehicles. A hundred miles of rugged logging roads separated the lake from the nearest town. In preparation for the trip we had read several “how to...” books on surviving in the wilderness. We had also spent all of our money on clothing and gear from a local mountaineering supplier. We even tested some of our gear by spending a stormy night huddled in our tent on Mt. Rainier. We were confident these preparations were sufficient to ensure success in our mountain living adventure. For transportation, my father had agreed to let us use his four-wheel drive pick-up truck. The truck was already equipped with long range fuel tanks, so we knew we could manage the long drive into the woods and back. We were full of confidence and excitement as we passed through the border at Blaine Washington into British Columbia late one Spring night. We were finally on our way. We planned a brief stop at William’s Lake for supplies, and then to drive up the Bella Coola highway to Hanceville. There we would fill our gas tanks and proceed on old logging roads for another ninety miles or so to Chaunigan Lake.

Our planned brief stay in William’s Lake was not so brief after all as I mentioned at the beginning of this story. When we were finally on our way we were slightly alarmed by the deteriorating road conditions during the next 150 miles. Finally we pulled into the Indian trading post of Hanceville. The locals had a good laugh when we told them of our plan. They explained to us that the roads were impassable this time of year because of the Spring thaw.

Well excuse me, but they clearly didn’t know who they were talking to. We had a 3/4 ton, 4-wheel drive, chain-equipped, International Harvester pick-up truck. It had long range fuel tanks, heavy duty shocks, and a transaxle power-wench on the front! We had mountaineering stuff on board. We had read books!

After some coffee, we politely explained to the locals that we would be just fine. We topped off the truck's fuel tanks and headed out. The roads immediately went from semi-paved to semi-there. Five or six hours later we had only covered about 70 miles. The road was hard to detect at this point, and we often turned up overgrown logging tracts, not realizing that we were no longer on the main road until the path would dead-end altogether. We had been in four-wheel drive mode since leaving Hanceville, and the mud was getting so bad that we finally had to put the chains on. This was a miserable job. Although it was a pleasant Spring afternoon on the high plateaus of central BC, the mercury was still dipping well below freezing in the evenings. Crawling under the truck, which at the time was stuck in ten inches of freezing mud, to wrestle with tire chains might have daunted lesser men. We were not daunted…we were frozen, but not daunted!

Soon we were on our way heading down a dirt road barely as wide as the truck itself. The passenger side mirror was scraping the hillside, while the driver side wheels were clinging to the edge of a 200 foot drop-off to a ravine. Our next challenge came when we found the road completely blocked at the bottom of a steep hill by a large tree that had recently uprooted. We reluctantly concluded that we had no way to proceed. We also discovered that our retreat would have to be in reverse gear because there was no room for us to turn around. How we escaped killing ourselves at this point is a mystery, but as I think back on it, this was not the last time that an unseen guardian angel must surely have been looking after us. The truck had a blind spot the size of Alaska in it’s rear-view mirrors. On each attempt to back up the steep narrow road would either jam the back end of the truck into the hillside, or slide partially off the road before jarring to a stop. The road was so soft that the truck was literally chewing it to pieces with each desperate attempt to back up. It became clear at one point, that if our next attempt failed, there wouldn’t be enough road left to drive on at all! Owing to equal parts of luck and grim determination, we finally managed to back far enough up the hillside to where we could turn around.

It was dusk by this time and we were getting discouraged. Searching for another route down the hillside led us to yet another dead-end logging tract. This time we managed to bury the truck all the way up to it’s axles in a snow drift. We were stuck. It was time to fire up the transaxle power-wench. We hooked the cable up to a nearby tree and engaged the drive. We reeled that poor tree in like a small fish on heavy tackle. The truck remained firmly lodged. We had barely enough cable to reach a larger tree. This tree held it’s ground and we finally were able to drag the truck out of the snow. There was no time for a sigh of relief though, because now we had a new problem. The truck, which had been backfiring and overheating for the past few hours, was on fire!

Considering we had about forty gallons of gasoline on board, more prudent men might have run for cover. Peter popped the hood while I grabbed the fire extinguisher from under the seat. When I pulled the safety pin and depressed the nozzle, we were presented with a trickle of flame retardant that wouldn’t have frightened a birthday candle. We started throwing snow and dirt on the flames in a blind panic. The amazing thing is, we got that damn fire out! Our hands were cut to ribbons on the crusty Spring snow, but we were jubilant. Assessing our situation, we determined that we were at least a four day hike from the nearest person. We were also in the middle of the vast British Columbia wilderness, on a mountain side, with a burnt up truck. For a topper, it was now definitely nighttime. The only light available to us was coming from the stars and a crescent moon. We were grateful for the moonlight. We were also tired, muddy, hungry, and cold. What to do, what to do...here’s a good idea...lets grab our packs and launch off into the woods!

We had convinced ourselves at this point that we must be close to our destination. Given the fact that neither one of us had ever driven there before, and the fact that there had been no discernable landmarks for the last fifty miles, our judgment was questionable. When you also consider the fact that we had been given directions by Doc Callison that were so vague that we had been lucky to find British Columbia with them, we were definitely guilty of some serious wishful thinking. We had managed to convince ourselves that the glowing patch of snow we could see beckoning to us through the trees on that moonlit night, was Chaunigan Lake. Our home away from home seemed to us, to be close at hand! We decided to come back in the morning and deal with the smoldering truck.

Distance plays tricks on you at night. That glowing patch of light was indeed a lake, but it was not close at all. In fact it was a long walk, or should I say, trip, stumble, and fall, through the woods. When we finally arrived at the lake edge, Peter informed me that the cabin was actually closer to the lake’s other end. Neither one of us had any desire to fight our way through the woods anymore that night. There was still ice covering the lake and we decided the shortest route to our destination was to take a straight line over the ice. This was an extremely bad idea. The lake ice was as rotten as week-old clams. Pete and I came from Seattle and we knew nothing about frozen lakes. What do you think we did? The ice would crack and groan under our feet, and black holes of water dotted the lake surface like so many moon craters. With each step, our foot prints would fill with water as soon as we lifted our feet. We miraculously made it to the far shore without incident!

There was no cabin there! We were disappointed, but we were too tired to continue, so we decided to call it a night. This may have been the first smart decision we made all day. Even so, there were more problems. My sleeping bag was stuck opened because of a jammed zipper. Before I realized it, I was shaking so violently from the cold that I couldn’t control my hands well enough to fix the zipper. Peter came to my assistance, and soon we were in a light, troubled sleep. I remember waking up in terror to the sound of an owl hooting in the tree above us.

The next morning was another beautiful Spring day in the Coast range foothills. As the sun melted the frost off the ground, we stirred to life. By this time, we were getting quite hungry and thirsty. While we both had a change of clothes, sleeping bags, and other assorted stuff in our packs, neither one of us thought to bring any food or water. This isn’t quite as brainless as it must sound, because we weren’t really planning on doing any hiking when we packed our bags back in Seattle. We had simply stuffed our backpacks as one might fill any other duffel. Although we were very thirsty, in a rare display of common sense, we decided against going back out on the ice to get water from one of the open areas. This meant that the only open water available to us for drinking, was from the narrow band of puddles that formed at the lake edge where the ice pulled away from the shore. The water was fowl with the algae growing from the mucky lake bottom. We were thirsty.. .we drank… yuck. As we packed up our stuff that morning we were faced with another dilemma, should we find our way back to the truck and deal with that situation, or should we launch off deeper into the woods? Any guesses as to our choice?

Peter had convinced himself that, although we were on the wrong lake, we weren’t all that far from our destination. This lake, he rationalized, was the small lake just south of Chaunigan Lake called Little Chaunigan. All we needed to do, he figured, was head north through the woods for a couple of miles, and voilà, we would be at our destination. I wanted to know how we were going to find our way back to the truck. With a wave of his hand that easily took in several hundred square miles of Canadian wilderness, Peter chided me that I needn’t worry, the truck was just...over...there. It would be three days before we saw it again.

The problem with navigation in the high alpine region of central B.C., is that there aren’t any useful landmarks. The place is dotted with hundreds of small lakes and it is relatively flat. Not that it seems flat when you are scrambling up and down endless hills to get anywhere mind you, but visually, every place you go looks a lot like every place you’ve been. I’ve heard stories of experienced woodsmen getting lost on short hikes in this area, only to be found years later by some hunter as a collection of scattered bones, or more often, simply never heard from again. We weren’t exactly in that situation however, unlike those veterans of the great out-of-doors...we had no experience at all! We were lost for at least a day before we even recognized our situation. I was beginning to wonder if the books we’d read really were the "complete wilderness living preparation guides" their dust jackets had proclaimed. As we wandered over hills and through valleys, ever more tired, ever more hungry, ever more nauseated from the fowl water we had drunk, we found dozens of lakes. Unfortunately, not one of them was Chaunigan, and not one of them had our log cabin.

By the second day of wandering we were no longer trying to find the lake; our primitive survival instincts had finally overcome our misguided wanderlust and we were now intent on getting back to the truck and our supplies. We were weak and light headed, and we found it necessary to rest often. Occasionally we would rummage through our packs hoping to find something edible that we had somehow managed to overlook. One time, as Peter was sorting through his stuff, I noticed that his pack contained a gift wrapped package about the size of a hard bound book. He explained that his sister had given it to him as a birthday gift, and he was duty-bound not to open it for several more weeks. Did I mention that I was carrying a rifle? I persuaded him to open it early. Amazingly it was a box of Betty Crocker fudge brownie mix! We shoveled the chocolate powder into our mouths, and washed it down with snow. The brown powder burnt the roofs of our mouths, and we practically choked on the stuff, but it tasted great!

On the morning of the third day after the truck caught fire, we stumbled onto a road that was slightly more substantial than the endless maze of abandoned logging tracts we had been encountering. Aside from being slightly more substantial than the other roads, this road also had one other distinguishing feature...fresh tire tracks...our tire tracks! By now we were so turned around, that we had as good of chance of following the tracks to the truck, as to following them eighty miles back to Hanceville. Our guardian angel must have still been on duty because after one more exhausting hike, we made it back to where we had started.

One of the nice things about being young and dumb, was the naive lack of fear that we were both experiencing. Throughout the entire ordeal, save one little disagreement about  prematurely opening a birthday present, we had never really argued, and we had never really been worried. Actually, in a desperate sort of way, were having, well...fun. We talked about dying and, in an ridiculous display of youthful machismo, even discussed the etiquette of cannibalism in such circumstances. I’m pretty sure that we decided against it.

Upon reaching the truck, the first order of business was eating. We were extremely hungry. True to form, we were greeted with yet another nasty little surprise. The new gas can, that we had purchased to hold kerosene for our lanterns, was defective. A bad seam along the side of the can had been weeping fuel into our food. To make matters worse, nearly all of our food was wrapped in paper and had been packed directly against the canister. Virtually everything edible in the truck was now soaked with kerosene. We felt the good spirits that we managed to maintain for the past few days finally began to slip away. What else could go wrong? I’m glad you asked!

A few things did go right, we managed to eat some honey and peanut butter. These foods had been packed in glass jars and hadn’t been tainted by the kerosene. The truck fire had done surprisingly little damage. There were a few wires with melted insulation, and a little scorching here and there, but no major engine hoses had been burnt. After the judicious application of a little electrician’s tape, which for some unknown reason we had a supply of, the truck was back in working order. The only thing left to do was to dispose of the kerosene soaked supplies, and to try to make it back to Hanceville. We made a small pile of fuel-soaked foodstuffs in the middle of the road, checked to make sure there was no danger of accidentally setting anything else ablaze, and ignited the rubbish. It made a cheery little fire and we hunkered down around it to warm ourselves and to lift our spirits. This proved to be a mistake. Just as the fire was burning itself out there was a terrific explosion from the smoldering embers. We both jumped three feet into the air. On second thought, Peter may have jumped a little higher.

We instantly knew what had happened. One of the casualties of the kerosene leak was a cardboard box containing cartridges for our rifle. The shells themselves were fine, but the box had just about completely dissolved. Some of the shells had been initially mixed in with the other ruined stuff, and we had spent some time carefully picking them out of the pile of things to be burned. We had obviously missed one. We were both dazed by the explosion, but at least I had the presence of mind not to be hopping about like some shell-shocked fool. This is precisely what my buddy Peter was doing. What was he babbling about...something like “I’m hit, I think I’m hit, damn I’m hit!”

Peter was hit. The brass cartridge casing had shattered in the explosion and a piece of shrapnel had buried itself deep in his inner thigh. Considering the location of the wound, we both immediately agreed that it could have been worse. Not only had the projectile just missed his private parts, no major artery had been severed. In fact, the inch long entry wound looked like a mere scratch. It was hardly bleeding at all. I broke out the medicine kit, and dressed the wound. It did not seem to be causing him too much discomfort and, oddly enough, this latest mishap put us back into the rummy good mood that had been dashed by the discovery of the ruined food. As we drove back to the "I-told-you-so smirks" that greeted us in Hanceville, we really felt a great sense of satisfaction. It never really occurred to us that we were abject failures in our mission to find our cabin and spend a month living in the wilderness. We had had ourselves one hell of an adventure, and were pretty pleased about the whole thing.

Late that night we pulled into William’s Lake and drove directly to the local Hospital. We were a sorry sight and Peter was starting to feel pretty uncomfortable by this time. The metal shrapnel was about the size and shape of a small arrow head and it had entered his leg, point first. Although it was clearly visible on the x-rays, the projectile had apparently zig-zagged as it burrowed deep into Peter’s thigh muscle, and the Doctors couldn’t locate it! They proceeded to transformed the small, neat incision on his inner thigh into an ugly, gaping wound. The Doctors kept probing and enlarging the incision until they felt they could safely go no further. The next attempt to remove the cartridge fragment occurred several days later in a Seattle hospital, and this attempt was equally unsuccessful. Finally, the Doctors resorted to inserting a sterile safety pin deep into the wound, and took new x-rays of his leg from several different angles. Using the safety pin as a reference point, the third attempt to remove the shrapnel was ultimately successful. To this day Peter has a large, mean looking scar, that cuts through a depression the size of a walnut, on his leg... all the result of injury that initially looked like nothing more than a scratch from a brier patch.

When I look back on it now, it seems to me that we really did believe that we might die. Even so, I recall the time spent wandering around lost in that beautiful wild country, as something that was deeply spiritual and uplifting. The possibility of dying lent a sense of legitimacy to our adventure that made us feel, well...proud. There was a right-of-passage going on, and we could sense it. We had started the adventure as two hopelessly inexperienced boys, bravely and foolishly challenging the unknown. We felt that we emerged as two young men, more adult, more confident, and less foolish. I doubt I will ever be that brave—or foolish—again.

Much later we determined that we had never been closer than twenty or thirty miles to Chaunigan Lake. There was, in fact, no way to the lake except through the tree which had blocked our path. The locals, we were informed, never traveled in those parts without chain-saws at the ready for just such occasions, and never ever traveled in those parts during the Spring thaw. The next fall Peter and I did return to Chaunigan Lake for our wilderness stay. In all the months we spent in that small log cabin, so far from civilization and human contact, we never once approached the level of perils that we had faced on our first failed trip to live in the woods. In any event, the time we actually spent living at Chaunigan Lake was full of adventures, but remarkably empty of folly. That, however, is another story.