I pulled off to the side of the road, horrified, amazed, and awestruck all in the same breath. A barren landscape stretched out from the logging road, the spindly roots of an endless valley of tree stumps bare from erosion, snow and green ice clinging to the dirty beaches. As I pulled out the camera to take a picture—morbidly fascinated—Amelia piped up in the backseat, "Look at all the octopuses, Daddy!" I had to laugh. It's crazy though—Williston Lake is a giant reservoir that used to be a forest and a river valley and now it's the largest lake in British Columbia.
Amelia and I had waited in Prince George for a couple of days while Jo and the rest of the archaeology crew went up to Raspberry Camp, a logging camp halfway up the lake. We headed up alone to meet them. The gravel road in is like a logging super-highway—wide, smooth, and straight. I managed to make it across the lake via the Causeway (not marked on our maps) thanks to the Dutch gas station attendant at Windy Point, just south of Mackenzie. From there the drive was easy and quick, that is, until the maps switched over to 1:5,000,000 scale. Then, things went a bit haywire. I got a little lost and drove the spur roads all around the general area of the camp, and finally pulled into Raspberry Camp about an hour, maybe an hour and a half later than expected. Amelia was asleep in the back. I got out of the truck, relieved to be there, and shook hands with a guy who introduced himself as Dean. He apologized right away, and I didn't understand what for. Then he told me that Jo and Roger had left about half an hour before to go look for me. He couldn't get them on the radio, so he jumped in a big red pickup and took off after them. Long story short—Jo and Roger nearly drove right out to Mackenzie and got back to camp at dark, bedtime for Amelia. (I was told later that Dean had been asked that morning to call me in PG and tell me to stay there because everyone was coming back—there was too much snow and ice to work.) Happy Mother's Day!
The next day we drove out to Mackenzie and spent the night at the hotel. Vashti, Lenore, Roger, and Morley all booked flights back to civilization. Jo and I decided we'd drive to Kelowna to wait for the call to come back up. It was my birthday. We drove that day down to Helena Lake, near Lac La Hache. It was a great little spot to camp and, apart from Amelia strangely filling her pockets with dirt, quiet and uneventful. The loons on the lake were fantastic, hooting and calling in the twilight. From there we made it down to Kelowna, and spent a few days at Grandma and Grandpa's house. I took off for a hike in Okanagan Mountain Park and a night camping by myself at Chute Lake. It was a nice break. Then the call came in on the Friday, I think.
We drove straight to Mackenzie from Kelowna—a ten-hour drive—and met up with the rest of the crew around noon the next day. (Not before taking some epic pictures next to the "Tree Crusher", Mackenzie's pride and joy, which boasts of "leaving in its wake a mass of crushed trees".) Back on dirt roads, we headed up to Raspberry Camp to pick up the quads and other gear, before pushing on to Fort Graham, on the other side of the reservoir. After a long, slow drive on a deteriorating dirt road, we arrived at our home for the next few weeks at 11:30pm. Not fun with a cranky, tired two-year old!
Fort Graham is a hunting lodge and it looks the part. A big log-cabin lodge dominates the cleared area, sitting on a bluff above a bay on the reservoir (dry when we arrived). Inside, antlers, bear skins, old rifles, boxes of shells, and pictures of past wildlife conquests. We snagged the only double bed in the place. Our room had the bigger bed and a single for Amelia. I moved in toys and books and clothes and tried to make it comfy for the kiddo. The night after we arrived, a grizzly came into camp, scavenging the meat from a recent bear hunt. The day after we arrived I went outside to see a dead bear lying across the tailgate of a beat-up blue pickup. Apart from the old rifles in the corner, in those first couple of days, I saw more than once a high-powered hunting rifle sitting propped up on the ground or lying on one of the tables in the common area, where Amelia would be spending all our time. I had my hands full.
But then, so did Jo. She was thrown right into work, a non-stop whirlwind of logistics, organization, and quad-riding. She liked the last one anyway. Plus, right from the beginning, they were finding crazy artifacts and sites. Working with the Tsay Keh Dene First Nations community, they walked the beaches. And when they got back to camp after a ten-, eleven-, twelve-hour day, Jo had to spend another hour or two coordinating different crews, liaising with the Hydro (the client) bigwigs, printing out maps for the next day, etc. It was pretty manic.
They worked six days straight like that. Amelia and I watched Curious George on the computer, went for walks on the little beach (bear spray clipped to my belt), played with dogs. She did her best, but she wasn't overly happy, and bedtime and naptime were especially difficult. A whole thing of hair gel was "played with", and literally everything else we left in the room was taken out, damaged, thrown, whatever she felt like at the time. I've never had to have as much patience.
The hunting guides and the guys who worked around the camp were pretty rough, but friendly. It's funny that Jo and I have been so diligent about keeping our language clean around Amelia—she's certainly been well-exposed to colourful language now. Jordy, the owner and operator of the lodge, was quite the character. He's a big guy and is bursting with hair. He sports a giant grey handlebar moustache and his chest hair pokes through the buttons on his torn and dirty shirt. He carries a .44 magnum in a chest holster everywhere he goes (including up in his super cool Super Cub bush plan). But, despite his booming voice shouting expletives of every kind imaginable (and a few, he must've come up with himself), he was actually very kind. He offered right away to supply Amelia and Jo more vegetarian food if they wanted it.
On the first day off, I took off with Morley (Jo's boss) on a couple of quads and went looking for something fun to climb. It was a great day, clambering up a ridge in the snow, getting treated to a spectacular view. Morley is a great guy to hike with—he's keen, extremely knowledgeable in the bush with navigation and general bush-skills, and easy to talk to.
Back at camp, we had another trying week of work busyness and searching for activities to occupy Amelia. Lots of colouring, reading the phonebook with Vashti in the evenings, fishing with sticks in a pile of sawdust... And, occasionally the dust storms on the lake—where Jo would be working—would make their way into camp as well, and I couldn't even take Amelia outside at all. But we made our fun, and we had some good walks with the dogs down to the, frankly stunning beaches. Towards the end of the trip, she and I rode on a quad together a couple of times, driving (very slowly) down the dirt runway to go for a walk and a play at a different beach.
And then, it feels now like it came out of nowhere but it definitely didn't then, the job was done and we were heading back.
We drove the first day up to Tsay Keh, the reservation a couple of hours' drive away from camp. When a place like that—population 250, still on dirt roads—is a culture shock, you know you've truly been in the middle of nowhere. The next day we drove down to Mackenzie again, and with a little annoying synchronicity, we had a similar mix up to the beginning of the trip. We stopped in Raspberry Camp to pick up quads. When we left, Morley and I were at the front in my truck, followed by the three other vehicles. We took a different road out, but looking back in the dust saw headlights following. About half an hour or so later, Vashti came on the radio saying she hadn't seen Roger and Jo, the last truck, for ages. We waited for a few minutes and then Morley and I decided to go back to look for them, thinking they had got a flat tire or something along those lines. We drove all the way back to camp, did a huge (very worried) loop, left notes, called on various channels on the radio, before we eventually figured out (guessed) what had happened. They took the normal road which was quicker and instead of being behind us, ended up in front of us. Again, long story short, we drove out to Mackenzie to find them waiting for us.
As we turned onto the paved road again, cheering, I noticed that to drive straight, the steering wheel of my truck had to be at about 90 degrees to the left. Shit. We celebrated civilization that night and in the morning, not knowing exactly what was wrong with the truck apart from a bizarre steering issue and a leak of some kind, they all left for Prince George while I waited for a tow truck. It eventually took me and the truck down to PG to meet up with the others. Jo and Amelia and Morley and Roger were to head down south, camping, and I would catch up with them when the truck was fixed. Vashti and Lenore caught planes out of PG.
It didn't take much to fix the truck—thankfully—and I was back on the road, only a day behind my girls and the boys. I drove down to the Lilloet area (Fraser Canyon) and without too much trouble, met up with everyone at an archaeological site called Keatley Creek. Beautiful terrain and a nice little camp spot, and some amazing archaeology. Shortly after Amelia went to bed, however, the skies opened up on our campsite, ironically the driest part of the interior of BC, but we stubbornly sat around the fire in full raingear. The next day, we were home.
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