Shangri-La!

While I was rolling the sleeping bags, I saw two people cresting the mountain. The breathless young woman mentioned last night’s storm. I said the storm was exciting, but at 58, I’d found the climb exhausting. She laughed, said she was 37 and hadn’t thought she would make it, said she couldn’t imagine her mother even attempting the climb.

We’d left Vancouver for the three-hour drive to Long Peak. Travelling the narrow coastal highway I felt nervous seeing signs warning of falling rocks from the steel-netted cliff face.

On the winding, narrow logging road I worried about squeezing past hell-bent logging trucks. When we finally parked the car dusk was falling in the shadow of the mountain. We camped on the shale beach beside the lake, cooked dinner, admired the clear night sky, and went to bed.

Early next morning we began the drive to the trailhead. The car struggled up the steep rock-strewn road and we soon realized we weren’t about to get much closer. We shouldered our backpacks and began the hike to the forest. Either side of the road grew pearl everlasting and other floral offerings in abundance, and we continually heard the sharp squeaks of pica darting for cover.

At the trailhead the pitch was considerably intensified as we climbed the steep path. At times the scree was so loose, the path so narrow I experienced vertigo observing the valley below. Our son, a biologist, was in his element; my husband was in no distress. Their backpacks were far weightier than mine, but my legs were turning to stone, and my lungs felt like bursting.

Our son had been there before and said we’d soon be reaching the Gates of Shangri-La, a widespread rockfall over which we clambered. The rocks were huge, the area wide, and it took quite a bit of effort to find our way through it. The views, too, were spectacular, looking across from where we slowly wound our way through rocks each as large as a car, a small shed.

Another milestone; a mountain hut and around it, a vertical green meadow dissected by a narrow trail. We peered into the hut and stepped inside. A big old stove, a long table, some chairs, and upstairs a sleeping loft. There was a visitor's book, signed by people who obviously slept over, intent on a longer hike than ours, presumably. A number of the messages noted the appearance of packrats, swifting away with anything not nailed down. Not far from the hut stood a reliable and stout out-house, of which several of our party made use.

“Not long now, Mom!” shouted our son encouragingly. As I struggled up and upward following a well-worn, but quite narrow pathway up the green meadow. Finally, it appeared that he was right; we were approaching what appeared to be another landscape entirely.

A marmot greeted us as we forded a stream shooting over the mountain from a blue-green glacial lake. Above the lake, after our 8-hour climb, we pitched our tent. On a bit of a shelf in the rock. A 'bit of a shelf' is the operative word here. The floor of the tent slanted downward slightly, toward to the lake. At the far end of the lake was the dominating presence of the glacier that fed it, roaring as it melted, for this was late August.

On day-trips ascending from our camp we discovered other, smaller glacial lakes and glaciers, some blooming with red algae. We crossed other rockfalls and accessed crests where we ate lunch and gazed over unending peaks across the Stein Valley.

On one of these excursions clear skies turned suddenly dark; a thunderhead began its journey toward us. We scrambled to descend. Thunder, lightening, great gusts of wind, sleet and rain pummelled our little tent, with us huddling inside, as the temperature plummeted, but it stood fast.

When the storm finally subsided, we began to think about something approximating an evening meal. Everything around us was completely drenched. And it was, by then, quite dark. Suddenly, we saw what looked like a flare across the valley, on another mountain top, opposite to where we sat. And as the flare grew, and we understood it to be someone's camp fire, we set up a loud cheer. Obviously heard on the other side, since we heard a faint response of a cheer from them.

(Made me wonder if in their distant proximity, I was as private as I thought myself to be, squatting over a fissure in the rockface, half-hidden behind a knobbly shrub.)

We slept soundly that night, though waking occasionally. I kept thinking we were going to roll off the side of the mountain. In fact, I shifted myself sometimes, with the feeling that the slant was compelling me in a direction I had no wish to go in. And when we awoke, it was to the rushing sound of the melting glacier, at the end of that fabulous blue-green lake below us.

The clear skies of the day before, that had made yesterday such an adventure, had given way, when we awoke, to a completely overcast, bruised sky, threatening to dump once again. We made another morning excursion after a good hefty breakfast of pancakes and tea, and mandarine oranges, scrambling over the rockface to find yet another rosy-crusted glacier. Returning to our camp site, with the threat of rain undiminished, we decided to break camp and descend.

As we descended the valley I felt good and brave and happy post-adventure, yet anxious anticipating the car-sized rocks at Shangri-La, the steep, narrow defile through the forest. The extent of my surprise (and deflation) cannot possibly be imagined as, halfway through Shangri-la we passed a young man with a paniered Labrador, then a family with two young children making their way up the mountain, happy in their enterprise.

How Canadian can you get?