This is a story about the importance of knowing how to enjoy the suffer. All real adventures have real unknowns. Sometimes unknowns mean you end up doing things you were not expecting to. Sometimes that requires suffering. I’m a big fan of people who can suffer in style, people who can acknowledge how ridiculous the situation is and then keep going. People who can laugh about how ridiculous the situation is while it is still happening. People who laugh because of how ridiculous the situation is. It is also important that they can then get themselves out of the ridiculous situation, but as they say, “the journey is more important than the destination” and I would rather enjoy twice the suffering than be grumpy about it and have half the suffering.
This past fall 3 friends and I flew into a lake to begin a multi day trip down the Klastline, a river in northern B.C. with less than a handful of descents. One blog post with put in, takeout and solid descriptions of the whitewater gave us enough info to jump right into this adventure without doing a ton of research legwork ourselves.
The sort of sentiment we were riding into this trip can be summed up by “2nd descents are the best!”, something my friend Riley (an excitable and charismatic ½ Aussie ½ Canadian) said during a unique trip to India where we got to be the second group to paddle a few rivers that other people had done the hard 1st descent work of finding, researching, troubleshooting (finding the sieved out canyons as well as the alternate put ins which avoid them) and documenting.
2nd descents have a great ratio of effort to adventure without one of the risks that 1st descents run. The risk of turning out to not be worth repeating.
We were about to travel through an incredibly remote place with the promise of fun whitewater, untouched wilderness and just enough unknowns to be a real adventure. What a treat.
There ended up being more unknowns than strictly necessary.
We didn’t know we flew into the wrong lake. We didn’t know the next day would be a solid 12 hour day of moving our kayaks through incredibly challenging terrain (ie. “B.C. hellfuck”).
Had we spent a little more time looking at the maps we would have seen that the creek flowing out of Buckley lake had around a 150 meter elevation loss over 300 meters of distance before it reached the Klastline. As we flew into the lake we flew right over the huge waterfall landing on an equally huge cataract that ate up the elevation drop. Motivated reasoning told us our eyes were deceiving us and that it must be the “60 footer that lands on rocks” from the blogpost, even though that was described as being on the Klastline, not the tributary. We had so much fun that night not worrying about being on the wrong lake with 12 hours of some of the hardest walking any of us had ever done ahead of us. Amazing fishing (like ruin future fishing experiences good), exploring an abandoned hunting camp that had been ravaged by bears, high on the expectation of the excitement to come.
We bathed in the bliss of our ignorance that night and woke up anticipating a leisurely float in the morning, nice whitewater in the afternoon and beautiful nature all day long. After a half hour’s peaceful float the creek got steeper, shallower and progressively more choked with wood. For a while we bounced down rocks and pulled ourselves over or under logs while trying to stay in our boats. Soon we resorted to dragging the kayaks down the creek and hauling them over and under logs. Eventually, between the extremely healthy alder population and the less healthy fallen pine trees there was enough wood in the creek to force us to shoulder our boats. Shouldering your kayak while walking down a creek feels wrong. You should be sitting in your boat, all of your possessions being carried along effortlessly by the current. Not having your boat sitting on you, balancing awkwardly while the current tries to push you over. We went from the creek to the shore to the forest, then back to the creek and back to the shore and each option somehow felt harder than the last.
As it became clear that this was not the tributary we were meant to be on, the reality of the day we had ahead of us set in. Unknown hours of heinous hiking and a portage of unknown difficulty around a huge elevation drop were in our future. Best case scenario was a gruelling day that would see us reach the river we meant to paddle half a day behind schedule. Spending a night deep in grizzly country partway through the portage and at least 1 unplanned extra day on the trip was a realistic scenario. Depending on how far the cliff band that formed the waterfall extended and how much rope work we would need to do, spending an unexpected extra few days in the woods was not out of the question. Even though we were well aware of this, the mood stayed light. At some point while pondering if we would make it to the Klastline that day Emmanual said, in reference to the obstacles in our way, “You can quote me on this. ‘Pfffffffshhhssshh’” and waved at the air with both hands. Bottomless optimism.
Rather than fearing the unknowns, dreading the work ahead of us, getting angry at each other, or beating ourselves up over our gaps in research the following happened. Someone said “this is pretty fucked up” in an honest acknowledgment of our circumstances. Emmanuel and I pretended that walking down the creek was the most fun thing ever, skipping and whistling and clicking our heels. We decided to enjoy the journey.
The peak of suffering in the journey all took place within about 100 meters of travel and 10 minutes of time (which was about as fast as we ever got). I stepped on the second wasp nest of the day. Since it took the wasps a few seconds to figure out what was going on and Emmanuel was a few steps behind me he took the brunt of their attack. His drysuit limited the wasps to stinging his hands and face (admittedly not amazing places to be stung). Thinking quickly he decided to flail around violently. When that didn’t work he bent over to submerge his hands and face in the shallow creek. A brilliant, although temporary, defense. Eventually we all got far enough away from the wasp nest for them to abandon the chase.
We gave the wasps some space and they settled down enough for us to dart in and retrieve a kayak abandoned during our flight with minimal further damage. A hundred meters of slightly more tentative bushwhacking past the wasp nest led us to where the creek fell about 75 meters as a cleanly vertical waterfall and then a further 75 meters cascading down improbably steeply stacked boulders. Emmanuel moved to check the maps on his phone as he had done a few minutes before the wasp attack when we knew we were getting close.
A single, loud “F**K” rang out across the valley from our vantage point at the edge of this massive drop. The front pocket of his lifejacket was unzipped, and empty. His phone had been in and out of that pocket so often as we approached the drop that he hadn’t zipped it up. We went back up to where he had dunked his face and hands in the shallow creek. Although it was shallow enough that he needed to bend almost in half to get his head submerged, it was deep and fast enough that the phone was long gone, possibly already over the falls and down to an elevation that we wouldn’t arrive at for a long time.
That single, loud “F**K” was the most upset anyone got that day by far. By the time we were back at the lip of the falls and beginning to contemplate what would be required to get around this waterfall we were laughing and joking, ready to figure it out and ready to have fun doing it.
After lunch with an incredible view from the lip of the waterfall we had a look around to survey our options. We were relieved to find a very steep, but not cliffed out shoulder to the cliffband creating the waterfall. It looked like some simple ropework to lower boats down through the forest was our way forward. As we filtered back to our lunch spot to pack up and get things moving one of my legs cramped hard enough to put me flat on my back. They had begun to cramp a bit when we stopped for lunch but I had been hoping that some food would help. After a minute of laying flat the cramp subsided and I stood up. Immediately both legs cramped and sent me back to the moss. That was the only time on this beautiful (mis?)adventure that I felt genuinely worried. Although we were dealing with more unknowns than necessary it felt like we were prepared. I mean, not prepared in ways that got us to the right lake, but we did come prepared to deal with landing at the wrong lake. We had brought enough gear and willingness to suffer to keep moving forward.
In that moment on the moss though, the leg cramps were something that I did not feel like I had prepared for or could suffer through. There is no force of will that can make sodium-potassium pumps work without sodium and potassium.
Laying there, waiting for the cramps to subside and one of my friends to come close enough to get their attention without alarming them, I had a real moment of worry. I didn’t know what would happen if I couldn’t move myself, let alone my 50 lb kayak with 50lbs of gear in it. Despite having 50lbs of gear, the only salt was in the last 2 instant noodle packages. I emptied a flavour packet into my mouth and tried not to cough out the precious powder. Much to my relief the salt worked and within a few minutes I was able to move again. Onward, forward and downward we went. Lowering boats through forest on a 50 percent slope turned out to be the fastest travel we had all day. The slope slowly eased and by the time we were past the cataract we were once again shouldering our loaded boats. One more bad stretch of thick bushwhacking, this time spiced up with a burn full of blow down and rose bushes, brought us to the Klastline.
That night we rested our tired bones sprawled among the boulders of the beach. One of the beauties of multiday kayaking is that at the end of an enormous day like that you can sit down with about 4 drybags scattered around you and have everything you need for the next few hours. It leaves you free to enjoy the place you are in.
That night we got to enjoy some of the untouched wilderness we were looking forward to. A wee little duck (which turned out to be an adult green winged teal, the smallest dabbling duck) tromped up and down the beach we had made our home on for the night. She seemed quite unbothered by our presence and did laps up and down the beach. Sometimes on land, but mostly in the water (catching eddies beautifully I must add), dabbling for her dinner while we enjoyed ours. Across from us in an eddy that none of us would have wanted to be stuck in we spotted a young beaver. Right above a log jam, with an undercut at the bottom of the eddy and vertical cliffs at the top this beaver looked like it was in a bit of a pickle. Although it eventually left the eddy we got to watch it make up its mind for a couple of hours while it moved around in the eddy inspecting the bank, probing the current and perching on a mid-eddy rock. It was so neat to just be a witness to these animals and their lives.
We had to keep going about ours, so the next day we packed up and set off to see exactly what was in store. The Klastline had all sorts of different whitewater. Short canyons, small bedrock features, waterfalls, boulder gardens and even a slide, although the seal-launch into the pool below it looked a lot nicer to all of us. The Klastline even empties into the Grand Canyon of the Stikine. The confluence is below the big rapids but above some of the prettiest canyon walls in the whole canyon. The Klastline also had a few portages. There are 2 big waterfalls (one of which remains to be run) that require some sweat to get around. By the time we got to the takeout we were about as tired as any of us had ever been. 2 massive days of adventure had drained us. But they had also filled our cups in a way that only dealing successfully with real unknowns can.
And we had a good time doing it.
