The Rainbow Mountains, mid September

Day 1

First night out from the Precipice, camped out of the Blue Turtle Bus, beside a burn at the trailhead. Deserted. As we approach a large black bear passes across the road, angled towards us, moving steady. It's unruffled as I slow to stop us colliding. It ambles past and alongside. I shout 'Take a photo'. Becs shouts DRIVE.

We're north-west of Anahim Lake, off the unpaved road to Bella Coola, and on the southern fringe of the Rainbow Mountains, or Painted Mountains, or Tsitsutl, the curved remnants of an eight-million year-old volcano, gouged and smoothed by glaciers, wind, rain. Time and ice. To the East is the Chilcotin plateau. West rise the Coast Range Mountains.

Bright spark of fire burns beside the Bus. Kids having their Little House on the Prairie tale (a little incongruent) on the bed beside Becs, before snuggling down in their cosy floor of thermorests, sleeping bags, porridge sacks, odds and ends wedging them tight, reminiscent of Sleeper-Train journeys south from Inverness when they were tiny little things. That passing time long and short like the rattle of the tracks and the vanishing night.

I can hear the water ever onward, so constant it is easy to feel how it carves the hills. Other than water, the only sound is space. No edge. These are the places of the world where your voice, every sound you make, the rock that rolls beneath your foot, the cough, the poetry, is lost in the same moment that it's uttered, where you recognise our true place in the way of things and time and place.

Day 2

We thought we saw the lights of Anahim as we returned from the burning, rippling, rising sunset, from the rocky ridge the vast glaciers of the Coast Mountains in the light, even beyond them peaks rising yet again. Then we realise it wasn't light at all, but fire. Forest fire. Flickering up and down, stretched, like a dragon rolled on its back to scratch. Or the fizz of nightwork on docks across water.

I have never been in a place of such silence. Your voice sounds but is instantly lost, a half-breath of wind. Here is a world of winds and forces, not voices. The silence is heavy, you feel the weight of it, the weight of the universe about you, its MASS. Tonight is very still, just a touch of breeze, but it makes no sound. The only sound is pen on paper, the rustle of my wrist against my coat, and the fire. And they are all as nothing here. A place of time. I could die here tonight and it would be ok. This world is giving.

Day 3

Night again. The smell of marmot, like old socks with musk and must. Gonna sleep in the tent tonight - the kids got cold last night in their thin sleeping bags with me out, Kai in particular asking me to join them tonight, Part warmth, part, I wonder, connection - we've had some rows in the past few days, and it's felt as if there's been a little distance. I love him so much. Yet we really fought the other morning by the Bus, he just refusing to get dressed, fighting it, battle of wills. Odd that anger sitting beside all the wonder and peace of this place. Feelings of loss, regret, hope, love, sorrow, concern, need for connection, and calm. I will try to speak with him on his own about anger and what might lie behind it.

Tight with Becs around the fire tonight. We chat a little about what this year might mean beyond.

In these mountains, high in the alpine, things grow very slowly. The stooped trees lower down, the lichen creeping to the craggy tips. Slow enough to feel time. As I walk across these ancient patterns every step leaves its mark. As if every step touches time.

Not quite pavement!

Life and death - here it's not the giving alone that fuels the peace. This land is both giving and receiving, it holds you and will return you. Age-old stuff, I suppose, round many a coffin. Maybe that's what I was sounding out for myself in the Rib poem.

Camped beside the loch. Cold, old and mysterious, cupped between two steep sides, the 'Molar' to the west, the inner circles of the Rainbows to the east. Held just in the way you crouch at the edge and raise the water to drink. There are occasional murmurs from the loch, tuneful, rock-ridden, lapping, but only once here and there, seeping into silence. It's the same water that flows within the rocks and cracks them like bowls and potters, and that flows within me, in my blood between my joints in my cells. As with my heart which is part held within the ark of my ribs, the space to beat and breath, part held by these rocks and cliffs about me, and on ever outward until the whole universe is holding my heart with care and love and it's truly open. Why try to close it in, put up walls of body and self? The heart is at home and free when it is open, held by the ark of the world.

Becs 'not quite thawed' in the tent. The wind here is cold and as I hiked alone this afternoon I missed Scotland, the tundra and crowberry soft and springy beneath my feet. To the tent!

Day 4

Hike up and in alone. Kids pretty cold, Kai perked up, Freya wearing those huge mountain gloves of mine. They leap from stone to stone as warm-up. While the snow begins in flurries, and then they build a home for their creatures beneath the old tarp, every stick and stone lovingly arranged, mugs of hot chocolate balanced in the 'kitchen', good chapter of Little House, one eye peeping from the 'window' gap at the world outside. They decide it's birthday time for 'Cheety' and a dog (?) and stir them up one chocolate cake, and one Annie Fruit Cake.

Fire burning, and I gathered a bunch of wood to keep it ticking. Then left. Northwesterly blowing, plumes bursting from my lips, up across the saddle to beyond. Like waves, dunes, the swirl of smoke, the juggle of clouds, of water, rising, dipping curling arching multi-coloured tears and joy of the world and the age and breath and force that has shaped it. Lava flows burst in fury, eruption, roaring down. These Rainbows were here first, then the Ilgachuz some millions later, then the Itchas, both ranges to the East. Now here is the moment between then and what follows. It's lasted millions of years. Stillness. The only things that are moving, slowly, are the two mountain goats far off, white splashes against red and orange. So slowly I think they're banks of snow or bright white rock. The cow grass in tufts, hunched, the wind, the clouds about me. Everything else is still. Not even water seeps between the cracks of stone. To leave shattered carvings. It's too cold.

The mountains hold in a curved embrace. There's warmth in them despite the freezing tips to my fingers. A place where you sit and eat your piece, Dave's bread, hard, slow chew in the cold, the comfort of a hat and a good old coat from Cioch on Skye, same flora, so far away. Did Tweedsmuir, Lord Buchan himself, ever come here and remember?

Again, this silence. Even in the fresher wind. Its solidity. Presence. So thick with silence that any noise, a moose treading purposeful, assured, upon circles of rippled mud, one stone against another, any noise at all must burrow through the silence until engulfed so soon. The thickness of the silence gathers too the mooses' bugle and it dies.

White-tailed ptarmigan, a flock of maybe 12. Rise, flutter, dip and lost back in rock, quiet as stones. One brave little short-beaked gray-crowned rosy finch. The creatures that survive here in this sparsity, this parred niche, are wonders.

A memory of not being in control, where there are others who would hurt you. The deer inside! The feel of marron grass. My Grandmother dieing in the frame of a bed. Whatever happened to Steven Kovatz? The smell of Switzerland.

I've walked far out on the long ridge driving into the mountains. It feels like the heart. Beyond me is an iconic flame, molten falling fire to its right. Or a tear of fire, a streaming fire. At its base is a ring of bright green.

Further along there's a rainbow. Further back, a darker tree of colour. Far below purple pines, killed by pine beetle. All the rainbows are fringed by rising, snowy peaks. And there are threads of trails across the colours, animals moving from yellow into dark swirls, above trees. Whitebark pine, alpine fir, lodgepole pine.

Becs climbs alone later. And sees -

The shards of rock you stand upon are jagged, hard-edged. They sound like bones at they rock against one another. They are worn down to their essence, like bones. Yet if you stoop low to join the lichen it is smooth, black, green, purple, white, growing in gentle curves. So too the hills themselves and all their swoops and swirls and curves. The vast upheaval of creation, its brute force, its massive rising, railing, flowing, heat and fury and cold, cold ice cold deep, is ultimately smooth and gentle, curved, kind, giving, receiving, forgiving, accepting, without bitterness or harshness or hurt.
So we needn't be too anxious in our brief moment, or as our bones join others'. We are held softly in creation.

And colour. Rainbow. Tsitsutl. Paint. Purples, reds, lavender, white, yellow, orange, ruby, black, grey, green, burnt. The small bird that creeps watchful on rock, the ptarmigan that are enfolded back into their landscape, the red azalea so low, the daisy rising incongruous purple at the crest, the purple leaves, the hawk with its stripe of white, the lines between yellow and black and purple - all shaped within the elements of rock, deep purple, like a well of colour for the life perched on the thinnest scrap. Or the brilliant white of that ptarmigan flock. As snow. At the two mountain goats born of snow and mountain, vanishing home.

Bones here are laid bare. The mark of one's step. Ever moving though you'd think it's still. Just in time. Ever shifting.

The perfect Zen garden can't conjure that.

On the loch a Golden-eye watches us.

Day 5

We crack up a bit on the way back out. Kids great. Parents a bit loopy!

We camp beside the last loch in the alpine, away from the bears. There's a big old wolf shit on the path. That would be so wonderful, to hear wolves at night. Just like Theodora Stanwell-Fletcher searched out in the coldest nights 70 years ago, in Driftwood Valley, not so far from here. Though not quite just like - all the wildness that's gone in that lifetime.

The snow comes heavier today, and the tent begins to sag. But we manage to get a fire going, fierce heart in the night and the swirling snow, and rustle up supper and hot chocolate for the kids inside. Quick dip in the loch - I'm soaking anyway, and it's beautiful. Kai wants to go out and run naked in the snow, but we channel his energy by running a stage of the Tour De France, the two of them lying on their backs on the groundsheet and peddling furiously above their heads, shattered by the final sprint.

Later, when I'm back to the fire and the night is dark grey, I see this movement in the clouds about me, high above, towering, like the mountain spirits are awakening to feast on a night like this. Then I suddenly shift and see that what rises up above me is my own shadow in the cloud, cast by the light of the fire. It's huge. I'm so long-limbed I reach the sky. A lonely giant. And the fire a furnace in the clouds.

Day 6

We wake early and it's very still. The morning's dark with cloud, but opening. It's a long hike out and we keep momentum in the kids with the promise of ice-cream in Anahim Lake, if we can make it in time, and turns taken to blow a whistle for the bears.

We realise after a while that the whistle pretty excellently mimics a marmot, and is probably more interest than threat to any bear.

We haven't seen anyone, no signs, all through. Late afternoon we're back to the Bus and in Anahim, all us people a little smaller. As we're pulling away, ice-creamed, we drive past a big Yukon truck. And then do a double-take. It's Dave, Rosemary, Fred, Monica and Liam, lad WWOOF working with them for a few days. Next thing we're part of a party at Mort's, Fred in his kilt, slabs of chicken, good home-brewed wine, lots of dogs, the old goat. Freya's in heaven (chicken, dogs, party) until one of those dogs bites off the head of her jolly plastic pig.

The Precipice, BC, early September to early October

Precipice Valley, North-West BC, East of Bella Coola. The remotest spot we've been in our travels so far. We feel like we've reached the edge where the tide turns, you hear it turning in the silence. We are with Dave and Rosemary Neads, who have carved out a life here over decades, in a place under ice and snow for 4-5 months of every year. When they first came it was a 4-5 hour journey to Anahim Lake and the road - rough west to Bella Coola, east to Williams Lake. It's now maybe an hour and a half, on the back of a logging track. They built their home over five years, Doug Fir (who was Douglas, I wonder) around broad windows over the valley. And left the Grizzly rub tree below the rim rock, where generation after generation of bear has trod to rear and scratch, always the same approach, the same care with which each in turn has placed its paws, in spots now so old and precise that the dents are worn deep in the earth. The bear is always there about that tree even if all you do is put your small feet in those steps and tug coarse hairs from the bark.

While they were building, they lived in a small log cabin down by the river. It's sandwiched between two of the half-dozen meadows ('long', 'round', 'river') that are scattered amongst the first-growth fir, pine, aspen, cottonwood - little human shapes in the wilderness. There were no meadows here 70 years ago. But there were the trails that we make like animals, never straight. The valley was an avenue for First Nations Chilcotin, Ulkatcho, and other bands, a meeting place for a clutch of paths that joined like rivers to flow-on down to the Atnarko Trench, a rare opening in the sheer wall of the Coast Mountains, path to Bella Coola and the sea beyond. The Hotnarko river of the Precipice flows into the Atnarko, so too trade would flow down-river, like the diamond-fine Obsidian from the volcanic peaks to the north and east, good for arrow-heads, later furs from the interior, while oolichan grease (boiled out of rotting catches of a smelt-like fish) flowed up the way, crucial preserve and dietary supplement for those far from the water. Alexander Mackenzie, first white to cross America east to west, passed north of here in 1793, rivalry between the bands shaping him a far more tricky route than that offered by the broad valley and its ancient ways.

That cabin is our home, cosy mattresses up a ladder-stair close beneath the steep pitch of the roof, big old stove, battered kettle, and a couple of teddy bears - just to keep topical - to welcome the kids. And in the mornings we brew porridge there and then hike up the hill along a steep-sided track, to be welcomed by Chilko, Dave and Rosemary's massive-breasted-hearted dog. He gets so attached to the kids that he won't eat his own breakfast until they arrive. Freya first, bursting out of the forestry at a sprint, red-faced, bright eyed, sweaty. Dave and Rosemary too, new to kids for such a good old stretch of time, build connection out of it - Dave working on his carpentry in the workshed with one on each side, deep in sawdust, hammering nails to make haphazard boats, or Rosemary, firm but loving, with Freya's head in her lap after she wolfs down a great bowl of supper and conks out. Close to the end of our time in the Precipice, Dave told us he was no longer scared of kids. And I no longer of chainsaws. Though certainly respectful. Which amounts to a pretty good exchange.

The sawing, the falling and the bucking, the stacking high into the roof-timbers of Dave's huge wood-shed, is our core task. All the heating over all those snow-bound months will come from that shed. It's getting your cave prepared, is how Dave describes it. I've never used a chainsaw before, and he's a good teacher. He gives sparse, key instruction. He watches. He gives you a clear sense of what you're getting right and wrong. Like getting the hell back and out of there as the tree begins to topple, not worrying for half a fateful moment about the saw trapped in the hinge. And then he leaves you to it. Each morning when I knew I was going to be using the saw I'd try and really focus on the power that blade had to change everything. Maybe that's just the novice in me, but Dave did lend me a book a few days in that detailed different safe techniques amongst dark boxes setting out how many fatalities there'd been in BC because of this, or that moment. And even when his bent-backed pal, another Dave, lumber man visiting from up north, three or four generations of sawdust in his blood, breaks from the fire and his songs to cut some fuel out of the black night, almost dancing with the saw he holds it so light upon his creaking joints, you sense respect. Becs and I are quite a team. Sometimes we head out with Dave as a threesome in the clanking ancient monster of a log truck to fall some real chunky old trees, Dave sizing them up and wedging them so they fall close to the track, the two of us, all day, heaving the barrels of wood across the rough and into the back.

Closer to home we're with the kids, who set up camps under the trees and use the stubs we saw to build palaces.

We meet all the locals on our first night. For many years it was just Dave and Rosemary in the valley in the winter months, alone about the fire between the snow and the wolves, who winter with them on the rocky outcrops half-way up toward the northward rim. But now Klaus might join them for Christmas turkey, after he's fed the cattle. He looks after the 50 odd head, who'll be out on the range all summer, but huddle about the hay-shed once the snow comes. A few miles further down-river there's Fred and Monika, organic farmers just getting started in the valley, all our good potatoes come from them, and Kai's kilt companion. Fred, as with the little man, likes to wear the tartan to a party. And then there's Lee, the ranch-owning-making-life-large-x-impressario, who's here throughout the summer, and hosts us all that night, with a mountain of prime pork ribs, cooked on a bonfire barbecue, dripping thick source, and digs out more whisky and his bass guitar so we can get a tune up and running. Every one of these folk is both larger and smaller in this place - we each stand out, stark, licking grease from our fingers, our togetherness and separation drawn vivid in the space that stretches out beyond. Klaus folds tight into his beard, vanishes, the kids feed the dogs bones, Dave wrestles the pain in his hip, fights alone, Lee sleeves rolled up open-chested works the fire and the talk like a rodeo. We're a small pool of language and construction and cut grass, the laughter ringing out but cut short in silence. Maybe we share vulnerability above all else.

And vulnerability certainly comes to us in the days that follow. Alongside awe. As Dave shows us to the outhouse by the cabin, right on the banks of the river, he gives us a can of bear spray, a 'banger' firing spring, and a ear-splitting horn. Use in reverse order, he tells us. If you're using the spray you're very close indeed. And he reminds us that the bears won't hear us by the water. And he tells us that the most important tool of all is awareness. Stay aware.

Staying aware, growing aware. That's me in this place in those weeks. The way I walk around a bush, or across a meadow, senses open, focussed on the fact that we are no-longer top of the food chain, digging up some remnant sense of what it might be like to be hunted. The cool stones beneath me in the river when I lie back to sink my hair, the smell of hay in the barn as I pull out the fiddle to play in the rain, the age of the wood in the walls of our cabin, our cluster of togetherness, the balance on the open back of the old truck that Dave and Rosemary suggest we should use, even for the journey up to the house, after the bears come.

Dave had seen a sow and 2 small cubs in the meadow behind the cabin that first morning, as he travelled out to pick us up from Anahim Lake. And we saw fresh shits, great piles of it, from then on. Take a poke with your finger and you can tell how fresh it is. But we only saw them and our other locals three or four days in. Klaus came down on his ATV and we piled into the truck to cover 500 meters safe and perch above the meadow where another sow and her two were grazing. I was astonished to see how big she was. Vast. Bigger than a bull, her long long neck stooped down to the grass, moving with slow, deliberate, absolute grace. Contained in her world with her cubs, without fear. But very aware, even though we were downwind, and their eyesight is not great. And then, already juggling anxiety and fear with wonder and thankfulness, the privilege of seeing these beautiful creatures in their place, knowing our own, there's suddenly another adult, ambling out of the trees that lie to the left of the space between us and the others, beneath the ATV and truck. Even Klaus, calm and knowledgeable and aware of the bears he lives besides, was surprised, wary. We backed away, bundled up somewhat reluctant kids, got the motor started (trick where you have to stamp the gas, turn the key, and wriggle it rapidly to get connection - Becs had the touch) and jolted away. The next morning we woke up to the other sow and her cubs just over the fence at the back of the cabin. All in all, seven grizzlies right close by, with another juvernile male, three-year old, wandering about at Fred's. They say there are around 70 along the Hotnarko/Atnarko, one of the highest concentrations in the world, and they're the good old chunky coastal ones, growing far larger than there interior peers on a rich diet of fish and berries and grass.

But it all got a bit stressful, over time. The concentration was unusal even by Precipice standards. Klaus knew that one of the sows was unafraid of human contact - 'not a runner', even from the big dogs together, and the motors. One of the grizzlies had taken three of the calfs. I went for a couple of hikes up towards the rim with the kids, them doing just grand at the bear-bell-yell act, spotting poos and giving them good pokes to see if they'd developed their 24-hour film. But it was pretty fraught. And we couldn't let them out of our sight for one moment, for all the freedom they've grown so used to. We helped Lee and Klaus bring the horses across, 5 including 2 towering, crusading, hoof-crushing Percheron, but although that might have kept the bears out of the meadow in front of the cabin, our route for washing-up at the river, it didn't make any difference out back. And then, as we cut timber in the woods, we returned one morning to find that a grizzly had carefully placed four great territorial shits around the kids' camp of the day before.

We felt it was time for a break! And had always known anyway that we wanted to head up into Tweedsmuir, the broadest stretch of wilderness in British Columbia, for a good while during our time with Dave and Rosemary. And the window for doing so before the cold and snow really began to bite was closing. So we sat round maps with Dave late at night, packed our sacks full of home-baked bread and home-conjured granola, got a lesson on how to get our hosts' proud old Dodge Camper (originally a delivery van) chugging (another art), and set off up the pitted track, for the painted mountains, the Rainbow Mountain Range, kids sloshing about in the back.

solo

Sunday November 6th. We're in Wallowa County, Oregon once again. Enterprise, held between the peaks of the Wallowa mountains and the depths of Hells Canyon. It feels like there's a bunch to tell about the past couple of months, but it's probably best to start here and now. We're at Rick's, and when I walk in the door these days it feels like a home. Put the kettle on, let the chat trickle, sort the kids, the instant warmth in familiar smells, knowing where the floorboards squeek. And Rick and I are with Freya and Kai, now 6 and 4 and a handful of days, while Becs is out and about in the hills. We dropped her off at Buckhorn Lookout on Wednesday, pack square above her head. Too much pasta I reckon but we'll see. She even had to leave her beloved binoculars, worried at the weight and the ways she hoped to take. We all looked down from the Lookout at rim after staggered rim of the north-south valleys that build up to Summit Ridge and the falling beyond, Hell's Canyon, 9,000' odd from the highest point to the twisting Snake. Then I took the kids off to fry bacon on a fire while she headed down. She's due back this coming Wednesday, and today the snow came, so I'm glad that she took my sleeping bag which is by far the warmest of our bunch, and hope she still managed to get a fire glowing to keep the stars company. I must pop out and sniff the air before bed.



But before then, just a few recent photos. These are of the last hike that the two not-so-little people did as 3 and 5 year olds. At Rick's you wake up each day to granite, the Wallowa Mountains right above you. They're always calling. And we seized on blue sky and late snow to climb right into them over four days. Not a soul. Fierce tight fires in the icy nights. Quick dips in alpine lakes (all four of us, it's catching). And Eagle Cap, at the heart of the wilderness. It's just over 9,500'. And here are the no-longer-so-little folk on their horses (take a stick, not any old stick) en-route ...

Six words on F 'n K right now - alive, rooted, together,

loved, loving, whole