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.