7 - Snowmobiling
8 - VIA Rail Part Two, Vancouver
9 - Washington, Oregon, California
10 - San Francisco
11 - Big Sur
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7 - SNOWMOBILING
We dress up with thermal underwear and our big coats, and wait for our pickup. The tv weather report says British Colombia is experiencing floods and a mudslide.
British Colombia is where we are headed.
We get picked up by Big Al, driving a people-carrier with about four or five other strangers in there. He takes us all to a clothes shop to rent some winter waterproofs, and then we hit the very icy road heading west. Pretty soon, we’re going up and down the treacherous mountain roads. Al’s choice of music - some Canadian Country and Western by the sound of it - was appalling, but we we‘re stuck with it.
Ralph is an old guy, probably only about fifty-five, who comes out to greet us. He speaks exactly like Arnold Schwarzenegger. I almost asked him to say something like “My name is not Quaid!” or “You blew my cover! I’ll kill you all!” but stopped myself just in time. He takes our group into a warm portakabin office and goes over our kit. He’s not too happy about our choice of clothing, and isn‘t afraid to let Big Al know. Some of us have the wrong type of boots, or gloves, or whatever. For a moment I think he’s not going to let us go on the tour, but he gives us all helmets and starts up the safety talk.
To get used to the machines, we do a few figure eights around the nearby field. Steph and I are on a double, with me driving, and the others are all on singles. We’re shown how to distribute our weight when turning, and shown some basic hand signals - slow down, stopping, everything is OK, and so on.
It’s rather like a combination of go-karting and motorcycling. Being so low to the ground, snowmobiles have a way of making you feel you’re going a lot faster than you actually are. It’s ace. Our big double sled is surprisingly easy to tip over, so I’m glad of this time to get used to it a little bit.
Just as I start to get bored, we’re off. We shoot towards the woods and start picking up speed. These machines are amazing. We’re travelling over a rough track, littered with all kinds of unseen forest detritus covered in a layer of snow, and the skidoos roar along quite happily, never protesting even when things get really bumpy. They accelerate with enough force to push you right back in your seat, and within seconds you can be tearing along at a heck of a speed.
I managed to get the skidoo up to forty mph on a few brief bursts, and we we‘re both laughing until our heads we‘re about to fall off. Mostly though, I’d guess we kept to a steady twenty-five or so, slowing right down for the sharper corners, or when we needed to pass between markers with more precision. With all this concentrating and shifting and leaning into corners, it’s quite a physical day.
We see wolf tracks. Ralph and a couple of the others actually see a wolf chasing two deer through the forest, but we missed them. We often find ourselves at a halt, alone in the woods on a mountain. I start to wonder if a snowmobile can outrun a bear.
For two hours, everything is just great. Then, the coat and waterproof trousers defence starts failing. The constant rain has worked it’s way through, and now the whole thing becomes more like hard work. We’re both soaked and starving. On the frequent stops, we get seriously cold. We halt at about 2000ft and Ralph points up, to the next mountain.
“We’re going derr,” he says.
We head on up and the track gets a lot tougher - tight bends and high drops, some only a couple of feet away in places. As we tear along, the track sometimes causes the skidoo to slide a bit too close to a sheer drop, and that was always a fun moment.
We hit a patch of slushy ice and that’s where the trouble starts. People get stuck. We all manage to get a bit further and then the ice starts to clog up some of the skidoos. Ralph calls a halt and starts fiddling with the first machine to break down, turning it on its back to start clearing the inner workings of slush.
He’s a lovely man, and a great guide, but he handles this situation all wrong. The rest hut isn’t too far away from here, and instead of organising our immediate relocation, he keeps us all standing in the ice and snow, soaking and shivering with the cold, whilst he ****s about with this one skidoo. By now we are literally drenched, and Steph is quietly crying because she’s so cold.
We are there for over half an hour. As Ralph ****s about, the other snowmobiles start conking out, one by one. I start muttering a few choice words, not understanding why he needs everybody to stay out here when there’s shelter about five minutes away. And now he has more than one machine to sort out, and he starts going from one to the other, starting them up and then waiting so long to get going that they start conking out again.
Eventually, he’s happy and we all get going, straight to that hut. It’s a lot smaller than I expected, and nobody had been there for days so there were huge drifts of snow to negotiate.
Inside, it’s not much warmer. Ralph gets a fire going pretty quickly and we all start stripping off our wet gear. Before long, garments are hanging off the backs of chairs and wall pegs, all of them steaming as they begin the long process of drying out. My *** is soaked. Pants, thermals, jeans and waterproof trousers makes four layers of ass-wringing wetness. Despite my best efforts, and plenty of time in rotation with the others in front of the fire, my clothes stay wet.
We are 6200ft up, so we’ve done pretty well. The rain has turned to snow again, so at least something is going right. We eat our packed lunches and only then do we start to chat and relax a little bit.
The group is a nice mix. There’s a young guy from the UK who has been travelling the world, a Brazilian guy who we later meet again in Vancouver, and a German couple who are somewhat reserved and yet authoritative at the same time. Then there’s Big Al, who recommends we go all the way down to Baja, California just to try some hamburger joint. We ask if we can smoke in the hut, and everyone is okay with that, which was a relief.
I’m amazed when Ralph tells us we’ve already travelled over twenty miles to get here.
An hour later, about 4pm by now, we put our damp clothes back on and set off on the trip back down the mountain. We’re already cold and wet so we can only accept that we’re going to get colder and wetter with a kind of miserable defeatism. I was just hoping we made it back before it got dark, mainly because of the drops, because I no longer gave a **** about the wolves or the bears.
The trip back is pretty fast and workmanlike, and the descent speed allows us to get through the soggy ice patches without any problems. Now we can really push the speed on some of the flat stretches, and the pace generally gets faster the further we descend. Back at the office, I have a go on a single seater machine, just to see what it feels like.
The drive back is dreadful. If I thought hurtling along an icy mountain was dangerous, that’s nothing to what we went through getting back to Jasper. We knew the road was about to be closed down for the night because of the appalling conditions, which had seriously deteriorated into a maelstrom of sleet and rain. The police are literally putting up the ‘Road Closed’ signs as we pass through. Big Al drives exceptionally well, handling more than a few hairy moments with reassuring competence. A couple of times the ice sends us slewing towards the barrier, but he manages to keep us on the road, more or less, and after two crazy hours we are back in Jasper.
We strip our gear off and drape it over the fixtures and fittings to dry. Despite all the hardship, it was a great day, and it would become my favourite time of the entire trip. I remember thinking at one point about the people back home. With an eight hour time difference here, they were probably eating their dinners by the tv. We were snowmobiling through the Rocky Mountains. It’s moments like that that make you realise that you’re doing something really special.
8 - VIA RAIL PART TWO and VANCOUVER
The next morning we get a lift in the hotel shuttle bus to the launderette. I say launderette, but it also doubled as an internet café, so you can drink a latte and surf the web as your washing gets done. What a great idea. After a few hours, washing and drying and packing our bags back down, we went to the train station and checked in the luggage. The train, due at 2pm, is at least an hour late. There’s a shocker.
We go and have a late breakfast at a place next to the Whistler Inn. It’s cheap, and enormous, and lovely. Steph has what appears to be a burger with all the trimmings, but the burger itself was the cap of a gigantic Portobello mushroom. That’s another great idea, but it’s a pity they have to happen in the middle of nowhere.
The train arrives, then spends an age ****ing about attaching another three carriages. Back and forth, back and forth, they seem to be doing it one coach at a time. The trains may be comfortable, and clean, and everything you’d ever want in a train, but the dawdling is a killer.
When we eventually board, it’s nice to dump the coats and settle in, but it’s not the same feeling as the first time. The VIA Rail hymen has been broken. There are a lot of rowdy old folk here, and most of them seem to be Brits. The kind of loud, sixty-something pisshead types who usually winter in the Costa del Sol. We get away from the noise by heading for the Observation Car, but that’s packed full of forty-something pisshead Brit ****ers. Probably the kids.
There are too many people on the train this time around. It’s dark at six, so we see virtually nothing of the mountains again. We think we can get to the Obs Car early tomorrow morning, and catch the last few peaks in daylight, and make plans to rise early.
The VIA Rail staff look at us for that extra half second as we walk the length of the Silver and Blue Class back to our seats. It’s the hair, it has to be. At dinner, sitting with an elderly pleasant Brit couple (abstainers, I think), I catch sight of my reflection in the window. What the **** have I done?
It’s a long night. The train kept getting delayed for God-only-knows what reasons, and we arrive at Kamloops something like an hour and a half later than we should have. Close to the front of the train, we sit in the Bingo carriage and wait patiently. I watch the GPS count down the last few miles to the station. An elderly couple come and join us, and the conversation veers around to cigarettes and smoking, and then thankfully to travelling. This guy seems to have been all over. He talks and talks and talks. When we chip in with something, he seems to ignore it and then rejoins his own monologue. His wife looks patiently on, not saying much at all. Maybe it’s just his way of dealing with the wait.
The guard says he’s only going to open the one door, which happens to be at the other end of the Coach Class section. We bustle our way through sleeping plebs, sprawled out anywhere they can get comfortable, and trip over bags and legs and anything else left lying around. Outside, it’s freezing, but we bravely stick it out long enough for two cigarettes. After hours of not smoking, and then suddenly smoking two in a row, we feel pretty vile.
I can’t get to sleep. I put my headphones on, play some music and spend a long time looking out of the window from the lower bunk. From my dark womb, I see a world of silvers and blues, of ice and still bodies of frozen water, and a world of plunging chasms. I see the realm of wolves and bears. I see the icy, methane slush of Titan. It’s all beautiful, in a vicious way. The realm of some fairytale Ice Queen. I consider waking Steph up but don’t, thinking she’d have preferred the sleep, but it’s a decision I now regret. |
