Canada
Wild Camping
Vivid rainbows cut colourful swathes across a heavy sky. I filled my stove bottle with petrol and packed minimal overpriced rations into a pannier in front of the old roadhouse, simultaneously swiping the air and slapping exposed skin in a rabid dance. Insects bit furiously in the fifteen minutes before rain. A few kilometres out of town, a bridge on the Alaska Highway passed over Beaver Creek, a clear river running over boulders, its banks littered with huge tree trunks washed downstream when this docile summer current turns fierce in spring. The empty far north reaches of Alaska and the Yukon Territory had taught me about the “wild” in “wild camping”. I checked the river for the rich red run of Sockeye Salmon, they were absent, which hopefully meant the bears were too, so I set up my tent on a flat area of the riverbank just before the rain started. In places like this humans are far from the top of the food chain.
I cooked in the drizzle, far from the tent, keeping food smells away from where I would sleep and, as the rain built, I threw a rope up and tied my heavy food bag high in a tree. This “bear hang” is a method to keep any bears away from the tent and give me time to get away from any carnivorous would-be thieves. The tree should have been about a hundred metres from the tent, but I was tired and wet and there was a convenient tree five metres away so that did the job. In bear country, anxiety plagued me until my food was away, it was like chumming the water for a shark dive but without the cage; a bear can smell food from 18 miles away. In the tent, a false sense of security descended, rain hit the flysheet as a breeze blew through the trees. Warm and dry and protected from the outside world, sitting in my sleeping bag, I calmly wrote about the day’s events. At that moment, I heard sticks crack beneath my food outside, I recorded the encounter in my diary.
26th July 2015: “I sit in the tent and see something moving under my food. I stay still. It comes back. I thought it was a fox but it looks wrong, the tail isn’t bushy and it’s too sleek. It has a cat-like face and a muscular body like a lion, big feet. But about the size of a big dog. It is unsure of me, I’m sure it saw me through the mosquito net. It crouches down in the low plants and sparse grass to hide, occasionally popping up to take a look. A beautiful animal. Just darker than the blonde of a lion, slightly coffee colour, maybe caramel. I wonder if it is something Jim told me about, an animal called a Martin. Have to research. Definitely feel more wild out here. Raised wildlife concerns.”
My concerns were justified.
Bear Encounters and Singing Lessons
Few travellers on the road in Alaska had seen bears, myself included; the imagery of moose in the middle of the road began and ended my list of iconic creatures spotted. In Yukon Territory, the stories began to change, as did accounts of how many black bears drivers had seen each day and descriptions of the giant grizzly I should expect to encounter on the road ahead of me. Questions were asked of me, what does a cyclist do in the road with a bear? I didn’t know the answer. Questions about the deterrents or weapons I carried; my simple answer was “a big stick”. It seemed I was the only person on the road without pepper spray.
Where previously, wild camping had always meant hiding from the eyes of interested strangers, it became about finding a place where I could run for help if needed. Still, cycling continued free of animal intervention until Watson Lake.
Another enormous restock of food before a long stretch down the Cassiar Highway; on the strip mall of Watson Lake I filled my empty bags with heavy provisions before doubling back to a bridge where I’d seen a disused camp site. I pedalled the dead weight of an over loaded touring bike down the gravel entrance path and accelerated around a corner. Perfect camping! The concrete platform where the office used to stand, nature reclaiming the flat sites which once accommodated RV’s, pylons missing their power lines. Following the inviting sound of rushing water, the worn trail lead me meandering between overgrown bushes towards… BEARS! Gravel. Skid. Freeze. Two metres before a collision, one bear dartted away while another jumped behind a tree and stared at me. I stood motionless. It was strange, the things that went through my mind in a bear stand-off, and what came to me is this… On arrival in Anchorage, a friend from university invited me to stay with his family for a week. His four-year-old daughter had a book about bears, which contained a poem to recite to bears if you should ever encounter them. And so alone, slowly edging my way backwards away from a bear, five metres away at most, in a child’s voice I sang “Hey bear, ho bear, I’m just coming through. Hey bear, ho bear, what ya gonna do…” and it worked!
No pepper spray, no guns, no sticks, just singing. I backed away and the bear stayed behind it’s tree. I escaped.
Realising the Magnitude of Danger
Bright blue glaciers topped the mountains that towered above the giant red barns of North American agriculture. In Kitwanga, at the intersection where the Cassiar meets National Highway 16, a free campsite accommodated me and a few RV travellers. Around a campfire in the evening, as sunlight flashed between a canopy of leaves, I described the animal I’d seen on the 26th of July. The older Canadian travellers used their iPad to show me a picture of a Bobcat, thinking that is what it could be, but the fur and ears were wrong. “Well there’s one other thing it could possibly be, but you would be very lucky to be so close to it,” they explained, before showing me a picture of the exact animal I saw on my first night in Canada. I was metres away from a Mountain Lion. It suddenly dawned upon me quite how lucky I'd been.
