Chapter 8 Five- or six-foot waves breaking over the top of our canoe
For Andra, paddling in the Bowron Lake Provincial Park was the fulfillment of a lifelong dream. Ever since she was a little girl, growing up in nearby Quesnel, she’d wanted to canoe the circuit, a 116-kilometre loop of lakes, rivers and waterways connected by portages and ringed by imposing peaks. But the experience wasn’t at all what she had imagined. Her plans were disrupted—along with those of many other British Columbians.
On July 3, Andra Holzapfel and her husband, Rick, drove to Bowron Lake Provincial Park with their two sons, Tom and Jack, who were five and three. On their first night, they stayed in the Bear River Mercantile, a combination guest house, restaurant and museum. The next day, they started paddling. Andra and her husband had already completed a couple of short canoe trips on other lakes with their children; this one, which normally takes six to ten days, would be by far their most ambitious.
As they set out, the lakes were like glass under azure skies. The kids were having a good time and the family made excellent progress. Andra and Rick successfully negotiated the first three portages, the longest of which was 2.4 kilometres. They even had an oh-so-Canadian encounter with a moose. On their third day canoeing, they stopped and set up camp around 4:30 in the afternoon. It was still hot, so it seemed like a good opportunity to try some manoeuvres with the boys. They wanted to show them what would happen if the canoe swamped. Rick and Andra got their sons into life jackets, put them in the canoe and tied it to a tree on shore. Then they waded out and began rocking the boat. When it was half full of water, a moose suddenly appeared and disrupted the lesson. She charged the family, retreated and charged again. On her second foray, she strode into the lake to a depth of about a foot. Andra and Rick got behind the canoe and dragged it to where the water was up past their waists. As they did that, a branch on the tree to which it was roped swayed, spooking the moose. She moved back, allowing Rick and Andra to retrieve their paddles and life jackets, cut the line and take the canoe further out into the lake. However, she returned for a third time, and the family stayed in the boat watching her for about an hour as she presided angrily over the campsite. When another party of paddlers joined them in yelling at the moose, she finally left. “It was a real adventure for the boys,” Andra said.
On July 7, the Holzapfels were a little late starting because the moose had kept them up the night before. They got going around 10:00 a.m., but made good time and reached the end of Isaac Lake, the biggest in the chain, a whopping thirty-eight kilometres long. Their destination was just a little farther, a small lake, McLeary, on the south side of the circuit. To get there they went on one more paddle, a minor one, and completed a couple more portages. Although the portages were short, they were strenuous because Andra’s youngest son, Jack, had fallen asleep, so she had to carry him as well as her thirteen-kilogram pack.
When they got to McLeary Lake and found a campsite, it was early, one or two in the afternoon. “But we were done for the day,” Andra said. “We were tired.” They wanted to rest up before attempting the next section, the Cariboo River, one of the trickiest parts of the whole trip. Then, just after the Holzapfels unpacked their canoe, they spotted a lightning strike. Almost right away, a huge plume of smoke roiled up behind them from somewhere near Isaac Lake. They saw the column getting bigger and bigger, and the smoke started curving over the mountainside toward them.
At the same time, Mark Taylor and Terri Carlson, two park operators, were in a speedboat travelling along Isaac Lake telling visitors about the newly imposed campfire ban. They and two park rangers, Jeremy Pauls and Ashley Brassington, were the staff responsible for the 150,000-hectare park. On July 7, the rangers were in the southwestern part of the circuit and the park operators in the northeastern section. Although campers were not allowed to use any motorboats, the park staff had them so they could patrol the area and offer assistance to any campers who needed it. When the lightning storm started, Mark and Terri sought shelter. “We could literally watch the storm come through and the fire start. It was pretty incredible,” Mark told me. From his vantage point, he saw more clearly than the Holzapfels. “There were seven smokestacks, not just one. It was quite a sight really. You knew pretty quick that it was something pretty serious.” Like Heather Gorrell, Mark called the Cariboo Fire Centre to report the blaze and also discovered that the centre itself was being evacuated. “That was a little spooky to hear. Obviously if they have been evacuated, you know that removes a lot of our support. If something did happen, something medical, it’s a long way.”
Without any guidance from his superiors, Mark started a local evacuation. “You didn’t have to be a genius to realize that it was a good idea to get everybody out,” he said. “The fires were growing fast—they got to over a thousand hectares within a couple of hours. The smoke was thick and you heard that noise, that freight-train noise that everyone talks about. And then, of course, the official word came through Heather.”
The fire was burning on both sides of Isaac Lake near the southeastern end. This was more or less the halfway point in the circuit. Turning people around to go back from there meant they faced about eight kilometres of portage. “Not everyone’s favourite cup of tea—portaging their canoes when they’ve just done that over the last two days,” Mark observed. But going forward when you had a thousand hectares of forest fire ahead of you, pitch black smoke columns, and dense smoke settling in the valleys wasn’t an appealing option either.
Over by McLeary Lake, Andra and Rick could see there was cause for concern. They abandoned their idea of stopping, reloaded their canoe and launched on the Cariboo River despite the hazards the river posed. The park map warned: “Navigating the silt-laden waters of the Cariboo River requires care and attention. Canoeists must remain alert for sweepers, deadheads and other hazards at all times.” “Sweepers” are fallen trees that block the passage of a canoe and “deadheads” are stumps or logs that are mostly or fully submerged.
“The weather started to get bad, windy,” Andra recalled. Though paddlers can encounter squalls and choppy water in the middle of Isaac Lake, it was uncommon to run into that where they were. “As the fire picked up you could feel it sucking the air toward itself,” Andra said. The blaze was generating its own bluster.
The Cariboo River was swift, so Andra and Rick had to keep a sharp eye out for the hazards the map had flagged. They hadn’t done much river canoeing, but steered through without trouble. Five kilometres later, at the end of the river, they spotted an emergency radio. They got out of the canoe and reported the fire to the park rangers, who had heard about it shortly before their call. “The wind was kicking up and we couldn’t stay on the river there any longer. So we started to go and were near the entrance of the next lake when the wind pushed up really, really strong. Five- or six-foot waves started breaking over the top of our canoe,” Andra recounted.
As the water swept over them, Andra looked at her two boys and thought, What have I done? What kind of mother am I that I’d put my kids in this situation? But she didn’t have time to pursue this line of thought much longer. The circumstances demanded her full attention. They were in danger of swamping and the steep, sharp waves made steering difficult. Aiming to go west, they found it difficult to make headway. Normally, if canoeists encounter waves they will try to point their bows across them. In general, less water will splash in the boat if the waves are coming over the bow than if they are hitting the side. The craft is also less likely to tip than if it’s sideways to the waves, rocking in the troughs.
A nearby sandbank looked inviting. Andra and Rick did what you’re not supposed to do. They turned sideways to the waves and let a surge of water thrust them onto the beach. They landed successfully. Within minutes, Andra had the kids out of the canoe and wrapped in a blanket. When it started to rain, she got out their rain gear. They erected an emergency shelter and Andra felt better. The kids were warm. She had taken care of them. They had been in proper life jackets in the canoe and she had been prepared with the appropriate equipment. She felt like she wasn’t such a bad mother, after all.
Then the two park rangers, Jeremy and Ashley, approached from the western end of Lanezi Lake. The rangers were telling campers to move away from the forest fire. Andra and Rick, of course, had been trying to do that when they ended up on the sandbank. The rangers understood why they might have sought temporary shelter there, but reminded them that they were only supposed to camp in the designated sites. Makeshift spots like the sandbar were not permitted. They weren’t safe and it was difficult for the rangers to keep track of people who weren’t in the official camping areas. Since Andra and Rick were past the halfway point, the rangers didn’t ask them to backtrack, which was a bit of luck. Though there were portages ahead, they only amounted to two kilometres altogether, so the second half of the circuit was not as arduous a prospect as the first. Fortunately, the wind had begun to drop some, allowing Andra and her family to pack up and leave. It was 5:00 or 6:00 p.m. They had been ready to quit at 2:00. “Now,” said Andra, “We were really tired.”
Anxious about tipping, Andra and Rick hugged the shore. The first campsite on Lanezi Lake was full, so they pressed on. A big group of people was already staying at the next site. As Andra related this part of the story, she said something that astonished me: “We tried to stop there but they wouldn’t let us come in.” I couldn’t believe that when you had bone-weary parents and exhausted kids, coping with a forest fire, high winds and rough water, anyone would be so unaccommodating. “This was a guide with a whole bunch of tourists,” Andra said. “Because we were slower, we ran into them several times. They were all young, in their twenties. They were taking sightseeing tours and stopping and doing little hikes. They were not taking the situation seriously at all. The rangers were really upset with them. I think that they might not be allowing the guide to take tours in there anymore.” I was so surprised by the anecdote, because in the many conversations I’d had about the wildfires, this kind of heedlessness was rarely mentioned.
Rather than confronting the unfriendly group of travellers, Andra and Rick moved on. When they finally landed at campsite number 34, it was dark and they’d paddled over eighteen kilometres, completed two portages and unloaded the canoe twice. They had been on the go for about twelve hours. Andra remembered how warmly they were welcomed: “It was a real community feel with all of the people staying there. When we arrived, there were eighteen canoes, but at least two or three more groups came in after us. It was amazing how many people helped us just to get dinner ready and to set up. As more people came in, we were all sharing food and helping each other and encouraging each other and it was a real neat atmosphere at that campground.”
Over on the northeastern part of the chain, park operators Mark and Terri were still trying to make sure everyone was safe. The canoeing conditions were far from ideal. The fire-generated winds were stirring up whitecaps. Ash rained down, which made it hard to tell water from smoke. “When it got to be dusk, and people were still in the fire zone, we loaded them on the boat,” Mark said. He gave a lift to about ten people, some of whom had sustained minor injuries. Normally, people paddle for two or three hours a day, so it wasn’t surprising that making them go for eight would cause a few aches and pains. “At times like that,” Mark said, “it’s just easier to put them on the boat and take a bit of stress off them and it speeds things up too.” Of course, there was a limit to how much the staff could hurry the evacuations, since they could offer no motorized way of negotiating the portages. Everybody had to walk those. It was about midnight when Mark and Terri finally felt their visitors were out of immediate danger and got off the water.
Andra remembers how heavy the smoke was the first night of the forest fire. It was not all that far away from them and gave the gibbous moon a lurid orange cast. The next day dawned grey and smoky. It was as if an impenetrable fog had descended. “It started to feel ominous,” Andra said. Oppressive, too, was the lack of sound. There were no birds or insects—at least no bugs flying through the air, only corpses of them littering the surface of the lake. Instead of all the usual summer buzzing, cheeping, peeping, squeaking, chirping and chirruping, an awful dead silence reigned. That morning, before Andra and her husband launched, the rangers told them the whole park was being evacuated. They had to get out as quickly as possible.
The family had three portages left before the end of the circuit. This was where Andra felt most uneasy because of the possibility that a fire across the portage route might cut them off from an exit. She didn’t know how many fires the lightning strikes had started. Nor did she know exactly where the fires were. The rangers tried to be helpful, but they didn’t have a lot of information either. One of them told Andra they were waiting for someone to do a flyover, which would give them a better picture of what was happening. “But we were a very low priority in the province. We didn’t know that at the time,” Andra said. “We just knew that there was no help coming, that nobody was flying over, that nobody was looking at it. It felt like nobody really cared what was going on. We didn’t know that there was this big provincial emergency going on. We felt abandoned.”
“The whole time we were telling the kids, ‘If you can do this, we’ll go to the ghost town when we get out,’ because the circuit starts near Barkerville,” Andra said. Barkerville was at the centre of the Cariboo Gold Rush and is preserved as a historic site and tourist attraction. “When the kids started to get tired we just would promise them we were going to go to the ghost town and we were going to have a lot of fun. We would play games with them as we went, sing songs, try to keep their spirits up and not show them how we were feeling.”
Andra and Rick were driving pretty hard to reach the end of the chain of lakes, but at one point on that fifth day, the smoke cleared a bit. They could hear birds and bugs again, a good sign. Andra and Rick were beat. They decided they had gone far enough—that they could call it quits for the day. But after they unloaded the canoe and began setting up camp, the smoke came back, and the birds and insects turned eerily quiet. In light of all the uncertainty about the location of the fires, they opted to move on after all. They took down the tents, loaded up and did the remaining two portages, pulling in at campsite 44. From there on, they would be travelling on water. Even if there were fires in the neighbouring woods, they felt they’d be safer. But the long days and physical strain were exacting a toll. “By the last little lake that we did, I was falling asleep in the canoe paddling because we were so tired,” Andra told me.
On July 9, the weather was bad again. On Bowron Lake, the last lake in the circuit, the Holzapfels were thrust to shore by strong winds. “It took us a long time to find somewhere to put in. It’s really cliffy there. We were stressed out about it. We found the tiniest little place where we couldn’t even set up a tent and we were talking about setting up a tarp emergency shelter for the night if it didn’t slow. We were only about two kilometres from the end of the circuit but we were stuck there.”
They waited for the wind to die down, and then pushed to the end as fast as they could. “The whole time my husband was yelling at me, ‘I don’t see any whitecaps yet,’ and we just kept going,” Andra said. “We figured if we saw whitecaps, we’d pull onto the side. I was watching for rocks and things in the water because when there are waves it’s harder to see those things. And then we were so relieved when we got in.”
The Holzapfels spent one night at Bowron Lake Provincial Park campground, where they phoned their families, who had no idea how they had been faring. That was how they learned that their story was just one of many—that a maelstrom had hit BC and lightning had ignited hundreds of fires. The park rangers and operators evacuated just under 250 people. They cleared the eastern section of the park in two days, and the western portion in two and a half. Despite everyone’s haste and agitation, no one had an accident. No one capsized.
A transplanted New Zealander, Mark had never been through anything like the forest fire in Bowron Lake Provincial Park, but he had served for eight years in the New Zealand navy. “Ultimately, that’s good preparation for stressful situations,” he remarked, chuckling.
Andra thought her kids were “real troopers” throughout the whole ordeal. “It took us five days and ten hours and we figured that is the world record for a three- and a five-year-old.” Indeed, the boys’ achievement put them in exclusive company. The vast majority of British Columbians who were evacuated in the summer of 2017 escaped fires by using a vehicle. They hopped into a car or truck and drove somewhere—to a friend, a relative, an evacuation centre. Only a small percentage got to safety by walking and paddling out. Of those, Tom and Jack were surely among the youngest. Remarkably, the boys wanted to come back another year, and they did. The Holzapfels paddled the circuit again in the summer of 2018, this time taking a more leisurely eight days to complete it—under perfect conditions.