Issue link: http://digital.canadawide.com/i/112497
Kick, Glide, Inhale A heart-to-heart about hut-to-hut cross-country skiing on the Bowron���s frozen lakes BY T Y E E B R I D G E P H O T O G R A P H Y BY C H R I S H A R R I S T he six of us are standing around the kill in our skis. It���s ten below, a sunny day in February. Our guide, Dave Jorgenson of Whitegold Adventures, points to the spot where timber wolves took down a young moose on the Kibbee Lake ice. When Jorgenson passed by a week ago it was still obviously a moose: two hindlegs and a foreleg, and a ravaged ribcage open to the sky like the remains of Thanksgiving turkey. All that���s left now is a light drift of grey-brown moose hair; no hide, blood or bones. To erase a 250-kg moose carcass takes a combined effort, Jorgenson explains, kneeling over the hash of tracked snow. Wolves likely cracked off the ribs and carried off the head, leaving the rest for coyotes, wolverines and foxes. In winter, the toothand-claw population of Bowron Lake Provincial Park vastly outnumbers domesticated, ski-wearing species. Kibbee is the first lake on the Bowron Lake Provincial Park canoe circuit. In summer the park attracts a thousand visitors a month, but in winter the preserve is deserted, its public-access log cabins vacant. By late January the surface of the long alpine lakes freezes with ice a foot thick and is covered in ski-able snow: 116 km of flat cross-country terrain below the peaks of the Cariboo Mountains. Jorgenson and partner Cheryl Macarthy are leading us ��� myself plus three of their friends from 100 Mile House, including photographer and naturalist Chris Harris ��� on a fourday ski tour. It���s a chance to get out of the city and learn to cross-country ski, something I���ve never done, but also a chance to explore the region. The northern Cariboo is many things: traditional Dene territory, gold-rush country, recreation destination and a wilderness that has attracted loners, trappers, dreamers and cranks for more than a century. It���s also full of dramatic, postcard-ready mountain vistas. Set the wideangle aside and one discovers a rarity, the world���s only interior temperate rainforest: part of B.C.���s ���wet belt��� of Engelmann spruce and fir, draped with witch���s hair lichen and precipitation-rich enough to collect more than four metres of snow each winter. While the park is far from qualifying as untouched wilderness, it is also one of the only protected areas in B.C. providing sanctuary for moose, grizzly and mountain caribou. And with few humans traversing its nearly 150,00 square hectares in winter, the silence is wide and deep. In the 1920s, three Cariboo couples ��� the Kibbees, McCabes and Wendles ��� helped convince the government to set the Bowron Lakes aside as a wildlife refuge. WESTWORLD p28-31-44-45_Hut.indd 29 >> W I N T E R 2 0 1 2 29 12-10-26 7:35 AM