Issue link: http://digital.canadawide.com/i/112497
predecessors in the region���s gold-rush towns of Wells and Barkerville, men with their own country-of-origin nicknames like George ���Scotty��� Gilchrist (from Scotland) and ���Dutch Bill��� Dietz (from Germany, close enough). Family lore has it that while living in the Cariboo, Grandpa Spud padded his income as a poacher, selling moose meat to then-owners of the Wells Hotel, to be served up as roast beef. Like every absent father or grandfather, Spud���s distance created a kind of trail ��� a passage that sons and grandsons try to follow to see what they missed out on. In my case, that means tracing his footsteps across the northern Cariboo and, more specifically, setting eyes on a real moose. Lichens are one thing, a moose is another. Yet beyond photographs, and despite many extended trips into the wilds of B.C. and Alaska, I���ve never seen one. For a Canadian to not even have glimpsed a moose on the hoof seems a basic gap ��� a civic one, like not knowing your provincial capitals. But as the grandson of a Cariboo poacher, it���s also embarrassing. By late afternoon my face tingles from the mix of cold, sun and wind. It feels good to bring blood to my generally bloodless, citified head. It���s why people move to such places: to have this feeling once a week or every day, rather than once every six months. And though the moose ��� and wolves ��� continue to elude us at Indianpoint Lake, we spot three trumpeter swans in formation, heading east in a hurry. It���s a hopeful backcountry moment. At seven to 12 kilos, trumpeters are the heaviest, meatiest birdon-the-wing in North America. From the 1600s on they were hunted relentlessly, as, along with a sizable roast, they were said to provide the best feathers for quill pens. By the 1930s, there were only a few dozen breeding pairs left in Canada. But 70 years on, thanks to populations rebounding in Alaska and British Columbia, Cygnus buccinator is back in the thousands. We reach Indianpoint���s tin-roofed log cabin at dusk. Jorgenson and Macarthy get the wood stove going, and over another wellplanned meal indulge a few questions about Cariboo life. The couple moved to Wells 15 years ago to be near the Bowron Lakes and surrounding mountains, where they spend winters leading backcountry treks; in summer, they run hiking and canoe trips, along with a well-loved local restaurant, the Bear���s Paw Cafe (try the barbecue ribs). Asked why they���ve stayed on ��� a stupid question, really, but one feels compelled to ask ��� Jorgenson does his best to define the ineffable. ���There are places with bigger mountains and bigger towns, more of everything. But there���s something here you can���t get on the North Shore of Vancouver or in Whistler, or Fernie, or Banff,��� he says. ���The North Cariboo has this profound effect on people, but not in a zipline, helicopter-ski, white-water-raft, adrenaline-rush way. More in a deep, insidious, poke-to-the-heart kind of way.��� Since the 19th century, restless immigrants ��� Billy Barker, Fred Wells, my grandfather ��� have gravitated to the Cariboo, a place where they could not only snowshoe, canoe and hunt but have a shot at filling their kitchen drawer with gold nuggets. The Bowron Lakes lie in what is known in tourismindustry boilerplate as ���The Heart of the Cariboo Goldfields,��� and if the slogan sounds corny, it���s worth noting that the gold is still here; people are still finding it. Following the recent stock market crash, gold prices have spiked to around $1,600 an ounce ��� making old claims potentially profitable. Meanwhile, mining companies are hiring in Quesnel, says Jorgenson, and local mountaintops are getting controversial interest from would-be ���hard-rock��� gold operations, the sort that pulverize ore and liquefy the gold with cyanide. Back in the 1860s, gold briefly turned Barkerville ��� about 15 minutes from the Bowron Lakes and now a historic town run by a local trust ��� into the largest North American city north of San Francisco, population circa 5,000. The town was named for Billy Barker, who struck a motherlode vein that paid out to successive miners the current equivalent of $60 million. The town of Wells, 10 minutes further down the road, was also named for a miner, who arrived 60 years later: Fred Wells got his start pick-axing, hand-crushing and sorting gold from the quartz veins of Cow Mountain in the 1920s. After a decade, his Cariboo Gold Quartz Mine was minting gold bricks, the first two of which he stuck in a backpack and snowshoed solo to Quesnel. EVEN IN THE ABSENCE ��� or undetected presence ��� of mega-fauna such as moose and mountain caribou, the Bowron is not without minor thrills, either, as men like Wells and my grandfather well knew. On the morning of day two, Jorgenson is fetching water from an ice-hole chopped in the lake when he surprises a wolverine devouring the last of some less fortunate creature. At noon, Continued on page 44 WESTWORLD p28-31-44-45_Hut.indd 31 >> W I N T E R 2 0 1 2 31 12-10-26 7:35 AM