Hermits and Ghosts
May 22, 1981 From Burton (446m), where some of my deepest insights into the powers of the wind gods occured, it is just 35 kilometres to Nakusp (457m).
With the discovery of silver, lead and zinc in 1891, Vancouver speculators rushed to buy property here and, as the metals boom expanded, Nakusp grew into a shipbuilding centre. The famous sternwheeler Minto was built here. The SS Nakusp, SS Moyie and the Rossland plied these waters, carrying supplies, prospectors and adventurers. Railway barons from Canada and the U.S. competed to be part of the transportation network, attracted by boomtowns springing up among the hills to the east.
Appropriately, I decided to rent a room in the town’s most historic establishment, the Leland Hotel, built in 1892. A soft bed, coat hangers to air my pongy strip, cold beer at street level—all this seemed a bargain at $10.00.
Perhaps I’d have been better off with a pint of ale in my water bottle next morning. Forgetting my recently-discovered allergy to apple juice, I filled up with the stuff on the way out of town and paid for my oversight with a terrible bellyache. In spite of the cramps, I covered 46 hilly kilometres to New Denver in 3 hours. On my seventh straight day in the saddle, the climbing hurt, either side of the aptly-named hamlet of Hills.
With stomach settled, I ordered a home-cooked meal of shepherd’s pie and salad in a little New Denver café. I was well into the area formerly known as the Silvery Slocan. Originally given the unoriginal name Eldorado, New Denver (556m) finally ended up as an homage to its Colorado predecessor. During the paranoia of the Second World War, the community also figured in a sad chapter of B.C. history, as a centre of the Japanese-Canadian internment system. Eight camps were scattered through this territory: Kaslo, New Denver, Tashme, Roseberry, Slocan City, Lemon Creek, Sandon, and Greenwood. Were these beautiful, untrammeled mountains any solace, I wonder, to those hapless Canadians who had suddenly lost their freedom—not to mention their worldly goods—due to a distant conflict?
Across Slocan Lake, Valhalla Park now protects some of that beautiful and wild alpine country and forest, once coveted by the timber industry.
Just outside New Denver, Highway #31A drops off a steep hillside to hurtle into a narrow valley. I was eating up the thrill, until I saw the road disappear around a hairpin turn. I was heading straight for the creek. Laying “Old Blue” at a precarious angle, I managed to navigate the curve, using the last inches of pavement on the outside of the turn. Immediately, the road demanded a quick opposing yank of the handlebars to line up a Bailey bridge, crossing the creek. But the leading edge rose some four inches above the pavement. A mighty heave lifted my front wheel, but the more heavily laden rear end slammed into the offending timber with a sickening thud and twanging of spokes. Frantic inspection revealed only a tiny flat spot on the rim. Praising my wheel builder out loud, I pumped on toward Kaslo. To get there, my tired “pistons” were compelled to push 520 metres upward, to mist-shrouded Zincton Summit (1085m), past a series of beaver ponds and small lakes.
“It is not down in any map; true places never are.” ~ Herman Melville
This picturesque “Valley of Ghosts” once bustled beaver-like with industrial activity. The rough and ready settlements of Retallack, Zincton, Three Forks and Sandon were the heart of the silver rush. The race to build a rail line here resulted in a small scale war between Canadian Pacific, with its Nakusp & Slocan Railway, and the American Great Northern subsidiary, Kaslo & Slocan. The competition led to an American raid on the CPR’s Sandon station, which had been built in haste, on land claimed by Great Northern.
K&S raiders slipped into town in the dead of night, released the brakes on CPR’s bunkhouse cars, sending them careering down the spur, then used their locomotive to tow the offending station into the creek.
The ruins on Zincton Summit are the remnants of their greed.
While snapping photos of jumbled timbers and scrap metal, I noticed another ramshackle building on the opposite side of the road. I wandered over. It certainly wasn’t built by the same hands as the infrastructure of the old mine site. Beams and boards have been erected, shall we say, whimsically.
A disheveled chap appeared on the porch of the eccentric structure. It’s apparent that the shack is a mixture of lumber and materials scavenged from the crumbling mine. In a thick Cockney accent, the lone mountain man expressed pride in his labours.
“Seen as Ah nevah built nuffink befaw, Ah don’t fink Ah done a bad job. D’you mate?”
“Not bad at all,” I agreed.
When I wandered into the Purcells, at 22, I was already an an experienced outdoorsman. Del, I learned, was fresh from the streets of “Sawf London.” He invited me in for tea.
“Ah play Moog synfasizah,” he told me, though there was no sign of a keyboard among his meagre belongings . . . or an electrical source to power one for that matter. Imagining a drastic change of scenery—from these cloud-tangled forests of British Columbia to, say, Albert Hall—I saw Del as his former Art-Rocker persona, a groovy figure, right down to his gold nose-ring and purple platform shoes. The latter, unfortunately, had not exactly prospered from service as mountain boots.
Only a few years earlier, I had lived in similar circumstances, without electricity or plumbing. Perhaps my home was a little more airtight—a broad-axed cabin built by the experienced hands of pioneer miners—and furnished somewhat more luxuriously, but it’s the smells of bush living that transported me back to my old home not so far away, on the east side of the Purcells. The mixture of wood smoke and kerosene lamp oil permeates everything. Consider the fact that, out here, without running water, one can’t be so fastidious, or obey the endless modern advertising prescription of obsessive scrubbing, cleaning and disinfecting.
Unlike Del, I wasn’t exactly a recluse in these hills. My mountain hideaway, though not nearly so close to a road, was a veritable metropolis compared to this lonely outpost. And I was not alone in my little cabin at “the Meadow.” Though our paths have diverged, my destination is the Columbia Valley, where I’ll meet the woman who shared that alpine redoubt with me. Our daughter will join me on the train back to the Coast, where she’ll spend the summer with me.
I said farewell to the lonely English hermit and, as the kilometres passed under my tires, I slipped into my own solo retreat again, becoming an extension of my machine. Was I driving the bicycle forward, or was it driving me? The sensation varied, according to the grade of the road. On the east side of Zincton Summit, I gripped the handlebars, as the bike took me on a wild ride down to Kaslo, on the banks of beautiful Kootenay Lake.
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