“Things don’t always go according to plan,” Anna said. “Then you just change your plans.”
I was bent over a log, feeling lightheaded and sick to my stomach. We’d driven six hours (two hours longer than usual, due to construction and traffic) to get to Strathcona Park, a vast swathe of mountain wilderness in the middle of Vancouver Island. This was my fifth backpacking expedition in Strathcona with Anna; it’s become a seasonal tradition. Anna and I met in undergrad and bonded over poetry and native plants. Anna encouraged me to become more outdoorsy and helped me reach my “cool mountain hippie girl” goals.
Anna is a poet and she lifts, so though she immediately burns in the sun like a poet should, she can gallop up mountains at a clip. She patiently endures my many stops to catch my breath, saying she admires that I know I’ll suffer but I do it anyways. I have a whole year between hiking trips to forget how much I suffered (and not prepare for the next trip in any way). I just remember the endless vistas of peaks and glaciers, the post-hike evenings where Sidekicks pasta tastes better than dinner at Il Terrazzo, the mornings waking by a pristine lake surrounded with flowers. “The alpine is my happy place,” I told my brother just before I left.
But this time was different. When we opened the car doors at the Flower Ridge parking lot, a heat wave walloped us. It was over thirty degrees, after a very cool start to the summer (down to ten degrees earlier in June). We crossed Henshaw Creek—a rush of tangled rapids—and headed into the forest. The tall firs and cedars provided a cool reprieve from sun. I’d read this was a relatively easy trail and knew it was a popular day hike.
Just a few minutes in, I had to stop. Fair enough—the trail start was steep. But when I tried to catch my breath, I felt nausea sweep over me and my head swam. I sat down and took off my pack until it passed. “This is so weird,” I told Anna.
She said, “If it happens again, we can just go down and find somewhere else to camp.”
No, I thought. I don’t quit. I might suffer, but I make it. But two minutes later, I stooped under my pack, panting and dizzy. A couple more times and Anna called it. “I don’t want you to have a medical emergency.”
I pressed her cold water bottle against my face and held onto the log like I was drowning. There was no way we’d get to the top at this rate, but I hated to admit defeat. I teared up a little.
I could only remember one time this had happened before, eighteen years ago when I was backpacking in Europe and started to hyperventilate on the Athens subway. Alice and I had to sit in a café drinking iced coffee for most of the day while Athenian men strolled by in three-piece suits. Well, if I’d had to miss the Acropolis due to heat stroke, surely Flower Ridge could wait.
We managed to snag the very last campsite in the nearby drive-in campground. Such luxuries: a picnic table, pit toilets, and an old-timey pump that gushed ice water. We walked through a field of daisies in the golden hour to swim in Buttle Lake’s shallows, then spread our blanket on fragrant native mint (I boiled it later for tea) and read until mist started to blur the edges of the lake.
The next morning, after the usual garbage camping sleep of people in their thirties, we were refreshed and ready to try Flower Ridge again. I carried only my daypack, well-stocked with water and snacks. The morning was about ten degrees cooler than the previous afternoon. The trail was, as predicted, not too bad. None of the typical endless switchbacks, only a few stairs. We “Offed” the mosquitoes, though they still complained in our ears of how their bloodlust had gone unsated for centuries.
I had no dizziness episodes, no nausea. And yet, I was struggling. Hazy as my memory of past sufferings may be, I couldn’t remember ever having to stop to catch my breath so often, and I’d done some hard trails. My legs were fine, but my lungs were like a newborn baby’s, insulted by having to breathe. Was it poor cardio? My perpetual anemia? I felt frustrated—the trail should be easy enough, but here I was, slugging along.
Eventually, about four hours in, the trees started to thin and subalpine flowers like Columbine and Red Paintbrush began to appear. I was looking for this shift. When the first scrubby Mountain Heather emerged and the trees became twisted and shrivelled, I knew we were close. Finally we came into the open—the familiar landscape of scummy ponds and bare rocks. There you have to follow little cairns and the occasional surveyor’s tape tied to a branch. It’s easiest to get lost in the alpine; trails are mere pale etchings over the rocks, easy to miss. Sometimes various routes braid in and out of each other.
The ridge stretched far and away up another mountain. But we were done. I was proud we’d made it, but we needed enough time to get down the trail before dark. We stopped to take in the views of Henshaw Ridge and the mountains beyond Buttle Lake. (“Are you ever going to call it anything other than Butthole Lake?” -Anna “No I am not.” -Liz) We found a shady patch beneath some gnarled cedars to eat Coffee Crisps. (Anna swears the caffeine boost works).
Someone called out to us as he approached from farther up the ridge. He was a lean man in his 50s, his face flushed and his forehead beaded with sweat. He was wearing his shorts on his head and only his underwear below. He told us he’d been coming back from Central Crags, just past Flower Ridge, and hadn’t been able to find the trailhead. “So I hiked back up to Central Crags to get my bearing, then came back here.” It must have taken him at least an hour to hike there and back again, but he said you have to get your bearings or you start to make bad decisions. “It’s the sun that does it. You start to panic. You lose sense of time.”
I gave him a couple water purification tablets—he’d just run out—and Anna tried to offer him Coffee Crisps. “Oh no, I can’t.” He’s plant-based and was dreaming of an “ice-cold kombucha” and fresh sushi when he finished the hike. (I only dream of something greasy and covered with cheese post-hike.)
Flower Ridge is one of the best-known hikes in the park, so we were surprised to have passed only two other groups as we hiked up. JP told us he likes to hike alone, because no one he knows is up for his level of adventure. Even if I had wilderness first aid training like JP and was as fit, I wouldn’t hike alone. Things can go wrong too easily, as JP had illustrated. He’d probably have got down fine without us, but when he asked, “Are you staying up here for longer?” I knew he wanted us to help him find the way back.
He hiked with us for about an hour, saying how perfect it was that he’d found us at just that time. “You looked very Lawrence of Arabia,” I said.
“How do you know that reference?” he asked.
“Oh, we were both raised differently,” Anna and I agreed.
JP eventually took off on his own, following the Kombucha Trail.
Our way down was much faster, no stopping for breath, but not fast enough for me. I swallowed my last bit of water and hoped we’d reach the end soon. My feet felt like pulp; Anna said she was getting the leg trembles, a going-downhill phenomenon. When I finally heard Henshaw Creek through the trees, I was elated. We high-fived and waved at the wildlife camera as we passed. We drove back to the campsite with the windows down and our hands brushing the cool air as we talked about swimming in the lake then eating Knorr Cheddar Broccoli Pasta.*
Flower Ridge wasn’t my favourite hike. But it helped me learn my limits. “Sometimes the body says no,” Anna’s Kung Fu instructor once told her. My body said no, and I listened. Okay, Anna listened, then made me listen. And, it seems my body also said, “Don’t go up today, and go up very slowly tomorrow, so you can show up at just the right time to help JP of Arabia find his way back home.”
Anna said, “It all worked out as it was meant to in the end.”
*This is not a paid promotion for Knorr Pasta. But seriously. Cheap hiking food.
Corrections: A previous version of this story reported that the pasta eaten was Sidekicks. This is the author’s preferred hiking pasta, but the pasta Anna cooked was actually Knorr’s. Henshaw Creek was also previously incorrectly identified as Ralph River. Our fact-checkers apologize for their errors.
Butt Hole Lake 😜 frankly looks like a beautiful, second-best-not-the-original-plan place to stay the night. I love that you have trained your soul to find what beauty may lurk in the circumstances that don't quite go according to plan.