Скачать или смотреть The Farm - McGregor Range

The Farm – McGregor Range

My first trip to the subalpine and alpine area in the informally named McGregor Mountains, immediately west of Pass Lake and north of the McGregor River (east of Prince George, British Columbia, Canada) was a multi-day ski tour and snow camp with my friend, George Evanoff, nearly 40 years ago in April 1981. For our camp, we first dug two enormous holes in the three-metre snowpack, one for a cooking and eating area, and one for a snow cave. The latter was excavated into the side of the hole and comprised a single double-wide sleeping platform on the back wall. I wrote about this snow-caving experience in my first book, Exploring Prince George. It wasn’t the first time I had slept in a snow hole, but it was the first in a full-fledged two-person snow cave. This one was especially labour intensive as we were on flat meadowland instead of the usually better option of burrowing into a steep mountainside or the side of a snow drift. Camp established, we enjoyed several days of fabulous weather and skiing.

A highlight of the trip was George telling me about the large hole in the ground in an alpine area directly east of us, on the other side of Pass Lake in a place he referred to as ‘The Fangs,’ because of the appearance of the jagged ridgeline above. This led to the discovery, naming and exploration of Fang Cave and many other caves in the area, and many years later to the establishment of Evanoff Provincial Park:    • The Discovery and Exploration of Fang Cave  .

Later that year, I did an impromptu solo bushwhack hike with my dog on what turned out to be a very wet day in June 1981 that ended up with a bivouac late in the evening in rain and wet snow, close to the site of our earlier snow camp. With no tent or sleeping bag, and just a small piece of poly plastic for a tarp, getting a fire going took a couple of hours and was essential to avoid hypothermia that night. I salvaged the still-green boughs from the two-month old remains of our snow cave to line the shelter. Having finally established a roaring fire by around 11 p.m., I enjoyed a steak and a very comfortable night. In short order, I cut down several dead snags with a small folding pruning saw, and without taking the extra effort to buck them up, I simply fed them progressively into the fire throughout the night. At one point, I woke up to find the soles of my boots starting to melt, having got too close to the fire – another great lesson learned. I write about this adventure many years later for a weekly outdoor column in a local newspaper that I called ‘Prince George Outdoors,’ and the paper’s resident cartoonist drew a superb caricature showing me waking up with a shocked expression and melting plastic dripping off my boots!

The following year, George and I and three others returned to The Farm for a four-day Easter 1982 ski tour and snow camp, with a variety of socked-in snowy weather and clear blue skies.

The video ends with two ski trips in 1983, and then a ski trip three years later in February 1986 using the newly built recreational cabin in The Farm.