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Tunnel vision: Scouring the Cheakamus Canyon in search of a sketchy, wire tube

Imagine you’re John Cabot. It’s the late 15 th century, and you’ve grown quite the beard for the occasion. You also kick it in some long and flowing robes, a style that makes you a pretty regal dude.
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Imagine you’re John Cabot. It’s the late 15 th century, and you’ve grown quite the beard for the occasion. You also kick it in some long and flowing robes, a style that makes you a pretty regal dude. Because you love trading so, you decide a more direct passage to Asia would be the bee’s knees, and you roll up to the King of England asking for money, ship parts and food to sustain your voyage across the Atlantic. Some merchants hook you up instead. Away you go.

When you get there, you plant a ripping good flag for the boys back home. But there are no cities to trade with — only small animal traps. And cod. There’s a lot of cod. You get the sense you could pull a Jesus on the backs of all those cod, and you write that in your diary. Then you head home, drum up support for a second trip, and vanish forever into the Atlantic fog shortly after departure.

Now imagine you’re Jacques Cartier. It’s the 16 th century, and you, too, have stylish dress and kingly connections. Away you go, across the Atlantic in search of gold, diamonds and a direct route to Asia. Instead, you misunderstand an Iroquois word and name the place Canada. So pumped are you on the whole deal that you come back two more times, then die of plague.

The lessons of Cabot and Cartier are simple: Odds are you won’t find the things you seek, but rather something else, which is often just as compelling — or, as Hans Blix might tell you, beguiling. What you do with whatever you find is up to you: You could set in motion a process that malignantly alters the course of continental history, or you could shrug and eat a sandwich amid some staggering scenery.

Richard Stephenson and I were looking for a wire-mesh tunnel spanning the Cheakamus. Richard came up to me and said something like this (dramatized for fun): “Okay, this guy told me about, like, a chicken mesh tunnel that hangs out over the Cheakamus. I have no idea where it is, but I think we should find it. We’ll bring rope and food. It could take days. We could get hurt. There could be rain, bears, drowning, even Kraken.”

Unlike Cabot and Cartier, we look in no way regal. Just the same, we approached the banks (to access our own funds, not some king’s) and loaded up on food and water. From there, we entered our ship, which is actually a jeep covered in dents and spray paint. We set steer down Paradise Valley Road, all the way to the end, where it gets rocky and dusty. Another friend commandeered the vessel back to Squamish, leaving us alone in the wilderness.

And away we went. The first part of the hike was simple, just a leisurely stroll, really. It brought us to Starvation Lake, which is one of the clearer bodies of water in the Squamish environs. Compared to Brohm Lake, it’s the difference between staring at a dirty brown wall with kids sticking out of it and looking at a nice painting by Lawren Harris. Except, we noticed, this particular painting had a smudge: Part of the reason the lake was so obviously clear was because six beer cans were glinting in the daylight deep beneath the raft we ate lunch on. Some people suck.

Fortified with peanut butter and bananas, we struck out for the more arduous part of the hike. At first, the trail winds its way between the Cheakamus and Highway 99, which is hidden from view by a belt of mountains. Here and there, we scampered off trail and headed west, where we found a number of lookouts over the river. Poor Cheakamus. It had a rough go of things a few years back when a CN train jumped the tracks and dumped nine cars into the river. One of those cars was full of caustic soda, and hundreds of thousands of fish died as a result.

About two hours later, after rolling our ankles innumerable times on small boulders, we found what we were looking for. Except, it wasn’t really what we were looking for. In my mind, I imagined a thick tunnel of wire drooping out over the canyon and running its course to the other side, all that frothy water babbling a hundred feet below. In Richard’s, there was a long-running tunnel stretched out parallel to the river. Either vision would’ve produced a bout of dodgy and potentially fatal fun.

But no dice, and just as well, given that we forgot the ropes. What we found was a five-foot stretch of retention mesh, likely installed to keep the rocky trail from tumbling onto the train tracks below. With a shrug, we ate some more lunch and took in the scenery. And then, careful not to hit each other with loose rocks and debris, we clamoured down the pitch and onto the train tracks, where we wandered aimlessly for a while, once again humbled by the vista.

After another 45 minutes, we emerged from the canyon onto Highway 99. From there, we hitchhiked back to Squamish, scoring a ride with an elderly couple who seemed to know everything about the people who built the original Elfin Lakes Lodge, which is up in Garibaldi Provincial Park.

Did we find our tunnel? No, nothing like it. But, just the same, we experienced the charge of obsession, albeit it on a much smaller scale than Cabot or Cartier. And, perhaps in direct proportion to the scale of our obsession, the resulting impact of our journey was nil.