A Hiking Story
Willmore Wilderness Park, Rocky Mountains, Alberta, Canada

At the start of my first trip into the Willmore Wilderness Park, we met Dave, our outfitter and guide, and his crew at the trailhead. We were at the horse staging area near Rock Lake, 20 miles west of the Hinton-Grande Cache Highway.

At the time, I was a dedicated backpacker, not a rider, but a friend had persuaded me to come on one of the horse-assisted hiking trips that he organized each summer.

On this first morning, as I watched the horses being packed, I had mixed feelings -- the backpacker's disdain for horses and riders -- nothing had ever carried my pack before contrasted with the feeling of a new adventure unfolding -- I planned to walk the entire 200 mile trip through a wilderness that contained no bridges, no roads or buildings [besides old trapper's cabins and the occasional forest service cabins] and few, if any people.

When I hoisted my day pack -- a mere 20 pounds of rain gear, camera, and the day's food instead of the usual 60 -- my mood lightened. Maybe travelling with horses isn't all bad. The other 40 pounds of gear would be carried by the horses. And, the horses would carry an additional 50 pounds per person including amenities like a large storm tent in which a person could escape the elements in the event of heavy rain or a summer blizzard, which is always a possibility in the Northern Rockies. What backpacker hasn't been stick in his or her small backpacking tent for days on end waiting for the rains to stop? Maybe I would be able to stand it after all.

My first few miles into the Willmore were disillusioning. I was used to hiking in big mountains on alpine and sub-alpine trails. But, here, we were following the heavily forested, relatively flat Wildhay River valley, hiking on an old dirt road that had been built 50 years earlier to fight a forest fire and then abandoned. True, it was closed to vehicle travel, but "Why," I asked myself as I reluctantly trudged along, "had I elected to spend two weeks in a place like this?"

It was at the two mile point that we came to the first stream crossing. There are no foot bridges in Willmore Wilderness Park, which is an attraction to wilderness lovers, but some of the rivers are big. The Wildhay River can be high enough in spring runoff or after heavy rains to make it impossible to cross safely on foot and, on occasion, even to safely ride across. But, today it was merely a refreshing, thigh-deep wade.

The bridgeless crossing sparked an awareness that I was embarking on 16 days of travel through a hundred square kilometers of true wilderness. My initial displeasure with the old, rutted road began to fade and I began to relax and enjoy the steady rhythm of walking and enjoying the local flora ... fireweed, blue bells, horse tail fern.

More good news came over the next few kilometers: the Wildhay valley broadened out and the Berland Range to the East and the Persimmon Range to the West began poke up above the softly contoured fir and aspen benches.

At the 14 km mark, the Pope Thoreau Trail branched off to the right and in another km, we arrived at the junction of the Indian Trail which continued North along the east side of the Wildhay River and the Mountain Trail which turned west through Eagles Nest Pass and North up the Rock Creek Valley.

This wasn't the big mountain country of Jasper and Banff, but the willow bottoms and the gentle ridges and peaks on either side of Eagle's Nest Pass made for a pleasing, human scale experience, one that I've now come to prefer to the Rocky Mountain Divide Parks of Jasper and Banff.

We pitched our tents that first night in a camp near Eagle's Nest Pass. No other camps or people were in sight. At the campfire, our guides -- whose suggestions were indispensable on this trip -- told us that our next camp on Persimmon Creek was l6 km up the Wildhay valley and that we could avoid the horse trail by climbing and then walking the ridge that runs between the Wildhay and Pope Thoreau Creek Valleys. Years later, I still remember scouting by eye the best route to the top -- no trails here! We had a mixed group of eight hikers, some of whom had extensive backpacking experience and others who had never been into the back country. Two were couch potatoes who had done several weeks worth of serious in-city walking before the trip to get in shape.

Setting a pace that was enjoyable for everyone, we made our way to the top of the ridge, moving through old growth spruce and pine forests, and then into open slopes covered in alpine wildflowers. Finally, standing on the top, I lost all concern about having come to the wrong place. The scenery offered views of the Persimmon and Hoff Ranges with the lush green willow valleys of the Wildhay and Pope Thoreau Creeks on either side.

We walked the full day through fields of wildflowers and along rocky buttresses of an serpentine, but safe, ridge-top, spotting caribou and big horns. Everywhere, we enjoyed a 360-degree panorama of mountains, basins, lakes and valleys. En route, we found caribou and moose antlers, walked through alpine flowers, viewed sheep, goats and caribou, and traversed ancient sheep trails across scree ridges cut not by humans, but by wildlife. While we walked in the sky above the valleys, the horses carried our gear on the horse trails below -- from sun up to sunset, we never saw them, nor did we set foot on the trails that they walked.

Toward the end of the day, we picked a route off the ridge to the Wildhay Valley below and stopped at the bottom to swim in the South Berland - a nice place to rinse off the day's sweat. Two km further, we found our camp next to a small stream, Persimmon Creek, put up the tents, and settled in for what became a regular campfire briefing on the next day's possibilities.

The sunset on Persimmon Creek was stunning. The hiking in the Persimmon Headwaters Basin was and continues to be the best of my life in mountains anywhere. I can't think of spending a summer without visiting it and the South Berland Headwaters Basin.

Most Willmore campsites are primitive. Some suffer from the impact of horses, overgrazing, tree hackings and litter - although responsible Willmore outfitters have taken control of this problem in the last 10 years.

Because we spent most of each day on the ridges, the physical condition of the camps was unimportant. However, we cleaned up several of the camps and I've noted years later that the early abuse of the camps has not been repeated.

The camps are located for their proximity to small streams, and offer shelter for hikers and grazing for the horses. The Willmore streams are small in scale and the sound of water brings relaxation at day's end for the hikers. The camps are good places to cook and sleep.

Although we preferred cooking over an open fire, the large cook tent provided a place to dry off after a wet day (which is inevitable on extended trips into any part of the East Slopes of the Rocky Mountains) and good shelter when poor weather persisted.

That first trip wound through places whose names and beauty captured the imagination. We crossed Jack Knife Pass, moved up the Sulfur River, and then climbed into the Hardscrabble Pass Area, more than 50 miles from our starting point.

A wonderful aspect of the Willmore is its numerous, extensive basins. Each basin contains its own special features: waterfalls, lakes, small clear streams, wildflowers, and surrounding peaks.

On alternate days we moved to a new camp or we remained in the same camp. When we didn't move we made day-long excursions into remote, seldom-visited basins. On one day, we wound our way up into the Persimmon Basin, traveled to the top of its surrounding ridge, moved along that ridge to the top of the South Berland Basin, and traveled down and back to camp - a 12 mile circuit without trails or footprints. En route, we saw a group of 32 goats and numerous mountain sheep.

It was 16 days later that we returned along the Rock Creek Valley to the East of the Starlight Range and made our way back through Eagle's Nest Pass and to the staging area. Our feet had toughened up, we had gotten leaner, and even the most advanced couch potato in our group had no trouble with the ridge hikes.

My thoughts about the Willmore at the end of that first trip were overwhelmingly pleasant. Willmore is a gentle, human scale wilderness. Its valleys are narrow, mountain ridges less high, forests less dense, and streams more easily crossed than those on the Rocky Mountain divide between Jasper and Banff. A person can hike off-trail to the top of most Willmore ridges and to the tops of many peaks in complete safety with one to two hours of moderate effort. The ridges tend to be open, alpine grasslands that can be walked for miles. The numerous deep basins make for pleasant day-long excursions into places where one has a sense of no other humans ever having set foot. Daily sightings of sheep and goats and less frequent sightings of moose, woodland caribou, wolves and grizzlies makes the value of preserving extensive areas of wilderness apparent.

It is those thoughts that have brought me back to the Willmore every summer since that first trip. I hope that you are able to enjoy the Willmore, or if not the Willmore, then some other big wilderness, as I have. Wilderness is indeed a blessing or as John Muir wrote: "Going to the mountains is going home."