Day 19: Boulton Creek Campground

After consuming 3 litres of ice cream, 6 large pizza slices and a half dozen assorted pastries between them, Flea, Slov and the Spunky Monkey headed to their allocated camp spot. They’d not gone 50 paces when Spunk cried, “Washoooout!” “The Boys!” Washout called back. 

“Man, when that weather came in today I was really worried about you up there on the pass.” The boys showed him what remained of their legs. “I’ve got some extra weed if you guys want it, by the way.” Washout pulled out no less than half an ounce. The packet read “Jungle Sunset”—a sativa Washout had purchased from a reservation. It was probably more weed than the boys had smoked, collectively, in the last half-decade. 

They pitched, ate, and hit the showers. $3 for 5 minutes and worth every penny. When the water switched off they gave their feet a liberal soaping in the sinks. 

Day 20

Before they set off, the boys popped into the exorbitantly priced Trading Post to bolster snack supplies and replace lost/defunct gear. Both Flea and Spunk had worn holes in all their socks. The trading post only sold “Sox”, however, so they had to settle for those. Flea had moreover lost both his drink bottles during the skin puncturing descent from Coral Pass. Slov replaced his lost sunglasses for less than he was charged for a pack of Oreos. Flea and Spunk laid a wager on how long the new pair would last before they were inevitably lost. Spunk called 3 days. Flea, generously, called 7. Last minute shopping done, they distributed the food and set off on Section C, which flaunted both Mount Assiniboine and famous the Rockwall Trail. They’d be seeing a lot more trail infrastructure and many more people.

The boys skirted a large, transparent lake. The surrounding mountains leaned over it as if to observe their ruggedly handsome profiles in its reflective waters. Up a valley cloven by a powerful river, they passed huge blocks of limestone glued together by moss. A steep ascent in the afternoon led to the glorious Three Isle Lake, where they partook of another refreshing dip and treated several moderately distant lake-siders to the sight of their frightfully skinny and unevenly tanned bodies.

That evening, with dire consequences for their snack supplies, they sampled the Jungle Sunset. Unsolicited, Flea stood up and acted out over the course of half an hour, a story set, appropriately, in a jungle at sunset: the time in India he and his friend Ollie were ambushed by monkeys in an abandoned castle. Spunk read a passage from Cormac McCarthy in which a man inadvisedly boxes an ape.

Day 21
The next morning Slov made to set off without his glasses and was saved by the diligence of Flea, who had a vested interest. In the hours before the sun clambered over the ranges, the trail served up yet another dose of what Spunk called “excessive vegetation.” At the top of a pass, mid-morning, the brush finally yielded to a long meadow in a high valley, through which the three boys gamboled happy as lambs in spring. Above them, glaciers dripped off the mountains like icing off a cake left in the sun. They took lunch at a bug-infested hell-hole of a camp.

Slov, who is not anyone’s idea of an organisational mastermind, is routinely the last one off the mark after a stop. As he came tardily out of the stand of trees where they had supped, he saw Flea and Spunk yelling and gesticulating wildly several hundred metres away. It sounded like they were saying “Food!” Slov thought, I may be forgetful but I’m not so useless as to forget that. He walked on. As he neared the others they now began to beckon him urgently. He hussled over to see what the fuss was about. “Moose!” Flea exclaimed. “A mama and her calves, came right past us, about 3 metres away. Then the calf got nervy and ran over there”—he pointed just to the right of where Slov had vacated the trees—”and the sow went over there”—he pointed to the left of where Slov had been. “We were trying to stop you getting between them.” It is a very bad idea to get between a mother moose and her baby. Not conducive to longevity. “I can’t believe we got to be that close to a moose”, Flea said. “Yeah that was incredible”, Spunk agreed. I was sure she was going to sketch out with us because of her calf, but they were so peaceful. Slov looked morosely at the trees where the moose went. No moose.

They polished off the remainder of the day’s walking and parked up at Big Springs Camp. There, they made the acquaintance of Uncle Bill, his daughter Maia, niece Rachel and her friend Kristen. We’re Kiwis, Flea said. And he’s an Englishman, Slov said, pointing at Spunk. “Our colonial overseer.” Everyone chatted about climbing while Slov and Spunk, whose shoes were both coming apart in various ways, glued and stiched and whispered prayers. 

“Well, bout that time”, Bill said at hikers midnight—9pm—looking tentward.

“You heading to bed?” Slov asked. 

“What now?” Bill returned. 

“Are you heading to bed?” Slov tried again, slower.

“To bid?” Bill tried. “I don’t catch your drift.”

The Spunky Monkey, with his perfect pronunciation, stepped in to help. “Are you heading to bed, Bill?”

“Oh! To bed. Gosh, sorry. The things you guys do to your vowels. Yes. To bed.” He ambled off, awkwardly.

Spunk laughed. Slov turned to Flea. “I think of myself as a cultured person. Worldly even. But do you ever worry that we just sound like bundy hicks?” 

Day 22

As another fine morning unravelled its banner in the sky, Spunk and the Bundy Hicks headed for Assiniboine, which lay beyond the alluring Marvell Lake and the cornily named Wonder Pass. As they climbed the Pass, the melodious tones of helicopter rotors filled the air and the trail overflowed with dayhikers. During the last 160km of Section B, the boys had seen a grand total of two people—one of whom was Washout. Now they encountered a group every few hundred metres. People in jeans and dress shirts. People toting camera tripods. Someone with a purple hat featuring a big bendy spring with a dragonfly attachment.
“Does it keep the bugs away?”
“Not even slightly.”
Atop the pass the view was impressive but not, Slov griped, wondrous. The range to the east, for example, looked like it’d been sat on. To the west, Assiniboine was obscured a suite of peaks that looked like they were made out of filo pastry.

The helicopter count numbered in the dozens by the time they left the pass. They were bound for the Assiniboine Lodge, which looked like a little Disney town. They made a beeline for Magog lake, which lay at the foot of the mighty Assiniboine. The “Canadian Matterhorn” finally hoved into view and it was, Slov admitted, worth the fuss. It made the other peaks look like foothills, towering above them with perfect pyramidal form, like the tomb of some iceborn pharoah from the Eocene. Beneath it, a truly superlative body of water. Apallingly, and despite the proximity of the lodge and the heavy trail traffic, no one was swimming in it. In fact, there wasn’t anyone in sight, bar a few people at the enormous front window of the Lodge a few hundred metres away. After Flea made a frantic excretory side-trip, the boys stripped, flashing their pale behinds at the enlodged spectators, and plunged into the glacial waters.

Afterwards, they rolled up some Jungle Sunset and sunned themselves on the rocks. Flea and Slov settled into a deep repose, supine and staring fixedly at the upthrust magnificence of Assiniboine. The Spunky Monkey applied copious quantities of sunblock and swatted at the amassing army of horseflies. An hour passed. Clouds formed and dissolved in the sky’s wide blue iris. Nothing moved on the shore of Magog except Spunks camp shoe, which struck with the merciless precision of a cobra.
Slov gulped dryly. “I feel like I’m falling through my sensations” he said, placing his comically rumpled widebrim hat over his face. Another half hour passed. Spunk nervously applied more SPF 50. “It’s a very… aesthetic… peak”, Flea croaked. He hadn’t yet taken his eyes off Assiniboine. “The sky is kind of… vortexing around it. I think I’m sort of hallucinating.”
“Maybe you’re seeing it as reeaally is.”
“Yeah.”
Spunk, not nearly as high as his friends, flattened another fly. “Yeeaah duudes” he drawled in an ironic faux-stoner voice. “Peeling back the layers, man. Seeing it as it really is.”
“Well, everyday consciousness is kind of a controlled hallucination,” Slov tried, defensively. “Who’s to say it’s more accurate than this?”
“Sure. I never said the hippies were wrong.” Spunk said, “they’re just intolerable.”

With a gradualism that rendered their progress almost imperceptible, the boys readied themselves to continue down trail. Spunk dispatched one last horsefly for the road. “Fucking bastards.” Flea mimicked offense. “Hey man, some of my best friends are horseflies.”
Flea had in fact been trying, in accordance with Bhuddist precepts, not to kill any of the multitude of biting insects. (The precept concerning intoxicants was being observed somewhat less rigorously.)
Spunk, definitely destined for a lousy rebirth, executed yet another horsefly the second it landed on Flea’s thigh. “Hey. Don’t kill in my name!” Flea protested.

A sweaty afternoon ensued. Flea and Spunk’s “Sox” both developed fatal holes. “That’s the genius of Sox,” Spunk said, “they imply the sock experience, but don’t guarantee it.” Slov was complimented by a passing hiker on his hat’s “jaunty angle.” “I think the musketeer hat is finally winning the hearts of the people” he said to Flea, who remained dubious.  Encamped at Porcupine that night, they had dinner with Bill and the girls. It was Rachel’s birthday. After dinner, Kristen brought forth a hefty clump of moss in which a half dozen candles were embedded. “Moss cake!” After the formalities, the boys were asked about their respective trail names. The Slovenly Loafer explained the provenance of his name and that of The Flea-Bitten Tramp before gesturing to the bashful Englishman and saying, suggestively, “And, well, The Spunky Monkey name derives from a sticky incident with a primate… it isn’t exactly PG, you know?” Flea continued in the same specious vein, “A bit of youthful indiscretion during his gap year in India…”

Day 23

Sunshine Village, a ski-resort in Banff which flaunted a cafe and grill house, lay a mere 15 kms from Porcupine camp. The three awoke from veggie burger themed dreams to saliva-moistened sleeping bags and sallied forth. Several times, as they crested some hill or rounded some bend, Flea turned and saluted the increasingly distant Assiniboine, but it kept punching above the horizon the whole way to Sunshine. They eventually made it to the village at 10am. In the cafe, they promptly utilized an entire wall of charging ports and staged a joint occupation of the rest room. “Now, that” Flea said, “was a superior defacatory experience.”

Slov, mainlined a litre of drip coffee and scratched his leg until it bled. He approached the register to get a napkin but was accosted by an overfriendly barista. “Hey man, you been backpacking?” He pointed to the boys corner, which was inundated with hiking paraphernalia and featured two sunburned, scraggly bearded, sweat-encrusted miscreants. “Yeah, we’re backpacking.”
“You see the Aurora Borealis last night?”
Slov discreetly grabbed a fistfull of napkins. He could feel the blood dripping down his calf.
“Nah, we were kinda in a valley.”
The barista swivelled the register computer screen, pulled up the live feed from the previous night. Ethereal green lights simulated by pixels danced in front of hapless Slov’s eyes as the blood finished it’s journey across the hillside of his ankle and began to pool in his camp shoe. “Yeah, beautiful.”

They moved over to the grill house for veggie burgers. On the wifi, Flea underwent the harrowing process of bookinga campsite through parks Canada. Only slightly less painful, he was bitten by a horsefly. He slapped it reflexively, leaving behind a smear of insect gunk. A chunk of his leg was still visibly forked between the fly’s detached mouth pincers. The animal kingdom, impelled by the forces of karma, immediately turned on him. A bold squirrel, which had been scampering around the deck, smelled blood and went in for the kill: he bit Flea on the foot.
“Fuck!” Flea looked, aghast at his bushy-tailed assailant. He turned, aggrevied, to his delighted friends. “He fucken bit me!”
The waitress swooped in with three veggie burgers. “You met Gary?”
“The squirrel is called Gary?”
“All the squirrels here are called Gary.”

They ate what turned out to be disappointing burgers. Flea valiantly dug into a mountain of fries in which you could profitably establish a salt mine. Slov went downstairs for poo number two—getting his money’s worth—but was confronted by a harrowing visage in the mirror. His face was leathery and sunburned and featured a ‘beard’ which looked like the poorly-skinned pelt of a street dog from eastern Europe. He shuddered and vacated the premises.

Flea and Spunk had replaced their defective Sox at the outfitters and were ready to hit the road. Or, relatively ready. Post-fries, Flea had gone a subtle grey and moved ponderously as they made their way into the backcountry. The sun shone more than was necessary. Rivulets of sweat ran down Flea’s cadaverous forehead. Slov and Spunk forged ahead, inspired by the liquid treasure promised by Egypt Lake. They waited there a while: no Flea. Cliffs reared up out of the water to the lake’s north and west. Spunk dived in. Flea finally arrived, looking like something well past its expiry date. He curled up lakeside. “I think I ate too much”, he said, stating the abundantly obvious. He wasn’t going anywhere, so after he sausage rolled into the water for refreshment, they forwent the remaining kms for the day and pitched at Egypt Lake Camp.

Day 24

After a night of digestive rehabilitation, Flea was back on his feet and the boys set off once again. A strenuous day on the cards: two passes in the morning would deposit them at the foot of the famous Rockwall Trail. Then, an 800m climb up to the spectacular Floe Lake, where they were to spend the eve. Flea lost his replacement water bottle. Spunk lent him his water bladder and a stern word about the consequences if he lost it.

On the topic of losing, after a heinously al-dente pasta lunch, Slov again walked off without his eyewear. “Your list, bro. Don’t forget your checklist,” Flea urged discreetly. Slov spun around and collected his sunnies from the dirt. Four days in. It was touch and go. “Don’t tell the monkey,” he said. Then, after a moments reflection, Slov narrowed his eyes at his friend. “Would you have reminded me if it was day seven?” Flea didn’t answer.

They found wild raspberries on the way up to Floe Lake, which compensated somewhat for the arduous, shadeless climb. They did some 20 questions to easie the passing of the miles and Slov was swiftly dispatched on Helen of Troy. “You can’t keep doing people from antiquity” Spunk admonished. “It’s too predictable.”

They arrived in the late evening, just as the sun drained from the basin in which Floe Lake resided. It looked like it had leaked straight out of the sky and puddled at their feet. The lake was embanked with snow piles that were fluffy and white enough to be vagrant clouds, and upon them were founded the ramparts of the Rockwall: sharp cliffs knifing darkly upward. The dust-caked trio took the plunge. The water was the quintessence of blue and gaspingly cold. The trio surfaced with indecorous whoops and yelps. Spunk, a climber, had muscles on his back moved like salmon in a river. “This is in the top 1 swims, boys” he proclaimed, and ducked under again. High praise from someone who gave the Brothers Karamazov 2-stars on Goodreads.

Day 25

The boys followed the Rockwall, which abutted the trail on the west, all the next day. The Rockies, attired in green, grey, white and blue, looked at their most regal. Unfiltered sun wrung the sweat from the boys bodies as they clambered up and down several passes. Flea’s hiking shirt looked like someone was in the process of founding another Salt Lake City. He laboured up in front.
“Alright Flea?”
“Why wouldn’t I be?”
“Well, it’s just that you’re going really slow.” Spunk doesn’t like slow.
“I love the amble!” Flea protested.
Moments later:
“Holy shit did you let one off? That’s blimmen chemical warfare”
Flea smiled contentedly. “Figured it was about time you learned some respect”
“Collateral damage” Slov moaned, long-siffering. “You’re worse than a skunk.”
“You’re part of the club now mate! The anti-social farters club.”
It was true Slov had let loose a few noxious wafts in the preceeding days.
“Yeah, but I don’t weaponise it.”
“One day you will learn to harness your latent power and become an Airbender like me” Flea counselled.

They arrived at Wolverine Camp early evening. It’s the only chink in the Rockwall, punching through to the west: a beaut spot sandwiched between sheer cliffs a couple hundred metres out of the Banff National Park. For this reason, Flea had been spared the ordeal of engaging with the Parks Canada booking system. After dinner, Spunk holed up in his tent and hit the shoe glue again—a concerningly regular occurrence. Flea and Slov discussed whether an intervention might be necessary. Was there a Shoe-glue Sniffers Anonymous in Canada? The Monkey vehemently denied any problem, citing the manifold cuts and holes in his footwear—a classic form of denial common among addicts of his kind. Slov’s shoes, for their part, were beyond hope. He had preemptively delivered a new pair to the next town.

Late that night, as darkness ladled itself into the valley, the boys heard a mighty cry from the near pass: “The boys!!” The boys stuck their heads out through their tent zippers, like three turtles with geometric nylon shells. “Washouuut!” The very man himself, waltzing in on the back of a heroic 40-something km day.

Day 26

They walked out together the next morning. Washout is a graphic designer specialising in video games—he once worked on one called “The Long Dark” in which players had to survive in the Canadian Rockies using only their wits and the resources to hand. “Have you learned a thing or too that might come in handy?” Slov asked. “Not really. Don’t let your health bar hit zero, I guess.”

About midday, the quartet passed by the eleventh highest waterfall in Canada. Through it, in The Spunky Monkey’s case. Perceiving the beauty and the velocity of the falling water, some primal drive superseded the measured propriety which typically confine his countrymen. This drive compelled him to strip off all his clothes, down-climb a steep, sketchy mineral sand embankment, clamber over sharp boulders and proceed hazardously through violent spume to the impact zone where he uplifted his pale arms and recieved the waterblasting of his life. Washout pulled out his phone and snapped pics. “Yarp.” He said, as the water pummelled the tiny nude figure, “That’s the money shot.”

At lunch afterward, Washout unveiled a new herbal strain: Animal Face. Sounded scary. “Wanna have a toke before we hit the road boys?” He brandished a tidily rolled J. “It’s a little stronger.” The boys exchanged nervous glances. “Maybe one toke.”

20 minutes later, Washout packed up his gear and left. The boys were half-paralyzed in the dwindling shade and unable to walk or talk or do much of anything. Eventually they mustered themselves and set off. Walking felt very strange. Each individual component of the walking process required ratification from central command. The internal dialogue went something like:
“Should we lift the left foot? Yeah… seems like a good idea. What now—put it down? Mhhm, solid plan. Maybe the right one? If you say so!”

Sweat prickled on backs as they ascended Goodsir, the last pass of the section. On top, the Spunky Monkey perched on a rock, and surveyed the ranges. He pointed a finger at one of the peaks. “It’s an ape. Face tilted upwards. You can see the protruding mouth.” He moved to the next peak along. “Baboon. Longer snout, recessive forehead. Hint of an incisor, too.” Several other primates were discerned in other peaks. It was a veritable zoo. Flea, more than a little red in the eyes, said “Animal Face, baby!”

On the way down to camp, John reflected on his criteria for marriagability. “The nature poo.” He said, enigmatically. “That’s the clincher.”
Slov absentmindedly fondled the poo-quipement (water bladder, bottle top with pierced hole, hand sani.)
“If they’re not comfortable shitting in the wild” Spunk continued, “it’s not meant to be.”

Day 26

They set camp that night 15kms from the highway and, whipped on by The Spunky Monkey’s merciless pace, polished it off in two and a half hours the next morning. At the trailhead carpark he cold approached a frightened Czech couple. “We’ve got room for one, I guess” the guy said with evident reluctance. Spunk leapt in and left Flea and long-suffering Slov on the side of the highway. Slov stuck his thumb out. Washout elected to walk the 10km to Field. Big trucks carrying denuded tree trunks hurtled past, as well as the customary onslaught of pickups. Slov sat down after a half hour stint. Flea, after all of a minute, landed them a ride. The boys benefactors, when they got a whiff, wrinkled their noses but politely ignored the stench and deposited their noxious cargo at Field. Flea and Slov found their jammy companion reclining luxuriously at the famous “Truffle Pig Cafe,” a cup of coffee and the decimated remains of a breakfast bun in front of him. Soon, the three of them were arrayed just so, the warm dark flush of caffeine percolating through their fatigued bodies as the sun beamed its approval from overhead. Slov squinted in the bright light, smiled, and donned his sunglasses with a victorious flourish.