Extreme Frontiers: Racing Across Canada from Newfoundland to the Rockies (15 page)

We camped on the summit, planning to sleep out in our bags. Russ was lying on his sleeping mat reading an old Penguin classic,
The Last Frontier
, which seemed pretty appropriate. As we chatted, he told me, in that quiet way of his, that he’d not realised the climb would
be so challenging. Challenging? It was bloody terrifying, especially that last ridge. I could still feel it now. Russ agreed,
admitting that that part had been pretty hairy, with nothing on either side and the knowledge that if you slipped, you’d fall
to what would be certain death. Not a nice thought, but when you don’t fall, when you make the summit, it’s a fact that the
feeling of achievement couldn’t be re-created anywhere else.

‘What’s really cool is that the four of us did it together,’ Russ
told me. ‘It’s the biggest challenge we’ve had so far, the top of a mountain, Charley; that’s a first for all of us.’

Having said that, the thought of climbing all the way down again was not one either of us relished, so Russ asked Barry if
we could organise a helicopter to pick us up in the morning.

As I said, the plan had been that we would sleep under the stars, but with rain clouds massing, we pitched the tents after
all. Evening was drawing in, and having got over the fear I’d felt on that last section, I realised that this experience was
right up there with anything I had ever done. I mean it; other than marrying my wife and seeing my children born, this was
just about the most amazing thing I had ever been part of.

I slept a little, but woke at about 1.15 to the most amazing storm. Thank God we’d brought the tents, because it was blowing
a gale now and the sides were rattling away nineteen to the dozen. That’s the thing about mountains: on a perfectly sunny
day there can be a sudden snowstorm that can lock you in for days.

Fortunately there was no snow and we weren’t locked in. By five in the morning we had packed up the tents and were ready to
go. The clouds were lower than ever, though, and with the wind swirling, the landing site for the chopper was a mass of flying
stones. He came, though, our bush pilot, bringing salvation from the skies, flying in with the wind buffeting the fuselage,
rocking the whole ship from side to side. He couldn’t wait long, so no sooner had the skids touched down than we loaded the
gear, clambered aboard and got the hell out of there.

W
e got back very early in the morning, which was just as well, as I had to take my place in the opening ceremony of the Calgary
Stampede. I’m not going to go into too much detail about it here, because I’ve already described my part in one, albeit slightly
less glamorous rodeo. All I’ll say is it was very cool to be there with the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge in attendance, part
of the greatest outdoor show in the world.

Thankfully, after all that excitement, I got plenty of much-needed sleep that night, and on the morning of 9 July we started
out on one of the most glorious drives you can make anywhere in the world. I say drives, but of course I was on two wheels
as we rode from Calgary up the Icefields Parkway. It is like nowhere else on earth. The road twists and turns through forests
and open grasslands into a panorama of lakes and glaciers from Lake Louise all the way to Jasper and the Columbia Ice Field
beyond. I was delighting in the fact that I wasn’t on a horse or a cow but a motorbike; two glorious wheels under me, or just
the one now and again when I had a mind to pop a wheelie. I
wasn’t halfway up Mount Fable, clinging on for dear life, or in a narrow mineshaft thinking about the squeeze. I was in the
great outdoors, doing what I like doing best, and I was revelling in it. Mile after mile just unfolded in front of me, and
I was really in the zone, until a sudden movement in the valley caught my eye. Something was moving down in a grove of maple
trees deep in the canyon – some sort of animal. Pulling over to the side of the road, I took a moment to figure out what it
was.

A black bear foraging for berries. I could not believe my eyes! A black bear, and only about seventy yards away. I’d never
seen one in the wild before. Black bears can be dangerous, but they’re more docile than their brown cousins and much more
likely to run from humans than get into a fight. This guy was beautiful, just moseying around in the brush, chewing at this
and that, minding his own business while the traffic zipped by on the road above. We had to press on, though, so clipping
on my helmet, I started the bike again. As I roared away, the bear looked up, a little nonchalantly.

Ahead of us was the ice field. I’d heard that you can visit the glacier in these incredible vehicles, sort of coaches, I suppose,
with tyres as tall as I am. When we arrived, a couple of the coaches were parked in bays, and having located a young guy called
Jason, I asked him if he would take us up to the field.

‘This is for TV, right?’

‘Yes, a show called
Extreme Frontiers
that’s going to be shown back in the UK.’

‘I tell you what, then,’ he said. ‘Rather than me take you, why don’t
you
take me? I’ve heard you’re up for different vehicles, isn’t that right?’

I was gobsmacked. ‘Really?’ I asked. ‘You mean I can drive?’

‘Yeah, why not?’

‘OK then.’ I didn’t need to be asked twice. ‘Let’s do it.’

Jason worked for Brewster Ice Explorers, who operate these unique snow-coaches, taking guests on what is called the Columbia
Icefield Glacial Adventure across the Athabasca Glacier. The area around Mount Columbia is unique – it’s what’s known as a
hydrological apex, where the glacial meltwater feeds rivers that pour into the Arctic Ocean as well as both the Pacific and
the Atlantic. It’s one of the largest accumulations of ice south of the Arctic Circle, covering more than 300 square miles.

Getting behind the wheel, I asked Jason who had made the snow-coach, and he told me it was a company called Foremost down
in Calgary. They had taken the best design elements from its two predecessors to build the vehicle I was driving now. Like
everything else up here, the modes of transport seemed to be constantly evolving. Sitting there looking at the switches, and
the old-fashioned steering wheel, I felt like I was in the old London bus on the first stage of my
By Any Means
expedition. Two levers operated the doors, one to lift the steps you needed to climb inside and the other to actually close
the doors. Disengaging the parking brake, I found the gear shift and put it into reverse. Jason told me that the key to driving
these coaches was to turn the wheel early, as it had a very large radius and took a while to spin round.

There are only twenty-three such coaches in the entire world – twenty-two operating here in the Canadian Rockies, with the
other being part of the US government’s research programme in Antarctica – and they cost $1,200,000 each, so I was really privileged
to be behind the wheel. And it actually
wasn’t that hard – the gears were simple to work out and the steering was power-assisted. Unfortunately, the hill out of the
loading area is one of the steepest around, and that’s what I had to negotiate first. It was a dirt road, and God only knows
what the gradient was. Sitting behind me, though, Jason was able to gauge how I was doing, and within a couple of minutes
he was offering me a job.

The tyres were pretty soft, and they covered the rugged terrain really well. I’d seen a picture back at the base where the
glacier was almost up by the road, but it wasn’t like that now. Jason told me that the ice had been receding since 1834, and
since then it’s lost about 70 per cent of its original mass. Right now it was losing ten metres or so a year, though the reasons
for that are still up for debate. When he’s taking tours, Jason tends to avoid the subject, because people have strong opinions
about whether or not global warming is to blame. He said that over the years they’d had many different glaciologists up there
taking readings and doing research; about half of them said the shrinkage was because of global warming and half that it was
just a natural phenomenon.

They have lots of climbers visiting the area, particularly in April and May when there is still plenty of snow on the ground
and they can make their way up to the ice field very easily. There’s a debate, of course, about whether vehicles such as this
snow-coach should be driving up the glacier at all, but Jason pointed out that it was safer to have organised tours than just
letting people cross willy-nilly. The glacier is potentially a dangerous place, with crevasses that you could fall into and
mill wells where water drills holes deep into the glacier. They’re avoidable, of course, but you can’t always see them, as
for much of the year they’re covered with snow.

I knew all about that, because one of the things Russ had planned for me later was a glacier rescue, where I would fall in
and have to rescue myself. When I told Jason about it, he thought it was a novel idea, as in his experience, people who fell
into a glacier rarely made it out. Glaciers can be very deep and you could be falling for a long time. But more of that later;
right now I was driving this incredible bus in this absolute wilderness, and I was enjoying every minute. The truth is, I’m
never happier than when I’m behind a steering wheel, and this was one of those incredible vehicles which you just tick the
box for and say, yep, been there and done that: a snow-coach on the Columbia Ice Field in Canada.

The glacier is on a V-shaped cleft and the safest way to traverse it is right through the middle. That’s where the ice is
deepest, and deep ice isn’t so prone to cracking as the shallower stuff. It’s not foolproof, mind you, and it is vital that
the road is well-maintained and regularly inspected for cracks, crevasses and mill wells.

The glacier opened up on either side of the road, white, grey and shades of yellow, cutting a swathe through the gorge. Passing
another coach on its way down, we got some odd looks from the tourists; I imagined they were thinking I’d stolen the vehicle
and was heading for the hills like a latter-day Dutch Henry or something.

‘Trouble is, you wouldn’t get very far,’ Jason told me. ‘This thing only does eighteen kilometres per hour. I could run and
still catch up with you.’

We went as far as the coach could go, and then got out on to the glacier itself, which is six kilometres in length and a kilometre
across at its widest point. Beyond it lies the actual ice field, and that is the size of the city of Vancouver. We all drank
straight from the freezing meltwater – it was crystal clear and as fresh as anything I’d tasted. Jason told me that the turnaround
point is the deepest part of the glacier; the ice beneath our feet descended some 300 metres. That’s as deep as the Eiffel
Tower is tall, so it’s a lot of ice. The coldest temperature ever recorded up here was minus 52 Celsius without wind chill;
that’s way colder than I wanted to experience. Not a place to get trapped in the middle of winter.

We said our goodbyes and thanks to Jason, then we rode the bikes on to Edmonton where we hopped on a plane to Norman Wells
in the Northwest Territories. Having explored the border with the United States, I was itching to dip a toe in the Arctic
Ocean.

We only waited in Norman Wells long enough to get the next plane, which took us further north to the town of Inuvik, part
of the ice-road system that criss-crosses Canada. Having been involved in driving Dalton Highway in Alaska earlier in the
year for a television programme on the world’s most dangerous roads, I was dying to meet some truckers so I could compare
experiences. A couple of hours later we were on the ground in bright sunshine, making our way across the apron to the small
airport building. The plan was to spend the day in Inuvik, then fly on tomorrow to a traditional Inuit village, where they
hunt beluga whale to feed them through the winter.

We’d been booked into a really neat little hotel – it was more of a lodge really, with individual log cabins – and we dumped
our bags there before heading off to explore the town. It wasn’t very big, just a handful of single-storey buildings clustered
around one road, with a population of a little over 3,500 people.
Those people (as we had found everywhere we’d been so far) were very friendly – happy to chat and keen to know what we were
doing up here. I wondered what it would be like to live here, with two months of the year in total darkness and another two
when it stayed light all the time. Wandering up Main Street, we found the Café Gallery – a busy little place with a long counter
and a handful of tables. We ordered coffee and some sandwiches, and took a moment to regroup and think about what lay ahead.

The Dempster Highway, more than 2,000 miles long, runs from the Klondike Highway in the Yukon up to Inuvik on the Mackenzie
River delta. It’s a famous road, attracting a real variety of people. At the café we met a German riding the highway on a
motorbike, but people do it on pushbikes, and some even hike the entire length of it. In winter, the road up here is permafrost –
solid ice – and the town is a stopping point for the men and women who drive those absolutely massive commercial trucks. We
hadn’t come across any drivers yet, but after we’d eaten, we did find a place off the main drag called Northwind Industries,
where they service the big trucks. They need a lot of maintenance, because they have to travel 800 kilometres of dirt road
before they hit the first tarmac, and from there it’s another 1,600 to the company’s depot in Edmonton. I chatted to Aidan,
a nice guy who ran the Inuvik depot. He told me how the terrain is tough on the vehicles; the trucks just tear through tyres.
On one recent construction job they went through fifty-four tyres in only the first week.

Outside, I took a look at one of the smaller trucks: a long-bonneted beast being worked on by a guy in a cowboy hat named
Guy Philippe. I was really intrigued by his accent – it still had the American twang but was definitely influenced by
French. Down south, listening to the cowboys talk, we could have been in America – apart from the odd word like ‘bugger’ and
the way they pronounced ‘out’ (more like ‘oot’). Over on the east coast there was the Irish influence I’d noticed.

Guy was repairing the hydraulics that worked the truck’s tipping mechanism, welding in a new plate at the base, and sparks
were flying everywhere. It was an easy enough task with the sun shining, but I wondered what it would be like in the long,
harsh winter when the temperature was fifty below. He told me he came from Ottawa, so perhaps that explained his accent. He
said that there were not that many heavy-duty truck mechanics around any more, and not that many drivers either, because younger
people had no interest in that kind of work. He’d only been in Inuvik for four months, but he had experience of the climate
and knew exactly what he was in for come the winter. The trucks would get iced up, and when they started to thaw, the water
would drip all over the mechanics working on them. I couldn’t think of anything worse than trying to fix something on one
of those vehicles while ice water seeped through your clothes.

Trying to keep a massive truck running is far more difficult than a car; everything is twice the size, three or four times
the weight and far more awkward. Add to that the extreme temperatures, and it’s not something I could contemplate, that’s
for sure. But it was exactly what this guy enjoyed doing: all his working life he’d been a mechanic, and he liked nothing
better than getting wet and dirty. He didn’t mind the cold either. He told me that being a mechanic up here was just like
playing with Tonka toys when he was young, only now the toys were a little bigger.

Aidan showed me around the inside of the workshops, where a massive twin-cab pickup, jacked up with winter tyres, was
parked. It was a colossal Ford 350, with bull bars and as many additional headlights as you could shake a stick at, and it
was nicknamed Little Pig. He indicated another huge vehicle that looked a bit like the snow-coach I’d been driving at the
Columbia Ice Field; this was designed to go under the tundra and carve out an ice road. He also showed me snow ploughs that
could shift drifts thirty metres wide, explaining that you couldn’t allow the snow to bank up on the side of the road, because
it would drift again every time the wind blew.

This area is oil-rich, and Northwind Industries’ trucks are used to ship out the sludge that’s brought up by every drill bit;
they transport it 2,000 kilometres south, where it can be treated and dumped effectively. Aidan told me that one of his vehicles
was just south of town on the weigh scales right now, and he could take me down to have a closer look. Finally, I’d meet one
of the drivers I’d been hoping to talk to. Maybe I’d get to ride along part of the Dempster Highway.