For those who never knew George Evanoff, I hope that his story inspires you to experience and to enjoy life in Canada’s outdoors to the utmost, and especially to tread lightly on the land and in the wild mountain environments that we still have in Canada. That was George’s wish when we discussed this project a few days before his death.
Thanksgiving 1998
Chapter 1
The morning was clear and cool as we began an hour of bushwhacking to reach the mountainside. There were still yellow and green hues on the trees, and the vegetation carried just enough frost to get us wet without soaking us through. With winter approaching, the bush was quiet, apart from the sounds that we made pushing through it. George Evanoff had invited me to ski with him to his lodge in the Rocky Mountains northeast of Prince George on the Thanksgiving weekend. It was October 1998. Less than a day earlier I had been sitting in my office contemplating the long weekend. Not having any definite plans for Thanksgiving, I had imagined three relaxing days at home, with excursions to enjoy the dramatic fall colours of British Columbia’s interior.
The phone rang; it was George. “What are you doing for the weekend?” he asked.
“Oh, nothing special,” I replied.
“Well, I’m going up to the cabin,” he continued. “Why don’t you come with me?”
Already past his mid-sixties, and a recent five-year colon cancer survivor, George set a pace in the mountains that few people of any age in north-central British Columbia could match. More than a decade earlier, he had conceived of and built a backcountry lodge in the Dezaiko Range of British Columbia’s Rocky Mountains, northeast of Prince George. He used it as a base for a company that he called North Rockies Ski Tours. With his wife, Lillian, he had run commercial backcountry ski tours there for thirteen years. Later, his son, Craig Evanoff, took over the operation, renaming it the Dezaiko Lodge. In the winter months, George flew clients to the lodge by helicopter for four to seven days of backcountry skiing. During the rest of the year he made regular trips to the lodge, usually on foot, to check on the place, do maintenance work, cut firewood, or to just enjoy the mountain wilderness, its wildlife, and its solitude. Located more than fifty kilometres from the nearest permanent human settlement, the lodge’s further isolation from adjacent forest roads was afforded by steep, wooded mountain slopes, and high ridges that had to be traversed to reach the site.
I thought over George’s invitation. The trip to the lodge would mean racing around after work getting food and gear ready, and getting up at five o’clock in the morning for the two-hour drive east to the staging area. I didn’t think of it as a trailhead, as this would incorrectly imply the existence of a trail. The first part of the hike was a three-kilometre walk carrying skis through wet, recent-growth McGregor Valley jungle, where I had gotten lost a couple of years earlier. George had deliberately allowed what had passed for a trail to grow in and all but disappear. The approach hike would be followed by a 1,200-metre vertical climb through the forest, across alpine meadows, and over a ridge, where we expected to don skis for the six-hundred-metre descent to the lodge. We would be alert for grizzly bears as this was an area of frequent sightings, where I had personally had five close encounters in as many years, and George many more.
We would be prepared for winter weather — storms and whiteouts are common in the Rocky Mountains, but as George often pointed out, “that’s how you get the good snow.” Winter comes early enough in the north, and it is easy to question the desire to climb up to it while the valleys below are still green. Part of the motivation lies in the joy of walking in the season’s first embrace of snow and returning to the fall colours below; in this instance, visiting a well-appointed backcountry lodge added further incentive.
Thanksgiving weekends in the Northern Rockies can afford beautiful golden fall colours, with pleasant shorts-and-T-shirt weather and dry alpine meadows stretching to distant ridgetops that are brushed with a hint of white. Or they can produce a metre of new snow at alpine elevations, as was the case during the first hike to the newly completed lodge on the same weekend in October 1985. On that occasion George carried a seven-kilogram turkey up the mountain and all the way back down again after we were rebuffed by thigh-deep snow at the treeline. With several kilometres of higher and more exposed terrain still to cover, and with more precipitation in the forecast, there was a heated debate as to whether, having lacked the foresight to bring skis or snowshoes, we should turn back. With the group evenly split, it was agreed that we would wait for Craig Evanoff and his partner, Bonnie Hooge, who were coming up behind the main party, to cast the deciding vote. Those who favoured continuing on, including George, were sure that youthful enthusiasm would carry the day. In due course, however, Craig, who would later go on to become a certified ski guide, demonstrated that the wisdom of youth sometimes trumps that of age when he arrived with the deciding words, “Are you guys crazy?”
After carrying a large turkey up the mountain, George Evanoff argues in favour of continuing on before agreeing to abort the Thanksgiving 1985 trip to his just-completed backcountry ski lodge.
In the days leading up to Thanksgiving 1985, it had rained steadily in Prince George, but our minds had not been in winter mode, and nobody had thought of snow. Thirteen years later there had been a few days of cool, wet weather in town prior to Thanksgiving, which probably meant some new snow in the mountains. We wouldn’t know how much until we were there, but this time we would carry skis.
The deciding factor to accept George’s invitation was simply that I hadn’t seen much of him for several weeks. This would be a chance to renew our friendship in the type of mountain setting that was its foundation. As we drove out to the Rocky Mountains on Saturday morning in George’s truck, I pulled out a tape recording that I had made from a CBC radio show that had been broadcast a few weeks earlier. It was a chance recording of a fifteen-minute debate between two men who had each written books about bear safety. The authors had differing views on the subject, and the drive out to the Rockies that morning would be a good opportunity to listen to and discuss the debate with George. We had both had many encounters with black and grizzly bears, some of which were shared experiences.
We didn’t start the tape until we were close to the mountains and were driving along the Pass Lake Forest Service Road. As we listened, we were travelling beneath the Bearpaw Ridge where, just two weeks later and a few hundred metres above us, George Evanoff would encounter a grizzly bear that was defending a moose carcass. A few months earlier, he had been appointed as a lay expert in a University of Northern British Columbia grizzly bear study in the northeast Rockies,1 recognizing a lifetime of experience gained in the mountain backcountry. George discussed his thoughts about bears as we listened to the tape.
In his later years, George did not feel that it was necessary to carry a firearm for defence in grizzly country, although an entry in one of his journals suggests that he may have felt differently during his big-game hunting days.2 He knew from experience that you would have to be both skilled and very lucky to use a gun successfully in a surprise encounter with a grizzly bear. But neither did he carry bear spray, which is considered to be a very worthwhile grizzly bear deterrent. I later discussed the circumstances of George’s death with one of the men we had listened to on the tape recording, a man widely regarded as Canada’s foremost grizzly bear expert.3 He told me that while bear spray is somewhat effective in the case of females defending their young, it is really dicey in carcass situations. He stressed that there is an irreducible bottom line with grizzly bears.
In the twenty years that I knew George Evanoff, we talked many times about his experience with wildlife and his feelings about bears. He respected them, and he was not generally afraid of them. That was not always the case for me. I grew up in England, a country where there aren’t any dangerous wild animals, and despite thirty years of roaming Canada’s bear country, I have never quite