At the end of a long mountain road are two lakes, irridescent in the sun and the breeze. I start walking away from Sabrina my adventure buddy, embarking on my longest hike yet and feeling nine days of food pressing on my shoulders, feeling the unfamiliarity of this area, and feeling the thinner margin of safety.

I cross landslides as I contour around the lake, before turning from the shore. At least the quiet forest feels familiar. I see a tower through the trees. An outhouse high in the air, lording over a campground with quiet dignity.

The trail steepens through open slopes. It’s warm and pleasant.

After four hours I get to my camp. Four young men play cards in the food area, yelling over the music playing out of a tiny speaker.

I set up my tent and start exploring upstream to leave the shouts behind. I find a lovely moss-coated canyon. The creek is a soft trickle and it is cool and peaceful like a zen garden. After clambering around, I follow the stream back down to a slot canyon: a break in the limestone a single stride across above a 40 meter drop.

The four young men are there. They drink gin out of a cup and say the view is better if I jump across. They watch me but I am afraid to step across the chasm. After a while they leave and I tell myself that I don’t care to impress them.

That night I get up to pee and the stars fill in every inch of the sky. I stare at the whole dome above me but I can’t see them all. Everytime I look harder at one patch I see more and more endlessly. Star drunk and shivvering I return to my tent.

In the morning I ask one of the young men where they are going. He doesn’t know and points vaguely. Another in the group walks over. He is quieter and has planned their trip and knows where they will go. He shows me on a map. I let him ask the question. I tell him. Yes, it is far. It is 200 kilometers.

I did this to impress them after all.

I leave camp before them. They are going the same way at first, before looping around back to the mountian road with the deep blue lakes. I wish they had left first to make noise for bears. At the pass, there is a lake and I take a long break. I never see them.

The trail becomes harder. I follow beside a river, almost wading through willow and berry bushes. I holler a hundred times to alert bears. I see and hear no sign aside from the occasional old paw print. I eat a blueberry, then many raspberries. Now it is hot and I am climbing steeply.

Stop and rest.

I don’t see a comfortable spot and I walk on another half an hour.

Stop now. You’ve let your shoulder get sore.

I stop. There is still much more to climb. Sweat runs down my arms and hands. I finally reach the meadow that I plan to camp at. I thought it would be easier. I calculate that I have over a pound of food per day. I tell myself my pack will quickly feel much better.

Bear tracks cross a lagoon from the fire ring, heading out to the meadow where I will sleep. I think about moving on. but I am tired and it is far to the first camp in Banff and I don’t like to stay without a reservation. I filter water and rest and drink and feel better. With returning strength comes confidence and I commit to staying.

I pitch the tent on the other side of the lagoon, away from where I will eat. The ground is soft with sphagnum, but it is a good metre above the waterline and it feels dry. I make supper and feel even better. It is calm and beautiful but this makes me miss Sabrina and wish she could have this experience, another memory connecting us.

The sun dips below the peaks and it gets cold very quickly. Mists rise at the meadow. I crawl into my tent feeling lonely. I put my bear spray beside my pillow and practice reaching it. I wonder if it is better to yell or stay quiet if something comes sniffing. I toss and turn. I am very uneasy and cold.

When I decide it is light enough, I unzip the fly and find it is covered in a paper-thin layer of ice inside and out. I eat breakfast quickly but take a long time to pack up because of the cold and the wet. Finally I am hiking through still forest on hard-frozen trail. I reach a frost-covered plateau at the pass with lakes mirroring peaks golden with the sunrise.

I walk and I am proud of myself for my first wildcamp and I think that I did well.

I know the willows of the descending valley will be wet but the day is losing its icy edge and I can see the sun-line creeping down to meet me. When I reach it, it is glorious. I sit down and bask in the warmth and feel good. It is a beautiful valley yellow with changing leaves and the morning sun. I’m alone save the circling birds and the prey they are looking for. I walk through knee-high grass passed an empty warden cabin. I pass trails leading left and right to silent campgrounds and lonely cols.

Then I come to a campground that is not empty. A woman sits at a picnic table. Before I can decide if I’m sociable, she says, “GDT?”

Just this section.

I see a PCT badge on her pack and comment. I sit down at a fire ring beside the table and have a snack while she tells me about that.

Where is the water?

She points through the willows. I find the same muddy seep that I’ve been following down from the pass. I collect some anyway. She is still at the picnic table when I return to filter.

The mighty Spray River.

It gets a laugh. She tells me that she is trying to stay at every backcountry campground in Banff, Yoho, and Kootenay. She has done over 40. She is going north too. I wonder briefly if I would like to walk with someone but I have finished filtering and she still has all of her gear out so I say goodbye and walk on.

It is easier to tell someone like this about my trip because there is no false modesty. She has hiked more than me and what I’m doing is not unusual to her.

The day grows warmer and I watch for a place to dry my tent. I come to a bridge in full sun with a hand rail. I pull out the fly and it is soaking. I drape it over the rail, then the tent inner, then my quilt just in case. I sit with my back to a tree. It is just warm enough that the occasional breath of wind feels good. The woman passes by before my things are dry. I see a gravel bar on the bank of the river. I go down and filter more water and dry out my feet.

When I continue it is through a gently undulating forest. I walk north and the monotony of the afternoon makes it feel like a long time, then abruptly, my single track joins a wide gravel path. Within minutes I am passing other hikers every few hundred metres. I see one ahead. It might be the woman but I’m not sure. I’m walking just slightly faster than her but it takes a long time to catch up and she doesn’t turn around. I feel awkward, like I am following her on purpose. I clatter my poles on stones to make noise, like for a bear. I’m pretty sure it’s her by the time she turns around.

Oh it’s you!

“You can walk with me.”

Alright.

We talk about her mission of 60-some campgrounds. Which are the good ones? She is a dispatcher in Banff and she tells me about a fuel tanker that crashed and exploded. The driver died. She starts to ask me about myself. I don’t like attention. I’m happy to meet others if we don’t talk about me. I eventually explain what I do.

We unconsciously walk faster and the final 5 kilometers to my turn off go by in no time. Then I am alone again, close to camp. It is a big camp and I can’t find my way around. Eventually I get settled and wash a bit in the creek. After supper I talk to an older couple who have been on all the most famous Canadian backpacking trips. When the question comes, I simply say where it starts and ends.

Yes, it is very long. Yes, my pack is heavy but I am eating as much as I can.

They say that this makes their own trip feel less impressive. I try to tell them that they are having a great trip at a different pace, but I worry I sound condescending.

Tonight Sabrina tells me that she has decided to join me on day 6 for the last section. I feel my margin of safety increase and I sleep better.

The next morning I walk to a long lake filling a valley bottom. A rusting boat is chained at the shore. I climb along its north bank, admiring glaciers dropping ice cubes into the lake. At around 9am I hear helicopters. They fly overhead, back and forth, every 20 to 30 minutes. I cross the pass into BC and look down at the cause.

A lodge operates these helicopters and maintains the trails and capgrounds in this park. For a couple thousand bucks you can be flown into the resort and fed and toured up mountains. As I stroll down immaculate trail, I understand why people pay this. The triangular mountain is an impossibly simple shape, like an Egyptian pyramid but twice as steep. A glacier sits on its lap, a lake lies at its feet. The valley is open, sparesely dotted with larch and spruce and a golden bed of willow. It seems designed. It lacks nothing people go to the mountains for, except peace.

I pass day hikers from the lodge and campground and continue north. It is hot and grasshoppers click and dry leaves rustle. I need to fill up soon. I come to a lake at a campground. There is no shade. Tents bake in the full alpine sun. All around is only loose rocks and a few hardy shrubs. It looks like half the lake has evaporated. A white mineral ring high above the surface shows where the water level should be. The volume remaining is blue-green, thick with rock flour that has been concentrated by weeks of drying.

I arrive at the same time as two women from the opposite direction. We look dubiously at the slope down to the silted up lake. There is nothing else. We find a way down, disturbing small bugs in the muddy shore, formerly the lakebed. It smells faintly like a beach when the tide is out. I try to collect water without stirring up the mud. I do not want to clog my filter, but it is hot and this is the only water until camp.

I climb back up to the trail to filter what I collected. Several bees are crawling around the lid of my water bottle, perhaps tasting the traces of mango juice that my mouth left behind. I try to shoo them away, but they are determined. Finally I knock the bottle onto the ground to send it rolling down the trail, and scoop it up at a run before the bees can land again.

I walk through a new kind of valley, chaotic, strewn with boulders of all sizes and shapes. The trail threads between them in a tortuous zigzag. I am hot and tired. I am eating as much as I can, and manage to swallow a large amount of trailmix.

Good. But you’re not drinking enough.

I drink a quarter of my bottle. I see a tree: a brave little stick growing out of some dust on top of a boulder. As I keep descending I see more, spindly firs and spruce filling in the space between the rocks. I get a stomach cramp, but walk on. The cramps get worse.

I sit down and drink another quarter of my bottle and my stomach gurgles angrily. What if the water is bad?

You filtered it.

What if the campers at that lake are in those silent sun-beaten tents, lying dead from the water? What if the evaporation concentrated some toxin?

You don’t know that. Dehydration also gives stomach cramps.

I lick my dry lips. It is late afternoon.

I do not trust the water. There is, I’m guessing, two hours to camp. That doesn’t seem too long. There will be good water at camp. Water I can trust. There is only a few mouthfulls left anyway. It would not change my dehydration.

It would not change a poisoning either.

I do not trust the water. I will wait until camp and I will drink and drink and recover. I feel alert and steady. I am not in danger. Only these cramps and my thirst.

It is harder getting to camp than I hoped. The kilometres drag on and there is much up and down. When I finally make it, there is just a tiny stream. I pour out my water and I filter new water and I use that to rinse my filter and bottle and collection bag, and then I filter water for myself and force myself to drink a litre. At the outhouse, my stool is very loose, but I feel better.

I talk to a father and son from Vancouver Island. They are going south to see the pyramidal mountain, like the two women I met at the lake. The dad has a sardonic observation about everything. The son seems content. I talk to another father and son team. The son is always shirtless or wears his shirt open at the front to show his pecs. They have cammo, military style bags. They have rations in black packaging with phrases like extreme wilderness. Both groups tell me that my climb up to the first pass tomorrow will be brutal. One calls it a scramble.

I meet an old woman. She is going my direction. She is not concerned about the climb. “Mountains go up and mountains go down,” she says.

By the morning I have slept well and feel better. I am relieved because this will be my hardest day. I hurry and manage to leave at 7am. Endless switchbacks take me up to the pass where the old woman is sitting on a rock. She points, now far behind, to the pyramid-shaped mountain that everyone goes to see. Then she points, far ahead, to a mountain that looms above my next campsite, a glacier just visible, a patch of white clinging to its side.

She has seen my tent and tells me that she is a fan of the designer. She has the pro version of his tent and his pack and has heard that he will open a store in Golden.

I take the lead, but when I stop for water the old woman passes me. I pass her again, but then it starts to rain. I try different combinations of rain gear, hoping to find something that will keep me fairly dry without getting too sweaty. She leaps frogs me again. Finally I give up and just sweat in my usual rain gear as it rains off and on.

I come to a huge alpine plateau straddling the continental divide. All around me are drifting curtains of rain and mist. I start to pass more and more people. Then I see the chair lifts on the slopes around me.

I suppose these high lifts are for mountain bikers but on a day like today I am not surprised that they seem completely unused. I imagine them in the winter when they drop off their burdens only to have them ski back down, and it strikes me as funny, like someone read the Sisyphus legend and was inspired to do “that but 10 times a minute.”

I’m tired and feel disappointed every time the rain picks up again. I did well on the first pass but since then I have not been making good time on what I wrongly assumed was a fairly steady downhill. But the trail is good and even with my poor attitude I am advancing.

Now there are many people, sightseers with binoculars and families. I stop to watch a mule deer graze. Two teenagers walk right up, chattering, before they notice me and throw a glance at what I’m looking at. A woman with a ski hill jacket asks me if I need directions. Perhaps people get turned around on all the viewpoint loops and side trails. I mention the pass I was hoping to make by lunch. She thinks for a couple seconds.

“Yes, eventually…”

This is not encouraging. I leave the chair lifts and crowds behind and around noon the rain stops for long enough that I take off my rain gear. I stop and rest and message Sabrina that I am tired and still have so far to go today. She is a whirl of encouragement and logistical preparations for when she joins me tomorrow. Buoyed, I continue on at a steady pace.

I zigzag over passes on the continental divide but there is barely any elevation between them. By two o’clock I have reached a familiar trail that Sabrina and I have hiked twice before. The sun even shines weakly and this encourages me up a gently graded pass.

On the way down I feel my knee. I have been waiting for this all trip. I immediately sit down. When I restart it is better for a few minutes and then it starts again. I rest for longer.

I have been doing weight training to strengthen the muscles around my knees. This has let me do all the hiking I wanted so far this year without knee pain, but I’m worried I’m asking too much today. My pack is still loaded for four more days of food because when I set out, I didn’t know if Sabrina could join me. I have already crossed several passes over the last 7 or 8 hours. I know if I stop for the day it will be fine in the morning but my reserved campsite is a long way ahead.

See how it goes.

I continue down, walking carefully, trying to keep what I imagine is good form, and making my poles take more weight than usual. I make it down to a river without the pain increasing. I rest again, eating and filtering water. There is a large campground here, and I weigh stopping. It might rain again. I don’t want an injury. The weather means there will probably be empty sites.

See how it goes.

I walk through the campground. My knee feels normal on flat and uphill terrain. A large family is throwing a football around. There are quite a few tents already set up. I keep walking through and then I have left the campground behind and I feel like I have made my decision and committed to finishing the day at my reserved site.

I remember the next part being very hard. Last year when Sabrina and I had done the first climb up to some lakes, it had felt punishingly steep. Loose rock and deadfall had made it exhausting even with only day packs. It is just has steep as I remember and though most of the deadfall has been cleared, the footing is still loose and eroded. I make steady progress at first but soon I am pausing to catch my breath every 5 minutes, and then every 2 minutes until finally I take my pack off and sit down.

I can’t burn the last strength in my legs or my knee might really get injured. It is late afternoon and while I’m confident I could make my way back down to the big campground now, I will eventually reach a point where I have to just keep going on.

I continue slowly. I tell myself I cannot check my progress until I am sure I have gained at least 50 metres elevation. It is step by step. I am levering myself up with my poles. Despite the coolness of the day the sweat runs down my face. Finally I check my phone. I have only climbed 12 metres. I laugh and sit down again.

Somehow I do make it up to the lakes. I take the turnoff up to the final pass of the day. The trail is less steep but strewn with loose rocks. The mountains on either side of me let off mighty cracks and rumbles and drop rubble continually.

The way down is a rock slide. I have to carefully pick my way down along boulders. I’m relieved it isn’t raining. I take it very carefully but a cobble turns under my feet and I strike my ankle against rock. I stop and rest while the pain recedes to a dull throb. It is an uncomfortable pause. The clatter of rocks cast off the mountain sides above me keeps me alert. I try to imagine where I should run if there is a landslide.

At last I am down. For the first time today I am sure I will make it all the way. I walk along the shores of a large lake and pass a family crouched at the water’s edge. The woman eyes me carefully while the man jovially tells me that there’s a bit of deadfall ahead but it won’t last long.

The final few kilometres feel impossibly long. It is a great relief to make it to camp. For the second time this trip I am very proud of myself. While it isn’t the hardest day of hiking in my life (that honour goes to day 3 of our Section E hike last year), it was the most distance and elevation I’ve ever done and I did it alone.

I set up camp and filter water and begin boiling for supper when the man joins me at the picnic table. He starts the family’s meal while he tells me about their trip. It is his family and some nieces and nephews. They had made it all the way to the pass today after a ten kilometre hike with their packs to camp. He is so stinkin’ proud especially of the youngest who is just 6 and never complained. Soon the woman joins him to help dehydrate ingredients for a backcountry shepherd’s pie. I inhale my own meal and leave them to a family supper.

The next morning I take my time but still break camp before the family has started breakfast. The long drive and logistics for Sabrina mean that the rendevous won’t be possible until at least noon. She and my mom will each drive to our endpoint on highway 1. She will park our car and then ride with my mom to the trailhead on highway 11, where I will meet them. She has probably been madly packing for the past day, pulling together a pretty difficult hiking trip while working full time. I’m so grateful for her and my mom.

As expected my knee feels fine again. Today I only have one full pass and I make it without trouble. I am almost eye level with the glacier that the old woman pointed out to me yesterday morning.

The way down the other side is a long gentle descent through forest and open slope. Mist blocks my view of the other side of the valley. I come to a burned section. The entire mountain slope is a forest of blackened, fifty foot high spikes. The mist hangs still among the trunks and the only sound is a river far below.

The trail has been kept clear, however, and by midmorning the mist has lifted. I make it the rest of the way to the highway uneventfully and find a seat at the main trailhead. It is busy with backpackers and trail runners. I am just another person waiting for my shuttle to do this famous point-to-point trip.

The timing is really good. The wait is just long enough to rest and make the mental switch to the final stage of the trip.