Hudson's Bay Company Heritage Trail

Hell Hill stretched out below me. This section of the Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC) Heritage Trail earned its nickname mostly from hikers going the opposite direction, grinding up an endless stretch of tight switchbacks as they ascended the Cascade Crest. Under my feet, it's about as steep and loose as a trail can get before gravity overcomes friction. After an hour of careful hiking, the trail disappeared in front of me. Instead, it looked like one of those giant sandworms from Dune had torn through the forest, leaving a deep trench littered with small trees and skull sized rocks.

This trench was just the latest piece of evidence from the 2021 atmospheric river that, over the course of two days, dropped nearly 300mm of rain on southwestern B.C. The rains washed out highways, stranded hundreds of people and forced thousands more to evacuate their homes. It also wreaked havoc along the 50-mile HBC Heritage Trail, a long distance hiking trail that tracks historical travel routes across the northern Cascade range.  

At the time, the fate of this trail was probably the farthest thing from most peoples’ minds. But in the months that followed, while governments and business started to get to work rebuilding the highways, a group of dedicated backpackers and outdoor educators took on the herculean task of bringing this trail back to life.

“We lost several bridges and two big ones had to be replaced. Massive landslides washed away several areas of trail completely. Trees were down everywhere like matchsticks. Every water drainage was scoured to bedrock,” said Nate Brown, assistant trail crew lead for the Hope Mountain Center.

As a nonprofit outdoor education society, the people at Hope Mountain Center are stewards of the HBC Trail. Since the floods, it’s been Brown and a dedicated team of staff and volunteers that have led the charge to resuscitate the trail.

That work has included everything from clearing fresh deadfall to rerouting the trail around landslides and bridge washouts, made harder by the fact that, for months after the flooding, access to the trail was hamstrung by closed and washed out roads. According to Brown, the work to fully clear the trail took most of two summers. First was what he called “summer of contemplation and planning” followed by trail work that fall and all through 2023 and 2024. When I started hiking the trail in late August of 2024, Brown was still out clearing deadfall.

From the moment I turned off the highway towards the trail’s eastern terminus near Tulameen, B.C., I saw the scars left by the floods. It had been nearly three years since the waters rose, but sandbag and rebar barriers remained all along the banks of the Tulameen River. At the river ford that starts the trail, waterlogged deadfall, flushed down from the forests upstream, littered the gravel bank.

Climbing up the first miles of trail, deadfall in open sections of forest looked like the piles of “matchsticks” Brown had described. I completely lost count of the freshly cut downed trees that flanked the trail within a few minutes. Not long after, I passed the remains of an old logging bridge that had been shorn in two when flood waters poured down the drainage. Now onto the Tulameen Plateau – a series of rounded summits in the rain shadow of the Cascades – the trail opened up into an old wildfire burn. The fire was long ago enough that iridescent purple fireweed and stubby trees began to reclaim the landscape. I could still pick out charred stumps and logs nested among the fresh growth.

I woke up early and cold the next morning, my tent coated with moisture. I boiled water for coffee and oatmeal and wandered around the campsite, having arrived just before dark the previous night. I was camped at Olivine Camp, one of 10 established campsites along the trail. Each one is well appointed with a bear cache, pit toilet and areas for both tents and cooking. Most of the sites are built on, or near, historic encampments. Some have massive interpretive signposts of the type you find in a museum, an odd sight in the backcountry.

Like many trails we now hike, the first people to walk along the HBC trail were Indigenous. When western expansion brought the fur trade to what is now B.C. in the mid-19th century, an employee of the Hudson’s Bay Company named Alexander Caulfield Anderson looked to Indigenous knowledge to find a path through these mountains. Blackeye, a Similkameen Chief, showed him the hunting paths his people had relied on for generations. Caulfield followed these trails and established the first version of the HBC route in 1846. By 1849 the HBC Brigade Trail officially connected camps and forts to the interior.

While the signs in campsites along the trail offered interesting nuggets of history, things settled in as I logged miles on the trail. After a day on the trail, I was starting to catalogue the different trail markers on the trees. The oldest were worn rectangles chopped into thick bark with an axe or a knife, some of which may have marked the original trail. Within some of these, faded and worn tin plaques marked the initial establishment of a recreational trail in the late 1960s and it’s construction through the 1970s. Signs from various government agencies, some no longer active, marked the passage of time. More recently, the Hope Mountain Center had put up bright red kilometer markers supplemented by multicoloured flagging tape to keeps hikers on track through the flood impact zones.

As I hiked, I was reminded of a quote from Robert Moor’s “On Trails” describing the paths we walk as, “the collaborative artwork of trillions of sculptors, large and small.”

I stopped for the night at Horseguard Camp, another well-built backcountry campsite along the banks of the Tulameen River. I couldn’t help but think of everything that had to happen to lead to this trail. Animals had to travel through these valleys and mountains in search of food. Early hunters had to follow them. These hunters showed these trails to newcomers in search of a route for commercial goods. Fur traders traveled this route for decades until the new travel routes and the promise of gold in the nearby Fraser Canyon led to its abandonment by the 1860s. Nearly a century later, a group of hikers found the trail and brought it back to life with countless hours of toil. Since then, it’s passed through various hands, each doing differing levels of work to maintain and develop it. I fell asleep that night thinking about all the history that would be lost if Nate and the Hope Mountain Center hadn’t been there to bring the trail back after the floods.

The next day was the biggest of the trip. I started early to knock out some flat and easy miles along a route I had travelled back in the summer of 2021.

A friend and I had met at a trailhead to the south to attempt a possible first descent of the headwaters of the Tulameen River. We loaded packrafts, whitewater gear and a few days of food into heavy packs and set off at dawn. By the time we hit the river late in the morning, it was already sweltering and we laid in fresh snowmelt to cool down. We didn’t know it, but while we navigated whitewater canyons and sweat on long portages around wood choked rapids, we were in the middle of an event that would be called the “Pacific Northwest Heat Dome” a period of heat that would spark devastating wildfires in the town of Lytton and claim hundreds of lives.

Both that event, and the 2021 floods were natural disasters fuelled by climate change. For the floods, the culprit was an “atmospheric river.” The term refers to long columns of water vapour that form a continuous flow in the sky. Normally these columns bring storms, but nothing of the scale and frequency that we experienced then and still see today.

According to climate scientists, rising global temperatures are increasing evaporation. This means more moisture in these columns and more powerful atmospheric rivers happening more often. Looking back at the 2021 floods, scientists at the University of Victoria found that the probability of similar rainfall events had “increased by roughly 50 percent by human-induced climate change.”

When these supercharged atmospheric rivers slam into mountain ranges, they can drop months worth of rain in a matter of hours, starting a chain reaction.

First, the soil gets saturated and, as anyone who has overwatered a plant knows, eventually the ground just can’t absorb any more water. This excess water pours over the ground and finds pathways down mountains, flooding small creeks and carving new ones in other low lying areas. As more water pours into these areas, it starts to wash away soil, pulling trees, rocks and earth down with it.

The new grooves converged into Sowaqua Creek at the bottom of the valley. As the creek swelled, it transformed from a low volume trickle into a surging freight train, wiping out bridges, washing away sections of trail, filling with debris and punching down the valley to the Coquihalla River. When this river, swollen by Sowaqua and other creeks, met the highway of the same name, it washed out 20 sites along 130 kilometers, closing one of the main arteries connecting Vancouver to the rest of Canada and stranding hundreds of people.

I camped that night beside Colville Creek and woke up to the familiar dank and fecund scent of coastal temperate rainforest. The bright orange, red, purple and yellow hues of the Tulameen plateau wildflowers had been replaced by a smorgasbord of greens that define so much of the Pacific Northwest.

It only took a few steps out of camp to come face to face with the impacts of the floods. Chainsaw cuts split through the trunk of an ancient giant that, after standing sentinel for generations, had crashed across the trail. Though no one was there to hear it, this ancient tree and its neighbours falling to the ground must have sounded like an artillery barrage.

As I climbed up and over Manson’s Ridge, the last high divide of the route, I noticed that some of these cuts were brand new, fresh sawdust caking my hiking boots as I passed by. If I had been a day earlier, I probably would have found Nate right here, chainsaw in hand, clearing this final stretch of deadfall.

I was close to the western end of the trail, one of the last sections to be cleared and brought back. As Nate explained, the Hope Mountain Center finished building detours on the last stretch of trail just beyond this in 2021. Before then, this section of trail followed a defunct logging road. When logging picked back up on the road, they cut a new trail through steep old growth on the opposite side of the valley. “We all know logging trucks and hikers don’t mix,” Brown explained. “Our amazing trail crew that summer managed to punch the trail all the way through… [we] put quite a number of bridges and boardwalks along the trail. During the first week of November we prepped the trail for a new aluminum bridge, connected the trail between bridges and packed up for winter.”

The week after they finished in 2021, the rains started. Two days later, it was like Mother Nature had shaken the Etch-a-Sketch on their brand new trail. Rebuilding that section of trail started in 2023 and it was finally re-opened in June of 2024.

The sky was tinged with a hint of wildfire smoke when I made it off of Manson’s Ridge onto this new trail. The smell of smoke reminded me of the fires earlier this summer in Jasper, one of Canada’s most iconic national parks. Politicians had lamented that nearly a third of the town’s buildings burnt in the fire, but I hadn’t heard much about the more than 30,000 hectares of forest and mountains. I wondered, what trails and campsites had been impacted? 

Photos shared by Parks Canada show sections of two iconic campgrounds, Whistlers and Wapiti, burnt and covered in ash. A picture shared on social media by a local photographer showed the Mt. Edith Cavell trailhead before and after the fire. In the latter image, the trees are gone and the sign is burned away. According to wildfire experts, the forests could take more than a century to recover in that area.

This train of thought led me to think about Mt. Robson Provincial Park, just to the east of Jasper. It too was also just starting to recover from trail flooding in 2021. Late that June, river levels in the park started rising when the Heat Dome opened up the snowmelt faucet. A storm quickly followed and, by early July, the park was evacuated and floodwaters charged through the iconic Berg Lake trail network. In 2024, part of that trail finally re-opened, with BC Parks hoping to open the rest in 2025. According to their website, this long process is because they are “ensuring we are rebuilding the trail with climate resiliency in mind”.

As I continued down the trail, I started to make a list of climate change’s impacts on trails I knew. There were the 2023 wildfires that shut down parts of both Cathedral and Stein Valley Provincial Parks. Or the climate change-linked rock fall on Squamish’s iconic granite buttresses that closed a number of climbing and running trails near my old home. I remembered conversations among guides about ski traverses and mountaineering routes that are becoming harder and more dangerous as glaciers recede and snowpacks decline. I thought about numerous closures on iconic long trails like the Pacific Crest and Appalachian Trails from yearly wildfires, not knowing that just a few months after this hike, much of the latter would face the brunt of Hurricane Helene. I kept going with everything from bikepacking routes to international destinations and backyard runs. I ran out of trail before I ran out of examples.

As my friend Sam pulled up to the parking lot to give me a ride back to my car, I searched for a tidy ending to all my thoughts. I wanted a soundbite or a pithy conclusion that could tie the whole experience together, but I struggled to find a clean line to pull all the threads together.

Climate change is sometimes described as an “existential threat”. As I waited for my ride at the western end of the HBC Trail, I felt like I was finally starting to understand what that actually meant. A threat to the very existence of something is difficult to imagine. Hiking the HBC trail was a trip through both natural and human history. It took me through wildlife habitat and across landscapes changed and still changing. It was an experience that could only happen on this trail, at this moment. And, it’s an experience that fire and floods could erase the possibility of future hikers having.   X