Spring Scouting

One of our pre-season tasks in the spring is to check out the trails we use to watch bears. Some are blocked by rock slides, others still covered in snow, and yet others have melted forever back into the bush. Our accomplice: a battered old two-seat bush plane built in 1957.

It’s one of the most thrilling times of the year in the Canadian wilderness.

The snowpack has ebbed in the high country, the avalanches have done their worst - taking down shrubs, bushes and even fully-grown trees - and the rivers and creeks are running fast and wild.

No two winters are the same here but it is a good bet that once the snow finally retreats and the hummingbirds arrive that something out there will have changed.

It could be a favourite forest road that has disappeared behind a pile of boulders, or an old pack trail carved out of the wilderness during the gold rush that has become forever impassable.  

And there is no quicker or more exciting way to survey our post-winter neighbourhood than from the air. And so each year we haul out the old bush plane - a Piper Supercub built in 1957 that has been patched, riveted and welded to keep her flying - and clamber in.

Even getting into the cockpit - ease of access seemed to count for little in the days of the stringy, uncomplaining aviators of yesteryear - is a challenge in itself.

It requires pushing your arse out at an undignified angle and right in the face of your passenger, grasping a bar above your head, and swinging both legs through the folding door in tandem.

Once in the plane you jam the puny but crucial fuel-air mixture slider to full rich, prime the engine with an ancient plunger, and advance the throttle a quarter of an inch (all as per the woefully skinny manual). Then you push the starter button and utter a quite prayer.

The propeller turns once, twice. And, if your chosen God is with you that day, the engine splutters into life and the propellor begins to whirr.

For a few minutes you sit and allow your body to get used to vibrations. The oil slowly warms and the instruments - not too many of those in this plane - begin to come alive. Sometimes the navigation system gives off a pleasing green light that means it is ready for service.

Either way, you wheel the old bird to the end of the runway, stand on the left brake, whip her rear end around, and push the throttle full forward.

The plane might be old but the engine is powerful and with maximum fuel flowing - even with two up - it leaps off the runway. Then you point the nose to the sky, sniff the exhaust fumes wafting into the cabin through holes in the fuselage, and wait till the altimeter reads 8,000 feet.

It might all sound like a chaotic and ill-considered process. But in the decades after World War Two tens of thousands of Piper Cubs, and the more powerful version the Supercub, were built. What is exotic for us, was, for our flying forefathers, perfectly normal.

Once the little plane is up among the peaks it flies like a dream. It turns on a dime, gives for panoramic views, and, should you get too hot you simply open the window. Or the door.

You can't, of course, see everything you would want to from a plane. But at 45mph and a few hundred feet above the ground, you see a lot.

You see if there is snow on the trails, the state of the avalanche chutes (favourite grizzly bear feeding habitat in the spring), and sometimes even obstacles on the forest roads.

And, at the back of your mind, there is always the thrilling thought you might even see a bear, padding across the snow or walking down a remote trail. Bears, especially grizzlies, love to go where humans rarely venture.

Two weeks ago I set out with my companion on just such a scouting flight. Taking off early, we flew west away from the sun before circling over a creek that comes out of the mountains, a favourite hiking destination of ours. The creek was still encased in ice and snow.

So we headed past peaks, cirques and cornices to the headwaters of another mountain stream.

As we flew along the valley the old airplane engine purred away in front of us. We were well below the peaks and hard up against the sides of the mountain. The water glittered below. It was hard not to love the world on a morning like this.

As I write this on the front deck of the lodge, high water has now arrived and the river at the bottom of the yard is pounding. The snow in the alpine is melting fast and the temperature is in the mid-high twenties.

But tomorrow morning, before winter disappears altogether from the high country, we will once more hop in the Supercub as the sun is rising and head up among the peaks.

There's always a little more scouting to be done.

At least that's the excuse.