Two days exploring western BC by Cessna 172 in 1987
I still fill many hours in most of my days scanning slides and documents. For the past 2-3 days I’ve been into the slide albums, most of which have been about adventures in BC on foot, by 4×4, and flying. I remember nothing about these adventures – all I have is the photos, but I have enough of them to re-create some of the trips. Some are pretty cool, and in this post I’d like to show you one of them, with my Cessna 172 C-GWDM on July 2 and 3, 1987. My brother-in-law Warren joined me for this adventure.
The first image is a scan of my log book for that series of 8 flights totalling 9.0 hours. We landed at Tsuniah Lake, Twin Lakes, Chilko Lake, Tatla Lake, Kleena Kleene, Bella Coola, Courtenay, and back at Langley. I wish I had many more photos, as the record is minimal and incomplete.
From Langley to Tsuniah Lake took us 2.3 hours – as you can see by this Google Map, it would take 10 hours to drive between those two airports. This route covers some extremely rugged and remote country – you can see an interactive map that you can zoom in on, here. Two other notable stops on this trip are also on this map – Bella Coola at the upper left, and Courtenay on the east coast of Vancouver Island, towards the lower left.
Tsuniah Lake turned out to be a big deal. Although it was very windy, we rented a boat to go fishing, and I soon caught my first-ever fish! Well, as a kid we fished for bullheads, but those creatures were so awful I was traumatized and didn’t go fishing again for decades. This fish, though, was beautiful, and was safely released back into the lake.
Leaving Tsuniah Lake.
Next we made a short hop over to Twin Lakes.
Twin Lakes is lovely but this seems to have been a fairly brief stop.
A few minutes after leaving Twin Lakes, we were over Chilko Lake, one of BC’s gems.
We landed at the Chilko Lake (Tsylos Park Lodge) Airport at the north end of the lake. That’s “Whisky Delta Mike” in front of the lodge.
This was another brief stop. This is a deluxe lodge which isn’t set up to cater to people on a tight budget just dropping by. This is the sort of place Cathy and I would book now, 35 years later.
We next flew west and then north in search of suitable overnight accommodation – which meant a place to set up the pup tent and fire up the Coleman stove. The next photo is looking south at Tatlayoko Lake, which is the next large lake west of Chilko Lake.
A few minutes north, the Tatla Lake airstrip looked perfect for our needs. The next image, from Google Earth, shows the airport at the upper centre.
Yes, Tatla Lake was perfect – this is exactly what we wanted. Okay, I suppose to be perfect it would have to be on a fishable lake, but it was very good 🙂
When I got home, I added some comments to the airport guide I used – created from the aviation branch’s official airport book, carried in a tiny 3-ring binder.
The next morning, July 3rd, our major destination was to the west at Bella Coola. Our first stop, though, was Kleena Kleene. The next image showing the Kleena Kleene airport is also from Google Earth – this was another brief stop, probably because the lake access wasn’t good.
We thought about stopping at Charlotte Lake, but didn’t.
Incredible Hunlen Falls, which flows from Turner Lake just east of Bella Coola. Wikipedia says “With an estimated height of 260 m, it is tied with Takakkaw Falls in Yoho National Park for having the fourth tallest single drop of any waterfall in Canada.”
I finally made it to Bella Coola! This was probably intended as the major destination of the trip, even though “major” only meant spending a couple of hours there.
We somehow got wheels and did a bit of a tour. The Bella Coola valley is gorgeous.
The main feature of our little tour was the Alexander Mackenzie commemorative plaque.
The tidal flats in front of the Mackenzie plaque.
Leaving Bella Coola, headed down the coast to Courtenay on Vancouver Island. That was probably just a fuel stop, and Warren and I landed back at Langley that evening. I didn’t make it back to Bella Coola again until May 2016, when I drove in with my motorhome.
Strangely, the photo above seems to have been the last photo I shot on this trip. I told a friend about Tsuniah Lake, though, and he got a couple of friends to join him and I flew them back there just 9 days later (July 12th, 1987). They had a very successful day 🙂 In this final photo, I’m second from the right, and my friend Doug is on the far right.
This post is sort of an experiment to see what I can do with photos of some of the cooler adventures I’ve been on in BC. I thought this one would be a good start because it’s pretty amazing what you can do in a small plane in just 2 days. The next post will be back in the Yukon, on another e-bike outing I did last week.
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This sort of ties together some of your earlier posts about your old flying days… Wonderful country and what a bit of a let down to do the pup tent and Coleman stove cookout after seeing that high end lake lodge earlier in the day. Good fast moving adventure and a safe one too.
In those days the high end lodge was scary (as well as unaffordable) – the pup tent was perfect. Things are very different now 🙂
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Aw, Warren was just a baby!
Haha – it feels like we both must have been not too far out of diapers 🙂