6 Whirlpools and Eddies

IRON CANYON - An eddy punched the jetboat sideways. The rigid eight-metre-long hull flexed. My head snapped and my teeth rattled in the force of the whiplash.

As the boat corkscrewed, I felt an intense desire to cinch even tighter the straps on my life jacket. The feeling was momentary. I didn't dare let go of the grab-hold to which I was clinging like some guy in the front seat of the Big Dipper Roller Coaster.

Simon Fraser had passed this unrelenting place in birchbark canoes almost 200 years ago on his journey to the Pacific Ocean. It was just as formidable for my trek - even using the latest and most sophisticated of 21st century technology.

A wall of muddy brown water foamed by the tilting rail, then, as the boat gave another sickening lurch in the opposite direction, vanished again, sucked down into a whirlpool the size of a small suburban bungalow.

This was a boat which at a touch of the throttle generates as much power as seven models of the four-cylinder Dodge sedan  that zips me around comfortably at freeway speed.

Doug Green gunned the boat's two engines. The surge from their 650 horses was discernible even with the force of the river. He hauled on the controls. The acceleration from the boat's powerful jets combined with the centrifugal force of the whirlpool to flick the vessel out of the vortex and into the next huge eddy.

But not before a slick patch of what looked like calm water suddenly erupted, boiling up from below. Steep waves jack-hammered the bottom - almost three centimeters of solid metal - causing the boat to buck and lurch alarmingly, first to one side, then the other.

"It's like wrestling an anaconda," Green yelled over the din of the engines. "It just keeps twisting away from me. This is total chaos. Anything can happen in here."

"Here" was Iron Canyon, a 30-metre-wide notch in the bedrock between Riske Creek and the Chilcotin River where the entire Fraser River spurts around a dogleg. Water piles up against sheer cliffs even as it changes direction, creating undertows and cross currents that wash across the main flow at right angles. Beneath it all, the river roars along in volumes and velocities that must measure in the tens of millions of litres per second.

"It is terrible to behold the rapidity and turbulence of the immense body of water that passes in this narrow gut," Fraser's journal noted in astonishment when he surveyed the rapid in 1808. "No less do the numerous Gulphs and whirlpools it forms constantly striking from one rock to another. The rocks are amazing high and craggy, particularly on the right side, and the water in a manner seems to have forced a passage under them and flows out here and there in numerous whirlpools and eddies that surpass any thing of the kind that I ever saw before."

Current unpredictable

Small wonder, then, that Fraser - after his men had dragged their canoes and cargo over a grueling portage rather than risk it - broached a carefully hoarded keg of "shrub," a concoction of lemon juice, sugar and rum. He ordered a dram for all hands.

Using the boat's global positioning system, we'd already clocked our downstream drift on one of the Fraser's calmer stretches above Iron Rapids at close to 20 kilometres per hour. In the deep, constricted canyon the flow was even faster.

As it had during Fraser's journey, the river had come up close to a metre overnight and its already complicated hydraulics were constantly changing, Green said, making it almost impossible to predict what the current would do.

"Those great big whirlpools open up and you just get going around and one opens up going the other way. You have to be ready for anything. I'm comfortable with it. You learn to become calm and focused, so you can see your way through the chaos as it unfolds, eh?"

I admired his Zen-like approach. It reminded me of Fraser's description of the philosophical calm with which his men faced the terrifying challenge of another rapid near French Bar Canyon that left no alternative but the route by water.

"Skimming along like lightning, the crews cool and determined, followed each other in awful silence. And when we arrived at the end we stood gazing on our narrow escape from perdition," Fraser wrote. Then, after taking a few deep breaths, he said, they went on to where their Secwepemc advance party was camped.

"Here we were happy to find our old friends, the Chief and the Interpreter, who immediately joined our party." The sense of relief in Fraser's entry is self-evident.

I'd explained to Green before chartering his boat that I wanted to experience the river in its raw power as Simon Fraser's party had experienced it.

 He'd taken me at my word, showing me the formidable stretch of water between Williams Lake River and French Bar Creek, just west of Clinton.

"The water must have been about like this when Fraser's canoes went through," Green had said as we ran down some lesser rapids toward Iron Canyon. "Man, oh man, it's hard to imagine. This is a real handful, even for this boat. That's big water in there. No fooling around, boy."

Green should know. He and his partner Charlene Lupien operate Cariboo Chilcotin Jetboat Adventures. They have been running charters and tours, mostly in the summer months after the runoff has subsided and the river is much gentler, for almost 10 years.

"We've had 12 mountain bikes back here." Green nodded toward his boat's stern. "I've had a 93-year-old woman and I've had a three-year-old, so I've had the full range."

At high water, he acknowledged, these passages are not for the faint of heart, even with twin engines generating 650 horsepower.

 But the trip put Fraser's descent of the river by canoe into a context that I couldn't have imagined simply by reading his journals, however vivid the accounts.

Of course, it wasn't all frightening white water and terrifying canyons, either for me or for Fraser's expedition.

As we idled along in the calm stretches that the old log books describe as "good going," Green helped me try to identify places Fraser mentioned.

"This would be where he crossed the river," he said in the vicinity of Chimney Creek. "He talks about a house and there are the remnants of a house here. You can see a gravesite and even vestiges of the trail they cut in the bank [for a portage]. California bighorn sheep can be seen here - this is one of the few places you see them because it's their northernmost range."

Signals of habitation

Fraser noted finding the horn of a "Sasyan or Rocky Mountain ram" with which he was familiar from his experiences with Tse'Khene hunters. And later we did see the rare sheep, some silhouetted on an escarpment, another small herd browsing on bunch grass on the steep banks close to the water's edge.

His campsite above Riske Creek was easy to spot. It is now Toosey Indian Reserve No. 3 and Green is from Toosey.

"I'd imagine the village site would be here," he said. "There are lots of flat spots, there's good hunting, there's good sturgeon fishing right there" - pointing to a back eddy-"there's a couple of ways in; there's quiet water and a good beach. Lots of kikwillie holes [remains of old pit houses] up there. Yeah, this is the place."

But it turned out there were more signals of human habitation than topography.

"Look for giant rye grass," Lupien said. "That's not native to this area. It was traded in from the Okanagan. The people would seed their village sites with it and then use it to weave mats and linings for their pit houses. So you can spot the village sites by looking for the giant rye. Then you'll find kikwillies. Look for big bush sage - you use that to cleanse your house. Wormwood sage, that's a natural mosquito repellent, common yarrow, too."

As we drifted, ran rapids and drifted again, Green pointed out the other signs of changing demography. Where possible, we paused to examine ancient petroglyphs carved into riverside boulders; stone ovens likely built by the Secwepemc who occupied this territory before smallpox depopulated many villages and Chilcotins expanded eastward; portage cuts left by Fraser himself; the tiny sod-roofed cabins left by prospectors in the 1858 Gold Rush; a building with one stone wall and a tiny stone spillway for a spring that's since gone dry - as many have since the advent of irrigation on the benches - most likely left by Chinese prospectors.

"It's a strange feeling seeing these things," Green mused. "Everybody's life is meaningful. Somebody spent some of his life here, built these things and now there is nothing left but these little ruins and they are disappearing, too."

Just as Fraser had sent scouting parties ahead to assess the risks before putting his men to the dangers of running a rapid, I'd mounted my own reconnaissance before making my rendezvous with Green, a Chilcotin from Riske Creek.

I'd begun by hiking to the mouth of Williams Lake River, now part of a regional park. The riverbed cuts through a series of glacial lake bottoms and I was fascinated by the sedimentary record in the steep banks, which revealed where the waters were 11,000 years, 16,000 years and 20,000 years before.

Mostly, however, I wanted a look at the long-abandoned village site at Ckemtsitsen, the creek mouth where Fraser would have stopped in 1808 on his journey down the big river that the Secwepemc call Setekwe.

The creek widened into a lagoon protected by a long sandy spit while the river beyond was broad and placid, except for a riffle along the west side where the Fraser swept past a ledge of striking red and black rock.

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