Company Of Wolves

Incubus | If Not Now, When?

In the Company of Wolves

I’d like to say that the howling outside is drowned out by the clinking of beer bottles and the unruly bedlam of drunken revelry, but I’d be lying. Instead, the unmistakable cry of wolves rises from the darkness outside – a truly unnerving sound that startles us from our semi-conscious slumber. It’s the first time I’ve heard wolves in the wild – or come to think of it, ever – and despite being levelled by an exhausting day of clinging to snowmobiles I jump from my sleeping bag and push my face against the window pane to peer out into the dark. I’m excited but – considering we’re 90 kilometres deep in the wilds of Canada – also a little unsettled by the prospect that I could easily become dinner before our four-day stay is up. Forgive me for seeming soft, but being eaten is quite an alien concept to someone who grew up in Milton Keynes.

The trip I’m on is meant to be another installment of Jeremy Jones’ two-year Deeper project: using splitboards to access the backcountry in as unobtrusive a manner as possible; pushing our physical and mental boundaries; finding our limits and pushing those of big mountain riding. You get the idea. It’s not going to plan. Instead, we’re hauling our asses up impossibly steep hillsides near Golden, British Columbia, on 800cc snowmobiles – our splitboards clamped ironically to the sides of the sleds’ racks. Sure, we’re hitting the powder and we’re exploring new terrain, but we’ve yet to manage a serious hike. The boards’ climbing skins haven’t even got a look in.

At least the cabin we’re holed up in each night is pushing my mental boundaries. When Jonaven Moore proposed staying in a friend’s “old trapper’s cabin” I pictured a rustic log affair resplendent with Canadian old timer memorabilia – gold panning apparatus, a rocking chair on the deck, an array of tobacco pipes, that sort of thing. What we have ended up in is a real trapper’s cabin, complete with more recent memorabilia: guns, jagged metal animal traps and random bits of fur. Jason Baun, a local snowboarder and our host whose family have the trapper’s rights to this area, is telling me how you catch Pine Martins – and how only last week he accidentally trapped a wolf.

“I thought it was a wolverine, there was so much commotion going on. I had to shoot it quickly.” I haven’t the nerve to ask him how you “accidentally” trap a wolf, or why the Canadian government pays $50 for each wolf shot – or if wolves come back to seek vengeance for a lost loved one. Whatever the reasons, it’s all sitting uncomfortably with my sensitive vegetarian principles. But right out the door, or at least, a further twenty-minute snowmobile trek into the abyss, lies some epic terrain: steep Alaska style faces, classic pillow drops and a dozen square miles of rolling glacier. “How easy it is to sell out when there’s a couple of feet of pow on your doorstep,” I muse.

The company of wolves, post production script

The Company of Wolves

Company of wolves

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