The Hunlen Wilderness Camp sits on Turner Lake's south end. Its proprietor, John Edwards, is there to rent you a canoe, teach you how to paddle it, and advise you on what fly or lure is working on the trout. You may arrive just as he's pulling fresh baked cinnamon buns from the oven, if you're lucky.

John also offers to guide you down to Lonesome Lake where he grew up on perhaps the most remote homestead in B.C. His father, Ralph Edwards, attained world fame with the publication of Crusoe of Lonesome Lake by Leland Stowe (New York Random House 1957). It chronicled the efforts of Edwards and his daughter, Trudy, in helping to save the trumpeter swan from extinction.

The giant swans, reaching weights of 14 kilograms and exhibiting wingspans of 2.5 metres, were once hunted extensively as a source of quills, decorative feathers, and down for power puffs. The known world population totalled fewer than 100 in the 1930s.

The Lonseome Lake population wouldn't have made it if Ralph and Trudy Edwards hadn't been who they were and where they were. Over the years, Ralph - and after him Trudy and her husband, Jack - horse-packed tonnes of barley over these rugged mountains and into Lonesome Lake to get the swans through the punishing winter. From near extinction the trumpeter swan population now exceeds 10,000.

John Edwards has been working at restoring the family homestead on Lonesome Lake and hopes soon to be able to offer pioneer-style vacations there. John feels that he is a teacher at heart and the country is his classroom. He feels his legacy will be to restore and preserve his father's legacy.

From the Hunlen campground at Turner Lake's north end, a trail leads up to Ptarmigan Lake and wide-open alpine hiking. At the other end of the 24-kilometre lake chain you can hike up to Sunshine Lake. Here you gain a panoramic view of the massive Monarch Ice Field that defines the park's western boundary.

To get into the Turner Lake chain you can hike the 24-kilometre trail to Hunlen Falls and, by using John's goodwill canoe found there, paddle another six scenic kilometres to his camp. Or you can simply charter a float plane in Nimpo Lake or Bella Coola.

I'm thinking that Tweedsmuir Park is a hiker's paradise as Gary Gale describes further trails he hopes to develop to yet more wondrous places. We are sitting, looking at Panorama Ridge and specifically at a great arcing glacier over a blue-green lake with a waterfall spilling down a black wall of granite. We are absorbed into the profound silence of this place and I remember a quote I had read from Alexander Mackenzie's journals. Leaving the area and packing an extra eight kilograms of smoked salmon he was given by the natives, Mackenzie climbed 1,300 metres, made camp, and sat to write:

We consoled ourselves by sitting around a blazing fire, talking of past dangers, and indulging in the delightful reflection that we were thus far advanced on our homeward journey. Nor was it possible to be in this situation without contemplating the wonders of it. Such was the depth of the precipices below, and the height of the mountains above, with the rude and wild magnificence of the scenery around, that I shall not attempt to describe such an astonishing and awful combination of objects; of which, indeed, no description can convey an adequate idea.

Photography and Text © Gary Fiegehen

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