Origin Story
The Walbran Valley: where it all started
Everyone loves an origin story. We want to know why people do the things they do, and what transpired to lead them down their path through life. It’s no fun to only see the results, it’s the trials and tribulations that are interesting.
Yukon Alpine Adventures is the result of many years spent hiking, camping, climbing, and skiing in the backcountry. Being active in nature is a core part of who I am, and starting an ethical guiding company is my way of pushing myself to grow, give back, and do better. Looking back, I must admit that this was never the outcome I expected and it’s the story of the curve ball that got me into the outdoors that I’d like to share with you.
Ten years ago, I was a professional trumpet and keyboard player based out of Victoria, British Columbia. I had pursued a degree in jazz trumpet after high school and was fully committed to becoming a career musician. I was lucky enough to collaborate with many different artists and spent much of my twenties travelling around North America and Europe performing everything from small coffee shops to big festival stages with Canadian indie bands. I had a closet full of skinny jeans and v-neck t-shirts and loved playing the role of the hipster rock star. It was fun, often greasy, and full of wild adventure.
Classic hipster pose
While it had its moments, the life of a touring musician was pretty unglamorous. The majority of the time was spent travelling in dirty vans, sleeping in cheap motels, and performing in loud, dingy venues. The outdoors started to present itself as a natural antidote to the grime of touring. The more I toured, the more I felt drawn to nature and as I stared out the window of whatever vehicle we were travelling in, I began daydreaming of a different kind of adventure.
Returning home I would immediately feel a desperate urge to go outside. I started tiptoeing out on local hikes and soon enough, I was cramming as many outdoor adventures as possible before leaving again on tour. I had been a boy scout as a teenager, spending many days and nights camping around Vancouver Island, but I had left all that behind when I began studying music. It had been over ten years since I had slept in a tent and couldn’t remember the first thing about camping. Now in my mid-twenties, I was dusting off my old camping gear and rediscovering the joys of adventuring in nature.
One day in 2014, a friend of mine sent me an announcement from the Wilderness Committee looking for volunteers for a 3-day weekend of trail building in the Wah-nuh-jus—Hilthoois Tribal Park (an island just off of Tofino, BC). I had never done anything like this and it sounded like a good time. Without knowing what I was getting into, I signed up and packed my bags.
We were tasked with helping the Tla-o-qui-aht trail guardians build boardwalk on their iconic big tree trail. Spending time among some of the biggest trees in the world while doing hard physical work was intoxicating. Never had something felt so impactful, meaningful, and tangible and immediately after the trip, I was looking for more opportunities to do the same.
I scoured the web for any trail-building opportunities, but nothing similar seemed to come up. I reached out to parks about their trail systems and offered to give them free labour but those efforts fell flat. I participated in another trailbuilding weekend in Wah-nuh-jus—Hilthoois Tribal Park, but spending three days a year just didn’t cut it. There was a fire in me that was growing and demanding I put my hands to work.
The early, bandana days
Another year went by without much luck when out of the blue, a chance phone call would change my life. In the spring of 2015, I had reached out to a friend at the Wilderness Committee to complain about the state of the trails in Carmanah Provincial Park. “Everything there is falling apart,” I told her. “Was there any way the Wilderness Committee could help me go in and fix things up?”. “Don’t waste your time in a protected area,” she replied. “You need to go to the Walbran Valley. They need your help and the valley is under threat of imminent logging”. A few emails and phone calls later to a mysterious group called the Friends of the Carmanah Walbran, I was in the back of a stranger’s Toyota 4Runner, crammed with tools, chainsaws and camping supplies, barrelling down the island’s remote logging roads towards the Central Walbran Valley.
The Castle Giant (Walbran Valley)
The Walbran Valley.
In YAA’s origin story, this is the turning point, the protagonist’s coming of age, the plot twist that affects the rest of the book….
The Central Walbran Valley is located on the southwest side of Vancouver Island, a few kilometres from the raging Pacific Ocean. The rainforest here is more akin to a jungle, where white-marbled limestone karst formations are overlaid by foot-thick moss and dense salal bushes that tower over your head. The valley is like a giant sponge that never dries out. Moisture clings to the air and dampness is a state of being.
This nutrient and moisture-rich environment fosters one of the greatest living things on earth and by biomass, the largest: big trees. The forest is like nothing I’ve ever (or since) experienced with 1500-year-old western red cedars over 50ft in circumference, enormous 300ft tall sitka spruces, and colossal douglas firs with 60ft wide crowns. To descend into this ancient valley is to go back in time and be dwarfed by a landscape of giants.
Getting to the valley is an ordeal. From Victoria, it’s a 3 to 4-hour drive (depending on how much you like your car) on logging roads that get progressively worse. It’s a depressing drive because once you leave the pavement, the drive is almost exclusively through logging cut blocks and clear cuts. The drive physically and mentally hammers the loss of these majestic forests into you. Every time I descended into the heart of the valley, I was struck by how precariously the valley was clinging to life. Seven cut blocks were proposed to go in, one was approved, a new road was being built on the mountain across from it, and the logging industry was bearing down to cut it all up.
It’s hard to describe the insane, magical, brutally challenging, and emotional period that followed. The Walbran’s network of trails hadn’t been maintained in years, and with the help of a few friends with vehicles and tools (I had neither), I immediately threw myself towards reopening the overgrown trails and replacing the rotten boardwalk. In fact, I didn’t even wait until I had the right tools and spent four days hammering chicken wire into boardwalk with a rock and the wrong kind of wire cutters. The fire within me grew to match the insanity of a rainforest under attack, and for the next two years, I toiled incessantly to help build access, replace trails, and take pictures to advocate for this special place. At our peak, we would spend 5-7 days in the park, building 12 hours a day, going back to town for a day or two to buy more food and nails before driving back.
I loved this work. Sure, I was broke (this was all out-of-pocket volunteering) and living in my parent's basement, but nothing gave me more purpose and energy than hauling giant cedar beams for days at a time in the torrential cold November rain. There was no turning back to making a living playing shows or finding a job behind a desk.
The final turning plot twist in his story happened in 2017. The band I was touring with went on hiatus and I suddenly needed to make some money. I kept looking for work as a trailbuilder, but there just didn't seem to be anything that remotely resembled what I did in the Walbran. As I was running out of options, a friend of mine told me to check out the Strathcona Park Lodge. They ran outdoor education programs for teenagers and were always in need of instructors who spoke French. Luckily for me, I’m a francophone. They also did all their training in-house, which meant I could get a job there with a resume devoid of relevant work experience.
My very first day assistant guiding my very first commercial trip. I was so nervous I ended up puking in front of the boss after dinner.
A lot happened after that, but things seemed to follow a natural progression. I worked for two years at the lodge before branching out and working for other schools and outdoor education programs around Vancouver. In 2018, I started training to become a hiking guide with the Association of Canadian Mountain Guides and shortly thereafter, in 2019, started guiding commercially on the West Coast Trail. One thing led to another and within a few years I was living in Whitehorse, itching to start my own shop. That story will have to wait for chapter 2: Olivier bumbles his way through entrepreneurship.
If you want to read more about my time in the Walbran and see some incredible photos, check out the following articles.