photo: www.jakobdulisse.com
The enchanted Incomappleux forest
Imagine: a waterfall-powered eco-hostel, 1,500-year-old cedars nine metres around, secret springs and goblin’s gold, a lush oasis 600 kilometres inland. It’s real, it’s rare, and it’s all waiting for you in the world’s largest inland temperate rainforest.
“Lord of the Rings,” murmurs someone behind me as our party of five follows Patrick Pyrz through a grove of majestic cedars in the upper Incomappleux Valley. Pyrz turns, grinning.
“I often describe it as Tolkeinesque,” he agrees. “But kids usually think of Harry Potter’s Forbidden Forest.”
Regardless of your literary reference point, there’s no denying the magic of the place. Thick moss cushions our footsteps and the lofty tree canopy swallows our voices. In this hushed green auditorium, the fluted notes of Swainson’s thrushes spiral upward as strands of summer sunshine descend.
We follow the path onward between the widely spaced trees, dodging prickly devil’s club and cutting through a swath of waist-high ferns. Up ahead, our guide promises, we’ll find an enchanting spring and rare goblin’s gold.
Pyrz first fell under the spell of the Incomappleux (in-COM-ah-plu) in 1992, while visiting friends who owned one of the few pieces of titled land there. The river valley, in the Selkirk Mountains about 100 kilometres north of Nakusp, kept drawing him back, and eventually he bought his friends’ 37-hectare property.
“I really didn’t have an interest in just owning a patch of land in the backcountry for myself,” he recalls, “but I always had this idea that I would like other people who don’t have the same backcountry skills as I do to be able to see and enjoy what I love, in relative comfort and safety.”
Read more in the current issue of British Columbia Magazine
