Last year, a group of eight people set out to hike the Monkman Pass Memorial Trail.
That in itself is unusual. The trail was officially opened in 2008, and if the trail has seen that many hikers in the last decade, it would be a surprise. Less than 100 people are known to have hiked the whole route.
The route approximates the path taken by Alex Monkman and other farmers out of Beaverlodge, who decided to push a route through to Prince George to cut down on the fees to get their grain to port.
For those who haven’t heard the trail, here is a brief history from the official brochure, written by Charles Helm.
“In the 1920s Alex Monkman had a vision of a trade route that went from the Peace Country to the West Coast via a low pass through the Rocky Mountains that he knew of, south of what is now the town of Tumbler Ridge, B.C. He believed that it was the quickest, most economic and efficient route for the farmers of the Peace Country to market their produce. At the time, northwestern Alberta farmers were struggling with long export routes for their products.
“He rallied successive governments to put a railway through the pass, but met with little support, and eventually shelved the idea. Yet Monkman refused to let his vision die, and in 1936 he and Crosby McNaught formed the Monkman Pass Highway Association. This group of determined pioneers led a drive to push a road through the pass and establish the trade route themselves.
“Over the next three years, many people put heart and soul into the highway route, often labouring for only three meals a day and the chance to share in the adventure. They built a road from Rio Grande to Kinuseo Falls, and in 1937 the Trailblazer crew of Alex Monkman, Carl Brooks, Ted Chambers, and Shorty McGinnis blazed a trail through the Monkman Pass.”
Despite limited funds, challenging terrain and lack of roadbuilding tools that we might find today, the crew managed to carry, push, pull and even sometimes drive a Model T truck through Monkman Pass to the Prince George side of the mountains. And it wasn’t these limitations that halted construction, but the outbreak of World War II.
In the mid-2000s, Kreg Alde, a Beaverlodge native, was able to gather funding to create the Monkman Pass Memorial Trail, which followed an existing route up to Hugh Lake, before extending the route through some extremely rugged county to Hobi’s Cabin, a distance of 63 km.
What was most unusual about the crew that set out to hike the route last year was the fact that they brought along gear to create a feature film of the trip, and even more surprising, despite the difficult terrain, nearly non-existent route and having less than a month to compress the hundreds of hours of footage into something usable, managed to do so.
The film, Ancestor’s Path: The Ancient Route of the Monkman Pass, gets its first public showing on November 15 in Grande Prairie before making its way onto Telus streaming services in December. I sat down with four of the filmmakers to talk with them about their adventure.
Wade Whibley was the person who got the project rolling. Whibley is from Valhalla, just outside of Grande Prairie. He was joined by the project’s two cameramen—Jared Matlock and TJ Kennedy—and Travis Fowler, who is a member of the Saulteau First Nations, originally out of Chetwynd.
Matlock originally met Whibley making a 48 hour short horror film in Grande Prairie. “As an avid hiker, I like being out in the bush, and this ticked both boxes. So it was pretty, pretty awesome project to be part of.”
Kennedy, who had also worked with Whibley on a short film project joined at the last minute after another member had to bow out.
Fowler says this experience of working together gave Whibley a chance to see how everyone interacted. “It gave him confidence to reach out to us to join the project. This was his project long before we were lucky enough to join it.”
But why did Whibley want to make the project? “I’ve hiked Monkman a few times into the Cascades,” he says. “A friend of mine suggested it. Once I started researching and seeing how rich in history it was, I realized this would be a really interesting story to try and tell.”
Whibley reached out to a friend who he had worked with on a previous documentary about the Grande Cache Death Race. “And then it just kind of spiraled from there. We did quite a few meetings just talking about how we wanted to approach it and whatnot. And then I started going through my network and reached out to Jared, TJ, and Travis. And nobody said no. They were all in.”
Whibley says for him, the draw was the scenery. “When you get in the Cascades, it was just majestic. You’re cut off from everything and just the sound of the water. And yeah, that was pretty much what got me.”
For Fowler, on the other hand, who grew up in Chetwynd, it was curiosity. “As someone who grew up in Chetwynd, there was a sign just outside of town that said ‘Gateway to Monkman Pass.’ And my dad said that his ancestors were friends of Monkman as well and had helped him throughout there. So when Wade approached me with this idea, I thought, yeah, this is something interesting. And it opened up to such a bigger project. There was more connections with Monkman to not only my hometown of Chetwynd, but to Beaverlodge and Grand Prairie and all through this area. I started learning more and more about how the Monkman Pass and its history is integral to the Grande Prairie region, and the Peace River area in British Columbia. So I wanted to reveal that to people.
And for Fowler, it sounded like an adventure. “I’d never done anything like it before. I had worked on a few documentaries before and some bigger movie projects. And filmmakers are always excited to film. But because it was the Monkman Pass, it was a documentary, we learned so much more and we’re continuing to learn more.”
He says that they gathered a lot of content over the course of filming the documentary, and while he won’t say what future plans are, he will say that there are future plans.
One of the biggest challenges, says Whibley, was the timing. “Our original plan was to hike the pass in the summer of 2023 but it got postponed to the following summer,” he says. “Our plan was to do a recon hike in late June/early July followed by the production hike in August. Due to the smoke and wildfires we ended up rescheduling a couple times and compromise on just doing the recon hike to Monkman Lake. This added another challenge because the deadline was in September, which only left a month to edit.”
Matlock says filming in the backcountry is always a challenge. You’re prepared for a backcountry hike for eight or nine days,” he says. “So you’re trying to stay light. But there’s ten or 15 pounds of extra gear right off the bat. So weight is a factor for sure. And then you have to have enough power…. Some people took power banks and some people took drone batteries. There’s a couple areas on the hike outside of park boundaries where we could fly. So we had to pack the drone…”
Most of the hike is following creeks and rivers, and Kennedy says he found out early that electronics and water don’t mix. “It was our first little creek crossing. And I went across first so I could film everyone coming across. Once everyone had passed, I decided to fill up my water bladder. And as I leaned over, my camera fell out of it’s harness and the camera—mic, lens, everything—wound up completely submerged in the creek. I got out of the creek in a bit of a panic. The manual focus on the lens no longer works, but everything else was fine. So shout out to Canon for their weather sealing on their cameras.”
Kennedy says this was his first real backpacking trip and he wound up overpacking. “Every day was a new challenge, whether it be hills, whether it be creek crossings, whether it be dealing with the bugs, whether it be dealing with heat and hunger or long hours or whatever. And it was just really, a really good group of people, right? And when I felt like I was like dying from the weight on my back, a couple of the people lent me their hiking poles.
For Matlock, one of his favourite moments on the trail was at Monkman Lake. “We were setting up for dinner at Monkman Lake and Phil points across the lake to this big boar grizzly, swimming in the water. And it came up on the shore, probably 300 yards away and started to walk around the lake towards us. So we’re getting prepared and it darts into the bush at about 100 yards away from us. We never saw it again, but we were all sleeping on edge that night.”
At the end of each day, they would do interviews with the members of the group, which sometimes felt like processing trauma. “Some of the days were absolutely brutal. Like we’d do like 2 km in 10 hours. We were literally sawing as we went. It was almost impassable at some points. So yeah, it was just an all-around insane time. But it was also a phenomenal time and I am glad I did it.
In honour of the original Monkman Pass effort, says Whidby, the crew brought along a die cast model of the original Pathfinder car. “We never put a whole lot of thought into how we were actually going to pack it. Fortunately, Stephanie had a spare pouch on her on her backpack. So we strapped it to the side, it was in the pocket. But the poor car, it took a beating, like everybody else. There wasn’t much left of it by the time we got to Hobi’s cabin.”
Fowler says for him, the most incredible thing was the bugs. “I’ve been in the bush most of my life, and I’ve never experienced bugs like that,” he says. “If anyone is thinking about going, be prepared. Secondly, the terrain in places was way worse than we ever expected. The third thing I noticed about the trail was Kreg and the crew, they put in a ton of work. And unfortunately, most of that work with Mother Nature already had done away with. The trail Monkman Lake is a great trail. There’s bridges over the little creek draws. You can’t get lost. It’s like a trail right down to the dirt. On the other side, you go up to the tarns. And then when you drop down from the tarns, it’s all bushwhacking. A lot of sawing and cutting. The Ice Creek Bridge has been washed out. The Misery Creek cable car crossing, had rotted out. A lot of times it was just GPS straight through the bush. So it’s very easy to get lost. There’s no trail markers really or a clear path. We did come on some trail markers because we had two really good guides that had GPS points.”
And as for the positive moments? “The way our crew reacted to each other, reacted to finding the trail markers and how everybody kept everybody in good spirits. Nobody was really mentally breaking down. We just kind of lifted each other up. The creek crossings went from, ‘Oh man, it’s so cold,’ to, ‘my feet are going to love this,’ because your feet would get a little bit swollen and sweaty and stuff. Our feet really took a beating.”
In addition to the four members of the crew I was talking to there was Phil Troyer and his daughter Nicole, as well as Stephanie Clark and Daryl Hudak. “I really wanted some diversity in our crew, not just guys going. So I started looking around. I actually reached out to a few ladies in Tumbler Ridge who were interested, but they weren’t available for that time. So I ended up with Stephanie, who is an outdoors person and hiker and a herbologist. Having her on board was a blessing. We were looking for someone younger, and Phil said he would ask his daughter, Nicole. She was 17 at the time. She’s in really good shape. She’s an athlete, so she had really strong, long, strong legs and her personality is just like Phil’s: just go, go, go. I thought the two women were just amazing.”
The one setback came a few days into the hike. “Nicole had a fever at the start of the hike. She was in such phenomenal shape that it only slowed her down only to match the rest of us. She didn’t complain, but it started getting worse. She started falling a lot more than normal and finally we decided we had to get her out, so called for a helicopter extraction the next morning, she was just she was so sick. And then that night, she wound up spilling boiling water on her foot, so she had to go.
After Nicole was flown out, the tenor of the trip shifted. “That was the point of no return because there was no other place you could get rescued unless it was a high line rescue, which is very technical, very hard to do,” says Fowler. “Once Nicole left, Wade and I kind of looked at each other and said, ‘let’s get our crew safe to the cabin.’ And you can kind of tell the documentary itself shifts from this fun walk we’re doing—we’re talking about all the plants, we’re making jokes—to ‘we got to focus because if anybody else gets hurt, we could get ourselves in a real pickle here.’ Not to say there was no laughs and we weren’t enjoying it. Absolutely we were. It’s just an awareness of how accidents could become problems on the trail.”
Fowler says the difficulty of the hike bred in the crew a sense of camaraderie. “We became really tight. It was a trial and a test and that’s probably why I feel incredibly close to my fellow hikers, even to this day.”
One of the most difficult situations came right at the end, with the final creek crossing. “That was the most dangerous one,” says Whibley. “It was the deepest and fastest and widest, and we had to go across together as one group on the suggestion of Daryl, who’s a skilled bushman. And when we got across there, we were all super emotional. There was tears in our eyes because we knew there was no more crossings. We could hear the boats. We knew the boats were close to pick us up. We were hugging each other, very emotional.”
Of course, that wasn’t the end of the adventure, as the boats were unable to get to where the hikers were, so went back downstream to a place where they could get to the bank. “We went from the elation of ‘we’re done the hike,’ to ‘oh my gosh, we can’t get on these boats’. We still had quite a ways to hike.
Now that the main film is done, the plan is to do an edit for the Banff International Film Festival. “When we put together and our first edit, it was three and a half hours long,” says Wade. “And we’ve watched it multiple times. I never got tired of it. Like we didn’t know where to even cut, what to take out. And so we really had to focus on a story.”
The film will be screened on November 15 at 7 pm at the Adventure Aviation Hanger in Grande Prairie. Doors will be open two hours early for people to meet the crew.
Above photo: Members of the Monkman Pass Productions crew take a break as they make their way along the Monkman Pass Memorial Trail. Photo supplied.
Trent is the publisher of Tumbler RidgeLines.
