Anderson Beach – Squamish River, BC

The following post reflects the thoughts and experiences from our stay on Anderson Beach along the Squamish River from the night of May 12 through the morning of May 15th. An additional post is provided following this one containing some of the many photographs taken during our stay in this beautiful area.

Friday the 13th is our lucky day. It took us a little while, but we found Anderson Beach at about 5:00 PM yesterday (May 12th). There is only a small group of school kids on the other end of the beach, and they are leaving as I write. For the moment at least, there is the hope Chris, Zeus, and I will have the place to ourselves for a couple of days. It is certainly remote enough for that hope to become a reality.

Backed by trees and shrubs, our camp is located at the top of the beach far from the riverbank. The sandy opening we have chosen provides us with plenty of sun and room for a nice fire, easily built from the abundant driftwood deposited against old sand bars and lodged against stands of still young cottonwood and alder. Between our tent and the fact we are using our tarp for the first time, we feel right at home.

The Squamish River runs through a deep, glacially scoured canyon. The mountains on either side are still covered with snow. Through the binoculars, the peaks some 1,000-1,500 metres above us are still capped with deep cornices several metres thick in their own right. Up river from our campsite, on the west side of the canyon, a waterfall pours over a cliff just below the snowline, giving us the sense we are living in a scene from Lord of The Rings.

We experienced a few drops of rain last night, but the coals of our campfire were still hot enough this morning that merely rearranging the unburned wood on top of them and awaiting a gentle breeze was enough to bring our fire to life. Now, as noon approaches, the sun is warming my shirtless back and all traces of the clouds that were passing like smoke above the trees this morning are gone.

3:45 PM

At last, a touch of pink from a mild sunburn!! We can only speculate as to the temperature, but since we are seeking shade, we assume it must be somewhere between 22 and 25 degrees. I spent the better part of the afternoon so far walking barefoot over the sand mostly dark, damp, and warm sand above a small diversion of the river. It felt good to take each step with nothing between me and the earth.

Wildlife has been scarce so far; the prints of a racoon, a bald eagle circling too far away for a good picture, common golden eye swimming and diving in a sheltered pool along the river, a butterfly, amphibian eggs strung out along a sandbank, warblers, chickadees, robins, and, of course, the ever present crow. This spring has been cooler and wetter than usual, so perhaps, like most of us, the local wildlife is waiting for a few more days like today before coming to Anderson Beach.

May 14th

It rained a little more last night. We will be interested to learn if any of us can get to sleep after this trip is over without first hearing the sound of rain against the tent at night. It’s still overcast this morning. None-the-less, it is warm enough to climb out of the tent without having to put shoes or a jacket on first, and this is an improvement over our initial camping experiences on Vancouver Island.

I was reminded this morning of the intelligence of crows. As we awoke, there was one right outside our tent looking to take advantage of any food we had carelessly left out. Yesterday, I poured a bowl of dog food for Zeus and left the bag next to his dish, rolling the top up to loosely seal it. One of the resident crows must have seen me feeding Zeus. Almost as soon as Zeus was done eating a crow flew down, opened the bag, and began to help itself to some dinner. None of us witnessed the opening of the bag, but it had obviously accomplished the feat fairly quickly. The crow only got a couple of pieces at most, as it was nowhere near as quiet as it was skilful.

In this age of mass extinction, we have come to generally think primarily of rare species. Rare species that also happen to be incredibly intelligent, like whales, hold even greater fascination for us. We forget that even when extinction was creeping along at its normal background rate, nature was full of countless rarities. In fact, the variety of relatively rare life forms is much greater than the variety of common ones. Intelligence has nothing to do with frequency, as evidenced by the smarts of the common crow and the stupidity of the species responsible for Earth’s latest mass extinction.