For hours, the rain pelted down. And when it mercifully stopped, the last thing on the minds of 45 hikers with Nature Vancouver was that further down the mountain, mudslides had severed their vehicle access back to civilization.
"It was quite an adventure," Jenni Lynnea, a retiree from New Westminster, said in an interview Monday. "I am a new member and this was the first camp I'd been to. Nobody ever complained. They were not resigned, but hopeful."
Nature Vancouver, formerly the Vancouver Natural History Society, had sponsored a series of two one-week camps near Blowdown Creek, accessed via gravel logging roads from Duffey Lake Road, between Pemberton and Lillooet.
The last camp, with participants aged nine years to 80-plus, was scheduled to wrap up Sunday, but Mother Nature had other plans.
Lynnea said there had been some rain on Thursday and Friday, but that the worst arrived at about 3 p.m. Saturday.
"Very serious rain, thunder and lightning - quite torrential," she said. "We were confined to areas where you could get shelter until about 7:30 p.m."
On Sunday morning, the weather had improved greatly and a charter helicopter arrived to pick up camping gear from their campsite and deliver it to a parking lot about one kilometre away on the gravel access road.
Lynnea said no one knew about the washout until a muddy mountain biker showed up to break the news.
"He said: 'No way you're going to get through.' He looked at the cars and our shovels and said: 'It's all a joke. You're f---ed. All those cars are f---ed.' He was quite pragmatic.
"It became clear everyone was going to spend the night there. Everyone had tents and leftover food. It wasn't an emergency, it was an inconvenience."
But not everyone was trapped.
Lynnea had a two-wheel-drive vehicle ill-suited for logging roads, so had parked farther down the mountain. She and her husband, Tom Gibson, along with three other women, managed to hike to the vehicle and drive out Sunday.
She said the road was covered with "fine-grain yucky mud" measuring about "five lanes of traffic" wide by two feet deep. The group of five hiked downhill about six kilometres to their vehicle, near Duffey Lake. When they returned home, they called the relatives of those still trapped to tell them what had happened.
Nigel Peck, a director with Nature Vancouver, gave credit to the B.C. forest service for plowing an access lane through the mud and rock to allow the hikers, along with about 20 cars and a five-tonne truck, to escape the wilderness area.
Lillooet RCMP, B.C. Emergency Management officials, and Blackcomb Aviation also assisted.
"It's all been resolved," Peck said. "I got a call from the camp at about 10 a.m. (Monday). They were probably in a restaurant in Pemberton that was doing a huge business from everyone ordering breakfast. It was a perfect ending."
Verne Rasmussen, regional wildfire coordinating officer in Kamloops, said his office was originally notified of the trapped hikers by a helicopter pilot. A provincial staffer, along with a contracted bulldozer operator, arrived on the scene at about 4:45 p.m. Sunday and had a total of three mudslides cleared away by 1:30 a.m. Monday.
"It's actually a nice little story," he said, noting that the campers responded to news of the road reopening with cheers and applause. "They thought they'd been abandoned to the world."
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