CASCADIA: Canada's Cascades & Spooky Tales from Nahanni

As your hiking boots air out on the back porch, take an audio hike with me into Canada's Cascades. Then, if you've got the nerve venture further north with me to a place nicknamed, "The Headless Valley."

Sources:

Nch'Kay' Great Flood Story, www.nchkay.com

North Cascades, Wikipedia

Peaks of the North Cascades, Northwest Alpine Guides

Mt. Garibaldi/Nch'Kay', Fire & Ice Aspiring Georegion

Teachings from Nch'kay' - The story behind the most notable peak in Garibaldi Provincial Park, Mountain Life Media

Unveiling the Mysteries of Black Tusk and the Garibaldi Volcano in British Columbia, Canada, YouTube

Sasquatch or Ridgewalker Pete?, CBC News

Funny Place Names of the North Cascades, The Squamish Chief

Meet the Ghosts of Whistler

The True Crime History Behind Nahanni National Park Reserve, Valley of the Headless Men, Red Web, YouTube

The Dark Atlas, Nahanni Valley, Canada

If you are searching for a fresh, binge-able podcast, this might be the one for you!

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:19

Hey there. I hope this episode of Cascadia finds you content, maybe resting after a long hike in the outdoors yourself when your boots are airing out on a back porch, or maybe you're on the trail with me. It's about time I went north, north, north to the northernmost part of the Cascade Mountain Range. In Canada, the Cascade Mountains are officially known as the Canadian Cascades. They're located entirely within the province of British Columbia. Stretching north from the Washington state border, they are most notable for their jagged glacier-draped peaks, subranges like the Skagit Range, and proximity to major outdoor destinations. The Canadian Cascades feature several defining geographic and recreational details. In fact, they span east of the Fraser Valley, north to the Fraser Canyon, and stretch as far as the town of Lytton. They comprise three main subranges in Canada: the Skagit Range, the Hosamine Range, and the Okanagan Range. They're also volcanic because they're part of the Pacific Ring of Fire. While predominantly non-volcanic, they do include stratovolcanoes like Kahilahalla Mountain and form the northern extension of the Cascade Volcanic Arc. The mountains are a hot spot, no surprise, for exploration and hiking. A primary access point is EC Manning Provincial Park, offering extensive trail networks for summer hiking and winter cross-country skiing, which I love to do. The highest point in the Canadian Cascades is Lakeview Mountain, reaching an elevation of 2,628 meters or 8,622 feet. I found more from Wikipedia. The Fraser River and the adjoining lowland on its south bank form the northern and northwestern boundary of the range. On the east, the Okanagan River and the Columbia River bound the range in the U.S., while the northeastern boundary of the range departs the Thompson via the Nicoamon River and runs via Flawless Creek, the Tulamine River, and Copper Creek to the Similcomine River. On the west, the foothills of the range are separated by a narrow coastal plain from Puget Sound, except along Chuck'nut Drive between Bellingham in Washington State and Mount Vernon, also in Washington, where they abut the sound directly. And by the way, if you live in that neck of the wood, you need to do Chuck'nut Drive. It is stunning. The current uplift of the Cascade Range began around 8 million years ago. The tribes living and using the range on the Canadian side of the border are the Nalaoka, Pamuks, the Stolo, and the upper and lower Similcomin subgroups of the Okanagan, a now extinct group known as the Nicola Athapaskans, also inhabited and hunted in the area, now occupied by the Similcomin. Many current geographic names in the region are derived from native terms, either by transliteration or translation. And one authority notes this quote, many names were derived from Chinook jargon, mostly applied by the United States Forest Service from 1910 to 1940, end quote. Discovery of gold by American prospectors on the banks of the Thompson River at its confluence with the Nicoamon River at the northern tip of the range helped trigger the Fraser Canyon Gold Rush of 1858 to 1860, which in turn prompted the declaration of the colony of the British Columbia to affirm British possession of territories north of the 49th parallel. The Fraser Rush led to exploration of the Cascades to the east of the canyon and in the valley of the Similcomine River, with minor rushes in the area of Princeton, British Columbia in 1859 through the early 1860s, and the creation of non-native towns on top of much older native ones, by the way, at Boston Bar, Lyton, and Hope, as well as Princeton. Early settlers also arrived in the foothills of the North Cascades in the latter half of the 19th century and utilized the range in a limited way as a source of timber and grazing land. The range is so rugged though that this exploitation was less dramatic than in other more gentle landscapes. So thank goodness for that, right? Early recreational use of the range included expeditions by the local climbing clubs, the mountaineers, and the Mazamas. These groups did not fully explore the inner reaches of the range and ascend the most difficult peaks until the 1930s and 40s. It was not until the 1970s that most peaks were climbed in the most isolated areas, making it one of the last explored ranges in the contiguous United States. The North Cascades are often referred to, like I said, as the American Alps by hikers, climbers, and mountaineers because of the sea of steep, jagged peaks that span across the range. This range's rugged approaches and exceptional alpine terrain make it a premier training ground for mountain climbers. I found this about Mount Garibaldi, which is a prominent peak in the area from Fire and Ice Georegion, quote, designated in 1927 as BC's first such set-aside, the 1,980 square kilometer Garibaldi Provincial Park's epinemus centerpiece, Mount Garibaldi, is a large stratovolcano in the Garibaldi Volcanic Belt, rising above the town of Squamish. It is known both for high-quality exposures of its internal structure, as well as conspicuous topographic anomalies attributable to the volcano's growth onto a large pre-existing glacier system, followed by the sequential ice melt collapse of its flanks over thousands of years. Up to 20 major landslides from the degrading peak have contributed to the debris field known as the Cheeky Fan, with the possibility of another continuing to pose a considerable geohazard. Despite its prominence as the largest volcano in southern BC, most Vancouver residents are unaware that Mount Garibaldi, or what the Nietzsche call dirty water or grimy one in the language of the Squamish Nation, is closer than the more readily visible Mount Baker in Washington State. In addition to the Nichke, other prominent volcanic features in Garibaldi Provincial Park include Opal Cone, Cinder Cone, Mount Price, Columnar Peak, Glacial Pikes, Round Mountain, Black Tusk, Clinker Peak, The Table, Atwell Peak, Dalton Dome, and Obsidian mining sites utilized by First Nations. The most prominent legend surrounding Nichke is the story of the Great Flood. This story tells, according to oral teachings, of a massive flood covering the land after the last ice age. As relentless rains caused water levels to rise, swallowing homes and villages, the ancestors of the Squamish people took to their canoes. Tethered to the peak, they paddled for safety. They gathered their family on only a couple of surviving mountaintops. Nichke was one of these peaks. The people anchored their canoes to the mountain using strong cedar ropes so they wouldn't be swept out to sea. And by the way, those pieces of rope are said to still exist in secret places on the peak of Mount Garibaldi, or Nietzsche. Once the waters finally receded, the people returned to their homelands, remembering to live humbly and kindly with the land. Quote, our land is laden with place names, mythology, and stories that remind us as Skowamish people of who we are and what those places are for, said Chris, spokesperson and counselor for the Squamish Nation. Our elders tell that Nietzsche was a place of refuge during the flood, which is kind of a universal story across many indigenous cultures, that there were apocalyptic floods, end quote. Lewis describes how ancestors fled in canoes, fastening cedar ropes to the top of Nietzsche to ride out the flood. According to legend, a few boats broke away and floated to Mount Baker, home of the Nooksak people who share similar stories of kinship. Quote, all of our teachings tell us that the reason the flood came is because we fell out of natural rhythm of the land and the birth. We stopped listening to the elders and our teachers and we fell out of balance, end quote. That balance would be tested again generations later with the arrival of European settlers. Colonialism didn't just disrupt the squamish way of life, it also changed the land in its stories. On an 1860 survey of Howe Sound, Captain George Henry Richards of Britain's Royal Navy determined that the prominent Nietzsche would be renamed Mount Garibaldi after Giuseppe Garibaldi, an Italian patriot who never once set foot there. That's who it's named after. It is so weird. Mountain Life Media's telling of the history continues. In August 1907, a group of six Vancouver mountaineers became the first known colonialist climbers to summit to the 2,678-meter peak. In their trip report, they described Mount Garibaldi as, quote, some terrible monarch of the skies not to be approached by man, end quote. Over the next 20 years, the area around Mount Garibaldi became a Mecca for alpinists, and the government of British Columbia designated it a park reserve in 1920. Seven years later, the province passed legislation to expand the land, turning it into an official park. In the late 1940s, Joan Matthews and Otter and Emma Brandevald built the Diamond Head Chalet near Elfin Lakes, an already popular staging area for exploration of the park. The lodge ran for three decades before it was handed over to BC Parks and fell into disrepair. In the 1970s, BC Parks built Elfin Lakes shelter in the same area. By the mid-1980s, some of the South Coast's most daring ski mountaineers had laid claim to first descendants on this iconic massif. And then they give a group of naming of those people. I had to ask though, is this Bigfoot Summer Palace? Mount Garibaldi, a towering peak in the Sea to Sky Corridor of British Columbia, is considered a prime waypoint in regional Sasquatch lore. Enthusiasts suspect the rigged remote wilderness stretching from the mountain to Alice Lake and the Ilaho Valley serves as a seasonal migration route for the cryptid. So here's the Sasquatch connection. The migration hypothesis is thus many cryptozoologists and researchers believe that coastal Sasquatches travel inland to higher elevation wilderness like Mount Garibaldi during the summer and migrate to lower elevations in the wintertime. Then there's local activity. Encounters, strange vocalizations, and unusual footprints have been reported in the heavily forested area surrounding Squamish, Braum Lake, and the Harrison Lake area further east. Then there's the historic lore. The broader region is deeply tied to indigenous Squamish heritage, which includes long histories of Saint Ayala or Wild Men of the Woods. There are terrain challenges with Mount Garibaldi. It has extreme isolation. The mountain itself is a heavily glaciated stratovolcano known for waist deep powder and steep broken glaciers. This unforgiving and largely inaccessible backcountry provides ample untracked territory for this legendary creature to evade detection. Okay. There was one incident that I have to call Sasquatch or Ridgewalker Peak. Here it goes. A white rock BC man believes he may be the Sasquatch, caught on a viral video filmed by wildlife biologist Miles Lamont while hiking Tri-County Peak in mountains near Squamish, BC, more than two years ago. And it's even longer than that since this telling. The video that I've linked to in the show note shows a black dot of a figure apparently moving up the slope of a snow-covered mountain in a remote area of the range near Tri-County Peak. Lamont estimated his altitude at 2,000 meters. Okay, and then I've got the video, as I'm going to mention, linked in the show notes if you want to pause it here and go down and take a look at it. But in the video, Lamont wonders why a human would walk up the side of a mountain in the middle of nowhere without a backpack or gear. Then there's Peter Tennant, aka Ridgewalker Pete. He says he believes he was the Sasquatch captured on the video, and this according to CBC. Since he posted it last month on YouTube, the video has more than a million views. And even though it was shot more than two years ago, the wildlife biologist is still wondering today what he saw. What we saw was not wearing any gear and no snowshoes and covering ground very quickly, he says. Tennant says he does a lot of solo hiking, shoots pictures and video of his walks, then sets them to music. And Tennant says he was on Tri-County Peak in July 2011, the same month Lamont shot his video. The hiker says he ran across the Sasquatch story on the CBC website and recognized the valley as the same one he'd been exploring that July. Lamont did this little pan around in the video and I started laughing because I recognized that valley, says Tennant. That's where I was walking all around, and then I looked more, and then I stopped and looked in my hiking notes and realized Tri-County Mountain 2011. I think that was me. Mystery solved. Or was it? Tennant recalls he was doing little day hikes on his weeklong walkabout on the mountain. There was a huge amount of snow left over from the winter that year, and I was shocked, he says. Even though it was summertime down in the valley up high, it sort of felt like winter. I was by myself and I wasn't really set up for avalanche stuff, so I decided to stay in the sort of higher elevation, but not go up to the peak. Tenant says he didn't have a backpack or snowshoes, but did have an emergency locator. The snow had melted on the surface, so I was just walking on top of the snow. But Lamont's not buying it. He says to be that high up with no backpack or snowshoes is bizarre. Well, Ridgewalker Pete says his hiking diary confirms he was on Tri-County Mountain the last week of July. This journalist says mysteries solved. Well, until we ask Lamont, the wildlife biologist who shot the video, when were you on Tri-County Peak? We were there July 2nd, he said, three weeks before Ridgewalker Peach. There are some tragedies from this area, and not murders per se, just sad tragedies. In 2024, there was a mountaineering tragedy. The bodies of three experienced climbers were recovered from the Atwell Peak area of Mount Garibaldi following a catastrophic avalanche. In 2023, there was the Black Tusk Fall. A hiker and emergency responder from Vermont tragically died after she fell from the highly dangerous chimney portion of Black Tusk. I wanted to know if there were more cryptids of the Canadian Cascades, though. Mount Garibaldi, which I've mentioned the Squamish Nation calls Nichke, doesn't have a classic monster like the Loch Nest monster, but the area is deeply rooted in indigenous mythology. The region's defining cryptid-like entity is the Thunderbird, a supernatural creature that caused a cataclysmic eruption of the nearby Black Tusk to punish local people for losing their balance with the land. I have done a whole show on Thunderbird, and I will link to it in the show notes. The legends associated with the mountain are rich and varied. The Thunderbird legend, according to stories from the Squamish and the Liliwat nations, go a little bit like this: a supernatural Thunderbird flapped its wings to create the Black Tusk eruption, which buried a village and forced the survivors to work together. Then there's the Frost Fiend and the Phantom Peak. Even local indigenous and settler cartography in the region reflects this eerie folklore, with nearby peaks historically tagged with names like Phantom Mountain and the Frost Fiend, which I find so interesting. That is not the last of the funny place names of the Cascades, though. And I found this from the Squamish Chief. The local sightseeing and charter company C Desguy Air has assembled a list of some of their favorite local place names, including the ominously titled Famine Peak and the theological sounding Devil Peak and Brimstone Mountain. Similarly fraught names include Devastator Peak and Phantom Mountain, as well as Abandoned Peak, The Witness, Snowblood Mountain, and The Frost Fiend. Those with an itch for climbing could consider Ice Flea Peak. Arachnophilic outdoor folk might head for Snow Spider Mountain. Many of these places, of course, had names long before English speakers tagged them. In advance of the 2010 Olympics, a lot of indigenous place names in the Sea to Sky region were restored, and the local First Nations are in various stages of documenting the earlier place names, which is amazing. Interesting, the name of the geological structure, most closely associated with the Squamish, has a slightly uncertain origin. By some accounts, the granite monolith has had a spiritual significance to the indigenous people for ages. Stawamas was the name of the village at the foot of the mountain, and chief is a rough translation of Siam, though the term apparently reflects a social ranking, of which chief is a fairly unsophisticated substitute. The reason it was given that name at all seems to be lost to history. There are a lot of place names called the Chief, Crairer says. I'm not sure if it commemorates a specific squamish chief or if that was simply a suitable name for such a prominent and beautiful monolith. Some of the monikers given to peaks by these groups are self-referential or in jokes. Bookworm Peak was one of the UBC Club's inventions. Among the highest peaks on Garibaldi are Dalton Dome and Atwell Peak, named after two of the first ascenders of Garibaldi in August 1907. Their names are Atwell King and Arthur Dalton, says Kraer, noting that one used their surname and the other their given name. These two were also among the first climbers to ascend the Lions. In 1903, they went on to help found the BC Mountaineering Club four years later. Then there's the macabre names from the Nahani Valley, which lies much, much, much further to the north. And I'll go in depth on that place in a bit. I just can't resist. It's not part of the Cascade Mountains, but I can't resist sharing its history with you before the close. But just as a little teaser, here are some of their place names from what I found on Dark Atlas. The area where the MacLeods were found is officially known as Deadman Valley. The creek that runs through it is Headless Creek. Looming above the river are the jagged peaks of the Funeral Range. Further exploration reveals the Broken Skull River, Doom Canyon, and the Vampire Peaks. This is not a coincidence. These names serve as a psychological warning system. They were bestowed by men who were genuinely afraid of what they saw, and I swear I'll give you more on that in a little bit. Do you want to meet the ghosts of nearby Whistler? Katie Cameron, born and bred in BC, describes it this way: Every town has its local legends and ghost stories, and Whistler certainly has its fair share of these to tell around the campfire. Like with any town where locals love to wow visitors and newcomers, sometimes a detail or two gets embellished. So take the following with a pinch of salt and then throw that salt over your left shoulder. So here's the first story she shares: Creekbread's female specter. Back in the early 2000s, a young girl was having dinner with her family in a restaurant called Oli's, now called Creekbread. As she gazed out of the window into the dark evening sky, the figure of a woman suddenly appeared to her view. Eerily pale with long black hair and a white dress, the woman meandered along next to the window and then vanished. Understandably unnerved by what she had just witnessed, she told her parents, who joked, that it was probably the ghost who haunts the building. They were referring to reports of a ghostly female specter, which dates back to the 90s when the building was an Italian restaurant called Settabello. The spook-filled rafters look pretty much the same today as they did back in the 80s when the image that they included in the article was taken. The reports mention her floating down from the rafters to the middle of the room and hovering about 10 feet up in the air before disappearing as she reached the back door. Occasionally, she was spotted sitting up in the loft, laughing with a ghost child, the lights flickering off and on, and things unexpectedly falling off shelves. Rumor has it that the two ghosts are a mother and a child who perished in a building fire. However, this is one detail that may be one of those embellishments we mentioned before, because the Whistler Museum has no record of a fire in that building since it was constructed back in 1979. In 2009, when the building was being renovated into its current incarnation as Creekbread, and they say it's a must-visit if you like pizza, the oven builder and co-owner of the new restaurant spotted the ghost while the other owner spotted her on a different occasion while working late. Perhaps these close encounters were why Creekbread was amenable to allowing two psychic mediums to visit three years later, with the intention of communicating with the restaurant's resident ghosts. It seems they were successful and managed to convince the ghosts to move on to the next stage of their afterlives, as there hasn't been any other report of the ghostly encounters in Creekbread since then. Just reports of really good pizza. The next tale that she shares is Bill, the Whistler Creek Lodge ghost. Multiple people who were lucky or unlucky enough to spot the Creekbread ghost happened to report another spiritual presence in the neighboring building, Whistler Creek Lodge. Housekeepers and employees of the lodge tell stories of the ghost of an old man who wanders the hallways. Some only felt a sinister presence while others spotted his figure in the stairwell. His name is Bill. Bill Bailiff is third from the left of the photo that was taken in 1916, which is included in her article, which I've linked to in the show notes. Some say he was a friend of the woman haunting the Creek Bred Building. Although if that was a pre or post-death friendship, we don't know. Apparently he is quite stubborn and isn't tied to the Whistler Creek Lodge building itself, but rather to the surrounding area. He likes the lodge. Sources report that Bill was a logger at the south end of Alta Lake around the beginning of the 20th century, but there was never a logging camp in Creekside. So that aspect of Bill's story doesn't line up. However, the Whistler Museum helped me track down information on Bill Bailiff, who was a UK immigrant well known in Whistler. Back then the community was called Alta Lake in the early 1900s. He arrived in Alta Lake around 1913 after quitting his job working on the Pacific Great Eastern Railway. He settled in a cabin on the west side of the lake and became a trapper. Although he was a logger before he moved to this corner of BC. Maybe this is the logging connection. There isn't any record of him working for logging companies, though, in the area. In 1933, Bill helped build Jordan's lodge in Creekside. This connects him to the Creekside area and means that Bill Bailip could very well be our Whistler Creek Lodge spirit. From all accounts, he was a gentle, community-minded man when he was alive, and he's probably just keeping a post-humous eye on his little community of Alta Lake. The last story she shares is the ghostly grab bag. While Bill and the Creekbred Woman are the two most prominent ghosts in Whistler, there are plenty of other spectral sightings, from flickering lights and haunting noises backstage at the Maury Young's art center to a little girl ghost at the Southside Diner who only appears to women at night. There are spirits abound in our little town. A colleague of hers even shared a story of getting pinched on his bottom by seemingly no one at all one night in a remote cabin south of Whistler, that maybe he'd had one too many, she says around the campfire that evening. There are even tales of a ghost cat living in a ski chalet in the Whistler K neighborhood. It jumps onto beds and curls up with tenants, rubbing against legs and meowing. The only thing is they don't have a cat. The same household described having trouble keeping a fire going in their hearth, having trouble with furnaces, as well as a memorable incident where a cutting board went flying across a countertop and onto the floor. That last occurrence was almost definitely the ghost cat. Our four-legged friends do love to knock things over for attention, and ghost cats are apparently no different. Another spooky tale is the disappearance of Ernie Archibald and the death of his friend George Trice in 1938. The Whistler Museum provided this tale in response to locals reporting ghostly figures and lights over Alta Lake each winter when the lake ice freezes. The story goes that the two men were crossing the frozen lake from Ernie's cabin to visit a friend on the other side, leaving a lamp burning in the window to light the way for a return they'd never make. No one knows what happened to Ernie, but George was found in the lake days later with a large wound on his forehead, with the sleigh mysteriously sitting on top of the ice. It is an unsolved, possible, murderous story hidden under the lake. Nestled on the eastern shore of Green Lake, on the north end of Whistler, lies Parkhurst. Once a bustling sawmill and logging town, Parkhurst was active from the 1920s to the 1950s and is now a popular hiking and biking route. Accessible from the Wedgemount Lake Trail parking lot or from the Lost Lake Network, the trail takes you to a jumble of relics in the forest. A gentle loop takes you past collapsed cabins. There's actually one last standing cabin at the time of this publication. Abandoned vehicles, oil cans, 1950s era appliances, and rusty bedframes, which are slowly being reclaimed by nature. While there are no known ghosts in Parkhurst, it is a unique place to explore a piece of Whistler's settler history. This author suggests that you take nothing but photographs when you go on a visit. On one memorable occasion, her friend decided to take an interesting-looking brick from the foundation of a collapsed building in Parkhurst. After lugging the brick back home to display in her backyard, she proceeded to have nightmares about the ghost of Parkhurst coming to retrieve the brick. She returned it to its home in Parkhurst a few days later. So you never know, maybe there are spooks and spirits to be found in Parkhurst after all. Just don't take home any relic. Let other people enjoy them when they're on their hike. All towns have ghost stories to tell. Whistler's rich history from remote fishing destination to world-class ski resort was bound to result in the insider digging up some colorful characters. However, we never imagined Bill Bailiff would be checking in on us from the grave, or that lights on the lake could be two souls trying to tell their story of what happened on the ice that fateful winter's day. So that's your little peek into the Canadians' Cascade. It's the northernmost point of the Cascade Mountain Range, uh, Cascadia for purposes of my podcast. But it used to be that hikers for the Pacific Crest Trail got to cross, it was like a gentleman's agreement, they got to cross over the border. And actually in Canada was the northernmost point of the PCT. But that was revoked, sadly, in January 2025. I promised you that I would tell you about this very spooky place called Nahani Valley that is very, very, very far north of Whistler. I'm talking close to Alaska, but I couldn't resist adding this big clump of ghost stories or campfire tales to the end of this episode. This place, Nahani Valley, is known as the Headless Valley or Valley of the Headless Men. Nahani National Park Reserve is inscribed as a World Heritage Site by UNESCO, and it's renowned for its natural beauty. Dark Atlas describes it as a land of superlatives, quote, canyons deeper than the Grand Canyon, waterfalls twice the height of Niagara, and limestone karst formations that look like the spine of a sleeping dragon, end quote. So what gives with this scary nickname? The mystery of the Nahani Valley stems from a series of unexplained disappearances and creepy deaths in Canada's remote Northwest territories. Specific to the Valley of the Headless Men moniker, well, that came after the body of several gold prospectors were discovered. Yeah, headless, which fueled terrifying legends about curses and lost gold and hostile monsters to boot. Here's more on those beheadings and disappearances that I found from Google Gemini. The legend centers on several gruesome discoveries in the early 20th century. In 1908, brothers Frank and Willie McLloyd, who had ventured into the wilderness seeking a rumored gold mine, were found by a search party. Their skeletons were discovered miles into the canyon. Both were headless and their camp had been burned. Over the next two decades, several other trappers and prospectors, including Martin Jorgensen, John O'Brien, and Angus Hall, either vanished without a trace or were found dead, sometimes with their heads mysteriously severed. And by the way, if you're looking for numbers, over 44 people have gone missing in the park. The above mentioned are just the most famous cases. Then there's the lost tribe of Naha. Long before European prospectors arrived, the local indigenous Dene, Slavi people, held oral traditions regarding the Nahani Valley. They spoke of the Naha tribe, a fierce mountain-dwelling people who would raid neighboring settlements in the lowlands. According to local lore, the Naha disappeared into the valley and vanished entirely, leaving no trace behind. I had to know more about the legend of the Naha and found it. The Deni people, the traditional inhabitants of the region, recounted stories of the Naha descending from the high country to raid settlements in the lowlands. But their disappearance? After a series of these raids, Deni warriors retaliated by traveling into Naha territory to attack their camp. Upon arrival, they found the encampment completely abandoned. Their campfires were cold, and the people had vanished without a trace, leaving no bodies, no graves, or signs of battle. The disappearance of the Naha remains one of the great anthropological mysteries of the Canadian North. Because of their sudden disappearance, the Naha became central to the enduring folklore surrounding the valley, including the mysterious unsolved deaths and decapitations of gold prospectors in the area during the earliest 20th century. When you camp on the riverbanks, you are sleeping in the ghost towns of a vanished people. That gave me goosebumps. There's theory and speculation about the mysterious Nahani Valley, because over the decades, investigators, folklorists, and the internet sleuths have debated the cause of these gruesome events. Some of the explanations follow. Harsh environments and animals. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police often attributed many of the early disappearances to starvation, to freezing, or animal attacks. Then there's good old-fashioned human violence. Many suspect inner prospector violence. So murder over gold claims or conflicts with unknown individuals in the wilderness, people protecting their own uh gold. And a lot of these accounts, people wrote letters, and it's almost ominous to read back on them that says, I found the most pure, beautiful gold. We'll send more word later, and then they're found headless. So there is definitely some lore in the area, and there's definitely probably a human being or more than one that was protecting their claim of the gold. Then what I told you about earlier, the uncontacted tribe. Because of this vast cave system that lies below this area, and the isolation, because you, in order to go visit the Nahani Valley, you either have to take a boat or be dropped by a seaplane to this park. There aren't any roads into this place. And it's that isolation that leads people to theorize that the legendary Naha tribe or another isolated group of humans secretly inhabited the valley and defended their territory, and often with violence if they had to. Then there's cryptids and curses. The extreme remoteness, the unusual geography, and bizarre nature of the decapitations have led to rumors of prehistoric beasts, they say like Bigfoot or supernatural curses haunting the canyons. The rumors and strange happenings make Nahani National Park Reserve a magnet for true crime historians. I feel like I have got to go visit it sometime in my lifetime. Well, I hope you enjoyed our sojourn into the mountains of the North Cascades, and then even further north. We're almost north to Alaska at this point. I hope your boots have had a chance to dry off a little and you have drunk some water and electrolytes, and you're ready to hit the trail again. Until next time, stay curious. I love you.