Years back, surrounded by the Cariboo mountain range, we went to sleep that first night at the Bowron Lakes circuit, in the tent we managed to get up at our first camping spot just before torrents of rain hit. When we awoke the following morning the rain had lifted and our eyes probed the mountains around us which had been entirely mantled with snow.

It was mid-September and it was cold, even at the three-thousand-foot level where we were. We had brought cold-weather clothing with us and we needed it. The weather was unfailingly overcast and windy with constant rain episodes for the eight days we were in the Northern British Columbia site so popular with nature-loving foreign tourists.

As Canadians, this was our ultimate wilderness adventure and one we had relished even before arriving from Ontario to British Columbia to meet up with our youngest son who lives in Vancouver. The long drive from Vancouver to our destination took us through geology cut through by the mighty Fraser River, where we saw Dall sheep alongside the highway we shared with thundering-through timber transports.

We saw tumbleweed in the desert areas, and huge cattle ranches and saw vast tracts of land with sophisticated irrigation systems where ginseng was being grown. We saw some stupendous geology at Cache Creek, and the Fraser River Canyon took our breath away.

During the circuit we paddled furiously to arrive at one lake after another. Everywhere we looked, in all directions, there were the mountains. Sometimes in the early morning hours the lakes were glassy-smooth; by the time early afternoon had evolved, the wind was up and so were whitecaps. Most of the campsites with multiple areas to erect a tent we had to ourselves. Owls called out close to our campsites, and that was the first occasion that I'd ever heard the spine-chilling screech of Screech Owls.

Toward the last third of the circuit there was a river/creek that had to be transited. Trouble was, despite all the rain that had followed us through each day's adventure, the passage was made difficult by the fact that the water level was low. Which meant that only one of us could be in the canoe, steering it, with the weight of our baggage freight (food, camping equipment) through, while the other had to wade the watercourse. It wasn't possible to bushwhack our way through the undergrowth on either side of the river. It was too densely covered with tall, spiny Devil's club (think of Stinging Nettle on steroids).

At one juncture we suddenly rounded a curve on another, more readily navigable river course when we came upon a browsing moose cow. My husband and our son were hugely enthused while I cringed backward in the canoe, trying to make myself as inconspicuous as possible, bedazzled in the direction of stark, primal fear at the presence of the monstrous-sized creature which, in fact, took little notice of our proximity.

At night all of our food had to be elevated to ensure they issued no invitation to the Grizzlies that we were cautioned would be about. The outfitter where we rented our canoe laughed when I asked if we would be advised to take with us pepper spray as a precaution. "This your mother?" he asked our son. "Hell, don't worry", he added, "you can easily outrun any bear while it's busy with your mum", he advised, laughing uproariously at his humour.

In leisure hours, during lapses in the rain, we would sit out on the trunks of beached old giants, musing about our incomparable adventure. And one of us would take the binoculars to play them over the mountain slopes before and beyond us to see if we could pick out the form of a Grizzly. We never did. But once, when we temporarily beached the canoe on a long stretch of shale, we saw the unmistakable and seemingly fresh imprints of wolf, alongside those of caribou.

And once during the trip we came across a different type of food storage at one camping spot; a huge iron safe, that had been unmercifully thumped by some irate Grizzly, denting the safe quite out of shape.