By the time we reached Williams Lake we were more than ready for a semblance of civilized life. In the eight days it took us to traverse the Bowron Lakes, canoeing and portaging through connecting rivers and lakes, camping rough in cold, rainy weather, we were more than grateful for the opportunity to wash the grime of the adventure away in a shower in the hotel room we rented for the night, to sleep in a linen-covered bed, and have some meals in a restaurant, taking the place of the camp food we'd been consuming.

Williams Lake is about as isolated as can be imagined for people accustomed to big city life. Yet transiting to it from over a week in the wilderness represented opposite spectrums of exposure to the natural world which we had actively sought out. We made the long trip to the Bowron Lakes because we value nature and our capability to live within its confines for discrete periods of time, taking with us the elements of civilization that those who pioneered life in that region could never have imagined.

Every day we were there, without exception, from the first paddle across the lake in our canoe loaded with all our provisions for the week, brought heavy, driving rain. Rain hurled itself against our little tent hastily raised that first night. When we awoke next morning, it was to view the mountain tops surrounding us blanketed in white. The circuit is completely closed in by the Cariboo mountain range. Wherever one looks, from the middle of a lake to the stretch of a river, either side hosts looming mountain slopes and the summits in the distance look grandly imposing, a total picture of a landscape both intimidating and stunningly beautiful.

We had, on our drive to the Bowron Lakes, passed huge ranches raising cattle. And farms where neat rows of ginseng were being irrigated. There were desertified areas with windswept grasses, cactuses and tumbleweed. Great swaths of those areas in the British Columbia interior are now singed black from hundreds of wildfires, mostly caused by lightning strikes on this year's drought-dry landscape. The owners of those ranches have evacuated as ordered, hoping their cattle might somehow survive.

Williams Lake has been evacuated. In areas close to Cache Creek, First Nations reserves have realized the loss of homes consumed by the hungry flames, fed by heat and by wind. A thousand firefighters and more from out-of-province are battling the flames with all the techniques and equipment at their command. When nature rampages, humankind extends an urgent effort to mediate. Invariably, nature has the last word.