By Steve Hubrecht
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Many Columbia Valley residents enjoy a good long hike in the mountains. But few like it quite as much as Heather Waterous. Last week the Invermere woman, along with her Whitehorse, Yukon-based friend Amaya Cherian-Hall took the first steps on what promises to be an epic human-powered journey.

The pair are attempting to hike, bike and canoe the entire Yellowstone-to-Yukon (Y2Y) corridor this summer. They began a week ago on Thursday, May 12, heading out on foot from West Yellowstone at the Targhee Pass trailhead near the three-way state border between Wyoming, Montana and Idaho and, if all goes well, their trip should wrap up some time in early to mid October when they pull their canoe out of the Yukon River in Dawson City. 

In between those two points, they’ll hike through deep backcountry along the northern stretch of the Continental Divide Trail from Yellowstone up to the Canadian border. Once there, they’ll quite literally stride right on into the Great Divide Trail, which begins at the U.S./Canada border and heads north along the B.C./Alberta border, passing through Banff, Kootenay, Yoho and Jasper National Parks, and then beyond to Kakwa Provincial Park. From there, the young women will cycle north along the Alaska Highway. Upon reaching Whitehorse, the capital of the Yukon, they will hop in their canoe and start paddling downstream until they reach Dawson City.  

Waterous, who works as a geomatics technician for Parks Canada out of its Radium Hot Springs office, met Cherian-Hall years ago at Quest University in Squamish. Both already had considerable background in the outdoors, and both joined the campus outdoors club. They both became leaders of the club, guiding their fellow students on outdoor trips. After graduation, both went in different directions (Waterous became an outdoor educator and mountain guide in the Cariboo Mountains and then Montana, before getting into ecology field work for Parks Canada. Cherian-Hall began a career in water quality monitoring). 

The Pioneer reached them by cell phone in West Yellowstone — mere hours before they started hiking — to find out where the idea for the trip came from, and what inspired the pair to do it.

“Amaya called me one day two years, during midterms, with the idea of traversing the Y2Y corridor,” Waterous told the Pioneer. “Of course, I was keen immediately, and we started planning, but things — school, jobs, life, then the COVID-19 pandemic — kept getting in the way. With the border (to the U.S.) now open again, we’re going to do it.”

The dream officially became a reality when the pair found out that they were being awarded a 2022 Royal Canadian Geographical Society’s Women’s Expedition Grant which will help the women fund the journey.

“We both love the outdoors, and have plenty of backcountry experience, but we’ve never done something quite this big before,” Cherian-Hall told the Pioneer.

“Of course, we know there will be hard days, but when you are outdoors for an extended period of time, you start to get into a natural rhythm, and just want to keep going,” added Waterous. “If grizzlies and wolverines travel this route, it is probably great for hiking as well. It seems my whole life I keep trying to spend as much time outdoors as possible, and this is a great way to do that.”

The women said they are expecting challenges with snow in the high alpine sections of the U.S. portion of their trip, given their early-season start. Canada’s mountain national parks — Banff, Kootenay, Yoho and Jasper — are another potentially tricky part of the trip for the pair, not because of any great physical hardship, but because the Parks Canada backcountry campsite reservation system leaves them precious little leeway when it comes to timing, and they have to make sure their planned-months-in-advance itinerary is bang on, or risk losing their campsite bookings.

“It’s a very strict timeline, and it will be on our minds constantly,” said Waterous.

Cherian-Hall is most excited for the U.S. section of the trip (“because it’s somewhere I’ve never been”), while Waterous is looking forward to the Rockwall in Kootenay National Park. “It’s been very close by, since I live in the Columbia Valley, but I just haven’t gotten a chance to get to it yet. Now I will,” she adds.

The pair say the journey is certain to be the trip of a lifetime.

“It’s really special to get a chance to do something like this,” Waterous told the Pioneer.

To follow along Waterous and Cherian-Hall’s traverse, check out their blog at y2ytraverse.weebly.com or visit their Instagram page at www.instagram.com/y2y_traverse/.