Around 11pm one evening, my buddy Neil and I arrived in Apex Village at
the resort, put on our gear in the workstation below, grabbed hand-tools and climbed into
the Apex work truck to make our way up the ‘cat-track’ to the snowline. Rob and
I were the only two [Apex employees] on the mountain at that hour of the night.
We exited the truck from the snowline where we had parked, and were slogging our way a
little higher up the mountain to the top of the Okanagan run, in order to access a heated
building that housed the main compression system. This building’s equipment
pressurized the underground water lines on that side of the mountain, and was our first
stop each evening. During the walk from where we parked the truck (snowline), and the
pump-house, Neil stopped to light up a cigarette and I walked on a few dozen feet further,
then stopped and waited for him. I was standing there, staring at the night sky, impressed
as I always was at how dark and quiet the mountain nights were before we turned on all of
the equipment. At this point we were about a third of the way up the mountain overall, which
begins at 5000 feet above sea level in a valley which hosts Apex Village, and tops out at
a little over 7000 feet in elevation. It must’ve been early November, as the snowline was
still quite low (which dictated how far up towards the pump-house we could drive the
truck). Rob’s smoke-stop stop put us at around 600+ feet above the valley floor.
As I turned to my left to take in the breadth of the valley, I saw –
clear as a bell, a cluster / arrangement of three white-ish lights, in a triangular shape,
moving dead-quiet down the middle of the valley. If I had to wild-guess at the speed it
was moving I’d say between 80 and 100 km/h - but that’s a completely baseless
‘guesstimate’. As for the look of the ‘device’; if you envision
something roughly the shape of a water molecule, with the little sticks connecting three
globes; kinda’ like this:
…you have the general picture.
This thing, however, appeared to be more or less symmetrical, both in the triangular
distribution of it’s orbs as well as the shape and size of each of the three which it
was made up of. I don’t recall actually seeing any ‘connecting rods’
between them, but I suspect that was formulated in my mind due to far too many hours in
school, staring at molecular charts, which has my brain assuming that anything in that
general shape is connected with ‘rods’(?).
It traveled toward the South-East, perhaps a hundred or so (?) feet higher again than
our own elevation as we stood on the side of the mountain, above the valley floor.
It’s path was more or less in the middle of the valley, perhaps traveling a little
closer to our side than the other, and it kept abruptly snapping position changes in a
forward cart-wheeling manner. All the while, it was moving in a smooth, unimpeded flow
forward, without any ‘jerkiness’ as it cart-wheeled and halted it’s
rotation. It appeared that the ‘orbs’ were exchanging position with one-another,
but one could clearly see that there was a definite clockwise / cart-wheeling motion, like
a ‘tumbling forward’ effect. It would rotate forward, pause in it’s
rotation – [but not in the overall cluster’s forward
motion as a whole], then rotate clockwise again, pause a half-second or so, etc.
In the few moments that I was able to observe it, this same motion was exhibited and
repeated precisely. As already mentioned, but which particularly struck me, was that
throughout it’s progressive rotations & pauses, the overall cluster never paused
at all in it’s forward movement. Nor did it create any sound whatsoever at any point.
I recall noting the complete quiet atmosphere.
I stood absolutely dumbfounded for a few seconds, watching it as it passed before me,
perhaps less than a few kms away from where I was standing. Then, as it was moving up the
valley to my right I turned and screamed something that I think was pretty much
unintelligible at Neil: something like "Dude, fuckin’ Dude!!! He was staring
into the cupped palm of his hand which was protecting his lighter’s flame from a
breeze, and drawing on his cigarette. The look in his eyes demonstrated to me that he
didn’t have a clue what I was on about. All the while I was subconsciously tracking
the progress of the device in my head. I recall thinking that it would be out of sight in
mere moments, so I wheeled back around to see the object and noted that it was
disappearing out of sight behind some trees on the far edge of the clearing that we were
standing on (the cat-track, three-quarters of the way down what is, in the winter, the
'Chute' ski run)
I dropped my gear and ran like hell towards the pump-house (up the rough truck /
cat-track, about a half km from us), the same direction that the device was heading,
catching glimpses of it through a thin stand of trees beyond me and to my left as I ran. I
could see that it was massively outpacing me, but I had in mind the idea of getting to the
next wide run beyond the stand of trees so that I might be able to watch the device as it
disappeared around the front of the mountain and / or, further down the valley. I ran as
fast as I could, but arrived to a black sky, not a trace of the device to be seen as it
had already rounded the mountain. I remember being very disappointed as I had a feeling
deep down inside myself that this was a once in a lifetime chance.
It was about then that I realized that I was going to have to spend most of the next 8
hours alone on the mountains, ‘in the middle of nowhere’ as I rode a skidoo from
snow-gun to snow-gun all over the mountain. The routine was that Rob and I would split up
at the pump house, taking turns night-on-night; one of us on skidoo to maintain the higher
guns, the other would stay on the Okanagan run (our main, gently-sloping ski-run), and
simply walk up and down between the three or four guns stationed there, keeping them from
icing up and imploding as well as making sure that the main pump-station didn’t
overheat.
It was my turn to skidoo to the higher snow-guns and around back of the mountain to the
guns at the old triple-chair. Skidoo duty is generally thought of as the ‘good
job’ of the evening, but it’s a little different when you’ve just seen the
freakiest thing in your existence and you’re alone in the middle of nowhere, in pitch
black, save for the narrow beam of an old-Skidoo headlight. "Did it land",
"is it making laps"? "Is this thing watching me as I cruise along on a cat
track miles from humanity at 3am"? It made for an interesting night…
Neil – he didn’t see a thing, aside from a freaked
out look on my face, me stammering something nearly unintelligible and bolting up the cat
track for absolutely no apparent reason. He must’ve thought I’d flipped my lid!
I soon related the whole thing to him, but he was quite skeptical, giving me one of those
"are you messing with me man" looks. We’d only known one-another for about
a year at that point, and given my words & actions on that cat-track, I guess he was
bound to have his doubts. If that bugger wasn’t so damned addicted to nicotine, he
would have had the show of his life!
There was however a night-watchman on duty at what used to be the Delta Hotel in Apex
Village that evening. I knew that he was on night-shift, janitorial / security (this was
only a short time before the opening day of the Resort’s winter ski season), so I
spoke to him the next evening, hoping that someone else had witnessed what I saw, if only
to reassure myself of my own sanity I suppose. Sure enough, it turns out that he was
standing outside the Delta getting some fresh air when he saw a brief moment of the
device’s travels as well. He didn’t see it in the sky as long as I had, as his
position in the valley floor robbed him of the commanding view I had at elevation. He
experienced it as a triangle of lights appearing from beyond the top gable of the Delta
Hotel and disappearing quickly beyond the rooftops of the adjacent Gun-Barrel Saloon. I
allowed him to describe to me what he saw without tipping my hand of a description, and
sure enough, it was the same object I had been viewing. It was obvious that he was as
happy to learn that I too had seen the ‘thing’, as I suspect he was looking for
mental self-reassurance as much as I was!
I’ve included a screenshot from Google Earth to give
you a lay of the land. I know it’s pretty low-resolution, but that section
of BC isn’t high-res mapped on Google yet.
So, that’s my true story. I am convinced that there are some freaky cats from
other worlds that are checking us out. I have no idea why they haven’t bothered
to obliterate us. I mean, really, we’re really just a bunch of idiots, a complete
danger to nearly every other plant and animal around us; pissing, shitting and dumping all
manner of chemicals into our clean water, brutally thrashing the only atmosphere we have,
sitting on more nuclear power than it takes to destroy every life form on earth many times
over and killing each other by the thousands each day… Then again, perhaps it’s
just that they’re taking a "sit back and let them annihilate one-another, be
patient, it’s only a matter of time…" strategy?!
