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.
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