the friendly camaraderie, the experience, and replaces it with the unmasked realities of life along the trail. It is not with the intention of dissuading the adventure-seeker from embarking on a journey, but to make him aware of the ease in which misadventure may take hold if unprepared. Living comfortably and peacefully in the wilds depends on a reliance of accrued knowledge, accepting all and any possibilities, and being humble in the face of Nature.
What we don’t know will hurt us.
SIX
HYPOTHERMIA
Iron rusts from disuse; stagnant water loses its purity and in cold weather becomes frozen; even so does inaction sap the vigour of the mind.
— Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519)
You start to shiver, sporadically at first, but then uncontrollably. Hands become numb and it’s difficult to take the lens cap off your camera. Goosebumps form over your entire body it seems as your breathing becomes quick and shallow. Shivering is violent now and any movements are slow and laboured. You stumble and your hat falls off but you don’t pick it up. Lips are pale. Ears, fingers, and toes are turning blue. Suddenly you feel this warm sensation and the shivering stops but you have trouble speaking. Your hands remain limp at your sides but you stagger on. You forget where you are and where you are going. Exposed skin becomes blue and puffy. There is some comfort as you lie down on the wet ground. Breathing slows as you drift off. Half an hour later your heart stops.
Hypothermia can occur in the summer; most people don’t realize this. Parents watch as their children swim off the dock at the cottage. Within fifteen minutes their lips are blue and they’re shivering uncontrollably. They wrap towels around them and tell them to sit in the sun or put clothes on. What parents don’t know is that little Johnny’s core temperature has dropped two degrees Celsius, from the normal thirty-seven degrees down to thirty-five degrees. That doesn’t seem like much but when the body temperature drops below thirty degrees, all major organs fail and clinical death occurs.
Hypothermia, or what was once referred to as “exposure,” is the number one killer in the outdoor adventure trade. And it happens a lot, mostly because people are unprepared or inexperienced. The unprepared tend to die on the trail, whereas the inexperienced die in the water. Either way, death by hypothermia, in most cases, is preventable.
I have been close to death more times than I would like to admit to. And I have been so cold and wet and miserable and tired that all I wanted to do was to lie down and sleep. But my will and instinct to survive overrode any self-doubt and I managed to pull myself from the edge each time, perhaps a little smarter for the experience. And most of these affairs occurred when I was younger and I brandished an imperishable attitude. I fought Nature on my terms alone; it was a constant battle to survive because I had yet to learn how to live within the dictates of the natural world. It’s much different now, and as a wilderness guide I have the welfare of the client to consider … and the client constantly tests your ability to ameliorate situations.
One of the odd dichotomies about wilderness guiding is the tenets governing the well-being of the guide. The guide remains, at all times, stoic, gallant, and self-sacrificing, which is true to an extent. But there are times when the guide is vulnerable, mostly due to his or her actions while tending client needs. On whitewater river trips, particularly in the Far North where water and air temperatures often hover just above freezing, it is often difficult to remain dry. The guide is in and out of the water or weather constantly — dislodging canoes off rocks, fixing equipment, pitching camp — while relentlessly checking the well-being of the group, and Gore-Tex jackets get thoroughly soaked inside from sweat and outside from rain or snow. During these times I have felt myself slipping into the first stages of hypothermia, well knowing the consequences should I allow it to progress to the point where I can no longer make a rational decision, or carry out even basic tasks. At this juncture there are few options. It is here that my own welfare supplants that of the client and the decision is made to stop, erect a temporary weather shelter, make a fire, brew a pot of tea, and get out of wet clothes. I am the first to tend to my needs. Usually by this point others in the group are also in need of a warm-up. The guide cannot benefit the group if debilitated; it’s the same principle extolled while flying in a jet with your children — you are always instructed to put on your own oxygen mask before assisting your kids.
I was hired one winter to guide and instruct a large group of high-school students who were stationed at a well-known outdoor school. The directors had assured me that all students had been well-trained in basic winter survival skills. Our destination was Temagami where we would trek in and set up a base camp using large canvas prospector tents equipped with wood stoves. It had snowed heavily overnight but the temperature hovered just above freezing and the snow was wet and sticky. I had instructed everyone not to bring skis because the conditions warranted travel by snowshoe. When I arrived at the base camp it was raining, the buses were parked and waiting, but the students were all standing out in the weather without their outer gear on — the instructors were nowhere to be seen. Thoroughly soaked, the students then sat in the heated bus for three hours for the ride to our start point. When they unloaded the bus there were no snowshoes — just skis; to add to the complexity of the expedition, one of the leaders had a severe cold. By the time we had everyone harnessed to their respective toboggans it was mid-afternoon and it would be dark by the time we arrived at our prospective campsite. The snow stuck to the bottoms of the skis like cement, everyone was cold from the start, and progress was interminably slow. I dropped my own load several times and went up and down the line encouraging the students (and leaders) to keep moving until we reached the campsite. Fortunately, I had brought a large thermos of coffee which was rationed out to the neediest along the line. I broke a trail to the campsite and began excavating a spot for one of the tents and gathered enough firewood to last a couple of hours. The group was in a sad state by the time they reached the campsite and few were able to carry out chores with any efficiency. We set up the one tent and ignited a fire in the stove and everyone huddled inside to get warm. This could have been a routine winter camping expedition with no hitches; instead, the directors of the group were negligent in preparing the group for the outing. The students were also incapable of setting up camp and lighting fires with any proficiency, even after I was told by the staff that they had already received extensive training.
One of the inherent mistakes made by winter trekkers and often those in a leadership capacity is to treat a winter expedition like a summer trip. A summer kilometre is two or three in the winter if the conditions are bad, and those beautiful summer campsites on the lake could be a winter camper’s nemesis during a storm. Judging the distance you can walk on snowshoes pulling a toboggan, or skiing with a backpack in the winter is more difficult, especially travelling with a large group. Students are notorious for not dressing appropriately and they often don’t factor in the consequences; to them, rescue is always close at hand, until something happens and the reality that they are in the wilderness sinks in.
One of the classic cases of a mismanaged expedition was the Lake Temiskaming tragedy of 1978. It was my first year as a ranger and the headwater of the Ottawa River was in my jurisdiction. I had paddled down this wide section of river on two occasions before; it was legend amongst the residents of the established canoe camps on Lake Temagami who made the crossing regularly, that this body of water was to be respected. On June 11, the St. John’s School headed out with thirty-one paddlers in four brand new canoes. They were eighteen-footers, not quite freighter or voyageur canoes, the leaders put eight in three canoes and seven in the other. Overloaded, the boats laboured in the rough waters. One canoe swamped, and then a second that went to help the first, then a third canoe went over. The fourth canoe did its best to shuttle kids and teachers to the Ontario side of the river but it wasn’t enough to save twelve kids, aged ten to fifteen, and one teacher. The river water temperature was seven degrees Celsius; a body loses heat twenty-five times faster submersed in water than on land. The kids never survived much more than an hour before succumbing to hypothermia.
St.