making a rough water crossing. Twelve students and one teacher died of hypothermia. Instead of waiting for calm weather, or rafting their canoes, the guides made the decision to cross a deadly piece of water just to keep to a tight schedule.
Even experienced guides perish, and this is typically the fate of those who defy their own abilities and common sense. A good guide knows the limit of knowledge and physical capacity that sets personal and group boundaries. Venturing beyond this principle opens up a quagmire of potential tribulations. Climbers often attempt to push their personal limits. Climbing is a completely self-indulgent sport and there are a plethora of famous mountain guides whose bones decorate the fool’s abyss. This happens when the level of risk is greater than the guide’s capacity to mitigate the unknowns … and in the wilderness there are always going to be uncharted and enigmatic trails.
It is said that fear is the mother of safety, and it is fear that intensifies an adventure trip. It is our basic survival mechanism and is an instinctive reaction caused by rising adrenalin levels. On whitewater river expeditions the adrenalin pulses with the current flow; the sound of rapids ahead prompts the heart to beat faster and the sweat to bead on the forehead. The unknown looms ahead. But there is no adventure if there is no risk, and when we tempt fate and step closer to the edge, there will always be an element of fear. A balanced sum of trepidation makes us wary; too little or too much fear makes us stupid. Fear conditioning is a part of the guide’s expected competence as a leader. The guide is expected to be stoic, fearless, intrepid, and responsive to any situation. Anything less could have disastrous effect on the well-being of the group. When anything goes wrong, everyone looks to the guide for a responsible and quick solution carried out with proficiency. And there are times, even for me as a seasoned guide, when fear is overwhelming and you find yourself grasping for a way out that remains elusive and improbable. The once tight ship starts to list to one side and everyone grabs for the handrails. Luckily, there is always a Plan B to put into play to counter all of Murphy’s Laws, or should be, in the guide’s bag of tricks.
I like being a guide. Unlike the role of an outfitter where life can be prosaic and predictable, venturing beyond the line of civilization with a group of eager patrons has a particular appeal to me. It’s not about power, although in the eyes of the client, the guide is often revered as a superhuman empyrean figurehead. Ego aside, the task comes with no shortage of challenges. And it is the capricious nature of the business, the alluring changeable trail of discovery that is attractive. And to see the wilderness through the eyes of those debutants, the children of Nature who view the sacredness of the landscape for the first time, to feel their excitement, to share in the journey in the most primitive way, defines my rationale for loving the guiding life.
FOUR
CONFESSIONS OF A TRAILBUILDER
As a single footpath will not make a path on the earth, so a single thought will not make a pathway in the mind. To make a deep physical path, we walk again and again. To make a deep mental path, we must think over and over the kind of thoughts we wish to dominate our lives.
— Henry David Thoreau
According to statistics, 90 percent of people think trails just happen. They appear inexplicably over the carapace of the Earth. It is one of those incontrovertible realities that go unnoticed, unquestioned … like the fissures in the bark of a giant white pine, the veins on a leaf, they materialize in front of us but we think little about how they got there.
The remaining 10 percent of folk have built a trail, somewhere in their lives, and know something about the disposition and temperament of trail building.
In March of 2007, I attended the Professional Trail Builders Association annual convention. Held in Reno, Nevada (of all places), it was a gathering of eclectic and somewhat eccentric trailbuilders, trail managers, park administrators, and industry representatives flogging the latest in soft-track excavators, gas-powered wheelbarrows and new-fangled hand grubbers. The main casino floor of the hosting hotel was abuzz twenty-four hours a day, non-stop with all the tawdry hoopla that inspires people to throw away their money. Upstairs in the boardroom was a gathering of the clan; bearded, suspender-jeaned trail engineers (old hippies), IMBA (International Mountain Bike Association) bicycle jockeys, and backcountry trail experts. It was an almost comical conjugation of two divergent cultures. In the least, the Reno scene inspired the convention theme, somewhat as a religious experience in the den of iniquity.
The best part about wilderness trail building is the lifestyle.
I attended the conference as a representative trails specialist for a resort I was working for in Muskoka, Ontario — the first J.W. Marriott luxury hotel in Canada. Three years before, billionaire owner, Ken Fowler, asked if I would construct trails in a one-thousand-acre reserve at the resort.
“You’re dangerous.” Fowler pointed his finger at me from across a table at our first meeting. He knew that I was an environmental activist with a bit of history.
“Yes, and you have to be accountable,” I replied. The elderly developer laughed at my pointed response. He agreed to protect at least half of the land purchased for the resort to be set aside for non-mechanized trail construction. I was to build a world-class trails system because the resort had little else to bank on as far as attractive amenities. They sent me to Reno to scope out the latest in sustainable trail-building techniques. I still had much to learn about constructing a good trail.
When I worked as a park ranger, there were no guidelines for constructing trails. You were handed a chainsaw and told to cut a trail from point A to point B, regardless of what was in between. Although I was cautious and careful enough when I did cut a new trail, there was no concern for the ecology of the landscape, nor any understanding of possible despoliation of the environment in the way of foot-trampling effects, proximity to bird nesting sites, or sensitivity of thin bedrock soils. You axe-blazed a rough pathway, in as straight a line as possible, then slashed your way through with a chainsaw. It was brutal. There was no art to it. That was almost thirty years ago.
Sustainable trail building is now considered an art and a sometimes complex engineering feat. There are more than twenty sciences involved, from understanding soil types, hydrological patterns and sensitive ecological attributes, to social and cultural elements (who walks a trail and why?) to consider. Constructing trails with a straight-line, Point A to Point B mindset adhered to an archaic, linear disposition; trails now take on a life of their own in temperament and configuration — straight lines were shunned, giving way to the evolution of the “stacked loop”… Point A now returns to Point A. It’s not so much the destination of the trail that is important, but the journey that unfolds along the way that counts. People prefer to walk in circles rather than on one-way-return trails.
It’s the same when designing water trails. Canoeists much prefer travelling in a loop if they’re on a lake trail; rivers are different since they run one way only. The more popular canoeing parks and reserves like Algonquin, Quetico/Boundary Waters, and Temagami, all have circular route blueprints. When I started designing water trails for Temagami, and later for the Province of Manitoba, I was relying on my own investigations with the aid of outdated and inaccurate trip records. Between the sixties and the eighties, it was common practice for the district forestry offices to analyze and record portage trails by aerial reconnaissance. Generally, a summer forestry student was hired to plot trails by sheer guesswork and estimation while peering out a window of an aircraft moving at 120 kilometres per hour. Locations of trails were oftentimes assumed to be where they should be (using the linear method of the shortest distance between points). The coarse, irregular topography of the Canadian Shield landscape defines where a trail can be established. Sometimes trails are located some distance from the assumed spot, having been determined by an impassable marsh or precipitous escarpment. People of the First Nations obviously knew the land better than anyone and established trails to adapt to the landscape; for me, it was necessary to think cognitively from the Aboriginal perspective and not through