VIA Rail’s The Ocean is the keystone of Canadian railroading history. People think of the CPR, the Last Spike, and the Canadian, but that’s the second half of the story. The CPR brought British Columbia into Confederation, whereas the Ocean‘s route made Confederation happen in the first place.

The Intercolonial Railway, linking New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, and the Canadas, was so important it was written into the British North America Act, 1867: Canada’s original constitution. The Atlantic colonies struggled to lay rails that, to the provinces of Canada, represented a vital link from the port of Halifax, the only major port in British North America accessible by ship all year round. These were the dangerous years following the American Civil War, when the Americans had crushing military superiority, expansionist ideas, and protectionist trade policies, while Canadians had good reason to think England could counterbalance that. The Atlantic wanted to link their rails and dilute their debt in Canada’s greater population; Canada wanted an all-red route for Imperial troops to Ontario and Quebec. No agreement should have been more natural, and it says something about the era that it actually worked out.

It cuts against the grain for a westerner to admit it but the Intercolonial Railway created the country. The Canadian Pacific merely expanded it. The Ocean follows nearly all the old Intercolonial route, now owned (of course) by Canadian National, and has since the first Ocean Limited set off in July 1904.

Yet it is, in every other way, a less historic train. Most carriages are from the 1990s, positively new for us, and it’s old without feeling historic; frankly, it’s shabby. The Ocean is a real transport link, the only practical overland transit between the Laurentian corridor and the Atlantic, but it survives because, when VIA’s budget was slashed, it served more valuable swing ridings than its sister cutting through Maine.

While it remains an interesting, beautiful experience (and, as a one-night trip, reasonable for even the ordinary person), it is relatively low on soul. Also time, so this post is a lot shorter than the last.

On Wednesday, April 2 at 7 AM Pacific, BC Parks will re-open reservations for Mount Robson Provincial Park’s Berg Lake Trail. You can bet it’ll be sold out by 8. The Berg Lake Trail, maybe the most popular backpack in the British Columbia provincial parks, has been closed since flooding in 2021. That beautiful region has captivated outdoorsmen for over a hundred years, and we may be sure there is pent-up demand.

One of the first it entranced was the Reverend George Kinney, clergyman and founding member of the Alpine Club of Canada. A capable amateur mountaineer, Kinney developed an obsession with climbing Mount Robson, the highest peak in the Canadian Rockies. Eleven times he attempted it, sometimes alone, sometimes with the best Canadian companions available; eleven times he was rebuffed. In August 1909, he tried again with Donald “Curly” Phillips, later a legend of the Canadian Rockies but then a 25-year-old fresh from the Ontario bush of no prominence or climbing experience. Their first three attempts also failed but on the last, Kinney’s twelfth, they attacked a fearsome direct route up the northwest face and claimed to reach the top.

Few today believe this. Their rash route seems beyond Kinney’s skill, let alone the unequipped novice Phillips. Though an accomplished alpine photographer, Kinney took no photos near the summit. He had preempted a planned ACC expedition, breaching climbing etiquette: learning of a British group attempting Robson, Kinney struck out half-cocked to beat them with less than three dollars in his pocket and hopes to find cash and a companion as he went. There was little of either: he had to sell horses and gear on the trail, and a succession of men bailed out of an awful, cold, wet journey until he struck upon the non-mountaineer Phillips. Kinney then claimed an extraordinary climb for which he had little evidence. Doubts formed rapidly, and continue to this day.

Whether they succeeded or failed, those who hike the Berg Lake Trail this summer will hike through the legacies of Kinney and Phillips. Theirs are some of the most remarkable stories in Canadian Rockies history.

Jasper National Park’s backcountry has never been more popular, and never harder to enjoy.

Backcountry trails in the park were at their height in the 1980s and 1990s. Usage was relatively low compared to the decades both before and since, but the trail network was over a third larger and generally in better shape. There was literally a hundred bridges, and it is said, perhaps exaggeratedly, that you could hike a hundred miles without getting your feet wet. Trails now considered adventurous low-water-season hikes were in regular use all summer, and the backcountry camper could have as much, or at little, privacy and challenge as he wanted.

Although Parks Canada hems, haws, and chooses their data carefully when the subject comes up, the fact is that more people than ever are using fewer backcountry trails. To be sure, backcountry campers are by-and-large white and by-and-large spend little money in town except at the bar, so are unfashionable visitors, but we are in an unprecedented boom of backcountry popularity which the park is content to treat with, at best, benign neglect.

Parks Canada today documents about 775km of trails relevant to the backcountry hiker. This is the largest Jasper’s official backcountry trail network has been in over a decade, because the 47.7km Maligne Pass trail was formally re-opened, not that it helps any. Apart from Skyline, those kilometers are less accessible to horse and hiker than they were before. The Tonquin Valley has been closed to horses and lost its lodges and even the Brazeau Loop, one of the few trails Jasper cares about, has been for serious hikers only since a bridge went out in 2022.

What does this really mean? A couple of wonderful projects, the Parks Canada History Archive and the Canadian Backcountry Trails Preservation Society, have archived what Jasper National Park’s backcountry used to look like. It’s gotten a lot worse. Everyone who’s been there knows that. But it’s also gotten a lot smaller.

It’s not that VIA Rail is good. That would mean high speed, high reliability, high frequency, and low cost. VIA Rail is slower, less reliable, less frequent, and more expensive than, literally, the bus.

It also cost the Canadian taxpayer $773 million in 2023 to carry 4.1 million passengers (their most recent annual report). That’s a drop in the bucket, or perhaps a drop in the budget, compared to the billions the federal government wastes every year, but suffice to say it doesn’t compare well to Amtrak. You don’t want to lose efficiency contests to Amtrak. In a serious country, VIA Rail could easily do more with less, pleasing the many Canadians who want to go by train and hurting nobody except us foamers.

However, when an American visits Canada and rides VIA Rail, he is pleased, even when the train is eight hours late. Easy for him to say, he doesn’t pay our taxes, but Canadians don’t feel the same way on Amtrak. VIA Rail, the $773 million remittance man of the federal government, too unrewarding to nurture and too popular to eliminate, has got character. It places elegant slow travel within reach of the middle class. And since we do not live in a serious country, for most of us the choice is not between “current bad VIA” and “hypothetical efficient VIA,” but between “current bad VIA” and no service at all.

VIA is not good, but it is nice. Recently I got to cross Canada by train, starting with the Canadian from Vancouver to Toronto. It was very late most of the time and I sampled many VIA inconveniences. It was still very nice, and not as a “subsidized cruise ship on land” which would be, let’s face it, a waste. In fact, one of the most worthwhile VIA complaints is how hard it is to see whether the niceness is what’s costing all the money.

It is less than 30 miles from the town of Healy, Alaska to the trail crossing of the Sushana River. It starts easily, on state highway 3, but going down the old Stampede Trail is at least moderately rigorous. An old road, mostly unmaintained, overgrown, and sometimes flooded, with bridges washed out. There are better trails, and you want a good degree of backcountry experience to hike it, but it’s far from bushwhacking.

Thirty miles in a day is an extreme, but human, hiking target: given summer weather, sufficient water, a pack loaded to the survival level, a long day before the sun set, and the maximum possible motivation, an experienced hiker would do it if his life depended on it. Taking a night on the way, it becomes reasonable in ordinary terrain. Thirty miles on foot is not inherently far. Through a burned and blown-down monstrosity of an ex-trail, thirty miles is a nightmare, but over a trail that is flooded, unmaintained, but gets fairly extensive use from ATVs and which one has hiked before, it will not be a problem.

Those paragraphs will be weirdly parenthetical to some and obvious to others. Yes, this is about Chris McCandless, aka Alexander Supertramp, who died in a disused bus-turned-shelter on the Sushana River in August 1992 and became an international celebrity.

McCandless did the hard part. He hiked to the Sushana from the highway in April, while the trail was snowbound and even the days were cold. He lived for over two months off an infamous ten-pound bag of rice and his .22 Remington. Then, come summer, he couldn’t get out. He did not commit suicide, which is willful self-murder: he tried to return, was unable to, and died, leaving final words that any of us would envy. Many have taken him as an example, and many have called him a kook, and one group is more right.

Sir Ranulph Fiennes is not everyone’s favourite adventurer, though he is mine. When the Guinness Book of Records calls you the World’s Greatest Explorer, people resent it. He has never feared positive publicity and has always been honest that he adventured to earn a living. Every year or two he releases a book, often hashed-together bits of his old ones. His attitude towards telling a straight story, as seen with his 1991 true-story-turned-fiction??? thriller The Feather Men, can be… negotiable.

There are things in common with Colin O’Brady, who now may be nobody’s favourite adventurer except his own. O’Brady holds records of the modern type, fastest to this, youngest to that, but won prominence in 2018 when, as the story goes, he became the first man to travel all the way across Antarctica, via the South Pole, by his own power, solo and unsupported. The specialist press was all over this claim even while it was being made, but after years of uncritical adoration from the mainstream media, Aaron Teasdale’s 2020 National Geographic article “The Problem with Colin O’Brady” put the fat in the fire.

Both Fiennes and O’Brady are professional adventurers, corporate speakers, and authors. Both were upper-crust before they were born; the “Sir” in “Sir Ranulph” has been with him all his life as his father, the second Twisleton-Wykeham-Fiennes baronet, was killed in action before Ranulph’s birth. O’Brady’s mother is a prominent businesswoman, NGO board member, and Democratic politician. Fiennes went to Eton, O’Brady went to Yale. Both are sometimes criticized for how forthright they can be about their true accomplishments.

Both men have skied the Antarctic landmass; Fiennes in 1992–93, with Dr. Mike Stroud, and O’Brady solo in 2018. Both wrote books about their expeditions, and neither quite achieved everything that their biggest fans might claim. Now the similarities stop. In one case, we see what might be called “honest spin,” a groping for lesser success rather than failure; not to be encouraged, maybe, but to be forgiven. In the other, we see spin of a different degree, better suited for politics than the white Antarctic.

In August 2023 I hiked quite a lot of Banff National Park’s Sawback Trail. It was a good time, mostly, but the weather was depressing, I lost my ebook reader, I broke my phone, and ahead of what would have been by far the toughest day of the trip there had been twelve hours of rain and I hadn’t slept a wink. So I hiked out of Johnston Canyon and went home. The details are in that diary if you want to read about the angst (a fair bit) and drama (not much); the point was I had left the job un-done.

So I booked a early-mid-July hike from Banff to Lake Louise, with a twist: rather than retrace my steps up the Sawback Trail, I would take the back half of the Sawback Loop, past Block Mountain and over Badger Pass. It was a fun idea. but ne’er yet has mortal man come up with the perfect plan and this wasn’t the exception. I was hiking somewhat early in the season, and according to the Canadian Rockies Trail Guide Badger Pass measures up at 2,565 meters (8,415 feet), “one of the highest trail-accessible passes in the Rockies [. . .] about as wild and remote a place as you could imagine,” featuring rocky, easy-to-lose trail, cornices, boulders, steepness, and Type 2 fun.

Badger Pass in early July would have been fine for the past several years, but not 2024. There was a cold spring and a late melt. No backcountry updates from Banff covered the area, and many lower points that had been updated were “not recommended” due to snow and even avalanche risk. What to do?

What to do was, once again, not go to Lake Louise. I would call it another frustrating failure, but this time it was entirely on my own terms. The trip I wound up with was the simplest out-and-back you could imagine, and one of the best times; accessible, given enough days for comfort, to many a hiker.

Mount Norquay to Block Lakes Junction and back, 50 miles almost on the pin. You know what? Recommended.

Everyone knew it was going to happen. The town of Jasper is… was? in a forest of trees killed by the mountain pine beetle, Dendroctonus ponderosae, over recent decades. Dry, hot summers, prone to lightning at all times of year, and filled with tinder. Now it sounds like the town is burned to the ground. Inevitable, but no less sad for it.

Naturally, blame is being cast. It’s the provincial government’s fault. It’s the federal government’s fault. It’s Parks Canada’s fault. The simple fact is that forest fires happen there, always have, massive ones, and when civilization came and started putting them out it did not eliminate the conditions but let them accumulate until they were past human control. Alberta, and Canada, are a long way from the only places to see this happen.

Vanity of vanities, says the Preacher,
 vanity of vanities! All is vanity.
What does man gain by all the toil
 at which he toils under the sun?
A generation goes, and a generation comes,
 but the earth remains forever.

Olympic National Park is, as you might expect, located on Washington’s Olympic Peninsula, a vast area of mountains, rainforest, and shoreline, interspersed with national forests and wildlife refuges, a complicated area with almost every type of outdoor experience imaginable. Climb a rock, sit by a lake, hike up a billion miles, drive straight to the scenery, stroll by the coast, camp for a night, camp for weeks, do something easy, or do something hard: you want it, it’s there. Over 900,000 acres of literally everything. The wilderness trail map shows how much there is for the backcountry adventurer. The park is plenty popular but that popularity is well-diffused based on a hiker’s time and desires.

Embarking upon the North Coast route, from Shi-Shi Beach to Rialto Beach, meant not much information to go on for hiking in May. The Ozette Triangle between the highway, Cape Alava, and Sandpoint is well-trafficked; beyond that I knew to expect ropes, boulders, and not much else.

The biggest surprise, apart from when I nearly died, was the morning I left. I had planned five nights on the trail (well, really four; the last, a mile of beach to the parking lot, was more a scheduling convenience), then out to a bus stop to whisk me back to Port Angeles. It would have ended on Sunday, and double-checking the bus schedule almost literally on my way out the door I noticed Clallam County Transit has no Sunday bus service. Whoops. At that stage the only thing I could do was cut a day out of my itinerary and finish Saturday instead, which worked out pretty well but set up some serious coastal hiking, when the hours you can hike are dictated by the tides and sometimes you have to go fast like it or not.

I think I did like it. It’s an interesting, beautiful place. Not the West Coast Trail, no, but with its own character, at once popular and primitive, with great crowds one moment and that “am I the only one here?” the next. At its easiest, it is some of the finest hiking I’ve ever experienced; at its worst, wild, rugged, and difficult enough. Worth a look.

The backcountry of Golden Ears Provincial Park up Gold Creek is little-advertised but well-known, a secret so open they’d admit it in Parliament. Even people familiar with Golden Ears sometimes don’t know about the camping back there: “no, not North Beach, if you head up the East Canyon Trail a few miles… past the falls… yeah, it’s official. A mile after the hiker bridge. All those tents were allowed to be there!” I’ve probably had that conversation ten times.

However, if you know, then you know. You saunter on up to Viewpoint Beach, or Alder Flats, with the bros and brewskis because either of them is a really easy hike from the East Canyon parking lot. I like to go into Golden Ears and enjoy the beautiful mountains, the pleasant creek, the hiking that is as arduous as you want to make it, but the Everest Base Camp-scale sea of sil-nylon in camp stops me from visiting more than occasionally.

Halfmoon Beach, three miles further up the East Canyon Trail from Viewpoint Beach, is also popular, and on a peak summer weekend you’ll see dozens of campers ripping around the shingle on e-bikes tossing cans over their shoulders while barking dogs stick their noses in your tent. That’s a good way to enjoy the outdoors, it’s just not how I enjoy it, and I take transit to Golden Ears, which means ten miles of walking just to get to the trailhead. So even when visiting Viewpoint I never really wanted the extra 90 minutes for more of the same at Halfmoon.

I knew I was missing out, though, and at last the perfect opportunity came. A glorious April weekend with enough time on Friday to do half the hiking in advance. The weather was summery but many casuals won’t camp in April, full stop; the place was almost certain to be quiet.

Boy, was it ever. Few campers these days get to have Halfmoon Beach totally to themselves. I did, and should never stop being grateful, because it was worth everything.

In many ways, backpacking is like a cat. You can ignore it for ages but eventually it’ll be sitting on your stomach screaming in your ear.

The resemblances do not end there. Like cats, backpacking can be a pain in the butt but we wouldn’t want to be without it. Some people spend exorbitant amounts of money on their fur princess/10lb-base-weight ultralight backpacking rig while some people just let the thing survive off a dripping bathtub faucet and the birds it kills… I’m slightly losing control of the simile here.

Also, everybody loves to talk about their cats and everybody loves to talk about their backpacking. It is spring with a vengeance. As I write this the sun is shining through my window. Last time I went to my favourite shoulder-season campsite it was actually crowded. So it’s is officially The Season; the cat of backpacking is making kitty biscuits in my blanket and walking on my face. He has lots of food but still demands to be fed, and it is time that I got up and moved the kibbles of backcountry excitement into a little heap in the middle of the bowl of outdoor adventure.

So here are the hikes with which I plan to scritch beneath the chin of my nature needs in 2024.

(Nailed it.)

On the night of September 29, Doug Inglis, Jenny Gusse, and their seven-year-old dog were killed in their tent by a grizzly bear on Banff’s remote Red Deer River.

There is no sign that the victims made any mistake. They were highly experienced in the outdoors. In that region of Banff National Park there are no bear hangs or lockers but bearproof food containers are mandatory and the park says they hung their food properly: if the park could tell that, it implies the bear didn’t get it. They carried bear spray, and emptied a can of it. They had a satellite messenger and the presence of mind to send an SOS, but the weather made it impossible for rescue by helicopter and even if it hadn’t, it would have taken a miracle to save them. While responding Parks Canada killed an older, underweight, aggressive female grizzly, and while the area of the attack is still closed to travel in case she wasn’t the bear responsible, the profile fits: it was late in the season, a cold spring has made for a bad berry crop, and bears jumping a camp is virtually always a predatory attack from an animal who is desperate for food before winter.

Small comfort, probably, to their families. It was the worst of all possible luck. Twitter comments were happy to write fan fiction about how it was probably their fault in some unspecified way but it wasn’t. It had probably been a couple days since the hikers had seen another human. Their ebooks were out. They were in their tent reading, waiting out crummy weather before bed. Any backpacker can see the scene in his head without having met either victim or knowing a thing about them besides where they were and what they loved to do.

They say if you never bail out on a hike you’ll eventually regret it, but they don’t say that when you do you’ll regret it anyway.

Even when I sprained my ankle hiking to Norvan Falls a few years ago, I finished going to Norvan Falls (though when it happened I was almost there anyway). But after four days of lousy weather, failed gear, and a sleepless night before a steep and dangerous-seeming day far from help having just seen somebody else hurt himself, my nerve failed me and I went home early. As a result this is not the full Sawback Trail, from Banff to Lake Louise; just a lot of it.

One can’t A-B test these things. No Control Ben pushed on to either hurt himself or be fine, so I shall always wonder. Writing up my diary for the trip I found I was justifying the decision to myself. The humble reader is welcome to judge, and I am actually interested in your judgement if you do, but the Inner Adventurer forever remains unsettled.

It was a real hike. Four days towards my goal before finishing up at Badger Pass Junction and returning. 43 miles, mostly short days, and a great deal of spectacular country. The Sawback Trail is recommended, but my luck was out: every day it rained hard. I lost my Kindle and broke my phone, which meant that I had heck-all to do while pinned in my tent.

I’ve been rained on in the Rockies plenty, but I’d never had a trip where it was just always raining; apart from the electronics problems I managed well, and that was good too. Failure can be as interesting as success. Right?

I like food (response from anyone who’s met me: we know), and backpacking cuisine is a frequent topic. From the cruise ship passengers who gawk in awe when I say I’m going off-grid for three nights and ask “what do you eat?“, to big-time through-hikers who get really good at assembling weeks worth of reasonably nutritious meals at gas stations, everyone’s got questions and some people have answers. It’s a very personal topic. Most beginning backpackers pack their fears, and in no case more than food: there is a fairly irrational terror of going hungry in the woods, when really all of us are fine if we hike and fast for a day. The authorities always recommend that we pack at least a day’s worth of extra food when we’re in the woods, and even allowing for that, it’s very easy to overestimate how much we actually need.

Today we can go to any outdoor store and buy lovely prepackaged meals of dehydrated deliciousness, which most backpackers do. However, those meals are expensive and their convenience comes at a cost beyond money. I’ve taken to making my own meals at home and packing them along. When I mention this in conversation, the next logical question is “oh, you got a dehydrator?” and the answer there is no: dehydrators are expensive single-use appliances, but there are loads of good dehydrated ingredients on the market today which anybody can use to assemble meals that are cheap, nutritious, filling, and yummy.

When packing food, and everything else, you make tradeoffs. However, after all these years, I’ve hit a system that works for me. I do not hike as hard and fast as a real through-hiker, but I do pretty well and am used to packing and hiking for two weeks between resupplies.

An easy out-and-back hike beside an artificially-dammed lake. Lake Minnewanka in Banff National Park is very popular, but not a glamorous spot for the hardcore hiker.

Most backpackers like a little struggle to give them that sense of achievement when they eat a freezedried meal and hide out the storms in their little nylon shanty. All else being equal they’d rather be alone, and out-and-back hikes are a chore. Since there’s no trail around the south side, Lake Minnewanka is popular, easy, and an out-and-back by definition unless you shoot the Devil’s Gap and come out pretty far from anywhere, near the South Ghost Recreation Area. Plus, though it’s an ideal shoulder-season hike, the Minnewanka trail is restricted to groups of four or more most of the summer to mitigate against the many, many, maaannnyyyy bears that congregate in the abundant and convenient berry bushes to get their feed on. So it’s a logistical hassle too!

I went because I was curious and because, since I had a few days at the beginning of July, it seemed like a good one to check off the list. I’d planned to do the whole thing, out and back, as far as the Ghost Lakes, but I didn’t. Too bored. So there’s an anti-recommendation.

However, dull though the hiking is, the camping is lovely. The easy trail, too, makes this probably the single best beginner’s backpack I’ve ever seen. Curious about this Rocky Mountain lark but understandably reluctant to brave bears and lightning when you don’t really know what you’re doing? Come to Lake Minnewanka! It’s so, so easy to get to, it’s as easy as hiking gets, and it’s rewarding! The hike is anything but a waste of time, especially when you’re in camp, sitting on the beach with your food and your book, watching the sun play across that vast lake. Want to bring the kids? They’ll have places to play and splash around, and the days can be almost as short as you want them to be.