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.

I don’t usually hike big trails twice, but 2023 is shaping up to be a major backpacking year. Therefore I wanted to do something in May, to see where I was at and get my legs under me in advance rather than relying on classic Ben Massey hiking-myself-into-shape-in-the-Rockies. May means no mountain backpacking, or at least none I wanted to deal with. So hey, why not the West Coast Trail again? Besides, I had unfinished business from last time. I had taken safe, boring forest routes when I did the trail for the first time in 2017. I wanted to see Tsusiat Falls in their glorious full flow rather than the September trickle. I wanted to do more beach stuff, in particular the nasty route around Owen Point from Thrasher Cove to Camper Bay. I wanted to see a little more of the coast, in particular the ferry from Bamfield to Port Alberni, which I missed last time out. I wanted to not get my tent flooded out from under me. I wanted to have a little less anxiety, and a little more time to experience the beauty. There were even some souvenirs that I have started collecting since 2017 that I wanted to pick up.

Things did not go entirely according to plan.

In September 2017 I was in some of the best hiking shape of my life while in May 2023 I was flabby and not physically ready for a harder trip. I had forgotten some of the difficulties of the trail and neglected all pre-trip training and preparation. Whereas in 2017 I reached Pachena Bay in perfect condition, in 2023 I finished bruised and battered, but luckily not broken, with torn-up pants and chastened pride.

Which does not mean for a second it was not a wonderful, entertaining experience. Just a different sort from what I expected, and very different from 2017.

I am a train enthusiast who hates flying. If I can reasonably take the train, I shall, and if it’s not reasonable I might do it anyway. Especially when hiking: you can’t fly with stove gas or bear spray, never mind checking your backpack and wondering if it’ll meet you on the other end.

This is not a politics post, but it starts that way: the National Post‘s Chris Selley recently reposted a July 2022 article about Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault’s rash promise to “cross the country by rail listening to people’s ideas about climate change,” reminding us of the Liberals’ 2019 campaign promise to “partner with VIA Rail to make [camping at national parks] accessible and affordable for more families.”

Neither trains to national parks nor a whistle-stop eco-tour happened, because Quebec-Windsor elites don’t know what the rest of Canada is. 95% of Canada has less frequent, less reliable, and slower passenger service than before the First World War. The High-Frequency Rail plan is peeling off the parts of Canada’s passenger network that get attention into a public-private partnership and the rest of the country will do what it can with a roll of quarters and 70-year-old train cars. When a politician says “I’ll take the train to Banff, how long could it be, six hours?” he’s not even lying, but ignorant.

Which is funny, because the trains are responsible for the mountain parks. The Canadian Pacific Railway built many of the trails in Banff, constructed hotels and tea houses, and literally opened Yoho’s Twin Falls with dynamite, but you’re not taking the train to Yoho anymore unless you work on one. In 1991’s The World of Lake Louise, one of Don Beers’ iconic Canadian Rockies hiking guides, he laments that “passenger train service is confined to weekends in the summer months. The trains stop only at Calgary, Banff, Kamloops, and Vancouver; the rail station at Lake Louise is closed.” In 1991 this seemed like an unbearable cutback; in 2023 we shout “RETVRN!”

You can still get to national parks by train. The adventurous can do a little more. Here’s what there is.

Bears are smarter than many people, and stronger than most. This past August another Problematic Bear at Garibaldi Provincial Park learned the knack of shimmying up BC Parks’ official bear hangs and bringing the bags down. Several hikers lost whole backpacks until conservation officers shot the bear.

This is the second-best recent British Columbia “bear defeating bear-proofing” story. The winner was at Akamina Creek in 2021, where a bear was caught non-chalantly opening bear-proof lockers right in front of several hikers (private video on the Great Divide Trail Hikers Facebook group). A few years ago Andrew Skurka shared a spreadsheet on Yosemite bears getting food from the portable hard-sided bear canisters. Most incidents involve user stupidity, but far from all. Given time, a cliff, a manufacturing defect, a slight fault in procedure, a plastic container weakened by UV, or just one that’s smarter than the av-er-age bear, that food is gone.

Traditionally this is when the author brags that he does it right. My food is all dehydrated meals and packaged snack bars, kept in an OPSAK resealable odour-proof bag that’s in turn tied inside an Ursack, hung on or stored in permanent infrastructure whenever available. Sure enough, a bear has never eaten my food (raccoons ate some once).

Except OPSAKs pick up odours from handling even before the openings fail, which they always do. Ursacks can be defeated when overfull, tied improperly, or a bear has four hours to work on the thing.

The author of this post is neither a bear expert nor highly experienced. In the wild he does what seems like it ought to work well enough. However, like most people who’ve lived in the world the past few years, he has a well-developed contempt for the narcissism of the expert. Responding to the Garibaldi incidents, the CBC quoted unnamed “advocates” whose words had no relevance to a bear climbing up the bear hang. Whenever a bear gets away with someone’s food wiseacres say “he probably didn’t do it right” and insist that if you follow these fourteen weird tips faultlessly every time you’re sure to be safe. It amounts to endlessly trusting the plan.

Five years ago (good grief) I hiked the West Coast Trail. On my second night out, after a very rainy hike to Walbran Creek, I woke afloat in the midst of a flash flood. Diving into the pouring rain to move my tent out of the new lake I snapped the pole twice and tore the fly to ribbons, spent an extremely miserable night in the ruin, and tarp-camped the rest of the trip. I replaced the tent with a cheaper, better one I still use, what was scary at the time turned out to be a great adventure, and almost all was well.

But sadly my nice old camera drowned in that flood, and the SD card with two days of pictures on it could not be read however I tried. For five years those two days have beem memorialized only by some bad phone photos. I re-read my own blog posts and relive the memories once in a while; that’s half the reason I publish them. I always felt that loss. The only photo I had for beautiful day one hardly bears thinking about.

One day, five years later, I was at the office testing software by plugging SD cards into things to bring photos off them. It was testing and therefore frustrating, and after my nth fix I grabbed the SD card off my desk, plugged it into the tablet, swore again because the right pictures weren’t coming up… then realized they were my West Coast Trail photos. I’d thought I’d thrown that SD card out years ago, and I did have a card in my office that I knew didn’t work, that I kept meaning to put in the trash but never did, and it just so happened this Android device could read it, and I got my photos off.

Before the flood I ended my diary for the day “God loves me and wants me to be happy.” When I got flooded I thought that was dramatic irony; it turned out to just be true. Those snaps set me remembering, and that set me wondering.

The South Boundary Trail. To some those words are instantly evocative. They mean history, grandeur, self-reliance, and solitude.

Jasper National Park has beautiful backcountry, from Skyline to the Brazeau to the Tonquin Valley; the South Boundary’s isn’t the same. The scenic highlight is Nigel Pass, which is also a day hike and easily backpacked on the Brazeau. Otherwise, there are wonderful moments but not constant stimulation. No 3,000-foot climbs, no camps above treeline.

The South Boundary just feels different. The ninth Earl of Southesk put it on the map in 1859 when, recovering from injury, illness, and the loss of his wife, the 32-year-old peer explored the Front Ranges, defined a great Rocky Mountain backcountry trek, met legends of the Canadian West, read Shakespeare and Bulwer-Lytton, and wrote his account with a personality that any fan of obscure backcountry content will recognize. The hunters with him had hardly the vaguest idea where to go: they were experts, not guides, and the earl pioneered this route.

As Jasper matured the South Boundary became popular until, around 1994, the parks began their long retreat from the backcountry. Wildfires in 2003 and 2006, and a flood in 2013, decimated the trail, and little was repaired. Reports discussed how difficult the path could be to find, let alone hike.

Then, in 2019 Stuart and Evelyn Howe recorded a two-and-a-half hour video of their hike. They found Rocky Pass, navigated the washouts, made it to the old paths above the Southesk burn, then got down to the bridge. They showed what victory looked like, posted their GPS tracks, and more would-be hikers were inspired to follow them. In the years since the trail’s been better-marked by cairns, markers, and flagging, and the park has made a couple maintenance trips. One hesitates to call a 75-mile trail with chancy fords, multi-mile route-finding, primitive campsites, unbrushed trails with six-foot willows, and one thoroughly remote trailhead “easy.” But it mostly is.