Then I went on
vacation again. It didn't occur to me when I was taking random
chunks of time off in late summer that I was only giving myself two
and a half weeks between trips. I came back from the Ice Age Trail
and I had to vacation again! Crikey! My rashes had barely cleared
up. I was planning on hiking the LaCloche Silhouette Trail but a
cursory inquiry into backcountry reservations in Killarney quickly
taught me that hiking Killarney is significantly more complicated
from a bureaucratic perspective than hiking in Whiteshell so I
decided to do Whiteshell. The Mantario Trail defeated me in June
2014. Now was the season and all the Canadians on the internet said
it was beautiful. I had to watch the episode of Little Mosque
where Amar, Thorne, Baber, Fred
Tupper, and Fasil, but not Joe, go camping to settle my nerves about
the advisability of camping in Canada. And I realized that camping
in Canada is about contrasts. One might find a London punk and her
insane Ukranian twin in the Canadian wilderness, or an imam and a
conservative talk radio host. As a solo hiker, I would need to
balance extremes. But I could do it. I'd done half of it already.
My
alarm didn't go off and I accidentally slept in 'til 7:00 in the
morning. I didn't mind much though. This was a travel day. I
petted Guinness for forty five minutes, slung my pack over my
shoulder, and headed out. The drive up was uneventful if longer than
necessary. I never stopped for a meal. I had rolls and cheese and a
clearance organic energy drink, but once I finished that I got into
the problem cycle of buying pop at a gas station and drinking it and
needing to pee and stopping at a gas station and buying pop. What
with road construction, I didn't make Winnipeg until 4:00pm. And
that was okay. I had nowhere to be for real, and I didn't know where
I was going to sleep. Probably in my car. But I wasn't sure where I
was going to sleep. Probably in the parking lot at the trailhead.
There was the charming West Hawk Lake Campground, but I would be a
forest troll surrounded by old people in campers whose alarms
wouldn't go off at 5:30.
I
made it up to Winnipeg with the intention of Wilderness Supply, but I
took the wrong exit on their ring road and ended up trying to drive
through some light industrial zone with a Tim Horton's. I was about
to turn left and get back on the ring road and there was Wilderness
Supply! Hurray! I bought my Manitoba Parks Pass and got back on the
road to West Hawk Lake. The Trans-Canada is a two-lane divided
highway for ten miles and then it goes down to one lane for a long
time through pine forests and granite blasted away to make room for a
road bed. Lakes! Manitoba only has 9,999 but they are spectacular.
I was still weighing the idea of camping and there were a lot of
potential campgrounds in towns along the road, but nothing tugged at
my heart enough to make me abandon West Hawk Lake. Canada has a
confusing series of symbols for roadside attractions and they put
everything a town has to offer on one sign. Some towns have camping,
or camping, eating, or camping, eating, horsie, golf, pool. Some
towns have camping, eating, swimming, golf, massage, falconry,
cholera, waterslide, mausoleum, pine tree. I stopped nowhere and
made West Hawk Lake in the early twilight. Ah, West Hawk Lake! I
immediately stopped for gas because in the event that my credit card
was cancelled while I was on vacation because some computer decided
I'd stolen my card and crossed the border, I wanted a tank of gas.
It was 7:50 and the West Hawk General Store was winding down for the
night. I bought my gas from the owner, from Forest Lake! and became
Canadian in the '80s. She and her husband were flying to Jamaica on
Friday to relax after the season. I crossed the street to the West
Hawk Diner and it was two minutes from shutting down for the night.
I was very sad. I did have one option, the slightly fancier bar and
grill next to the general store. (Technically, I had another
option: getting into the trail food early.) I walked back across the
street and checked on the hours of the fine restaurant. I had hours.
It was a nicer place than I deserved, considering I was wearing
trail clothes with a blazer . I went in the bathroom and realized I
was wearing hiking boots, a teal paisley skirt, a pink striped shirt,
and a floral blazer. Three clashing patterns, three weird lengths,
three different styles. But there was nothing for it. I opted for
the Greek salad, since I was about to spend a week without
vegetables. Nom. I enjoyed it immensely. The waitress said they'd
had a lot of Mantario hikers the previous weekend. I wondered if I
was too late in the season and I would be alone in the woods, but
when I rolled through a couple miles of rural roads into the parking
lot at the trailhead, there were four cars and I knew that I would
have four friends on the trail. No one else was sleeping over. I
put down my backseat and got ready for bed. There was a scary time
when I thought I lost my InReach and couldn't contact my family and I
would have to go back to the telephone box at the West Hawk
convenience store and place an international call on my credit card
to let my parents know I was okay. Can telephone operators still do
that? But I finally found the InReach in my fanny pack. I still had
some useful junk in my trunk from the garage sale: a coat, a couple
shirts, and some broken shoes I need to recycle in the shoe recycling
box. I put the coat under my sleepy bag and made things comfier. I
could stretch out well in the trunk. Yaris! There was a weird gap
where the trunk floor and the backseat separated for a few inches,
but as I slept my coat worked its way in there and I was even more
comfortable. The stars shone brilliant.
I
woke up to windows all steamed up and a cold morning. Hey, I had an
extra coat! I fussed through my stuff and checked supplies. I did
not get as much of an early start as I wanted considering that all I
fundamentally needed to do was put on my boots and go. But mornings
are tough and it's hard to tear yourself from the security of a cozy
car and head out into a wilderness that defeated you last time. I
did it though. I walked across the parking lot. I took the
obligatory selfie. I walked up the sandy gouge where the Mantario
starts on a dirtbike track. I walked to where the ttrail shifts off
the track and onto a footpath and starts to go up through the forest
with pink rock underneath your feet and girding the path and grassy
clearings and pines. Then all of a sudden the trail goes downhill
and crosses the Whiteshell River on a sturdy little bridge of greying
wood. The first thing on my map. I was making good time, and here
was water and unimagineable beauty. I crossed the bridge after forty
five minutes of hiking. When I attempted before, I'd hiked from my
car to a campsite forty five minutes in and then I'd taken another
half an hour in the morning. I must've been tired, and very possibly
out of shape. And here I was, forty five minutes in and already at
the first milestone. I could do this. But maybe I shouldn't? I
tried to set an intention and realized I couldn't use Meghan again.
I'd done a Meghan hike, devoted to dangling my toes in the water, but
this hike needed to be about something else. And I don't believe in
hiking for something like World Peace. World Peace can be acheived
by concrete actions, not hiking a trail or running a 10k. I didn't
have anybody whom I could hike in honor of. Everyone I know is bored
of my walkabouts or they're flat-out worried about me. And here I
was alone in the woods again. I would at least need to keep my mood
up, which is hard when you're on your own. In 2014, this area was so
mosquitoey that sometimes I couldn't open my eyes all the way. Now,
everything was a pine-scented idyll with a few drying logs from the
old blow-down. Through a marsh, and I crossed the first set of
railroad tracks and walked down them a bit to find the little orange
flag that marked the trail. Mantario is usually blazed blue, and I
wondered who'd been through marking orange. A school group in two
chunks, maybe, with one adult blazing the trail for the slower kids?
A caretaker enthusiast? It was nice, whichever. There were spots
where the blue blazes did it, and spots where the orange blazes
helped. I went uphill through thick woods and had a snack at the
abandoned airfield, built to defend central Canada during the War,
now decomissioned. There's a falling tower and a broken trail sign,
left for East Caribou and right for the rest of the trail. I ate a
Pearson's nut roll and went right. A while later, got my first
glimpse of Caribou Lake. My second glimpse of Caribou Lake had a
weird rowboat in it. Who leaves rowboats lying around the back
country? But there it was, pulled up on a rock with no oars. I
continued up and away from the lake , then down and over a stream, up
and along a ridge, down more, streams feeding the lake, more lake
views. I began to worry that I'd missed the campsite. I didn't need
it: I could eat lunch anywhere, but it's nice to check landmarks. I
was relieved to find it finally, but it was filthy ! Ugh. I've seen
beer cans and old pants in my life, but this was the worst thrashing
of nature I've ever seen with a semblance of camping. Most people
who hate nature this much just run a bulldozer over it. The bearbox
was piled with decomposing garbage. Somebody left their entire foul
camping trip. There was a coffee can full of dirt, a busted up tent
, a tarp, a cooler, cans, nastiness, food containers. I wished I had
the gumption and the resources to pack it out but that was too much
and too disgusting. I went down across the big flat rock to the
picnic table and a ton of little garbage on the ground, but nothing
gross. Little corners off packets of things and tiny wrappers.
There was another rowboat with the most ghetto canoe paddle in it:
the blade off a kayak paddle attached to a stick with rusting wire.
WTF. I ate my PBJ burrito to the lapping of little waves and enjoyed
sitting down in nature. I was making good time, but I still had
places to be and things to do. My next challenge was walking past a
pair of ribs and a skull that I'd seen in 2014, and I spent an hour
walking carefully in apprehension of that challenge, but they just
weren't there. Do wolves gnaw old bones in winter? Pretty
clearings, lush grass, drying mud, pines, and four or five mosquitoes
left over from the season. I went in mud up to the top of my boot,
and was cheered by somebody's lost hat stuck on a dead tree, and ate
another Nut Roll. There was the survey monument, then the trail
bears left into thicker woods, and I kept an eye out for the logging
camp brick oven but missed it.
At
Marion Lake there's a huge beaver dam crossing. The map calls this
"treacherous" but there's nothing to it, especially in the
dry. Go down a slope, hopscotch over some rocks separating a jewel
lake from a lush beaver marsh in wide glacial vistas under an
enormous blue sky, and go up the trail, probably. Except there was
no up. Orange flagging around the bottom of cliff to the left and a
rock ledge over the lake and then there was nothing path-like, just
me and the ledge and a grassy cliff with no tread. Flagging,
flagging, dead-end. There were about six places on the cliff that
looked climbable but nothing that screamed, "I'm the trail! Go
up here! You'll know where you are once you get to the top." I
decided to ascend. I don't like leaving the trail, but ten feet up
isn't getting lost in the bush. There's no way I wouldn't be able to
navigate from the lake I was standing next to. I scrambled up the
cliff and stood on top of it and it definitely was not the trail.
Green and waving grasses up to my knees and scattered trees and mossy
branches for tripping over. But there was something thirty feet away
along the edge of the cliff that looked like a trail. I walked
carefully towards it and it was the Trail. From the top of the
cliff, I could see how I was actually supposed to go right from the
dam around a curve and up some blue flagged slope to where I was
standing now. I had done it the hard way, but that was okay, and now
I knew that the orange flagging could lie. So I pushed hard around
the lake edge for a long time, because it's a big lake, and finally I
found the campsite and I was home! I did think briefly about going
on to Peggy Lake but it was 4:00pm already. So I set up my tent in a
nice tentsite on the beach and decided to kick back in my chair and
sunbathe. It was a little cool out, so I had to put on my sunbathing
sweater. There was a frisky little chipmunk running all over the
place. It may have been two chipmunks. He or she would run close to
my feet and away and into the fireplace and onto the rocks and
everywhere. He even ran over to my tent and gave it a good
looking-at but I told him not to do that. He wasn't very interested
in me while I was eating supper but that night, when my tent was
rustling, I was sure it was chimpmunks and not bears. The wind off
the lake was strong and some brilliant asshole had built a windscreen
at the fire pit. It was an utterly ingenious woven stick work of
disregard for leave no trace camping and it really did block the
wind. When I woke up at 5:30, as is proper, I was excited to have
some windless peanut butter and headlamp time and there were little
mice running all over the rocks by the fire pit, nibbling and leaping
and being adorable in their mousiness. They were so cute that I
dipped a pine cone in peanut butter, which is against the rules. The
one who got it thought it was wonderous fare and ate most of it
before his friends realized he was up to something. I packed up and
was sad to leave my little mouse friends and my sleeping chipmunk
friends, but there were more wild campsites with incredible beaches
ahead of me and I needed to go to them. I pushed on through marshier
terrain and some highs and crossed the power lines and the portage.
I was coming up on Peggy Lake around 10:30, walking along some grassy
granite way, when I spotted people. I had my fear reaction before
they noticed me, and they jumped ten feet into the air when they saw
me coming. After they calmed down a bit, we introduced ourselves.
Their names were Peter and Curtis and they were doing the trail in
five days, this being day four. Peter was excited about my hat. I
was wearing a YMCA Camp Icaghowan hat because, after the Ice Age
Trail, I was testing out whether I preferred baseball caps to my
ladies' camping hat. Peter was a camp director at a Christian camp
nearby and he looked similar to Peter the old director at Icaghowan;
Curtis looked like Harold from Red Green. They'd met a couple going
north in moderate distress: the man leaned against the wrong tree
while they were crossing a beaver dam and got fifteen wasp stings.
Peter and Curtis camped at Peggy with another couple whom I would
probably meet up with because they were travelling slowly and taking
their ease. I was so heartened to see people and I felt so much
safer. I walked with an extra zing, crossing the next tiny little
stream flowing over rocks between blue lakes, and up the massive rock
the size of a duplex sloping at a seventy degree angle up onto the
bald. I crossed on the lip of soil in the crease of the rock and
felt a little bad doing it because other people were climbing there
too and it the dirt getting a bit kicked up.
Peggy
is one of the most beautiful campsites on a trail where everything is
beautiful and windswept and next to some kind of epic Northern vista.
You come out over a hill and descend a barren slope with little pine
trees past the bearbox, which is well visible from the campsite, and
then you have six different options to cross a little stream to the
campsite where there are comfortable private tent pads on either side
of a gentle ridge up to the privy. I stopped at the picnic table to
fill up my water bottles and bask. The mad lasher left some sort of
elegant yet non-LNT contraption made of sticks next to the fire pit
which someone told me later was a chair. I took off my boots and
dabbled my feet for the sake of the sunny day. It was lovely. But I
pushed on. My plan was to lunch at Moosehead and make it to
Mantario, which left no room for wiggling about on the beach. So I
pressed on along the straight, woodsy path and walked by something
that looked quite like a picnic table. I kept walking, decided I
needed desperately to turn around and find out for sure if that was a
picnic table, so I dropped my pack and went back to inspect what
turned out to be the Olive Lake campsite, a sweet little spot with a
picnic table and one tent pad but no breathtaking vistas. On the
IAT, I'd give my kneecaps for a campsite like that, but on the
Mantario Trail, it's disappointing.
I
chugged on along through forests and a few little marshy spots.
There was one place where I went astray. The trail goes down and
straight into a marsh and one stands there for five minutes and
wonders how the trail goes through a marsh before one decides to
backtrack ten feet and realizes that the deer go into the marsh and
humans go up and around the lake. There were other footprints down
in the marsh, so I knew all my other trail comrades I hadn't met yet
were also confused. I walked hard and long and ate a nut roll and it
was nearly 2:00pm when I started climbing over the boulder field at
the Alice Lake campsite and heard a a funny jingling I thought I'd
heard once hours ago right around Olive. I looked around and there
were people at Alice starting to cross the beaver dam. I wanted to
be their friend but I had a whole basketball court of boulders to get
across safely first. I went like a mountain goat but they were
crossing the dam while I crossed the bridge. They didn't see me at
all. I scurried through the campsite to the marsh and extensive
beaver dam system, went out on a flat rock to get to the dam and hit
a dead end. I tried another rock and found a dead end. There was
only one way to even approach the big beaver dam and I had to skirt a
lot of likely looking routes to get to it. My ding-a-ling-a-ling
friends were across the dam and disappearing into the trees, and I
took myself firmly in hand: if I didn't meet them at Moosehead, I'd
meet them at Mantario. I walked carefully around the tide pools and
onto the beaver dam, which needed some beaver love, but it was so
much easier crossing now in low water season, than when it was when I
crossed this dam before and it was one floating stick. I stepped
carefully, and there were shoddy bits, but I made it across safely
with ease and went up the slope into the woods. Moosehead was up
ahead and I was deeply confused about why the lake was on my right
when the lake should be on my left and whether something disastrous
would happen, when the lake opened out on my left and I was walking
into Moosehead campsite in all its beautiful granite-beached
slopiness and vastness. My new friends were at the far picnic table
out of the chill wind from the lake and I went over and introduced
myself. Their names were Scott and Becky. Scott vaguely reminded me
of a guy I used to volunteer with and Becky had the black Irish thing
going on. They were both lovely. They'd been out for three days
already. They slept at Caribou the first night and Peggy last night
with Curtis and Peter, and they were heading for Mantario tonight. I
said I was too, "...if you don't mind sharing." They said
of course, and invited me to sit down at the picnic table with them
and all their food that was all over the place and covering the
entire table. I didn't want to make them move; I also had my cool
reclining ground chair, so I thanked them but declined and impressed
them by sitting down in my chair and leaning back. Ah. We chatted
while Scott lit their stove, Becky dug out the soup mix, and I
unloaded my peanut butter. I took out my InReach to let my family
know the exact location of my lunch by magic and Scott asked me if I
found the GPS useful. I explained how it wasn't a GPS, or
technically it was both a GPS and a Facebook machine but I didn't
have those activated, but I could text with my family, and Scott said
to Becky, "Let's not tell your mom those things exist." We
had a nice lunch, or at least I did. Their soup, delicous though it
looked, was still cooking when I ran out of room in my tummy and put
away my peanut butter and all the detritus I had scattered around me
for the lunching of. I said goodbye to Scott and Becky with the
sureness that we would be back together in a few hours and set out.
The
stretch between Moosehead and Mantario is one of the most beautiful,
the hardest, and the starkest sections of the Mantario Trail. From
the campsite, you walk along the shore of Moosehead Lake for a few
hundred yards and onto a beaver dam so old it has trees taller than a
man growing out of it. The dam has real tread, and beach, and looks
more like skinny long peninsula, except the one place where the
beaver left a gap and you can see that all this land is built on
sticks. From the dam, you hike up and then you stay up. There is
nothing but a granite table stretched in front of you with trees far
away down steep slopes and the sky and the sun and the wind. Then
the sweetest blue lake comes into view like a picture from a
storybook, and once that passes, you find Mantario Lake on your right
and it continues for ages. Finally, two waterbottles later, the
trail starts going up and down, and painfully up, and why am I going
up?, there are a couple portages and then you're going through thick
woods and walk right into the Mantario campsite. I was disappointed
my hike didn't take longer because it was amazing. I love the wind.
But Mantario is amazing too. It wasn't a windy day at water level,
just on the tops, so there wasn't a particular wind off the lake,
which was nice because Mantario is at an inlet on the northern edge
of the Lake Mantario and the wind could whip the water into whitecaps
and freeze the whole site; Mantario was the farthest I made it in
2014 and I had to sit huddled on the far side of a tree to eat a
power bar without the wind blowing through me. But this evening it
was calm and sunny. The tiny little island out in the lake was
perfect. A person could swim out there under thoroughly different
conditions. Then they could stay there and eat pine nuts and lead a
miniature life. Ah beauty. Scott and Becky were far behind me so I
got first tent padsies and took the one off to the side where there
was less space and more privacy and wind protection. After I set up
my tent, I went banging through the woods looking for the bear box
and gathering firewood. There were a ton of false trails in back of
the site but I just couldn't find the bloody thing, or the privy.
After I'd collected ample firewood anyway, I gave up. I sat in my
chair on my picnic table in the sun with the water laking in front of
me and relaxed and the trees rustled and various things happened in
Terry Pratchett's head that he wrote down for me to find out later
and then I read them. After a while, I started wondering whether
Scott and Becky were going to show up, and if not, should I go
looking for them? Obviously a night search would be a bad idea but
we had hours of daylight left and if they were in peril, I had a
device for summoning helicopters. Conversely, if they'd just gotten
tired and decided to bivy down, I wouldn't want to search needlessly
for safe people. What if they'd stayed at Moosehead because they
didn't want to camp with me and then I blundered up and started
trying to splint them? Finally, they saved me from worrying by
walking into the campsite. They took the tent pad straight back from
the picnic area and I continued kicking back. Scott walked down the
trail past the campsite and found the bearbox right there, and the
privvy a little ways back in the bush. We chatted and ate our
respective dinners. I had beans, they had a boil in the bag meal.
They
went off to get more organized and I decided to get the fire going
because dark was falling and I was getting cold. I'd been worried
that I would be camping with adamantly anti-fire green people, but
Becky and Scott had made a few comments already indicating that a
fire was obligatory. We had a crackling fire going and I was getting
something out of my tent when I heard a tinkling bell come from
farther down the trail. I hung around to see who it was and two
women walked into the campsite. I greeted them loudly since I was
covered in twilight and they didn't spook. They seemed a little
desperate and very happy to sit down. Their names were Amy and
Claire. They had nice puffy jackets on, and trekking poles, and
looked like people who knew their stuff, or people who take gear
reviews seriously. It was hard to tell in the dark. One of them dug
a cook pot out of her pack and the other one pulled out a a hanging
water filter. "We ran out of water," Claire said. No
wonder they looked so rough even in the dark. It transpired they'd
hiked from Richie Lake and Amy hurt her leg somewhere in the morning
so they'd been going slowly all day. They'd filled water at some
point but hadn't filled it again and they had this retarded hanging
water filter. I gave them a bottle of my iodine water to start their
food and we chatted. Claire and Amy had such thick accents I thought
they must be Quebecois but they were from a town half an hour outside
of Winnipeg. Scott and Becky had accents a little bit, and they
spoke in kilometres and thought it was fifteen degrees out, but Amy
and Claire were from a different land. They were funny too. Claire
said, "Should I tell them my story about Pop Tarts?" Amy
said she definitely should. Claire said, "I was looking for
backpacking food recipes online and it said on this one website, 'Pop
Tarts are a great morale booster! Bring some along,' and I decided
to get some when I was food shopping. We ate them today and they
were gross." I was on my chocolate and apertif course and I
offered everyone some tiny booze. I always bring enough that if I
make new camping friends, I can share, and this was only the second
time ever I'd had camping friends. Amy didn't want any but Claire
chose a tiny hard lemonade. She said, "A great morale booster.
Ha!" They'd had a rough day. They'd gotten off the trail
somewhere up past Richie Lake, climbed a cliff, and found a sleeping
bag, a bunch of food packages, and a pair of boxers, shredded up and
mauled. They'd gotten the hell out of there. Claire said, "The
bear didn't maul the guy. If some man was mauled by a bear, we'd
have heard about it, but the bear definitely got his pack."
They'd had to climb up a cliff where a scraggly, manky rope was tied
to a root to make the ascent, but there was a scramble next to the
root where most people avoided the rope and hauled themselves up.
They had ingredients in Ziplock baggies and I was horrified when they
chucked the empty baggies into the fire. Come on. We sat around the
fire a little more. Scott and Becky were yawning. I decided it was
really time for bed. Seriously past time for bed. 9:30. What kind
of wild night was I having? I left my Canadian friends with the fire
and crawled into my tent and my snuggly clothes. Camping is so easy
when it's dry. I made a sleepy time mix on my iPod and fell asleep
before the first song was done. I woke up cold but pumped. I was
only wearing one pair of long underwear, one t-shirt, and one
sweater, cold!, so I put on my a long undershirt and my fleece. I
listened to my music even quieter in my tent because I didn't want to
wake my friendly buddies at this ungodly hour. Out of my tent, it
was even colder with damp chill. I put my arm back in my tent and
found my other long underwear shirt and my mitten gloves. So glad I
brought them. I tied the shirt on my head and rememebered why this
was worth it: A mist covered the lake right up to the shore. The
island was disappeared but the crescent moon and Venus shone through
the haze. My breakfast had a chipmunk friend and I took turns
watching him and the mist so slowly disappear while the sun rose. I
had my peanut butter tortilla in utter peace. Then I fiddled around
a bit and got my tent down with my freezing hands. Amy woke up and
said goodbye to me on her way to the bathroom and I set off along the
trail uphill in an early morning in thick green woods. I was scared
for today. Claire and Amy made the trail sound difficult and I'd
already climbed things hard and hiked far and stepped carefully. I
have no idea how to freestyle up granite precipes.
The
trail climbed through the nice forest up to another granite top and
view of the forest. There had been a burn up there and it was an
easy mess of tree trunks and low bushes, along with the rock and the
astounding view of the next lake or Mantario Lake. It was a little
hard to tell. I was descending from Three Lake to Two Lake to One
Lake and felt backwards. The important thing was that I was walking
on the correct path, which was easy because there's only one path in
the whole of the forest. The terrain wasn't so easy but it wasn't
any more difficult than before. When I found the place of the
helping rope, I was surprised, firstly because when I looked at the
trail, it went straight down. I took some vertical trail pictures,
and then I looked around and there was another route and maybe
another one. There were plenty of ledges and places to rest while
descending, and I wasn't afraid to climb down. The rock chimnied and
I scooted carefully down past a yellow rope two feet to my left and
said, "Oh, that's what Amy was talking about" and then I
was at the bottom of the cliff and not worried about getting up again
because it was not hard. There was one place where the path stopped.
I crossed a little stream and went up and the trail went around on a
wide ledge on the side of a cliff and then it ended. I couldn't find
the bloody thing at all, and I was definitely still on the trail
because it was flagged. But where was the next flag? There was an
up climb that could be the trail and it was the most trail-looking
thing I could see, so I climbed up the cliff and stood on top of the
cliff looking around for more trail, but it seemed that the place I
had climbed was not trail at all so there was no trail to follow past
that. I tried walking along the edge of the cliff to see if there
was any trail around, if I had climbed up in the wrong place and I
should've climbed up nearby, but there was no trail, just the wind
blowing in the grass and the rocks and the sky and the sun. It was
one of the more beautiful places I've ever seen, up there. I sat for
a while, looking, and then I got down and tried walking the trail to
where it dead-ended again, and found a little bit of trail on the
other side of a bush and kept trucking. So much pretty. I had a
long haul that day so I kept pushing. There was a lookout on the map
and I looked out over it, but it had a view of more trees. I'm not
sure why that was the lookout, since I'd seen thirty places of
equally spectacular beauty, but it was very high up. Then I met two
men walking along a granite top between some trees. The first one
saw me, and I saw the first one, and we said hi, and the guy behind
him jumped a mile. I'd met so many trail friends by then that I
don't even remember their names. They asked me where I was coming
from and I said "Mantario, but I left at 7:30," so they
wouldn't get over-optimistic. The first man said, "At 7:30, I
was trying to get five more minutes in my sleeping bag but he made me
get up." They'd camped at Richie and they were doing the trail
in four days, heading to Mantario tonight. They'd met the couple who
got stung by the hornets on their way out. I told them they'd be
meeting Scott and Becky soon. The front man asked me if I was the
girl who'd said she was solo hiking the trail this weekend on the
Mantario Trail Facebook page. No, but wow. Unicorns! The second
guy didn't say much, but he had a hunting knife on his hip and a
stubby blaze orange knife on his shoulder strap, which is overkill.
We wished each other luck and I headed on for Richie Lake. I hiked
along and started seeing lower land, more mud and trees and less
granite tops. There were portage trails and places where a tree had
fallen and people kicked another trail around it. Everything got a
little damper, and the mud crust appeared. I pushed on into the
thick forest and the rises and falls, all the clustered pines and the
knowing that there was a lake, at least one, nearby, but I'd never
see it from here. Richie Lake campsite was meant to be off the trail
somewhere and I wanted to find it and have lunch there but I was
worried I would miss the turn and never find it and I would never
have lunch until supper time. So I was that much more surprised when
I came up on a huge blue peeling board sign, "Richie Lake
Campsite 400km" in big letters with a big arrow. It was the
kind of sign that you could see if you were stumbling exhaustedly
through the woods hoping to find the campsite in moonless dark, which
was probably the point. I followed the turn-off, went up and around
and down through sparse pines past a bear box and a privy off in the
woods but not as discreet as these things usually are, and here was
my picnic table at Richie. Lunch! Today was a sad day because it
was the end of my tortillas and from now on I would be stuck eating
peanut butter off Wasa crackers like a health martyr. The lake had a
seagull flying off in the distance and I watched it and ate, then
checked out the campsite. The picnic table had space for a tent
behind it, and then there was a step, as with a sunken living room,
up to a perfect campsite with an illegal fire ring and space for one
flat tent and one slopey tent, then back through some trees was a
lovely tent pad where someone had taken an enormous shit. That
explained the flies. Toilet paper too. Then there was another,
smaller tent pad and another trail to the privy. I moved on. I was
definitely moving faster with better muscles and less food weight.
The terrain from Richie was forested and post-muddy. There were
massive steep hills to climb, but the trail was dirt not rock.
Hemenway was close by, according the map and I got high up again and
gazed at the massive Crowduck Lake and then started lowering down
onto granite tops that wove around each other like little rooms. I
was wearing my stripey t-shirt and enjoying the stripes and my
lemonade and all the prettiness. I was a little distracted when two
men popped out somewhere and I said hi to them and we chatted a bit.
I asked them how far to Hemenway and they said, "You're almost
there." From then I walked about two hundred feet and turrned
somehow and there I was looking at a picnic table and a little lake
and two more Canadians. Friends! They were monkeying around with a
kitchen tarp a little ways from the kitchen. The campsite at
Hemenway Lake is a vast rock room,one wall the lake, one wall forest,
one wall forest and rock, and one wall a thin line of trees
separating it from another room. There were two obvious paths into
that room and I found out later that the bearbox and privy were in
there. The floor of the campsite room was all granite and flat the
first ten feet from the forest wall and sloping down to the lake 'til
at the end there was a forty degree angle of beach granite. So there
was a ton of space, but not many tent sites, unless you like sleeping
on igneous rock and waking up in lakes. Cate and Karen already had
their tent set up in spot near the kitchen and there were other
places where a person could set up the tent if they wanted to chip
away at the precious topsoil. I wanted to avoid that so I went and
checked out the other room, but stabbing the topsoil with tent stakes
was my only hope really. I chose a spot barely bigger than my tent
set up. My tent stakes went half an inch into the soil, hit granite
and I ended up finding some rocks to hold the ropes down. Then I
moved to the picnic table and sat with Cate and Karen, not being too
sure if I was intruding or if hanging out by myself by the lake in
full view of them would be weirder. Obviously, I chose the expedient
of holding a book but not reading it. They were Winnipegers, and fun
people. Cate had step-kids and when I said I was Minnesotan, she
said, "Winnipegers love Minnesota." She said she hadn't
gone down to the States for back to school shopping this year because
the dollar was up but she usually does. She talked about all the
things you can get for cheaper in the US, like cheese. I said I
wanted to spend a day being a tourist in Winnipeg before I went home
and asked them what I should see. They said, "The Forks,"
the new riverfront shopping district and Human Rights Museum. Cate
told a story about Duluth last month with her husband and step-kids:
she forgot her sandals so she bought some cheap flip-flops, sprayed
herself down with bug spray, and the sandals melted. A tingling ding
started from the south and I said, "Ah, I wonder if that's Scott
and Becky." Karen said quietly, "I wouldn't say this to
someone with a bear bell, but they've done studies with black bears
and grizzlies in Alberta, and bear bells attract black bears.
They're naturally curious so if they hear a rhthymic noise, they'll
get closer to see where it's coming from." Scott and Becky came
through the trees just then. I was glad to see them, as I had the
same questions about what to do if they didn't turn up that I'd had
the previous night. They set up their tent on another little patch
of dirt closer Karen and Cate and came to sit around the picnic table
with us. We checked in on our relative days, hiking the same
terrain. They'd also gone off-trail somewhere, and met those two
guys with two knives. Karen and Cate had great stories. They were
both a little rounder than they used to be, I'm sure, but they'd done
adventuring, and not just American things but Candian
outdoorspersonship. Cate said, "Never try to cook with a white
gas stove in your tent in northern Saskatchewan in winter because it
will flare up and burn a hole in your tent and you will spend the
night freezing and being snowed on." Scott asked her how they'd
survived the night, and she said, "Slept in the tent with twenty
dogs. We were far away from everything. Like, the nearest town was
three hours away." Cate started a fire to eat supper by, and I
was even more surprised. Some people are so anti-fire, but not these
people. They weren't anti-throwing their plastic bags in the fire
either. Different cultures! I've never seen a massive poop on a
tent pad in the States either. But regardless of what is warm, or
produces carbon, or the state of a nation's bowels, we had a pleasant
evening and sat around the fire until the brilliant sunset in pinks
and oranges over the pines. I went to bed around 8:30, which is
pretty late for me camping alone, and they tucked in a little later.
I wore all my clothes to bed, but the temperature didn't drop as much
as the night previous, (we were also on a cute little lake, not a
huge lake) so I had a toasty warm night.
I
woke up well and didn't dally in my tent too much, because today was
the day, and the haul, and the climax, and the midpoint. I followed
my headlamp down the eight foot trail to the other granite room. The
bearbox and privy were off to the left in a little wooded area. The
bearbox was plumb full what with three sets of food bags and the
random crap that somebody left in there: a bottle of cooking oil, a
huge metal army first aid kit, and a box of crackers. People.
I
carried my stuff back through into our campsite and looked around for
where to eat. Not at the picnic table, because Cate and Karen were
asleep close-by. The nicest spot was near the beach but that sloped
enough that if my water bottle fell over, it would wind up in the
lake before I could catch it. I went down to the shore to see if
there was anywhere flatter, like the illegal fire ring I couldn't see
in the dark. I heard a plop. There was a beaver in the water and
I'd disturbed him. He was wary of me. I froze and went slowly down
on my haunches. He was floating in the water a foot off shore,
eating a medium-sized tree branch. The beaver ate the tree and the
sun started coming up glowfully. He adjusted and I got to see his
beaver tail. Beaver! I watched him for a long time, doing his
beaver thing. He was pretty great. Finally, I left him to it and
set up my little stove next to my tent's grassy patch. I missed my
tortillas, but my peanut butter was just fine and I had cocoa in my
coffee and a little bit of fruit. It was a really nice morning.
Finally, I rolled up my tent and most of my clothes and food, stuffed
them in the bearbox, and I was ready to roll and be back in a few
hours. It felt great having a nearly empty pack. I had a couple
sweaters, my rain fly, lunch and some sundries, but there was nothing
to stop me flying down the trail except that it immediately
dead-ended across the rock sheet from the privy and I had to retrace
my steps twice to figure out which stand of trees I was supposed to
go through. From there I chugged along through thick forest not very
far at all before I got my first glimpse of Big Whiteshell. Hemenway
is a teeny-tiny kettle lake between Crowduck and Big Whiteshell, and
Big Whiteshell is so big that it has civilization. It was a little
disappointing to stand at the edge of the forest and see houses far
away across the lake, after the wilderness. The first time I came to
a sandy beach, I made a sand castle, as is proper. The weather was
warm but blowy off the lake, and I started to see fishermen and
fisherchildren and fisherdogs out in boats. There was another sandy
beach, and a walk through woods ten feet from the shoreline, and an
unofficial campsite. I kept weaving between beaches and woods,
crossed a few streams with bridges and stepping stones. There was
more excrement. Apparently Canadian outdoorsmen subscribe to the
laws of Manu
(http://www.economist.com/news/asia/21607837-fixing-dreadful-sanitation-india-requires-not-just-building-lavatories-also-changing).
Nice unofficial campsite was ruined by poop. There was no chance of
stepping in it because of the clouds of flies. But mostly the walk
was sunshine, lapping waves, interesting ducks, trees, fishermen, and
the sensation of moving quickly. Then there was a road, which was a
huge deal. I crossed it and thought I might be getting somewhere,
but the trail wove still quite onwards after that. This was the
segment that everyone on the internet complains about, the long ATV
trail that's all mud. Curtis from Peggy Lake got stuck in mud up to
his waist here three days ago. In spring, they say, it's impassable.
In September, the middle of the road was glossy wet, but it was easy
to walk along the high shoulders. Mantario hikers say this segment
is boring, and I hope they never do the Ice Age Trail. Then an
elderly couple appeared. Nice people. They said hello and were very
much impressed that I was nearly done with the trail. They were from
Winnipeg and had a cottage on Big Whiteshell, and were surprised that
I was an American. I said goodbye to them knowing that I'd catch
them on the flipside and went on. And on. And on. And then I came
down a hill and here was the road and the trailhead! It was so
uneventful and yet full of accomplishment. The trailhead wasn't too
exciting, with no amenities like potable water or a toilet. Just an
informational kiosk with a map and a wee bit of history, a shiny
black bench dedicated to a Canadian soldier who died in Bush's Iraq,
and eighteen cars parked on the roadside. I took an oodle of selfies
in front of the sign and sat on the bench and ate a nut roll and
wondered where all the people in these cars were, since I hadn't seen
them on the trail. I think they were all out in boats. I waved
goodbye to the trailhead, took a few more pictures of myself, and
turned around to do the entire trail over again. It was about
11:00am. The old couple weren't very far when I found them again.
We said hello again and chatted some more. The lady said she'd heard
somewhere that Thanksgiving was the most American of holidays and she
wanted to know what I thought. I said I supposed it was true,
because everyone in America does the same thing and eats the same
thing on the same day, unlike all the other holidays which are
celebrated variously by culture or family. (Judith Martin makes a
compelling argument that high school graduation is the most American
of holidays, but that's not annual for all.) She told me about
Canadian Thanksgiving, which is completely different and in October.
She said, "It's a harvest festival," and I didn't explain
that our Thanksgiving is also a harvest festival that just happens to
come six weeks late. She said they were Jewish and told me a little
about Sukkot, which was also coming up. Finally, she patted my arm
and wished me luck and I hiked on, and ran into Scott and Becky five
minutes later. They were looking forward to getting out and taking
showers, and I assured them that they were twenty minutes from the
trailhead, with the conversation with the sweet elderly couple
factored in. From there, I hiked on alone, through the wood, across
the road and along the shore of the lake. There was one confusion
where the trail went into a swamp and dead-ended. It took me four
tries to figure out where I was supposed to be going. The crazy
ducks were back after I'd disturbed them, sunning on a rock. Some
fishermen within waving distance waved at me and I waved back. I ate
lunch on a beach with the sun on my arms and it was delightful. My
sandcastle was falling apart already when I went past it. Then I was
back in the wood and then I was back at Hemenway. It was a little
disappointing to walk into the campsite when all my campsite friends
had left. I repacked my pack and chugged off quickly, even though it
was a pity to say goodbye to the nice slanty beach and the beaver.
And then I made my quick and uncomplicated way through the forest to
Richie Lake. I was a little worried that I might somehow miss the
enormous sign that said "Richie Lake 4600km" but I didn't.
I turned left, followed the trail, and met my new friends. They were
the two dads I'd met right before I got to Hemenway. They said they
didn't mind me staying the night at their campsite. They had their
tent pitched close by the picnic table, so I climbed up the little
rise to the next tent pad and said hello to my next new friend,
Jason, who had his stuff in a pile on the best tent spot. I didn't
want to sleep next to the giant poop, so I started pulling my stuff
out and setting up my tent on a the sloping tent pad while Jason
sorted out his gear. He was solo, which I thought was pretty cool.
He went to look around at the other tent pads and then came back and
started doing foot care. I had my tent up, so I sat down next to him
in my chair and we chatted. He said his wife was actually in St.
Paul that weekend to see the Taylor Swift concert. I did not know
that there was a Taylor Swift concert on in St. Paul. He asked me if
I would have done anything different had I known, and I said I would
have stayed out of St. Paul to avoid the traffic. He'd stayed at
Peggy the previous night with a group of people who were too rowdy
for him and planning to camp at Mantario tonight, so he'd pushed a
little farther and ended up at Richie. He went to set up his tent
back in the wood behind the poop . I was confused. If he wasn't
sleeping on the flat spot, why was I going to spend the night sliding
downhill? Still, I'd slept steeper and I believe that sleeping on a
hill presents a healthy challenge. I moseyed down to the shoreline
and looked around. The giant rock underneath my tent and the
unofficial fire ring and a lot of other space stuck out into the
lake. There was van-sized rock at the shore and some boulders at its
base so a person could climb up onto it and stand there for a while
and watch a canoe paddle far off in the evening water, wondering if
we were going to have even more camping friends tonight. Then I got
bored, slipped down the rock, and wandered up the beach on the other
side to fill my water bottles on the dads' side of the campsite. The
canoe pulled up, and it had a male and a female in it. The guy was
their spokesperson and he discussed with the dads whether they should
camp here and where the best spot would be. The girl and I said hi
to each other. The guy decided, with the girl's consent, that they
should pull around a little bit and camp a hundred feet around the
other side of the peninsula. They never came back to visit. For the
rest of my camp there, I could see the end of their canoe parked
onshore, but they were camped within easy reach but not connected to
our site and I didn't want to go bashing around the shoreline
invading their privacy just to have a wee chat. The dads had their
fire going for an hour by then, and Jason was getting his own fire
started six feet from my tent. It was definitely supper time and I
was very confused about everyone's campcraft and need for personal
fire and where I should eat. I'm no LNT fire hater, but three people
needing two fires between themselves when the sun would be up for
another two hours, that's excess beyond Americana. Jason was eating
next to my tent too, and if I got eaten by a bear during the night,
let it be on his own head. I hopped down the ledge, tipped back in
my chair at the dads' fire, and heated some water for my soup. We
chatted about hiking and stuff. They were doing a two night out and
back; they'd hiked to Richie yesterday, today they'd hiked up to the
place where it said Lookout on the map, and tomorrow they would go
back to the trailhead and get their car. They wanted to know how I
filtered my water and what kind of stove I had and these gear
questions, which was nice of them but, as much as I'm proud that I
camp efficienlty, it's hard to talk gear to people who clearly have
better (more expensive) stuff than you. They had a nice hanging
bladder water filter like the two girls from Mantario, but they were
using it well by staying at one campsite and not wandering around
unable to hang it. They'd already eaten and they were drinking cocoa
by the fire. I asked them what I should go see when I was a tourist
in Winnipeg and they also said The Forks and the Canadian Museum of
Human Rights. One of them said that it was a Canadian National
Museum, one of only a few outside of Ottawa. The other dad hadn't
been there. The one had been there on his son's field trip and he
wanted to go back when he wasn't herding fourth graders. He said the
Holocaust floor was like a heart attack, and there was a
contemplation room on top. I'd had some good soup, powdered Lipton's
style, on my Ice Age Trail adventure, and I assumed that a similar
powdered soup from Costco would be as nourishing, but I realized
after my first few slurps that this stuff was unbearably salty and
not umami at all. I tried to get down as much as I could, slowly.
The dads switched topics from the Canadian Museum of Human Rights to
sheds and roofs and dad stuff. I read and sipped and tried to
nutriate myself but the soup was gross. I tipped my cup into the
fire, built it up a little, and ate a chocolate bar. The dads
laughed when I pulled out my mini-booze. They declined, their
froggie water bottle was full of whiskey. I sipped and read and
enjoyed the warm until I got too tired and decided it was time to
sleep. Jason's fire was dying down and there was an incredible
sunset. It was a pity to get into my tent but I wanted to be by
myself and not bogart somebody else's camping trip. I fell asleep
before the first song on my sleepy mix was over. I woke up warm and
cozy because I had all my sweaters on. The morning was beautiful as
I snuck quietly around the dads' tent to the bearbox and dug out my
food. I had my breakfast next to the illegal fire ring looking out
over the lake drinking cocoa in the dark listening to a loon far off.
And then the sunrise came and turned the whole sky pink. I
shouldered my pack and waved goodbye to Jason, who was sitting on the
giant rock heating water on a white gas stove silhouetted against the
last colors of the sunrise like a Backpacker ad.
I
climbed the high ridge above Ritchie Lake and joined up with the main
path. My pack was so light I was going wicked faster. I cruised the
thick forests and started pushing upwards a little slower. There was
a lot of terrain here. I needed to walk carefully, slow down, climb
a rock, choose the real turning out of a few options. But the
weather was perfect and I was by myself again, just me and whoever
else I happened to come across. I was walking hard downhill past a
giant boulder in an area where I'd already passed some wolf scat. On
top of the boulder and there was some wolf poo and a jawbone. Just a
jawbone. All those little white teeth. Immediately an unearthly
howling started and I thought I was going to die. I pulled out my
bear mace and remembered that no wolf has ever killed a human bigger
than a toddler. Yelling nonsense, I kept on trucking while the
wolves moved around me in the near woods. Or they were extra loud
and in the far woods. I couldn't tell. I climbed a rugged hill with
the bear mace in my hand and came out on top of another bald granite
hill. Walking across it through jagged bushes, wondering if the
wolves were gone, I saw a pack of humans coming at me. This was the
group Jason camped at Ritchie to avoid. There were four guys, and a
girlfriend: leader who got the trip organized, the short funny one,
two unremarkable ones, and the girl struggling along the rear. Dudes
three and four were struggling too a bit. The leader was going flat
out. No pacing, no letting the slowest member go first. When the
leader stopped to say hi, everyone else fell into line and got a
breather. The short funny guy said, "You're the girl who's
hiking the trail by herself both ways! You're a legend!" I
said, "Thanks." Aw, shucks. I like being called a legend.
He said, "There's a wolf pack after you." I said, "I
know." We chatted a little and the girl and I had a smile at
each other. They'd stayed at Mantario with two women and they warned
me that I'd be catching them on the flipside. The short funny one
was darn impressed. As we parted ways, he said, "Legend!
You're a leg." I could get used to that. It was nice to see
them amid the struggles. Like the struggle up the cliff with the
ganky rope. It wasn't hard but it was careful, climbing with my legs
and my arms and putting my feet in the right place. I like going up
cliffs like that. It's fun to scramble. I walked hard. The trail
was getting eas... I could do it quickly.
I
was up on top of the first big hill looking down at Three Lake when
Cate and Karen turned up. I was surprised. Cate said they'd decided
to just do a there-and-back. The hiking was a struggle when they
really wanted to be swimming and reading. I totally got it. I said
I'd heard they'd stayed with a rowdy crew last night. Karen said,
"They did have a bottle of vodka, but everyone got to bed by ten
o'clock." We said our goodbyes and I hiked down the sloping
shores of lake Mantario, which must have been huge when it was a pool
of melting glacier. That slope went on forever, not least because I
got lost on a deer trail and took ages to find where the trail
actually turned off on an undiscernible jog through a tree. Finally
I made it to beautiful Lake Mantario around 10:00am. So early in the
morning and I had gone so far already and I was so disappointed in
somebody. Not sure who was disappointing me, but one of the Mantario
buddies left a smoldering firepit full of Alpine meal wrappers. I
didn't want to pack out their ashy, gross food trash, so I dumped a
few bottles of water on the fire, stirred it around, and ate a nut
roll because I needed energy and the lake was beautiful. I gave
myself a good sitting down before I pressed on to Moosehead.
Mantario to Moosehead, I've decided, is my favorite hike of the
Mantario Trail. So many views. It's all view really. It's
unbelievable. Just granite descending into sylvan forests and
splashy lakes that are so blue. I decided to have my lunch up on a
massive piece of solid granite overlooking the last little lake
before Moosehead. The temperature was Canadian 30º and sunny
pleasant breeze all over. I put my shirts to dry in the sun and
kicked back in my chair with the sound of the birds and the air and
the great land of Canada and the bear bell. Oh no. I whipped my
shirt back on just as two teenage boys and a girl popped through the
last screen of trees. I stood up and said hi and we had a slightly
awkward conversation. I think shirtlessness is legal in parts of
Canada but I don't think it's common. They trundled on and I kicked
back again. It was a pity to get up, but I was between getting to
Moosehead too early and getting to Peggy too late and I knew I was
probably aiming for the Peggy Lake campsite with its windswept
bearbox on a hill.
My
next surprise was soon and German. I was crossing a big bare expanse
of rock when a lone man popped into view. He asked me if I could do
him a favor. I said yes, probably, as favors can go in any number of
directions. He explained that he, Dietlieb, a German fellow with
trekking poles and possibly technical leiderhosen, was supposed to be
meeting his co-workers at Caribou Lake but he'd been having such a
lovely hike that he decided to ditch them (not his words) and
continue on his own. He been trying to text them from the tops of
mountains but he didn't have bars in the valleys. If I ran into his
co-workers, could I tell them that Dietlieb had continued on without
them? I said of course, because why wouldn't I? I was supposed to
be on the lookout for Chris and Jeff. Chris had "Asiatic
features" and Jeff was not Asian. I assured him that I would
keep my eyes out for an Asian guy and white guy. Soonly, I was going
downhill through thick marshy forest on the north end of Moosehead
lake, which turns wildly through swamps and pines and unmapped lakes
until one ends up on the beaver dam so big it has trees growing out
of it. A person could live on that beaver dam like on the olde
London Bridge. Moosehead had Alpine meal packets in the firepit too,
but at least they weren't on fire. Morons. I kicked back on the
picnic table on the beach and read the whole trail journal that was
still in a plastic bag in a box nailed to a tree. Everyone had been
there, people who wanted a beer and lonely people and highschoolers
and people with dogs and happy people and me last year, and people
who were being eaten by mosquitoes, and Winnipeg Muslims, and people
with hornet stings.
