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Editorial: A walk in the woods
Commentary by Joe McWilliams
for South Peace News
Pardon me for writing about what I did on my summer vacation. What follows could very well be boring.
Feel free to skip to the end.
Last spring I came up with the brilliant idea of hiking across the north shore of Lesser Slave Lake. At least it seemed brilliant when it was still in the conceptual stage; when it came time for actual planning, it started to get less shiny.
For starters, I didn’t know if there was anything you could call a trail. I tried walking on the beach a few years ago, and while it had its charms, walking on rocks can start to get on your nerves after a couple of hours. So the goal – or part of it – was to walk on an old trail in the bush just off the shore, the existence of which was more rumoured than confirmed.
Then the question came up of whether it could really be done, on foot, in two days from Marten Beach to Grouard.
‘Take my flare gun,’ said my friend Doug. ‘You’ll probably need it.’
He also implied we’d have a heck of a time getting across some of those creeks.
And what about the muskeg? Terrible stretches of muskeg along there, said someone else.
My idea was to do Marten Beach to the narrows in one day, camp there and then do the next leg to Hilliard’s Bay park in another day. I hadn’t really looked at the distance. The closer the day got, the longer it looked.
Plus, a guy would have to arranged passage through the Kapawe’no land at The Narrows. That kind of thing takes time, and I left it way too late.
Then Dan, who had agreed to hike with me, proposed that we get a boat ride across to the narrows and walk back to Marten Beach. No overnight, no worries. It sounded great, but what we needed was intelligence on how realistic it would be to do that stretch in a day, given whatever the terrain was like. Nobody we talked to knew anything current about it.
I decided I’d have to make some phone calls and find out what we were getting into. But then I realized I really didn’t feel like it. On to Plan ‘C’.
‘Plan ‘C’ was simply to walk out from Marten Beach early one fine morning as far as seemed reasonable, and then walk back in time for supper. This had obvious drawbacks, but required the least amount of planning, so that’s what we ended up doing.
We left at 7:10 a.m. and got back at around 5:00 p.m., a couple of hurtin’ Albertans.
The north shore is a wild and beautiful place, and long may it remain so. Its relative inaccessibility is one of its principal attractions. You have to work to get out there, even if you do it on a quad. We saw eagles, pelicans and deer galore. We saw miles of rocky beach, a bit of sand and lots of swampy stuff, right down to the shore (also a fridge, an inflated air mattress some treated lumber and other bits and pieces of human junk). In the bush we found lots of decent trail and also lots of soggy going.
I figure we got about halfway to the narrows by a bit before noon. One of these years I’m going to walk the whole thing.
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