And so, as my life creeps on at the middling age of 53, I adventure more than ever. I try to do two major expeditions per year, mostly in the Canadian wilderness as it’s the most remote, least populated, and pristine landscape on the planet. Virtually every other place on Earth is tangled with an overabundance of people. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not a misanthrope, as I seek and require human companionship like anyone else. But living within society is a constraint on pure, authentic freedom. It’s the nature of our species to tell others like us what to do, where to go, how to live. Democratic, communist, Amish, it doesn’t matter – all ideologies ultimately come down to control. To escape these oppressive inclinations, I regularly strike out for the great beyond, accountable only to the journey and the people I’m travelling with.

For this book, I chose the year 2018/2019 as an example of this life to shine a light on my motivations by immersing the reader into the experience of carrying out three consecutive journeys through some of the most remote terrain on Earth. I’ve continued to do a couple of big wilderness pilgrimages annually since that year (completing another ten major expeditions) but that season stands out in my mind as a seminal example of the outdoor-tripping life. As time moves on I’ll continue to seek out these experiences, laying down lines through the wilds until my very last breath. It’s rarely easy, but nothing worthwhile ever is.

Preface

I mark the seasons by adventure. My life cycle rotates around canoe, kayak, ski, cycling, and packrafting trips through wild places. A paddle across Canada by canoe in the summer of 1995 got its hooks into me and I haven’t been the same since. The typical pattern of a job, house and kids never appealed to me; in fact was never even on my radar as a way to live, for better or worse. For me, nothing that exists within human societal structure compares to the immediate and immersive experience of being on a journey through a wilderness landscape completely new to my eyes. Seeing a polar bear up close and personal, running a remote whitewater river, hacking a campsite out of the bush with a machete. These and most every other moment of an expedition are viscerally vibrant.

And so, as my life creeps on at the middling age of 53, I adventure more than ever. I try to do two major expeditions per year, mostly in the Canadian wilderness as it’s the most remote, least populated, and pristine landscape on the planet. Virtually every other place on Earth is tangled with an overabundance of people. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not a misanthrope, as I seek and require human companionship like anyone else. But living within society is a constraint on pure, authentic freedom. It’s the nature of our species to tell others like us what to do, where to go, how to live. Democratic, communist, Amish, it doesn’t matter – all ideologies ultimately come down to control. To escape these oppressive inclinations, I regularly strike out for the great beyond, accountable only to the journey and the people I’m travelling with.

For this book, I chose the year 2018/2019 as an example of this life to shine a light on my motivations by immersing the reader into the experience of carrying out three consecutive journeys through some of the most remote terrain on Earth. I’ve continued to do a couple of big wilderness pilgrimages annually since that year (completing another ten major expeditions) but that season stands out in my mind as a seminal example of the outdoor-tripping life. As time moves on I’ll continue to seek out these experiences, laying down lines through the wilds until my very last breath. It’s rarely easy, but nothing worthwhile ever is.

Introduction

Movement. It’s what we’re hardwired to do. Ever since humans first evolved into some facsimile of our current genesis in Africa, staggering around on two legs for the first time like a newborn zebra, we have wanted to move. Sure, some folks wanted to stay in familiar surroundings, to call a place home, to never set foot beyond the visible horizon. But then there were always the curious, restless wanderers, those who wanted to see past that mental wall, to experience the new, the different – the crackling possibility of what lies beyond.

We spread out from our African origins for thousands of years, horizon to horizon, expanding across once-nameless tracts of land we now call Europe and Asia, over the Bering land bridge across North America, South America, by boat to Australia. We fanned out over the whole globe until we’d seen and mapped it all.

The endless unknown is now the limited familiar, connected by technology and eight billion others like us. The mysterious, endless horizons disappeared, but that internal, eternal lust for wandering never did.

There is, however, still respite for the wanderer. Vast, lightly tracked pockets of land that have been largely left alone, do indeed exist. They are rugged, ice-locked, bug-infested places protected by their inhospitable nature. 

This is where the wanderers find solace, can still move toward seemingly endless horizons, and quell that infernal wanderlust. This book is about three remote, northern adventures I undertook in the course of a year: a 230-km ski traverse of Baffin Island was followed by a 1750-km canoe trip across Nunavut, then capped with an attempt to retrace the 550 km overland ski route of famed explorer John Rae to the Northwest Passage. Not only do I delve deeply into these journeys, but I also reveal the displaced time between these life-giving, primordial wanderings. Remote explorations are physically challenging and uncomfortable but are often far easier for the wanderer than the fallow times.

Thoreau once said, “All men lead lives of quiet desperation.” It’s not the adventure that will kill the adventurer, it’s the quiet desperation of the everyday. Caught somehow in the paradoxical comfort of modern society – a place where most everything is easy and catered – the skin of the wanderer crawls, beads of sweat run down the back, the mind twists between hysteria and numbness. There is seemingly no peace in peace.

In these times we cling with our fingernails to our sanity until we can flood our minds and bodies with the sweet opiate of adventure once more. One, however, cannot exist without the other. The highest high of adventure must be countered by the lowest of comfortable lows. Light cannot exist without darkness. Once the wanderer accepts this balance – this rhythm – they can passionately follow a lifelong path of adventure.