Ben Massey. Backpacking enthusiast, creator of this site, former writer of sports articles for several websites and one magazine, all-round handsome guy, and writer of his own blurbs.
Of Canada’s government-created problems, the poor state of some backcountry trails is not a major one. It affects thousands of people rather than millions and ruins vacations rather than livelihoods, safety, and society. Getting outside is good for you, physically, intellectually, and spiritually, so there are real consequences, but not quite as bad as the day-to-day Canadian experiences of unemployment, wage stagnation, price increases, and societal collapse. Hiking is not, in any properly-calibrated order, a very big deal.
However, it’s an interesting one. Parks Canada might be the electorally safest part of our government. There are institutions like the CBC or VIA Rail which defenders call underfunded and critics want abolished; their are quangos like the Canadian Forces or health care which everybody promises to improve and nobody does. But Parks Canada, though certainly criticized, is as close to a universal National Good Thing as we get. Nearly everyone wants Parks Canada around. The Libertarians would sell it, but they’re the only ones. Even the separatists object to the “Canada” part, not the “Parks.”
Yet it is clearly going downhill. Nearly everyone seems to want protected wild places that Canadians can access, except sometimes those responsible for providing it.
There are many types of government malice, using “government” in the proper, wider sense. The judges who write our most important laws, the bureaucrats by whose whim anything ever happens, the array of cultural and financial interests whose power would be so much simpler to deal with if it was all or even primarily about money.
You would hope that Parks Canada exists to do the best it can. Resources are finite, it has to prioritize, and sometimes priorities to you and me are not priorities to the nation; that is unfortunate, but healthy. Nonetheless, while Parks Canada’s dollar stretches only so far, we suppose it wants to do its best with every dollar it has, and taken all in all the organization will want the best for the country.
Friend reader, the example of the Simon Creek bridge to Athabasca Pass in Jasper National Park shows it is not so.
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Happy Dominion Day! Checked out your elbows lately? How are they doing? Are they still up? Have they been bruised and nicked by powerful blows given and sustained in the name of making Canada strong?
It’s easy, and to a point wise, to be sarcastic. We all know that Canadian governments are not serious about Canadian independence, notwithstanding the fact that may be less unserious about it than they have been in sixty years. However, you and me, the humble private sector, are not the government. Combined we spend more money than the government does, and if you and I adjust our buying decisions, it makes a difference. We live in a market of cheap imports and all know there’s often no choice. But we can do something, and thirty million somethings add up to rather a lot.
Too few things are by Canadians in Canada now. Take backpacking equipment. If you wanted to buy a backpacking tent made in Canada, I am not sure where you’d start. My tent was designed in Canada but made in China by the usual suspects. We cannot buy what doesn’t exist, and should not buy from cretins regardless of nation, but if Canadians patronize good Canadian businesses, more will crop up. It’s happening in the United States, where after generations of outsourcing, cottage manufacturers of backpacking gear are gaining a real foothold in the market. Some of these manufacturers get big and start making everything overseas as soon as they can scale to it, but not all do. The comparable economy in Canada is even smaller than population would suggest, but it exists, and we can support it.
Disclaimer: I am not always as good as my word here, any more than anyone else. I consider made in the USA by Americans a not-bad second to made in Canada by Canadians, and sometimes buy accordingly. This is a guide with the best knowledge I have. Suggestions and first-hand experiences are encouraged.
Further disclaimer: absolutely none of these links are affiliate links, and if you buy any item linked from this page the author receives no commission of any kind.
Perhaps you have heard of the “Canada Strong Pass.” Despite its name, it is not a pass but a discount the Government of Canada is offering this summer for VIA Rail trips, national parks admission, camping reservations, and other things I don’t care about because elbows up or something.
Why on Earth the Liberal Party of Canada should try to buy my vote I am not sure, especially since the election already happened, but cheaper train tickets and camping is a good way to go about it. Sadly, the Canada Strong Pass was announced in June while Parks Canada reservations opened in January. The country’s desirable national park campsites in both front and backcountry have been booked for months.
The train discount applies only to economy fares, so while great for people between Windsor and Quebec City, most of the country can still only pay more than the cost of an economy-class flight to sit in a chair for days at a time. However, don’t feel too bad about that, since the Canadian only crosses the country twice a week in either direction, demand for sleeping accommodation in the summer way exceeds supply, and most of it’s been sold out for months too.
On the bright side, the camping discount was retroactive, and I have a reservation in Jasper this summer. It’s in an area I had to phone the park to book, so a very nice lady from the trail office called me one Saturday morning from a private number asking me to read her my credit card information to process my refund. There is no lady in the world so nice as to phone me and ask for that, but I was obviously not the first person to say so and she suggested I call the Jasper trail office myself. I did, she picked up, and was successfully refunded $13.56 to make Canada strong or whatever.
By this point I was starting to think the Canada Strong Pass might be ridiculous, so I ran the numbers. Would you like to go camping this summer thanks to the Canada Strong Pass? In a phrase, too bad, it’s too late. A theme of this site this spring has been that our national parks, and especially our mountain national parks, need investment. How kind of the news cycle to bring that fact to the fore.
- NORTH BOUNDARY—185 km. Elev. gain 1055 m. Max. elev. 2019 m. Trailheads are at Celestine Lake parking lot (limited access). 53 km from Jasper townsite, and at Mount Robson service area, 88 km west on Highway 16. The trail is well marked and all major river crossings are bridged. A variety of side trips are possible. Some horse traffic.—Jasper National Park trail information summary, 1985
North Boundary 179 km. Elevation gain: 2688 m and loss: 3122 m, from Celestine Road to Berg Lake trailhead. Maximum elevation: 2019 m. North Boundary country possesses its own unique brand of beauty – a wilderness of broad valleys and distant views that is inhabited by an array of wildlife. The trail is rugged in places although most major river crossings are bridged. Some horse traffic. Very remote, trail is maintained infrequently.—Jasper National Park backcountry guide, 2012
The North Boundary Trail
159 km one way | 7-10 days | Dogs permitted | Horses permitted | No bikes
The North Boundary trail is a remote wilderness route, recommended for users with significant backcountry skills and experience. Highlights include Snake Indian Pass and the headwaters of two major park rivers; the Snake Indian River and the Smoky River. Some major rivers are not bridged. Fords can be dangerous. Rivers can be impassable during times of high water. This trail is best travelled in later season.—Jasper National Park backcountry trip ideas guide, March 2025
How do trails get worse? Money. Bridges go out, tracks slide away and are never replaced, trees fall that are never cut, brush grows and hides the path away. Jasper’s backcountry trails are getting worse. But what does that mean?
On Wednesday, April 2 at 7 AM Pacific, BC Parks will re-open reservations for Mount Robson Provincial Park’s Berg Lake Trail. You can bet it’ll be sold out by 8. The Berg Lake Trail, maybe the most popular backpack in the British Columbia provincial parks, has been closed since flooding in 2021. That beautiful region has captivated outdoorsmen for over a hundred years, and we may be sure there is pent-up demand.
One of the first it entranced was the Reverend George Kinney, clergyman and founding member of the Alpine Club of Canada. A capable amateur mountaineer, Kinney developed an obsession with climbing Mount Robson, the highest peak in the Canadian Rockies. Eleven times he attempted it, sometimes alone, sometimes with the best Canadian companions available; eleven times he was rebuffed. In August 1909, he tried again with Donald “Curly” Phillips, later a legend of the Canadian Rockies but then a 25-year-old fresh from the Ontario bush of no prominence or climbing experience. Their first three attempts also failed but on the last, Kinney’s twelfth, they attacked a fearsome direct route up the northwest face and claimed to reach the top.
Few today believe this. Their rash route seems beyond Kinney’s skill, let alone the unequipped novice Phillips. Though an accomplished alpine photographer, Kinney took no photos near the summit. He had preempted a planned ACC expedition, breaching climbing etiquette: learning of a British group attempting Robson, Kinney struck out half-cocked to beat them with less than three dollars in his pocket and hopes to find cash and a companion as he went. There was little of either: he had to sell horses and gear on the trail, and a succession of men bailed out of an awful, cold, wet journey until he struck upon the non-mountaineer Phillips. Kinney then claimed an extraordinary climb for which he had little evidence. Doubts formed rapidly, and continue to this day.
Whether they succeeded or failed, those who hike the Berg Lake Trail this summer will hike through the legacies of Kinney and Phillips. Theirs are some of the most remarkable stories in Canadian Rockies history.
Jasper National Park’s backcountry has never been more popular, and never harder to enjoy.
Backcountry trails in the park were at their height in the 1980s and 1990s. Usage was relatively low compared to the decades both before and since, but the trail network was over a third larger and generally in better shape. There was literally a hundred bridges, and it is said, perhaps exaggeratedly, that you could hike a hundred miles without getting your feet wet. Trails now considered adventurous low-water-season hikes were in regular use all summer, and the backcountry camper could have as much, or at little, privacy and challenge as he wanted.
Although Parks Canada hems, haws, and chooses their data carefully when the subject comes up, the fact is that more people than ever are using fewer backcountry trails. To be sure, backcountry campers are by-and-large white and by-and-large spend little money in town except at the bar, so are unfashionable visitors, but we are in an unprecedented boom of backcountry popularity which the park is content to treat with, at best, benign neglect.
Parks Canada today documents about 775km of trails relevant to the backcountry hiker. This is the largest Jasper’s official backcountry trail network has been in over a decade, because the 47.7km Maligne Pass trail was formally re-opened, not that it helps any. Apart from Skyline, those kilometers are less accessible to horse and hiker than they were before. The Tonquin Valley has been closed to horses and lost its lodges and even the Brazeau Loop, one of the few trails Jasper cares about, has been for serious hikers only since a bridge went out in 2022.
What does this really mean? A couple of wonderful projects, the Parks Canada History Archive and the Canadian Backcountry Trails Preservation Society, have archived what Jasper National Park’s backcountry used to look like. It’s gotten a lot worse. Everyone who’s been there knows that. But it’s also gotten a lot smaller.
It is less than 30 miles from the town of Healy, Alaska to the trail crossing of the Sushana River. It starts easily, on state highway 3, but going down the old Stampede Trail is at least moderately rigorous. An old road, mostly unmaintained, overgrown, and sometimes flooded, with bridges washed out. There are better trails, and you want a good degree of backcountry experience to hike it, but it’s far from bushwhacking.
Thirty miles in a day is an extreme, but human, hiking target: given summer weather, sufficient water, a pack loaded to the survival level, a long day before the sun set, and the maximum possible motivation, an experienced hiker would do it if his life depended on it. Taking a night on the way, it becomes reasonable in ordinary terrain. Thirty miles on foot is not inherently far. Through a burned and blown-down monstrosity of an ex-trail, thirty miles is a nightmare, but over a trail that is flooded, unmaintained, but gets fairly extensive use from ATVs and which one has hiked before, it will not be a problem.
Those paragraphs will be weirdly parenthetical to some and obvious to others. Yes, this is about Chris McCandless, aka Alexander Supertramp, who died in a disused bus-turned-shelter on the Sushana River in August 1992 and became an international celebrity.
McCandless did the hard part. He hiked to the Sushana from the highway in April, while the trail was snowbound and even the days were cold. He lived for over two months off an infamous ten-pound bag of rice and his .22 Remington. Then, come summer, he couldn’t get out. He did not commit suicide, which is willful self-murder: he tried to return, was unable to, and died, leaving final words that any of us would envy. Many have taken him as an example, and many have called him a kook, and one group is more right.
Sir Ranulph Fiennes is not everyone’s favourite adventurer, though he is mine. When the Guinness Book of Records calls you the World’s Greatest Explorer, people resent it. He has never feared positive publicity and has always been honest that he adventured to earn a living. Every year or two he releases a book, often hashed-together bits of his old ones. His attitude towards telling a straight story, as seen with his 1991 true-story-turned-fiction??? thriller The Feather Men, can be… negotiable.
There are things in common with Colin O’Brady, who now may be nobody’s favourite adventurer except his own. O’Brady holds records of the modern type, fastest to this, youngest to that, but won prominence in 2018 when, as the story goes, he became the first man to travel all the way across Antarctica, via the South Pole, by his own power, solo and unsupported. The specialist press was all over this claim even while it was being made, but after years of uncritical adoration from the mainstream media, Aaron Teasdale’s 2020 National Geographic article “The Problem with Colin O’Brady” put the fat in the fire.
Both Fiennes and O’Brady are professional adventurers, corporate speakers, and authors. Both were upper-crust before they were born; the “Sir” in “Sir Ranulph” has been with him all his life as his father, the second Twisleton-Wykeham-Fiennes baronet, was killed in action before Ranulph’s birth. O’Brady’s mother is a prominent businesswoman, NGO board member, and Democratic politician. Fiennes went to Eton, O’Brady went to Yale. Both are sometimes criticized for how forthright they can be about their true accomplishments.
Both men have skied the Antarctic landmass; Fiennes in 1992–93, with Dr. Mike Stroud, and O’Brady solo in 2018. Both wrote books about their expeditions, and neither quite achieved everything that their biggest fans might claim. Now the similarities stop. In one case, we see what might be called “honest spin,” a groping for lesser success rather than failure; not to be encouraged, maybe, but to be forgiven. In the other, we see spin of a different degree, better suited for politics than the white Antarctic.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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