Kristen Chadwick, USDA Forest Service

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.